Don't point that thing at me

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:06:32 GMT

Never underestimate the stupidity of stupid people (eh?!). Do you think that this guy ever looks at his life, sees himself trying to hold up a convenience store with his finger, and says "yeah...my mom and dad sure would be proud." ?

A robbery at a Git-N-Go Convenience Store on the south side of Des Moines on Thursday morning was called off for lack of convincing theatrics.

"Well, I could tell he didn't have a gun," said Terry Cook, a clerk at the store at 2140 S.E. Park Ave. "I knew it was his finger. I could see his thumb sticking out of his coat pocket."

The would-be robber, who acted tough and even inserted a harsh expletive in his demand for cash, wanted to argue.

It is a gun, he told Cook.

No it isn't, Cook said.

The frustrated suspect left the store but paused a moment in the parking lot, perhaps to go over in his mind the argument he'd just lost. He disappeared just before police arrived.

How could a robber have been so careless as to leave a thumb sticking out?

"Think about it," said Police Sgt. David Coy. "When you play cops and robbers how do you hold your hand? With the thumb sticking up, right?"

When it was all over, the reality of what he'd just done began to sink in, Cook said.

Until the police arrived he had reacted instinctively. Given time to think about it, he realized it was a frightening experience.

Still, Cook said: "I know what a gun looks like. I'm not stupid."

No arrests were reported immediately. Detectives will view video from a surveillance camera to try to identify the suspect.

source

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!

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Don't point that thing at me

Robots and main page accessibility