The Downside of Google Ads

Like most people who spend a lot of time working on their computers, I have a big ole power strip with about 15 things plugged into it. Naturally, I this has led to a horrible tangled mess of cables behind my machine. Today I decided to do something about it.

After a few minutes of alone time with Google, I found this device. All well and good, but I wanted to try one before I went and bought the dozen I really need. Fine. I did a Google search for "cable turtle" and lo and behold, sponsored link #3 was target.com.

Great! There's a Target down the street from my house. I went to their website to see what their pricing was like, and, hopefully, to confirm that said item is likely to be in my store.

The link took me to a generic landing page with a bunch of crap I didn't care about. Then I searched the website for "cable turtle," and guess what? They don't carry that item!

This ticked me off. (Hence, blog post.) I understand using Google's tools to cast a wide net to draw people in, but using word substitution to create an ad for something you don't even stock can't possibly be a good idea in any rational universe.

Does this mean I will stop shopping at Target? Unlikely. But it does mean I'll think twice before I click through to their website again.

Ride of the day

Short one today: 12 minutes, 2.4 mi.

Ride update of the day

Had a bike ride for lunch today. 1 hour 26 seconds, 10.5 miles, the longest ride I've done since returning to Austin. (Previous rides included a 6.3 and a 5.1, plus a bit of puttering around the neighborhood.) Good to see that in spite of 2 months of being sedentary, I can still do that without keeling over and dying.

I finally made it out to Brushy Creek Lake Park. 20 minutes to ride there, and 4 minutes to do a complete circuit of the main trail, so the Law of Irony was preserved :-) The park is pretty new and the trails are mostly packed earth. They didn't hold up so well in the recent spate of downpours. All of them were worn, in some cases eroding significantly around the edges, and there were a few cyclist-killing ruts. Nice park though, essentially a big loop around a grassy wetland, much like that park in Sunnyvale that I can't think of the name of where I fell off the wall.

On a map at the park (the only one I could find; that place needs better signage), I saw a reference to a "Cedar Park Regional Trail". I went exploring for it, but it seems like that might just be a gleam in some city planner's eye. Certainly there were no water crossings other than Brushy Creek Rd.; my momentary excitement at the prospect of a non-road way to travel out to that area was quickly extinguished. I did find a maintenance road that ran under the elevated part of Parmer there, but it dead-ended at Brushy Creek Lake, and it was more suitable for mb than my poor hybrid.

Writing update

Did the lion's share of the rewrite of Lucky Dragon today. Not quite done yet (sorry, virtual writing group!). Could maybe have finished it but got stuck on the torture scene. The plan is to finish this in the morning -- if I can get past that scene, the rest should be smooth sailing.

Still, turned out to be a lot more work than I thought.