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Diskage:
Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
Curse of the Day:
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Tuesday October 8, 2002 |
| Quote
of the Day
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain; and most fools do. -- Dale Carnegie |
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Daily
Update Yesterday I endured it until around 4:30, since I was really working quickly on the band names. Yes, I still persevere on those, and the S page is done, 27 damn bands on it, by far the most of any page thus far. T only has about 8, and it's all done, and I'm hoping that U, V, W, X, Y, and Z will all be pretty quick, since there aren't many bands with those letters for their name. After that I'll have to go back and update a bunch from the first half of the alphabet, since the entries got a lot longer and theoretically more amusing over time, and I need to even things up somewhat. I really want to get the whole thing done and posted, mostly so I can get on to working on other things. I want to get several chapters of my fantasy d2 novel thing done by Halloween, for thematically-linked reasons as well as D2 site content reasons, and there are other things I keep putting off doing as well. I was in the middle of Travis yesterday when I finally decided it was too hot, and left. My dad was out of town and I needed to go over and get the mail and take out the trash and feed the koi, and I wanted to ride my mountain bike. I hardly remembered how, after not being on it since about April, but I had a nice, crash-free ride. I'm in vastly better condition than I was 6 months ago, which isn't any surprise given how much I walk and stairmaster in the course of my degenerate employment. I didn't do any bike riding all seasons since my knees and legs are often very sore from work, and I didn't feel the need for additional exercise then. I'd like to stay skinny, and perhaps get skinnier this winter, so some sort of exercise is a must. Metabolism sucks. I could eat everything, as much as I could stand, and not gain a pound when I was 18 or 20. Now I eat less, and lower calorie stuff, and will easily pork up from it unless I go out of my way to work out. Not that this is anything different than every other person on earth finds out when they get near 30, but of course I thought it was just something for other people, since I'm special and unique and all that. I'll have to take the camera over and get some pictures of the bike-riding area some time. It's not very pretty or scenic, being mostly dirt trails around canyons. The area is an actual park, Mission Trails Regional Park, and yes it has a website. You can see a trail map there, but it tells you nothing. The trails are steep and amazingly-rocky. One of the weird things is that riding the bike you'll go over rocks of all sizes from about 8" diameter down to pebbles, mostly embedded in the hard packed dirt. It's basically like riding down a flight of stairs the whole time. Not that steep, but at least that bouncy. I've found that you have to hold the handlebars in a loose grip, stand up gripping the seat with my thighs, and just hang on. It's not that hard to stay on the bike, but you get this amazing rush of blood in your hands from 60 or 90 seconds of constant hard vibration, and they itch and almost burn. It's uncomfortable and disconcerting. The looser grip helps somewhat, and keeps your forearms from throbbing like a coffee percolator. The other thing you can't see on the trail map is how steep things are. Lots of the hills you can barely walk up, much less ride a bike up, and it's quite easy to go along a normal wide path that you could drive a car along, and then turn right and go down a hill and suddenly the trail is 3 feet wide with chaparral 10 feet high on both sides, and about as steep as a black diamond ski slope. You'll ride down and be going 30MPH with the breaks on, get to the bottom of a little gully and make it about 10 feet up the other side before your speed is gone and you're trying to pedal up what feels like the side of a building. Most of it can be done if you downshift to the lowest gear and stand on it, but it's hard. There is technique involved, since if you lean too far forward you won't have enough weight on the back tire, and it'll just skid in the dirt. But if you lean too far back you can't get enough leverage to keep moving, and you can easily tip over backwards. This spring when I was riding there semi-regularly I had to get a new back tire for my bike, a super knobby one, to have the traction to get up the hills. The whole park isn't like that; there are lots of very wide and easy walking paths that you could drive a car over, but all around them off to the sides are these mountain goat detours that are a lot of fun to ride on, assuming you don't die trying. I'm feeling pretty good today, and it's going to be hot as hell again this afternoon, so probably I'll go over to dad's and get my bike out again. I need the exercise anyway. Some news, mostly since there are pretty pictures with both. • Astronomers have found what you might call the 10th planet. It's been given the handy name, "Quaoar" which is a Native American name meaning, "hard to spell". The object is about half the size of Pluto, and way way out on the edge of the solar system. However they're not calling it the 10th planet, and in fact there's debate over whether Pluto should even be the 9th one.
So take that, foul Disney hound! There are a couple of cool artist's renditions of the planet that I've archived here. • Article about the safety of planes used to fight wild fires in California isn't all that interesting, but the one picture of a plane crashing, it's wings actually breaking off in mid-air, is pretty impressive. |
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 ite
stats are a thing I've always enjoyed poking through. One of the main
joys of having my own site (at least so I thought before I had one) is
that I'd be able to see all the stats all the time, and see which pages
were most popular, who was looking at what, trends over time, etc.
As it's turned out, I'm less thrilled with them than I'd planned on being. Initially I'd look at them every day, and when they are (frequently) broken I miss them, but when they're working I don't get quite the chubby over things that I used to. One problem is how buggy they are. The page loads are all screwy due to some browsers caching and others not, and there's no way to accurately estimate the amount of unique visitors from the stats I have. The most interesting thing is seeing what people search for and end up here. The frustrating part is that I don't see the search strings they ran with Google, and that's by far the most popular browser. I just see the search strings from some other, unknown, less-used search engine, at least going by the numbers. As of now, after 7 days of stats, there are 516 referral hits from http://www.google.com and 257 from http://google.yahoo.com as well as dozens each from about 10 international Googles, including UK, Italy, Canada, Germany, and Singapore. Yet I only have 15 listed search strings, 12 of which have 1 search each. They are amusing, at least. The top one by far is "argyria pictures" which has lead 9 people here. There are another two who searched for "argyria pic". That's that weird blue skin disease you get from ingesting silver through a delusion that it will cure diseases. I posted about it and posted links to some pics of it after there was a news item about some guy running for public office who had it. As I posted at the time, it was damn annoying there weren't any pictures of him. Obviously other people felt the same way. What is usually the most common search string here is in second place now. It's "mini skirt" which has 5 thus far. I can easily imagine why people are searching for that phrase, but I don't know why they land here in the process. Last time I checked on Google there wasn't any page on this site in the first 5 or 6 pages of results for that search. One weird thing in the searches that have gone just once each is this group:
I haven't listened to or watched the Howard Stern show lately, so have no idea if this is a new catch phrase, or it was part of some show, or some celebrity said it? Why would someone be searching for "it's just wrong" in relation to him? I tried a search for that phrase and his name, and at least I know why I'm getting hits from it, since the 3rd site suggestion is here, for the August 26th blog. Which of course had nothing to do with their search, I just happened to mention Howard Stern and had that phrase in near juxtaposition. The first link does appear to explain things though, where an actual Howard Stern fansite describes things. "It's Just Wrong" shows up on their site, but no explanation. I went back a few weeks into the archives and finally found an explanation:
I'm not sure what the appeal of that is. I guess a hot sister and it's semi-incestuous to have the brother responsible for her stripping, which makes it more amusing than just having any random couple come in and do it. I don't see what the big deal is, but then again I'm an only child. They are apparently talking about upping the prize to $25,000 and trying to get some celebrities to do it. Who would you get anyway? I mean there aren't that many brother/sister celebrities in the first place. Erik and Julia Roberts would be good, but obviously Julia wouldn't have any interest. They'd probably end up with some guy on a WB sitcom who had a hot sister, which would be pushing the definition of "celebrity" quite a bit. The problem with that sort of thing is that you'd never get a woman to do it who wasn't taking her clothing off all the time anyway. So some stripper would do it, but who cares, you could see her in a g-string for $20 any Friday night. Aside from the search strings, the referrals are interesting. I'm getting hundreds to the SC Ghost article, but all from the mentions of it I put on a couple of pages on the D2 site. Those hardly count, being as I wrote the pages and put in the link here. It's not like some troll on Gamespot thought the article was roxor (which it's not) and linked here about it. There are a few inexplicable referrals as well. This happens every month where the referrals chart will list some page on a site somewhere and say there are 7 or 9 or 12 hits from it, and when you look at that site you can't see any way on earth that's accurate. It'll be a news article on CNN, for instance. Thus far this month there are 10 referrals, all in one day, from this: http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi. This is probably accurate, since there seem to be extensive community bulletin boards on that site, and someone must have posted a link to here from some post there. Why it got 10 hits all at once and none since I dunno. Another odd one is the 7 referrals from this: http://q101.com/ultracrib/site.html. It looks to be some sort of radio station contest from Chicago where they are giving away a year's rent in a nice apartment, a car, and some other stuff. Which is fine, but I have no idea how 7 people got referred from that to here. The international traffic is also interesting to me. Here are all the countries, in descending order, as they are listed. Canada is 331 hits at this point, NZ is 199, and Costa Rica is 11. There are other countries between 1-10, but I only see the top 30. The top two spots are "US Commercial" and "Network". I don't know what either of those are, exactly. They are both well over 4000 at this point though, which is probably 3 or 4x more than every other country combined.
Yes, US Military and US Government are both listed. From Italy down to Costa Rica goes from 66 to 11 hits, which is hardly enough to count. I mean if one person from Mexico looked at a few archived pages and the Hot or Not page they'd jump up about 10 spots, since there are like 20 images on that page, and I believe they each count as a file load. One funny thing was that China had a lot of hits at one point last month, and I posted about it and said I was surprised they could even access this site, and that I should make some comments about "falun gong" just to get blacklisted. It appears to have worked. Sorry, whoever was enjoying the site from China. |
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