The year was 1983. Shoulder pads, Transformers, and breakfast cereals were all the rage. While dreaming of at least two out of these three, I happened to view a TV commercial for the latter.

"Mom: Eat your cereal, Johnny!"

"Mmm! It stayed crunchy!"

The cereal in question was Post Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran, a peculiar combination of other cereal names that made it more of a mouthful to say than to eat. It was probably for this reason that Post abandoned the cereal less than a year later, after the initial round of commercials had long since drifted off the airwaves.

This presented a problem when my 11 year-old self tried to convince my family that this cereal actually existed.

The TV commercials were long gone, and back then nobody was archiving them in any format. The cereal boxes themselves were off the shelves, and may never have even made it to the shelves in my market. How on earth was I going to convince my mother and sister that such a crazily-named cereal actually existed? They thought I was just making it up to be silly and to fool them, and without any evidence on my side, it was hard to make the case that I wasn't.

Flash-forward 27 years later.

On a complete whim, I decided to try and search for this long-lost cereal on the Internet. YouTube hadn't archived any of the commercials. The breakfast cereal page on Wikipedia steadfastly denied that such a cereal existed. Just when I thought Google was about to fail me, I came across this:

It was an archived copy of a local newspaper, circa 1983, and an article written by Martin Sloan, a bored consumer beat reporter, about the existence of coupons for Post Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran. While the image was a scan of the newspaper, the textual contents were fully indexed, allowing me to jump directly to the relevant snippet. You can view it here yourself just by clicking this link:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19830831&id=dfILAAAAIBAJ&s...

If this doesn't blow your mind, think about more than just breakfast cereal for a moment.

If, as this odd case seems to confirm, Google is scanning and full-text indexing the contents of every newspaper ever written, the potential of this for information retrieval is incredible. While most newspaper stories are filler and nonsense (like my breakfast cereal coupon article), they remain the standard archive for daily human events for the last two hundred years.

Before, if you wanted to read something from an old newspaper, you had to trek to a library and hope that they had a copy archived on microfiche, then painstakingly search for the right issue and page. Searching was impossible. So all this knowledge just ended up stuck on tiny bits of film, hidden away from the reach of all but the most incredibly patient of researchers.

Google may piss me off with their AdSense and AdWords rackets, but the fact that they are engaging in this deep a level of information archiving makes it hard for me to do anything but love them. The human race can only be boosted by easy access to our entire history, not just for silly things like Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran, but for important things, and everything in between.

Maybe I should send them a Valentine.

The last thing I expected to find in my mail box was a letter from Google trying to win back my love.

Maybe it was just coincidence, but I found it interesting considering that just a few weeks I put up a blog post entitled Google Ads are useless and don’t work. Perhaps the semi-sentient, Skynet-like Google bot had noticed that I had complained about low Google AdSense revenues, run a quick check to confirm my low Google AdSense revenues, and then fired off this automatic card. It does feel a bit weird to receive a Valentine from a machine entity.

Nonetheless, here it is. Google is offering me a “free” $100 to spend on AdWords, so that I can advertise my own blog. Buried in the fine print is a little “gotcha” line about how unless I cancel, Google will continue to charge me long after the $100 is gone, a nice source of recurring revenue for them. It’s a great endless loop of cash for the search engine giant—I pay money to Google so that people will visit my blog, then I put AdSense ads on my blog page so that Google can charge other advertisers money for viewing them. Only in the unlikely event that someone actually clicks on a link do I get my fraction of a millionth of a penny in payback. Google, meanwhile, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Still, I wonder if it might be worth playing with my “free” $100 just to see how the other half lives. How much traffic could I drive to my site with a few AdWords? Perhaps I could forget about trying to get big numbers on for my blog and just advertise my novel, Edge of Infinity, directly. At least if people buy my book I get a measurable bit of cash, rather than millionths of billionths of a penny.

Maybe I’m just being a grumpy old curmudgeon. Google has been a great resource for me for years and has never charged me a penny for their services. Maybe I should give them a chance. Maybe Google really does love me.

On the other hand, maybe Black Mesa will help me out. That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance.

I have the worst of all colds.

Like other colds, this one saps your energy, fills your throat with vile phlegm, and keeps you coughing all day long. But unlike other colds, this one destroys something far more vital--your hope.

This isn't even like H1N1, which seems to hit like a ton of bricks and then flies away never to be heard from again. This thing is like a cancer, going into remission from time to time and then coming back with a vengeance. My wife has it as well, so we share our suffering and thus lessen it, but watching it come back and attack her again after she was getting better is just too much for me to bear.

Like an idiot, I've tried to make being sick not impact my work schedule, so after taking only a single day off I went back to work. It's something that we all tend to do, thinking that loyalty to the company trumps one's own personal well-being, and I don't subscribe to that philosophy at all, yet here I am. Jen is temping so her schedule is a bit more flexible, but now she has a new assignment, right at the worst possible time.

Well, having let all that out, I'm not actually sure if it will make me feel better or not. Obviously I've let blogging slide during this period, as something had to go. This post is at least a way of acknowledging this.

One good thing: I've finished responding to all my Amiga game developer emails, and I'm ready and itching to start writing the article, which should be a good one.

I haven't felt much like blogging this week, but here's a quick update:

• Started my Project Management Professional (PMP) course last Saturday. Thinking of doing a big blog post titled "PMPing ain't easy"
• Got invited to fill in on an Dungeons and Dragons game at a coworker's place this Saturday. REALLY excited about this!
• I am about 3/4 of the way through answering all the Amiga gaming emails I received. Some of them have been really amazing.
• At work we've started this huge important project using a brand-new platform with conflicting (some may say incompatible) goals for delivery, a hard due date, and nothing but problems. This has been causing some stress, as you can imagine.

Life is certainly interesting. I wouldn't have it any other way.