Remarkable benefits of NASA technology

Having spent the past week in the Clear Lake City area of Houston, in light of the recent flap with astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, I guess it should not come as a surprise that every time I passed by the NASA Johnson Space Center there was a queue of reporters waiting to have there smiling faces videotaped in front of the NASA front entrance.  Of course, the most interesting aspect of this stranger-than-fiction drama was the fact that Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando while wearing a special "space diaper" that obviated the need for pit stops.  I asked the guard at the gate of NASA if there was any way I could buy or otherwise obtain one of these coveted "space diapers", but he didn't find the humor in this so I left before he could call the cops.

 Lisa Marie Nowak and Nick Nolte.  Separated at birth?  I report, you decide.

A Valentine poem

Valentine's Day is right around the corner, so you should set your MS Outlook reminder to give you the electric cattle prod sometime before Wednesday.  Of course, I like to stay on top of these things, so to speak.  Therefore, in order to display my more sensitive side to my lovely wife, I embarked upon some original poetry.  Chicks dig poetry.  Without further adieu...

Washington Monument
Never looked as grand
As what I have for you
In my hand
Happy Valentine's Day

See what a true romantic I am?  I wonder if I can sell this one to Hallmark?

News from people with similar DNA

My chef brother, Josh, opened his new restaurant, Deep Ellum in Boston last month.  He's been getting some rave reviews from the local press, which is always welcome.  I asked him if he had a web site yet, to which he did not answer.  So I did a registration lookup at DomainTools.com and found that he already did have a domain registered, and when I visited the web site, it was already under construction.  Josh was not happy that I found his web site.  But I hope everyone in Allston gets a chance to sample some of his remarkable cooking.  He's phenomenal.

Yet another case of Texas envy?  I report, you decide.  I'll update when the website is "officially" launched.  Till then, you'll just have to find it yourself.

San Antonio's biggest problem

One thing people certainly will not envy about Texas is that 4 of the 10 "fattest cities" are right here in the Lone Star State, with San Antonio topping that list at position #2, just behind #1 Las Vegas, NV.  Now anyone who's been to San Antonio knows that the food is great here - barbecue, Mexican, and many others.  San Antonio is one of the most hostile cities to bikers, and there are so few bike trails that it's hard to understand how Lance Armstrong got his start here without getting run over.  And the few existing public parks and green spaces in the Alamo City are lame.  If I were king of the world, I would kick the military out of Camp Bullis and turn it into the most wonderful public green space in all of Texas.

On getting noticed by search engines

It's clear that I have much work to do when it comes to search engine optimization.  I read with eager abandon the article on SEO referenced by my friend Big Nellie on his blog.  You would think that because I registered the domain "chrisvelazquez.com" and that my site is called Chris Velazquez, and that in fact my name is actually Chris Velazquez, and has been since birth, that when you type the phrase "Chris Velazquez" in the search engine, that the first entry for "Chris Velazquez" would be one of my own pages.  My home page has the words "Chris Velazquez" in the title tag, the H1 tag, and all over my web site.  Yet if you go to the #1 search engine, you won't find any pages of this website at all unless you place the term "Chris Velazquez" in quotes, and even then it only shows one of the blog pages, sometimes.  It's not that I'm in love with my name; my name is pretty ordinary, and there are a few other people who also have the same name, including a rancher in New Mexico and a film producer.  As you can probably tell, this entire paragraph is an attempt at an experiment to see whether this page will become the first search engine result for the term "Chris Velazquez".  Sorry to have to bore you with all this.

 What Gooooooogle thinks about my website!