Scott Hebert

Although originally started in Illinois, there are more Dairy Queen’s in Texas than in any other state. In fact, DQ has a special menu for Texas stores featuring items like the Hunger-buster and the Belt-buster.

When stepping into a DQ, there are only two things you need to be aware of:

1. The Dude
   DQ has a bunch of other stuff on the menu, but all you really need to know about is The Dude (that’s the #6 combo at my DQ). The Dude is a chicken-fried steak sandwich.
2. Blizzards
   Most folks already know that Blizzards are a soft serve treat. A good DQ employee will flip that Blizzard over to show you how thick and delicious it really is.

   What a lot of folks forget is that there are 3 seasonal Blizzard flavors that must absolutely not be missed:

   • Thin Mint
   • Pumpkin Pie
   • Peppermint Chip

   When these flavors are on the menu, you must pull over and grab one. Other than that, just about any flavor is acceptable (though Heath Bar is the best).

Tags: dessert, food

A bunch of food related stuff cropped up recently:

1. This is chili weather. My wife taught me that it’s good with sour cream.
2. They could stick those heat tiles to the bottom of the Space Shuttle with wet Fruity Pebbles.
3. As I rediscover every year, Southern Comfort brand eggnog is the best. It comes in traditional and vanilla spice. I tried Hood cinnamon eggnog. Also good.
4. My wife and kids had never had Jiffy Pop until last week!
5. Ranch Style Beans are highly underrated.

Tags: cooking, food

I just rolled out a new release of AleTale, the social network for beer lovers. This new release included the following:

• Several bug fixes. Some weren’t really noticeable; others resulted in internal server errors.
• A few SEO related changes were made including changes to title tags, and new META tags.
• Cleaned up several listings, especially related to search.
• Other little things that probably bothered us more than you.

If you haven’t already, please join our community and start sharing your passion for brew. If you have any ideas how we can make the site better, use the Contact link at the bottom of any page.

Tags: aletale, beer, django, programming, python

We just got back from a long weekend in the San Francisco area. While we were out, there I finished two books:

• Treasure Island, which you’ve heard of, and
• Dead Sleep, which you may not have.

Check them out; I really enjoyed both of them.

Tags: books, reading

Last week, I changed the name of one of my WordPress plugins. The plugin adds a new column to the Pages and Posts panels of the WordPress administration pages. The new column displays the Google PageRank^tm for the page or post in question. Additionally, the plugin adds a global Google PageRank indicator to the top of all administration pages.

Initially I gave the plugin a cutesy name: SlaptiGooglePR. This was somewhat informative and tied into the title of my high tech site, Slaptijack. I felt the name was clever, but still indicated what the plugin did. After nearly two years of service, I decided that it might be helpful to rename the plugin to something more descriptive. I noticed that the plugin did not rank very high in the WordPress Plugin Directory’s search results for common terms like “pagerank” or “google pagerank.” In the end, I decided to simply call the plugin the Google PageRank Tool.

Honestly, the tool hasn’t been a huge hit over the last two years. There have been over 2,000 downloads, but nothing to write home about. What I have noticed, though, is that the act of changing the name tripled the average daily downloads!

So, what’s in a name? Maybe more than you thought.

Tags: google, pagerank, php, plugin, wordpress