Chuggnutt!

Month: January 2006

  • I am Snarky Bend!

    Chris started it; I’m just jumping on the bandwagon!

  • Mouse fire!

    Okay, this is kind of an awful story…

    No, scratch that. It’s a story that seems like it should be awful, but I just can’t take it seriously. It just makes me laugh. I can’t help it: Mouse takes down house.

    On Saturday, a Fort Sumner man’s home fell victim to a mouse fire.

    Homeowner Luciano Mares said he caught a mouse inside his residence and discarded the creature in a pile of garden refuse he was burning on his property near the home.

    “I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house,” he said.

    The. Mouse. Was. On. Fire.

    Update: Snopes debunks it. It almost happened, but the mouse was already dead.

    Update #2: According to CNN, the story may be true after all:

    Is that plausible? Fort Sumner Fire Chief Juan Chavez said Tuesday he thinks so.

    “There’s no reason for him to lie about what he told us,” Chavez said. “I don’t doubt it at all.”

    There’s hope!

  • Two for the price of one

    Just pointers to a couple of blog posts I enjoyed.

    First, Chris reviews Burger King in a fun sort of anti-Bend Restaurants way. Plus, you gotta love it when someone puts so much effort into writing a review like this…

    “Parked in lot?”, you ask, and yes I did because there are critical steps in eating your Whopper, and the first is, eat it when it’s hot and fresh. Yes, “Eat your Whopper while it’s hot and fresh,” is what momma always told me. Also the fact that the window view from the restaurant isn’t really much different helps too. The next tip I have to offer you is to put a few onion rings and some of the zesty onion ring sauce on your Whopper and then get ready for Whopper-Bliss.

    The other pointer is to Jake and to his post about the PHP easter egg. I wasn’t aware of this particular quirk, either, but apparently PHP will output an image of a dog if you append a string to the URL appropriately. I do know of the phpinfo() “easter egg” that only appears on April 1—the PHP logo image is replaced with something goofy. But this other one is new to me.

  • PlayStation 2

    So I had a bunch of Christmas and birthday money this year and decided to go crazy and do something I normally wouldn’t do: I bought a PlayStation 2 game system. I know, I know, new XBox, yadda yadda, but frankly there’s a larger library of PS2 games out there and most of the ones I really want to play are on PlayStation only anyway.

    It was the Costco bundle; comes with the console (which includes one controller), an extra controller, memory card, and two games. The one game we played around with this evening (kid friendly) is ATV Offroad Fury 3. It’s pretty fun so far. We get a kick out of watching/causing some truly spectacular crashes. :)

    Also I’m intrigued by the possibility of plugging it into the internet and doing some network gaming, since it has that capability. We’ll see.

  • ’05 retrospective (personal)

    So, now I’m looking back over 2005 from my own standpoint. It was a busy, eventful year.

    Last January I buckled down and began eating healthy in order to lose weight. That was enormously successful—and satisfying—as I lost 40 pounds. So far I’ve kept it off, and plan to keep it off. My next goal in this vein should be to get into shape; yes, I’ve lost the weight, but I definitely need to start exercising. Realistic? Knowing me, it could go either way.

    Also last January I narrowly missed being selected for a jury. Of the one week I was on call for jury duty, I only got called in that first day, and ultimately wasn’t selected. It was the first time I’d ever had jury duty.

    I wrote about it, but I didn’t get fired for blogging.

    Memorial Day weekend, I put together a playground. Almost. I find it notable because I think it’s the largest thing I’ve ever built.

    It was a year for travel. We made it to Portland a few times, but our big trips were the Alaskan cruise and our week in Florida.

    The cruise vacation marked not only the first time I’d been on a cruise, but also the first time in Canada and Alaska. That was quite a trip: we drove to Vancouver, B.C., stopping to visit friends in the Seattle area each way. And Alaska was amazing… I’d definitely go back.

    Florida was flat and humid. The trip was worth it, though, and we made it out ahead of Hurricane Wilma.

    I also did an overnight trip to Walla Walla, Washington, for work. First time there, too; I rather liked it, except for going during the hottest part of the summer.

    I lost my cat. That was one of the hardest, worst things to happen in many years.

    And, we got a new cat. A kitten, actually. That’s fine, I don’t really have an opinion on it one way or another, it is what it is. Better a cat than a dog, though. I’m so not a dog person.

  • ’05 retrospective (historical)

    Looking back on some of the historical events of 2005. For some reason, it seemed to me to be an interesting year for centennial events also.

    2005:

    • The Huygens probe landed on Titan (Saturn’s moon).
    • One Pope died and a new Pope was selected.
    • Deep Throat’s identity was revealed.
    • Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, Bixoli, and the Gulf Coast. It was an unusually dense and destructive year for tropical storms.
    • Civil unrest hit France in the Paris suburbs.
    • A 7.6-magnitude earthquake stuck the Kashmir region in Northern Pakistan, killing nearly 90,000 people.
    • NASA more-or-less successfully launched a projectile into a comet for study.

    Centennial notes (1905):

    • Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity.
    • Bend, Oregon became officially incorporated.
    • Las Vegas was founded.

    Bicentennial notes (1805):

    • Lewis and Clark arrived and wintered at the Pacific Ocean.
    • The Battle of Trafalgar: Admiral Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish naval fleet.
    • Napoleon, meanwhile, soundly defeats the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz.

    Obviously I’m only touching on a very, very abbreviated list. A good one to review (and getting better each day) is Wikipedia’s 2005 page. But, I think it’s a decent touchpoint to start with, and it definitely stimulates the thinking. At any rate, those are some of the first things I thought of or stood out to me when I was looking back at 2005.

    What 2005 events are significant to you?

  • End of the World!

    Okay, not so much really since it’s only the beginning of January, but go watch this. It’s surprisingly hilarious.

  • Simpson’s Scooby!

    Scooby's at the Front Door, on Bart Simpson's chalkboard

    I warned you there was more coming. :)

  • 2005 Chuggnutt Zeitgeist

    It’s time for another edition of the Chuggnutt Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Google and since I did one last year. Interesting stuff, if you’re into blogs and stats and such. On to it!

    • Number of blog entries: 244. Last year: 306.
    • Approximate total number of words: 39,810. Last year: 45,537
    • Average words per blog entry: 163.2. Last year: 148.8
      It only looks like I wrote less than last year, but you know what? I was also writing on The Brew Site. I’m doing a Zeitgeist post over there too, but the quick numbers are 222 posts and 38,371 words… which combined, yields 466 posts and 78,181 words. Surpassed!
    • Total visitors: 633,110. This is unfiltered, so it includes bots, spiders, RSS readers, etc. Last year: 242,433
    • Average visitors per day: 1,734. Last year: 687
    • Total real visitors (approximate): 430,505. This is the actual number, with most of the bots and such filtered out.
    • Average real visitors per day: 1,179
      This year I made the attempt to show actual visitors to the site, not just the automated stuff out there. To that end I filtered out anything identifying itself as a spider, known RSS feed slurpers/readers, bots, crawlers, and non-browser agents. I didn’t get everything out, but this is a pretty decent snapshot. Note this doesn’t speak to unique visitors; the stat package I’m using doesn’t classify that and I’m not using Sitemeter or anything that supposedly tracks unique visitors. I imagine a good part of the total visitors are repeat visits, so I won’t hazard a guess as to how many unique hits are there.
    • The most active month was October, by a long shot, because of the Burger King mask post—people were hammering this post looking for a Burger King Halloween costume. Not surprisingly, this post has also garnered the most comments: 673
    • There were three days on which traffic spiked considerably: April 30, with 9,152 visitors; July 20, with 7,575 visitors; and August 18, with 8,915 visitors. Unsurprisingly, those appear to be times when I was FARKed—that is, someone linked to one of my pictures from the FARK forums.
    • Ten most popular blog entries:
      1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
      2. Houston’s glass public toilet: 9,610
      3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
      4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
      5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
      6. Leonard Nimoy’s Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
      7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
      8. Central Oregon’s biggest baby?: 3,821
      9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
      10. Never ending fall: 3,017
    • Total number of comments (not counting spam): 1,556
    • Most popular searches on this site:
      • burger king: 34
      • burger king mask [variants]: 24
      • i want to buy the burger king mask: 5
      • Beaubien [variants]: 28
      • z21: 27
      • ktvz: 8
      • html2text: 24
      • trump: 10 (plus 3 variants)
      • donald trump: 6
      • donald trump bend: 3
      • donald trump bend oregon rumor: 3
      • (Total Trump related: 25)
      • fantastic 4 cash card [variants]: 14
      • fantastic 4 [variants]: 16
      • bend oregon [variant]: 14
      • bend: 12
      • php: 12
      • blog: 12
      • amazon: 11
      • lovecraft: 10
    • Ten most popular search engine searches landing here:
      1. burger king mask: 5,295
      2. boba fett: 3,086
      3. pdb reader: 1,972
      4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
      5. darth maul: 1,534
      6. kermit the frog: 1,376
      7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
      8. www.amazon.com/burgerking: 1,210
      9. super walmart: 973
      10. palm reader: 877
    • Top five search engines:
      1. Google: 72,180
      2. Yahoo: 20,629
      3. MSN: 4,042
      4. AskJeeves: 1,259
      5. AOL Search: 1,061
    • Here’s the approximate breakdown of browsers and agents, gleaned from the full numbers:
      • Internet Explorer: 61% of all traffic
      • Mozilla/Netscape browsers (Firefox mostly, I think): 23%
      • Opera: 1%
      • RSS readers/agents: 2%
      • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
      • Other stuff (random bots, feed readers, crawlers, obscure browsers): 4.8%
    • Among real visitors, some surprises in country of origin (I’m not listing all country stats here; suffice to say, the U.S. and Canada are the top two):
      • China: 13,221 visitors
      • Malaysia: 1,930
      • Uruguay: 1,371
      • Sweden: 912
      • Saudi Arabia: 899
      • Greece: 524
      • Iran: 450

      I’m surprised I’m that popular in China.

  • It’s the 2nd already!

    No, my title doesn’t really have to do with anything… I just thought I’d use the first thing that popped to mind when I started this entry. This is pretty much a plain-vanilla blog entry, with some ramblings about books and such.

    I’ve been reading Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson lately, getting close to the end. It and Red Mars—great books. I’m not sure if I’m going to start reading Blue Mars (the final book in the trilogy) right away, or start something else; I’ve been anxious to start Quicksilver, of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, but that’s a monster book in its own right… Plus, I’m halfway through How the Mind Works, by Stephen Pinker, and that’s pretty interesting stuff, too.

    What’s sad awesome is I went and bought a bunch more books with my gift card and Christmas money. I’d better get reading!

    I’ll have some more 2005 wrap-up stuff written tomorrow, too. And I’ll do another “Chuggnutt Zeitgeist” chock-full of stats and trivia. Perfect for all the navel gazers out there. Executive summary: traffic was up from 2004. Nice, eh?