Month: March 2007

Whoa…

I’m by no means all that interested in my orbital position in the “blogosphere”… at all. I don’t really consider this a “blog” so much as an extension of the website I started way back in 1997. That site’s original purpose, to share with our friends photos and text of my family’s life while we were overseas, has remained true. Though we’ve been back in the USA now for over eight years, and my family has opted out of participating (for the most part. Sue watches WAY TOO MUCH TV and has bought into the whole “Internet is rife with stalkers and ID thieves!” paranoia that the news media espouses CONSTANTLY) so the site is more about sharing my photos and text with my friends.

There are a bunch of you who participate right here, via the comments. There is an even larger bunch of you, who just email me directly, maintaining a sort of asynchronous communication channel, me outbound via HTTP and you inbound via SMTP. I’m OK with that too. The majority of folks in that latter category are the folks I’ve been communicating with for a LONG time. Old habits die hard I guess.

As it is, I figure that I have about 30 to 50 people, that I know personally who view this site on a regular basis. I’ve even “met” some people via this website, but none of them “face to face” so far. There are likely a few hundred folks who wander by, one offs… compulsive link followers who get here via clicking my name in another website’s comments area probably. You can measure my hits in the thousands… so I’m not cultivating a following, a technorati ranking, or any sort of revenue. If you EVER see advertising on this site, even google ads, you know it has been hijacked or something! I just can’t lower myself to “monetize” my friends. I really do see this as a form of personal communication.

So where am I going with this?

Today I was helping my staff work on deploying a frequently requested technology, and we were using this server as a guinea pig. I wondered how I, or more specifically our customers, would be able to gather data on this so I peeked at my stats. The image above snapped my head back a bit. SOMETHING I posted this month got a BUNCH of traffic. Since I do not have my stats tweaked to show granular data (remember, I really don’t care about them mostly) it took some digging and postulating to figure out what.

So it looks like the torrent of traffic started on the 14th. Looking back, the ONLY thing I can see that started that was my “William Fucking Shatner” story.

Must be the word “fucking” in there because I don’t see any incoming links for that page. So here is a hint for all you traffic whores (that means YOU John! 😉 ) use the word “fucking” a lot. heh.

Bill Maher: New Rules: March 16, 2007

HBO: Real Time with Bill Maher: New Rules: March 16, 2007

“after 9/11, President Bush told us Osama bin Laden could run but he couldn’t hide. But, then he ran and hid. So, Bush went to Plan B: pissing on the Constitution and torturing random people.

Conservatives always say the great thing Reagan did was make us feel good about America again. Well, do you feel good about America now? I’ll give you my answer, and to get it out of me, you don’t even have to hold my head underwater and have a snarling guard dog rip my nuts off. No, I don’t feel very good about that.

They say evil happens when good men do nothing. Well, the Democrats prove it also happens when mediocre people do nothing.”

Well said.

Car Photo Of The Day… mirror image.

I could not pass up the opportunity to grab this photo. The subject is the 2006 KZOK Classic Car Calendar, being held up by the Calendar’s Art Director, Dave Webber, open to the page showing the car parked in front of him. Feel free to take a guess at the car make and model, I have no idea what it is (but can look at my copy of the calendar later to verify your guesses.)

The honor of being picked for the calendar was very nice, and the photo shoot was fun. I had participated in shoots before as an Art Director myself, but it was fun to be merely a spectator (and a bit of a stylist. 😉 )

In December of ’05 they had an official release of the Calendar at a Car Toys store in Issaquah, and several of us who owned cars chosen decided to show up. The weather was perfect, so I had to go. All the guys from the Bob Rivers Show signed a copy of the calendar for me and I grabbed a few extras to give away.

I kept my calendar open to “June” all year that year. 😉