Despite my best efforts, starting our apartment search a month in advance clearly didn’t work in our favor (we started 8 days before our lease was expiring last year, so a month seemed generous!). Meg’s main priority was finding a two-floor apartment in our price range; we did that, and put down a pre-security deposit of a couple of hundred bucks to prove our intent, and waited for the day that we would meet the landlord to pay the rest and get the keys … but that was never to happen.

Instead, the night before we were to do the swap, the landlord called me.

“So, I need to talk to you guys.”

“Oh? What about?”

“I didn’t think I had to tell you before … but I put the house on the market a couple of months ago, and now I have an interested buyer.”

[ pause ] “Huh.”

“But I do have a condo in the same community that’s available!”

“Does it have two floors?”

“No.”

Needless to say, I was pretty peeved. What happened to common courtesy? One would think that when we first went to look at the townhouse, she might have mentioned that it was on the market. Instead, she said that we would sign the lease for a year, and if we liked, we could buy it after that.

Ridiculous.

So it ended up being a crazy weekend of visiting loads of apartments in the area, because, well, our lease is up August 31 and I really would rather not be homeless. Unfortunately, none of the two-floor places we looked at had central air, or they had strangely-shaped and very small bedrooms, or they were totally beaten up. You’d think that landlords would take care of their property, but apparently that’s not the case.

At this point, I am just awaiting confirmation from the landlord of a place right on the border of Edison and Metuchen. It is one floor, but it has two good-sized bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, gorgeous hardwood floors, central air, a large yard, and is located close to the Parkway and Turnpike - must-haves in my book.

I wish I had someone else to go through this process for me. I’m exhausted. And so is Meg.

The sad thing about all of this is that, for what we pay in Jersey for a two-bedroom, one-floor apartment, you can get a three-bedroom townhouse in Northern Virginia, or a 2500-square-foot house with a two-car garage in North Carolina.

Can you tell I miss the South?

Johnny C. Taylor, president and CEO of Black Web Enterprises, viewed the results of Google searches to be too white-oriented, thereby ignoring the needs of minorities. So in April the organization developed their own search engine, RushmoreDrive, and their own algorithms to weigh black-focused web sites more heavily than others. Claiming to be the “first-of-its-kind search engine for the black community,” RushmoreDrive offers search results that are more in tune with what black people are looking for; yesterday’s LA Times article on the subject referred to a search on the term “Whitney,” which, in Google, returned results that included the Whitney Museum of Art in the number one spot (its web site URL is www.whitney.org - having this be the first thing that shows up on a search for “Whitney” doesn’t seem all that crazy to me personally). On RushmoreDrive, the number one spot from the same search was reserved for Whitney Houston, because that was most likely what a black person would be looking for. (I’m finding it hard to bite my tongue about the fact that the “Whitney” search on RushmoreDrive did indeed turn up Whitney Houston’s web site … with Dominican singer Kat De Luna’s description below it. Huh?)

Stereohyped did a very interesting test of search results with RushmoreDrive and Ask.com (though the latter is not exactly one of the top search engines in the world) which you should check out.

I do think this is an excellent example of entrepreneurship - providing a service to a specific segment of the population - as long as it doesn’t get all political and mention that whole “oppression” thing. And they need not worry about Google searches being determined by the majority - aka white - population for too much longer. A U.S. Census Bureau study released Thursday has determined that today’s minorities will outnumber the white population in the United States by 2042.

This is exciting: scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have finally been able to “cloak” three-dimensional objects so that they basically appear invisible.  A report on Yahoo! News explains that “people can see objects because they scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye. Cloaking uses materials, known as metamaterials, to deflect radar, light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream.”  I know I’d definitely be in the market for one of these!

Rules: Google “Your name needs” and describe the first ten results.

1. Ingrid needs … some help.

2. Ingrid needs … to write her book and help with the movie and kindly DISAPPEAR!

3. Ingrid needs … OUR help, she needs YOUR help.

4. Ingrid needs … data from the model RVAR variable.

5. Ingrid needs … YOU!!!

6. Ingrid needs … to practise her “discernmetnalist” gift that seems to have been waining.

7. Ingrid needs … the flyers a week from Monday to put in the Del. Mar Times.

8. Ingrid needs … to learn not to fall over. <- my favorite

9. Ingrid needs … to take some time to recover.

10. Ingrid needs … to first select the Identify tool located to the left of the map.