Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • ’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?

  • My favorite posts of 2005

    Being inspired by Chris’s post about the same, I decided I’d list my favorite/best posts for 2005. These aren’t the most popular ones (I’ll cover those later), but the ones I personally think are the best.

    I’m not ranking them, though, other than in the date in which they appeared.

  • Unfortunate ad placement on Bend.com…

    Is it just me, or does this particular ad placement on the Bend.com article pictured below seem really… I don’t know, juvenile? Not to mention, wrong.

    Thumbnail of Bend.com's unfortunate ad placement
    Click for full size

    It just hasn’t been the same since Barney left.

  • Obligatory post-Christmas post

    Okay, I freely admit I stole the title from Jake. Everyone have a good holiday? Mostly? Good.

    There’s no denying it, Christmas is for the kids. We had more presents under the tree than ever, I think, almost all for them. And, they’re just at that age now where Christmas is a Big Deal, possibly the Biggest Deal of the Whole Year, so it was full frontal X-Mas this year. (Yeah, I chose that phrase deliberately, just to weed out the pervs. I’m watching you.)

    So, here’s a (mostly boring) list of what I got this year, both for my birthday and Christmas (no particular order):

    After the morning of opening presents and ooh-ing and ahh-ing over new toys and cleaning up and everything, we went out to my parents’ house to spend the rest of the day eating and visiting in our traditional Christmas manner. This is actually my favorite part of Christmas, I think, family and friends getting together to celebrate the holiday.

    This year we caught up with a family friend we hadn’t seen in four years, with an interesting backstory: he’s a forensic criminalist based in Ontario, Oregon. That’s right, he’s a CSI, although, as he put it, without the guns, the drama, or anything like that. He wants to get transferred to Portland because there’s not enough homicides in Eastern Oregon… seriously. Mostly it’s lab work, identifying meth and other similar drugs.

    What’s funny is that I was under the impression for years now that he was a forensic psychologist, which is what I’d been telling people. Doesn’t that seem more exciting or interesting somehow? I don’t know, but I was pretty amused by the thought of him matching wits with the Hannibal Lecters of Eastern Oregon…

    Ah, such is Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year!

  • Spamments

    You may or may not have noticed that I’ve turned off comments on posts older than three months. I wasn’t getting tons of spam comments (spamments?)—I suspect my filtering was working well enough—but I was certainly getting tired of the ones that were coming through. Since they were almost invariably on old posts, I finally bit the bullet and took care of the problem.

    If you have a burning desire to write about a past blog entry, just use the contact form. Of course, that’s no guarantee that you’ll get anywhere. :)