Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Spilled milk and changing email accounts

No joke. After returning from Joia's house this afternoon, I went to pour Isaac a cup of milk. He asked for it "warm" and upon trying to transfer it to a glass to warm it up, I spilled the entire cup all over my jeans and the floor.

I also said "crud." Isaac then said, "Dud."

At least I didn't say "Ugh" this time.

The good news is, Scrubs is now my new best friend (as if he wasn't already.) He really likes milk apparently.

The bad news is, when a dog puts his paws in milk, then his paws get wet and mixed with the dirt on my hasn't-been-swept-in-a-few-days-floor and you have paw prints all over the house.

Crud.

Ugh.

Another bit of bad news is, I wasted YET ANOTHER glass of milk! Crud AND Ugh!

I then had to shut the kids out of the kitchen to clean up the milk Scrubs left behind and the footprints and, well, Elijah doesn't take kindly to separation from me at all lately. Screaming ensued. Screaming and screaming and more screaming.

Isaac then felt left out and decided to attempt to cry too. But alas, he isn't very good at it. Especially not when he was faking it. It actually made me laugh more than sigh.

. . . and then it was nap time.

Whew!

***

In other news, I have emailed all of the people in my contact list to let them know that I am changing my email address. If you did not get the email, please leave a comment or send me an email to my current email address.

I told people in the email that the reason for the change was because my old email address contains my last name. Many people have then followed up with an email asking me if I think they should do the same thing. Is having your name in an email bad? No. Not necessarily. So I wanted to explain myself a bit.

My last name is not very common at all. If you have my last name, you are probably related to me. I think I know every person with that last name on a personal basis. This makes John and myself easier for people to find.

I mentioned that my blog is going to go private. It still may, but I am looking into some other options. I can only take 100 people if I go private on blogger. Don't worry. I don't plan to do this as I would have to "pick" people to include. That's not very nice now is it? I will either switch to another blog service or look into a few other options. However, if I can get my blog to quit showing up on search engines, I may be able to leave it public.

Next year, JB will be a practicing physician on a new Base. There is a chance this will be a very small Base (since most of the Bases on our list were smaller Bases.) This means that he may know nearly every person on Base as a patient (or at least a good portion of them.) He really does not want his patients to be able to read every detail of his life via blog.

That being said, if you google our last name, the first hit you get is my blog! Ugh! This means that if a patient googles JB (and believe me, people do google their doctors), they will find my blog with pictures of him being a goofball or complaining about work or whatever else. That really isn't ideal.

So, since my email address includes my last name, I have removed it from all places it was previously listed on blog entries and am attempting to remove it from the Internet's history for all times. Sometimes I would like to post my email address. Therefore, I have created a more non-name-included email.

If anyone knows how I can get my blog to quit showing up on search engines (I have changed all the settings I know of), please let me know. I welcome any advice.

7 comments:

ErieContrary said...

Wendi, if you go to your dashboard and click "settings," on the very first page, if you scroll down they ask, "Let search engines find your blog?" If you click "NO" it works. I'm assuming you have already seen this since you are so blog savvy, but I can't understand why it wouldn't work for you? I can't find my blog ANYWHERE when I put in my name or even the name of my blog!! You're right, though...yours is the first thing that comes up if I type your name in.....

June said...

I see you have the noindex and nofollow meta tags, so that's a good start. Keep in mind that it takes some time for these changes to propagate, and unfort, not all search engines respect meta tags.

Have you gone through this page?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156412

Sorry to say, but my husband (an IT guy) is firmly of the belief that anything you publish on the Internet will forever be out there, somewhere,, despite one's best attempts to erase what has been said. People who truly want to maintain their privacy are best served by not posting personal info online.

Gabbs said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
AW said...

IT girl here...

June is correct that some information will always be available. If you google something and the link ends up taking you to a dead end, there is always the "cached" pages that might allow you to view a page that is archived. (See the blue link under an item in a search.)

Unknown said...

One thing you could do to help prevent searches it look into a robot.txt file. If you put that in the root of your folder with folders you don't want searched, search engines are not suppose to index those folders. I have one in some of my folders and have tried to do a search and not been able to find them. That being said, blogs are highly indexed because of the always changing content.

Wendi Kitsteiner said...

I had long ago checked all the right buttons with no success.

I did the robot.txt file in my header today I think. They said it can take awhile to go into effect?

I am not too worried about my blog being stumbled upon -- moreso patients doing searches and finding JB.

Living in pure chaos! said...

I am a lurker on your site! I don't have any suggestions on how to go private. Just wanted to let you know that I love your insight on being a mom. It makes me feel normal! Thanks for being so open about what goes on in your day to day life.