It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

So I went out in the yard to work Saturday and realized after a few minutes that I'd forgotten a tool. I made my way into the back door of the house, which is by the laundry room, and was greeted with what I can only describe as the nearest thing to a sauna that I've had in a while. There was a loud "shhhhh" sound coming from the laundry room and the place was filled with hot steamy air.

The hot water hose to the washing machine had burst, with water literally splitting out of the side of the hose. I grabbed a towel, turned the valve off, and then started cleaning up the mess. The water had been spraying up to the ceiling and along two of the walls.. so water was everywhere. A catch pan wouldn't have helped here.

I was lucky since the damage seems to be limited to just some air ducts that were water logged and will need to be replaced. I hate to think what would have happened if I hadn't forgotten that tool (having my mind on work paid off I guess) because the mixture of water and steam would have made a mess pretty quickly. Actually, I do know. Two of our friends have had washing machines run amok in the last year. One did nearly $50,000 damage since it flooded not only the main floor of a house, but the basement as well.

So for now I have braided steel hoses running to our old washer. Our hoses were probably 12yrs old and had been through at least 4 moves.. so they should have been replaced long ago. I also tested with a water pressure gauge overnight and found that the high pressure was 160psi (way high).. so that might have had a small part in it.. so I'll need to get a regulator on our line.

But I started looking at more permanent solutions. Here's what I found..

whole house..
http://www.h2obreaker.com/ProductFeatures.html

just the washing machine
http://www.plumbingsupply.com/washingmachineshutoffvalve.html

of course a $10 ball valve or two will do the same thing, but they require somebody to remember to turn 'em on/off.

I've been pretty good with the search engine rankings for sites for ages.. I've had #1 ranking on some nice keyword phrases, and never had trouble getting a site ranked well. I don't use tricks, just follow the rules and try to use some common sense. So I was caught totally off guard recently when I noticed that two sites that I had built up to great rankings were suddenly waaaay down in the rankings.. and if I went into the Google sitemaps site it showed that the site was indexed but had no query stats (odd.. it had been #1 in results for months..), and their "page analysis" showed good keywords. Googlebot was visiting the sites on a regular basis. The sites had always been on the same server and I have high ranking sites on the same server (so it's not an IP address penalty thing). I hadn't redesigned the sites or changed code, and nothing really stood out that I felt could explain the loss in rankings.

Then it hit me - I had started advertising for the sites with adwords. Hmm.. so I did some checking on the keywords that I was advertising with (via adwords) and tried putting those phrases into Google. You know what? The sites didn't show up in the top 300 for most of those phrases. Yikes. I remembered that the credit card I set up for adwords was lost and cancelled and I had gotten one of those nasty "your payment was denied" e-mails. So.. could it be that Google penalized the sites for that? Others have thought the same.

Now I've read many times that adwords don't affect "organic" ranking, so who knows for sure.. it might be something totally unrelated. There's no way to tell for certain what caused the drop in rankings, but I'm pretty certain it wasn't something I did.