“They are playing down to the competition” is a term that gets thrown out there by sports broadcasters a lot. What it basically means is this: If a top-ranked team is playing a vastly inferior team, then the top ranked team will sometimes just sort of sleep walk thru the game, doing just enough to get the win, but over all playing sloppy and far short of their potential. A good example of this in reverse happened last night. My North Carolina Tarheels were playing a higher ranked and largely regarded superior Michigan State team. To this point in the season, the Heels had sort of muddled thru the “cup cake city” portion of their schedule, easily beating the Central Floridas and Gardner Webbs of the college basketball world, but not quite looking like a top 20 team should. Last night however against a team that on paper atleast they weren’t supposed to beat, they played poised, determined, aggressive and together. The freshman played beyond their years and the upper classmen did what you expect of upper classmen.  They played “up” to their competition.  From a Tarheel fan perspective, it was beautiful and I couldn’t help but think, “why don’t they do this every game?, why don’t they always play at the highest level?”.

The same question can be applied to code, design or whatever you happen to be doing. Shouldn’t we all try to perform at our highest level day in and day out? I’m not saying our performance should be perfect all the time, thats not realistic, but we can always make the effort to perform at the highest level.

Wether you are coding a huge database application, a small static site or making a simple update, do it like a champ, do it at your highest level.

Everyone at Integritive knows I don’t have a TV, it’s a bit of a running gag around here. My response to anyone asking about a certain episode or show is always

“I don’t know if I’ve told you this but I don’t have a TV.”

But why not? Television is, after all, a part of America’s shared experience. It’s at least as much or more a part of America as baseball and apple pie. A friend of mine once told me that when he was traveling in a remote part of Morocco people he met would try to get him a TV to watch once they found out that he was American because they assumed that’s all he wanted to do.

And that, to me, is part of the problem. When I was a child TV time was kind of a special thing: I had to know what I wanted to watch, only had a few hours a week, and we didn’t have cable so choices were limited. Once my family got cable everything changed- sitting on the couch became the default place to be, regardless of whether anything worthwhile was on. Sitting down at a table to eat dinner became picking a spot on the floor, couch or cozy chair. We did what the millions of other families around the country were doing: watching electrons light up a phosphorescent screen for hours on end. It becomes what you do, what you think about and what you schedule your life around. In short, TV becomes who you are.

But that’s not the only reason, after all if you can exercise some self control you can limit your watching to a reasonable time and avoid overindulging (as in anything, really). In my opinion the content of TV programming is a strong reason to forgo it altogether. I’m not talking about violence or sexuality, but rather the lack of worthwhile programming. Sit coms are a paramount example of this. In 30 minutes there is an introduction, conflict, elaboration and resolution where everything is back to where it was in the beginning. Even the way we talk about TV episodes reflects this- “Remember the one where X goes to Y?” or “Remember when X did Y to Z?” we don’t talk about the resolution or the moral because that’s not the emphasis of the show. In that way, TV has nothing to teach us. There is no reality to any of it and in the end the purpose of the episode is forgettable and transient, which brings me to my next point-

Everything you see on TV has been fabricated. What you are viewing is not objective. It has been created from a human imagination, written, created, edited and cut by people with biases, agendas (conscious or subconscious), fears, aversions and then passed through a filter for sexuality, violence, and language. What you see is nothing close to real and yet it it often presented as such (see the list of writers, editors, directors, gaffers, lighting technicians, wardrobe and makeup at the end of a ‘reality’ show if you doubt it). Even worse are news shows which have a moral obligation to be objective yet make no attempt to be so. TV has almost nothing to teach us that is worth the time we spend on it.

Spending is what really drives this whole train. About 1/3 of the time you spend watching TV is commercials. When you change your perspective you might find that the commercials aren’t there to support the shows, rather the shows are there to make you watch commercials. Some people don’t seem to mind this but as a person who doesn’t make impulse buys and understands the intentionally misleading and/or ambiguous wording and presentation of most advertising I find commercials on TV unbearable and useful only in revealing the truth of motivation behind a show.

Finally, according to the LA Times the amount of time watching TV that you will spend as an average American is about 150 hours a month, that’s over 6 full days. This represents an incredible opportunity cost. Consider what can be accomplished in 150 hours- the possibilities are endless, and yet most people are content to spend this time doing nothing more than watching electric fire in the shapes of people pretending to be someone else.

So a short summary of my long post here is TV is bad because:

1. TV becomes your identity
2. TV conflicts are not meant to teach resolution
3. TV is fabrication presented as truth
4. TV shows exist to sell products, not entertain
5. TV wastes a lot of time

Don’t even get me started on the internet…

While working on my last task (SEO optimization), I wanted to brush up on my knowledge.
So I did some research on what Meta Tags are and what the specs are. Way back then when I started working on and with Websites (1998) Metatags were all the buzz and everyone implemented them with the hopes of getting higher SE rankings. The success rate was not really predictable and definitely not based on the Meta Keyword Tag.
Then it became really quiet around the Meta Tag front and I, honestly stopped following the trends until today.
Now I came across this very interesting article dated Oct 1, 2002. 

Death Of A Meta Tag

Here the Author (Danny Sullivan – founder and editor of Search Engine Watch from June 1997 until November 2006)  says: That even in it’s heydays the meta keyword tag was only a handful of Search Engines (AltaVista, Infoseek, Inktomi, Hotbot, Lycos) supported this tag. Google NEVER implemented support for the tag at all. 
Supporting Engines dropped support for the keyword Meta Tag in the years 1997 – 2001.
The only survivor who still supports this Tag is Inktomi.
Reason for dropping the support of the tag is the enormous risk of spamming. All who worked on or with Websites in the late 90′s have heard of the trick to use keywords completely unrelated to the content of the Website, but being searched every second billions of times, just to allegedly increase SE rankings.
If you are interested you can read the full article here.