From Jo'Burg Airport

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Delayed posting by 3 days
I’m sitting here in the Johannesburg airport. Mad again that they have wireless access but want me to pay for it. At $5 for 30 minutes, I’ll wait to upload later.

We have a couple hours before our flight to Cape Town leaves, so my wife is catching a couple Zs on my lap while I type. As I sit here looking at her a funny conversations come to my mind that we had last night over a drink.

I forget what we were talking about, probably NECC as that’s what I have on my mind and she’s excited as she gets to visit with her sister while I’m at the conference, so San Diego worked out for both of us. We got on the subject of Googling your name. I asked her if she had done it lately to see what came up. She said that she hadn’t but that someone stopped by her office the other day and commented on how nice her resume online was. They said they Googled her name to find her e-mail and a link to her resume came up as the second link.

The conversation:

Me: “That’s great..that’s just what you want!”
Wife: “How does Google rank pages?”
Me: “It’s complicated really there are a number of algorithms that they are using to calculate different things such as links to and from the page, views, stuff like that.
Wife: “So exactly what makes it determine rankings?”

OK, so she asked a follow up question and I’m thinking she really wants to know some of this stuff. She knows I just finished listening to the audible book The Search and I figured she wanted to know.

Me: “Well, Google has these programs called spiders that search the web. Once it finds a web page it reads that page for links and then follows those links to other web pages.
Wife: HUGE sigh
Me: “What?”
Wife: “I really don’t want to know.”
Me: “But you asked me to tell you.”
Wife: “Yeah that was my mistake you got into your teacher voice.”
Me: “My what?”
Wife: “Your teacher voice, your whole body changes, your voice changes, and I know I’m in for a lesson. I like it sometimes, but tonight is not the night for a Google lesson.”
Me: “I don’t have a teacher voice!” (don’t really remember what she said after that anyway)
Wife: Laughing “You do so, it’s not a bad thing it’s just you and after 10 years I can tell when I’m talking to teacher Jeff or Husband Jeff and tonight I just want husband Jeff.”
Me: “OK, fair enough.” (I can never argue with her logic and it was way too beautiful of a night in Singapore to waste it on a Google conversation anyway.

The point is…I think…that if you are a teacher you are a teacher for life. If given the opportunity to teach you grab it and run, whether the time is appropriate or not. I love my wife for many reasons one being she keeps me in check when I go into “teacher mode” many a time I’ve gotten the squeeze under the table to stop talking. But inevitably, I just don’t think I can help it…I’m a born educator!