When computers misbehave

I love computers, but they are sort of like teenagers. They do a lot of amazing things that can be quite difficult to understand. And just when you think you can trust them and leave them alone unsupervised, they mess up big time!

A machine with a mind of its own recently left me scratching my head, and wishing I could turn it over my knee.

The Capital Press has started a new blog about small farms, sometimes lovingly (or disparagingly perhaps) referred to as hobby farms. So after getting the site up and operational (not fancy mind you, but there), I decided to register it with Technorati. Technorati attempts to keep an obviously electronic eye on what's happening in blogs and track things like popularity of sites and topics. So i plug the new information into Technorati for the blog, which we are calling Back Forty, and some machine with a screw loose somehow figures the name of the site is — get this — "Reilable backstreet boys compilation."

I can assure you that there is not one reference to the Backstreet Boys on the new blog. The best I can figure is that someone, at some point, had used the URL we are using for the Back Forty blog to write about allegedly reliable (unless there really is such a word as reilable) compilations of music, or whatever, related to the pop boy band, and Technorati didn't take the information I gave it but instead decided to live in some realm of the cyberpast where someone actually gave a rip about boy bands.

Sadly, the ghosts of that era still haunt us and our new blog. I have the iPod cranking out some country music (The Wreckers, "Leave the Pieces" at the moment) to expunge any boy band lyrics that try to sneak into my synapses. If only Technorati's misfiring memory could be repaired so easily.