The Ruffles Report

My humblest apologies for the lack of updates. But I have a great excuse… and pictures to boot!

I used to get spoiled before I lived with my two-legs. I could anything I wanted. But now I have to scrounge. I only get his hand me downs. Take my computer for instance. You would think a hip young pup like myself would be rocking a MacBook Air or something. I do have an Apple computer, I suppose I should be happy about that. But being forced to this this jury-rigged computer is just sad:

A beatup PowerBook G4. My window to the world

My two-legs has had this since before I even existed. Both of the hinges have broken off so the screen just flops around like a dead fish. He “fixed” it by adding decorative string and gaffers tape to hold the screen up. Classy eh?

What’s more, his rigging put serious stress on the screen power cords. Now, every few minutes the screen shuts off. I then have to close the lid and reopen it, hoping it will come back on. If not, I close and reopen. Repeat ad nauseum. I think the power brick cord has a short in it… I keep burning my little paws.

Ugh! Forced to use inferior products.

So I have been pouting, and dealing. You have no idea how long it takes to get stuff done when you have to constantly open and close your laptop, are only surfing the Internet with Wireless B speeds, and have to download photos with a USB 1.1 speed port. Slooooooooow let me tell you.

I have a new system in place though. I just log on to my two-legs nice computer when he is at work. Ha! Suck on that two-legs.

Stay tuned for more of TheRufflesReport!

OK, I am really going to nerd out here a bit. So if you were looking for a cute story about me napping or harassing big-little-bro you will just have to come back in a couple days.

My two-legs is a huge nerd, and having lived around him for a few years his nerdiness has begun to rub off. I asked him to set up Google webmaster account for my domain. It has some cool referral stuff, and shows where your page is ranking in searches (there is much more cool stuff in there but I have not figured out what it is for yet). Page ranking is a tricky business. Companies spent untold amounts of money trying to get their web pages ranked number one on the various search engines. I know personally that I never go beyond the first page of Google results. If it did not come up at the top, I probably did not define my search properly. Page ranking also varies on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You may be king for a while, but someone else is always trying to knock you down. Let us see how TRR ranks with the Google:

You can try these out, none really worked for me.

These are results from the last 7 days (there are even weirder ones further back). I tried most of these links, and could not find my little corner of the web. *Sigh*
One that was very interesting (and for whatever reason not shown here) is I rank in the top 10ish for “what is ruffles” and of course, number 1 for “the ruffles report.”
But, are people honestly going to be searching for me? Like one day they think, “oh, I wonder if any dogs named ruffles are blogging about themselves” No. They are probably going to find me via referrals (or “friends”).

The two-legs’ web host has some decent tracking tools, one of which is the referral URL (how people got to my site). The top referrer is… *drumroll* … valria.wordpress.com! She has sent me a whooping 85 unique visits for the past year. I have no idea if they stayed to read anything, but I like to believe they did… I can hope.

Suck it Bing!

Here is some of the other data (because I know everyone loves to look at stats). Pretty standard stuff, except for the flux of people who found me via domaintools.com using a whois search… I guess therufflesreport.com is more valuable than previously thought. Hooray for land grabs.

And just for the fun of it, let us look at the number of unique visits to my little blog here:

Check out July, thanks for the support in my sad times!

So, why all this talk of visitors and referrers and other things you probably do not care about. Well, I was checking out the tumblarity of some two-legs I know (no, my two-legs does not tumble) and lately I have just been thinking about blogging, and internet popularity and all that jazz. I honestly do not know what to make of it all.

Hmmm, I honestly thought I would be able to come up with something more profound than all that, some sort of all all encompassing nugget of wisdom. I have thought on it a great deal (after all, I do nap and think every hour of every day) and I have not reached a definitive conclusion on anything.

“The internet is frickin’ awesome.” (I think we all can agree on that one) There is a great deal of noise though. “But we can generally filter the noise and only get what we want.” But there is just so much content out there. “True but so much of it is just rehashing of previous content and/or junk; so we rank the content.” But who does the ranking? “The crowds.” Hrmmmm. Do we trust the crowd? “Well, we can start with friends and family, see what they like, who they follow, and then build our own little internet crowd.” So, like a clique in high school? “Yes like a clique… no, no, no. It’s better. Cuz they are like, our friends, but we don’t really know them, but they post funny or interesting or insightful stuff, that we like.”  Do you happen to know what an echo chamber is (metaphorically)? “It’s not an echo chamber, it’s fun, and I like it, and shut up.”

The preceding was a conversation I had with myself the other day while looking introspectively at my own internet habits. I spend a fair amount of time surfing the intertubes. Not too much, just enough I would say. Certainly I could be on it more. There are some core sites I visit, I live by my feed reader. Some comics, some tech stuff. I do not really follow any two-legs directly, or any four-legs directly. To be quite honest, there is simply too much stuff out there. To many bloggers, too many tumblrs, two many twitterers, way too much stuff on youtube, quite frankly I just try to block it all out.

But there is a trap there, if I do not follow people, does that conversely mean people will not follow me? If I do not make my web presence known through blog rings, and referrals, and ranking, and search engine optimization, and re-tweeting, and re-tumblring, and generally being part of the Internet community, will I be left blog alone in my own little corner. Is a blog with no readers truly a blog?

If you look directly to your right (note this will only work if this is the top post and/or you have not rotated your screen and/or my two-legs has not jacked up the theme again) you will notice that I have joined Twitter. That is right fair readers, now you can get constant, mundane thought-provoking little nuggets of randomness wisdom from your four-legged friend. Unlike some tweeters (looking at you polythink) I intend to post at least once a day. I am one step closer to becoming an Internet sensation.

If you direct your gaze further down the sidebar, you will notice a second Twitter account. “What? You’re going to post on two separate Twitter accounts?” No, gentle readers, you will only have to follow me in one place. I am trying to keep my Interweb chatter to a healthy minimum. There are however certain cold, dank corners of the Intertubes where shady, unscrupulous ilk live who like to impersonate innocent puppies, celebrities, organizations, and just about anyone they want. Sometimes this is unavoidable, for instance if you happen to have a common name. This happens to my two-legs all the time. With a surname of Taylor (15th most frequently occurring last name in 2000 census, down five spots from ’90) and a given name of Michael (most popular boy’s name in 1983 and 4th most frequent male first name in 1990 census) it can be quite difficult to find him amongst the plethora of Michael Taylors inhabiting the blogosphere and Twitterverse (my two-legs loves this slight edge of anonymity it gives him). Other times it is for far more malicious purposes meant to draw in unsuspecting Twits for nefarious purposes or to simply increase their follower/following count.

Ruffles is fairly uncommon surname. There are a number of Ruffleses out there, most appear to be in EU as they don’t show up in US Census data. But Ruffles is not my surname, it is my given name. I have yet to come across another being with a first name of Ruffles (OK, once there was this other four-legs at the dog park named Ruffles. She was a girl, and a schnauzer but things got complicated so I try to block it out). This should be a fairly easy process to find me. So, do a search for Ruffles on Twitter. I will wait. Done it? No? OK, I will help. Click here. Ok, scroll down the list, let us see here. The first three look legit, various two-legs with a last name of Ruffles. Hmm, Mr_Ruffles eh? PinkandRuffles? oh my… Ah, MrRuffles_ (not to be confused with Mr_Ruffles) appears to be a bunny. Normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. rufflesthedogg? Wait, my name is Ruffles. And I am a dog (though in my world dog has only one “g”). His “name” appears to be “Ruffles aka Ruff-Man.” Huh? My two-legs calls me Ruff-man. What is going on here? From Seattle? I live in Seattle. Ok, 11 updates over a brief 16 day period. Updates include talking about birds, napping, eating, sleeping, and more napping. That is exactly what I will post about!

There you have it. It appears that some ne’re-do-well has pilfered my identity! And they already have 14 followers! I have no followers…

So this is why I need you, my readers, to start following me. It is the only way for me to boost my ratings in the world of Twitter. I must oust this imposter from his lofty height of hit number 13 in a query for ruffles. Click on “Constant updates by me” header to the right where you will be taking a stirring page containing my updates and a tiny picture (with my crazy beard that my two-legs recently shaved off). If you do not have a Twitter account, sign up, it is easy. While I fully expect Twitter to wither and die in next few years (or explode and die which would be much cooler) it can still be fun to be on what is now the butter knife’s edge of technology.

On another Meta related note. It appears that my two-legs has been man-handling my themes again. I have him do it as I tried to myself and got confused with all the widgets and sidebars and skins and plug-ins and stuff. This new one is pretty cool I guess. Still not me though, ya know?

I will bet that you did not know that I am quite the intellectual puppy. Look! I have the nerd glasses to prove it:

Professor Puppy reporting on Shark Baiting and other concerns

I, Professor Ruffles, would like to talk to you today about Internet rumors, social phenomenon, networking, and googling (as the kids call it). Earlier today, my two-legs received an unsolicited invitation on “Facebook” (an increasingly popular online social networking site and known time sink) to join a group called “Stop the usage of dogs as live bait for sharks!” My two-legs just ignored the request, as he does most of the requests and invites he gets (he is not terribly social but he is learning), I decided to hit up Google and see what I could learn.

http://www.google.com/search?q=baiting+sharks+with+dogs

The first hit is a to a National Geographic article written 4 years ago that appears to have gotten this whole thing started. This is the most oft quoted article and contains the bulk of information. It tells the story of a film crew for Fondation 30 Millions d’Amis (the Thirty Million Friends Foundation) who traveled to Réunion, a small French-controlled island off the southeast coast of Madagascar in the India Ocean. They found a few accounts of this happening, mostly local independent fisherman. They took photo and video, the most widely circulated is a 1min 10sec clip of a rescued 4-legs at a vet getting fixed up. The article also looks at the French government’s response and public outcry. The government believes it to be isolated incidents and reiterate that this practice is against the law and will not be tolerated. The article goes on to describe one local fisherman who was arrested and fined €5,000. Then there is information about petitions you can sign, organizations offering rewards, and other “What you can do” info at the end.

The next hit is Snopes.com. Snopes is a “urban legends reference page” that looks at rumors and legends and attempts to view them from a skeptical rational eye. I would deem them as pretty good at what they do but, like everyone, they can be wrong. In our case, they are mostly just unhelpful. The article has not been updated since 2005 (shortly after the NG article aired) and contains most of the same info. It also contains a letter from the US French Embassy reiterating France’s stance on the practice. Their stance (in case you forgot) is they are against it.

Further down the page we have links to the video I mentioned earlier. There are also links to various blogs, forums, and websites. Most tend to have the same information, peppered with moral outrage, and of course, the photo of the 4-legs with the snout piercing (which I opted to not repost here out of respect for my reader’s tummies). There are also a handful of petitions you can opt to sign.

For whatever reason, there appears to have been a surge of interest recently. Many blogs and forum postings are from early/mid June of 2009. My thought is that the Facebook group (I do not have an account so I cannot tell when the group was created) rekindled the interest of this unfortunate story and now you two-legs are just hurling the same outdated information around. As far as this young pup can tell this is a barbaric practice perpetuated by a small, deranged subset of local fisherman in a remote part of the world.

Here is what I think you two-legs should go out an do: find these monsters, stick hooks through their ankles, drag them through the ocean and see how they like it. Nothing. “Nothing?” Well, nothing in a loose sense of the word. Petitions and groups expressing your outrage and concern on a practice last reported to have happened in 2005 is all well and good but little can be done with that. The practice has already been banned. It is not accepted by the government. “Well,” you say, “I want the government to step up its enforcement.” Yes, that would be nice. However, the police (even the French police) cannot be everywhere at once. They certainly cannot be constantly trolling the waters of the Indian ocean in the dead of night (when it is said the fisherman set their traps for sharks). Even if they could, that is a great deal of petrol to burn. Besides, these people are criminals. Not just ordinary criminals but insane, heartless criminals with no regard for life (no matter the species). These people generally cannot be reasoned with, and any fine you give them will just make them work harder at baiting sharks to pay off the fine. I hear you say, “We could kill them.” Yes. Yes we could.

The most sensible, and least glamorous, is to stop the demand. Sharks fetch a high price in many markets and are often seen as a delicacy. Having never had shark, I would not know. And I plan to never know. I will not eat shark. “What if it is killed humanely?” you ask. My answer is probably still no. With so many other delicious things to eat why would I want shark? “But Ruffles,” you query, “I’m just one person. How do I get everyone to not eat shark.” Aha, therein is one of the thorny problems of this greater issue. Do you have the right to tell others what to do? And if so, where does the line end?

Indeed you two-legs often get upset by reports of people eating 4-legs or other animals you deem too cuddly to simply be eaten. However, other parts of the world have not had the same relationship with four-legs as most Western countries have had. To some, we are just another animal. But bear in mind, our practices in Western culture are not all sunshine and rainbows. Can you guess which creature that American two-legs eat a couple times a week is actually revered as a sacred animal. The cow! And what crazy sect of two-legs society believes the cow to be symbol of the earth? Hindus! I do not think Americans would react too kindly if Hindus started sending them letters and emailing petitions to stop eating our bovine brethren.

Two-legs and four-legs have come a long way since we domesticated each other. We have learned and loved our way through many millennia and we continue to grow closer every day. The world is not perfect. It never has been, it never will be. The “good” of the world is always marred by the few agents of “evil”. That will continue. All we can all do is be as morally upright as we can and encourage others (through open dialogue, good works, and brotherhood) to do the same. The Internets are a starting point but it is how you conduct yourself in reality that really matter.

Aside:
A few of the petitions I ran across felt like scams. One asked for an email password in addition to your email address (typically this is so they can then spam your contact list). Others just looked odd. Just a reminder that there are a number of derelicts out on the tubes that are not there for the good of world and just looking for a way to make some $$$. Prof. Puppy out. (I will post something more uplifting tomorrow hopefully)