Washing Machine Stadler

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, December 13, 2007 2:31pm

Wow, after getting into the whole Twitter thing, I'm finding it's really hard to fire up the ol' blog editor and actually write something over 140 characters. Wait, didn't my last entry start this way? Well, as they say, thoughts are fleeting, but a blog is an online journal ordered chronologically.

With that in mind, can I ask what's up with this?

I mean, I know it's a spam site, a giant link farm designed to give the impression of actually being a home electronics site (thus the catchy domain name homeelectr.info, which I like to pronounce "home electrinfo", or at least claim that I would) while really only serving to up the search engine rank of whoever paid it to link to them (at least until Google gets wise and adjusts its algorithm or bans them).

What I don't get is what it has to do with my last name. There is not, as far as I can tell, a washing machine made by a company named Stadler, nor is there a particular machine model named Stadler.

Best I can tell, it has something to do with an entry on my blog, linked to from that spam site, in which I came up with puns about a bicycle-powered washing machine. Which, somehow, led to my last name being [Update: the latter part of this sentence got truncated when I first posted this; thus, Jarrett's comment below] associated with washing machines, not that that makes sense.

Sure, that site was probably generated by some Web-surfing robot, so it doesn't have to make sense, but find it troubling nonetheless. Every bit as troubling as the vision I just had of robots literally surfing.

And yet, I feel that "Washing Machine" Stadler would be a great nickname. I can't explain it — just a gut feeling.

For those of you who were wondering if I found out about that site by vainly Googling for my own name, the answer is no. No, I set up a Google Alert to do the vain searching for me. And it just emailed me about this search result today.

So I've hired some Web-surfing robots to tell me every time they find my name, and they told me they found my name on a site generated by Web-surfing robots. Yeah, that seems about right.