Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • 2007 Chuggnutt Zeitgeist

    Yes, it’s that introspective time again. Since I’ve done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

      2006 2005 2004
    Number of blog entries: 155 244 306
    Total words written (approximate): 29,894 39,810 45,537
    Average words per entry: 192.9 163.2 148.8
    Total visitors (including all the junk): 1,041,504 633,100 242,433
    Average visitors per day: 2,853 1,734 687
    Total real visitors (approximate): 681,069 430,505 n/a
    Average real visitors per day: 1,865 1,179 n/a
    Most active month:  October, then May October n/a
    Ten most popular blog entries:
      1. The Skittles beard commercial: 8,253
      2. Bill Gates’ house: 2,985
      3. Smoke alarm batteries: 2,922
      4. Jack Bauer Facts: 2,245
      5. Cooking salmon: 2,186
      6. The Lost Ultimate Theory: 2,016
      7. Chuck Norris facts: 1,935
      8. The name game: 1,778
      9. The Dirty Screech: 1,705
      10. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans: 1,390

     

     
      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 non-spam comments: 599 1,556  
    Ten most popular searches landing here:
      1. boba fett: 2,851
      2. darth maul: 2,243
      3. burger king mask: 2,158
      4. skittles beard commercial: 1,395
      5. free palm ebooks: 1,389
      6. matrix name generator: 1,045
      7. pdb reader: 993
      8. jedi: 890
      9. never ending fall: 865
      10. biggest baby: 851

     

     
      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

     

     

    		 n/a
    Top five search engines:
      1. Google: 66,133
      2. Yahoo: 19,000
      3. MSN: 4,526
      4. AskJeeves: 1,871
      5. Altavista: 510

     

     
      1. Google: 72,180
      2. Yahoo: 20,629
      3. MSN: 4,042
      4. AskJeeves: 1,259
      5. AOL Search: 1,061

     

     

    		 n/a
    Approximate breakdown of browsers and traffic:
      • Internet Explorer: 61.83%
      • Firefox/Mozilla: 25.06%
      • Opera: 0.76%
      • RSS stuff: 5.21%
      • Other: 7.13%

     

     
      • Internet Explorer: 61%
      • Firefox/Mozilla: 23%
      • Opera: 1%
      • RSS stuff: 2%
      • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
      • Other: 4.8%

     

     

    		 n/a
    Total number of bot hits: 418,028 n/a n/a

     

  • Words written in 2006

    I’m adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow… the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that’s roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

  • Where is the time going?

    Time has been passing too quickly lately. Seriously. Where has it been going? I keep finding myself surprised to discover that something I thought happened just last year was really three years ago, for instance, or that I’ve been at my current job for four years, and it doesn’t seem nearly that long.

    Part of it is that I get older, the passing of time seems to speed up. My grandmother used to say this all the time, and while (as a kid) I knew the truth of this, I never really knew the truth of it, you know? I’m not sure that’s possible when you’re young; time seemed to pass so slowly then.

    (And yet, here I am now, stuck in the present like always.)

    I don’t mean to imply that I’m depressed about my age, or anything like that. It was more of a fleeting observation that I wanted to write down—without sounding too maudlin. Perhaps I’ll have more to write about this at a later time…

  • My favorite posts of 2006

    I did this same thing last January, and thought it was good fodder for looking back on 2006: my favorite posts over the last year. I noticed that I wrote less here as I stepped up my writing on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, and I wonder: if quantity went down, did quality go up? :)

  • 34

    On this day…

    • Hanukkah ends at sundown
    • Festivus is “traditionally” celebrated
    • The Night Before Christmas was first published, in 1823
    • Eddie Vedder was born in 1964
    • The Emperor of Japan Akihito was born in 1933
    • Van Gogh cut off his ear in 1888
    • A whole bunch of other stuff happened

    …and oh yeah, it’s my birthday. I’m 34 today.

  • What’s shakin’?

    Yes, I’m aware I haven’t posted much here on chuggnutt.com lately. I’ve been focusing most of my writing energy on The Brew Site and Hack Bend recently, since I keep thinking of topical things for those blogs and I really don’t want to become a caricature of myself with “Lost” rants.

    Aside from that, here’s a loosely-presented list of things that have been happening:

    Thanksgiving was very nice, and low-key. We did the expected big dinner at my parents’ house, though we weren’t a big crowd. We made some excellent pumpkin pies with a gingerbread graham cracker crust. (Gingerbread graham crackers. Seriously. Rachael Ray is on the box.)

    I hung outdoor Christmas lights on the house the day after Thanksgiving. The cold air gave me a bit of a cold.

    The day after that consisted of generously picking up weary travelers Shannon and Brian from the Redmond Airport; Shannon confessed a creepy desire to pummel saguaro cacti. Whack job. :)

    The two recent books I’ve read/are reading are Stephen Baxter’s Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space. I think Time is the better written of the two, where he actually builds characterizations (mostly; he’s not as strong here as some writers) for his cast, whereas in Space they feel more like mouthpieces or conveniences. Maybe he just got lazy, since he’s sort of continuing the main character’s story, and didn’t feel necessary to rehash… or not. I don’t know. They’re full of interesting concepts, nonetheless.

    When I get a chance (which isn’t often), I’ve been thoroughly enjoying “Secret Weapons Over Normandy” for the PlayStation 2. That game completely rocks. I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I do; I think a big part of that is the relatively simple controls used.

    (Yes, that’s me: I need simple video game controls. I’m retro that way.)

    Anything else? Um… working. Nothing interesting to report there.

  • Protolariat

    This entry stems entirely from a gross misspelling/mishandling of the word “proletariat” on my part. “Protolariat” is not a real word; if you search for it nothing comes up. What better opportunity to create a new word and be the only search engine result for it? :)

    So, what should the definition be? I’m thinking something along the lines of:

    • An incomplete model of string theory
    • A poorly-executed or work-in-progress “Web 2.0” site; possibly derogatory. “Friendster is a real protolariat”
    • Mushroom juice
    • A long piece of rope with a knot at one end

    Coining new words with the power of the internet!

  • Akismet

    I’ve started using the spam-killing service Akismet to handle comment spam on my three blogs. That, and instituted a basic moderation system for comments. I can’t say as I’ve been dealing with as much comment spam as some people, but I just got sick and tired of dealing with the problem myself and decided to offload the work.

    So far Akismet is pretty slick, though I’d guesstimate that it has only caught 50% or so of the spam comments I’ve received since activating it today. I’m hoping it gets better.

    It took a little bit of work to integrate it into my custom software, but I was able to crib a PHP class someone else had written and get it all integrated fairly smoothly. If you’re running one of the standard platforms like Movable Type or WordPress, though, there already exist handy plugins that you should just be able to drop into your blog directory.

    So if there’s any comment weirdness over the next few days as I monitor the activity and work out the kinks, bear with me. If you post a legitimate comment, it should show up right away, unless it was incorrectly flagged as spam. That’s where the moderation comes in; I’ll make sure to approve legit comments ASAP.

  • Diversion

    We got the minivan back from the shop this week, and today I had the distinct pleasure of attending a diversion class for the ticket I had received (you all remember my accident, right?) The diversion class was the kind with the driving simulator—whenever you’re involved in an accident this is the type of class you get. It ran from nine until about three.

    The class by itself was just fine; full of information and videos about traffic safety, etc. Definitely worth it to get the ticket expunged from the record. The simulators, though, they were something else…

    …as in, really old technology. I’m quite sure they were state-of-the-art fifteen years ago, but in this day and age they just seem, well, sad. Seriously, these are circa early- to mid-nineties units; the “simulators” are basically adjustable seats with the simplest possible console you can imagine: steering wheel, ignition, speedometer, and indicator lights for the program. Gas and brake pedals. Gear shift (for an automatic) and emergency brake.

    Everyone sits in these consoles and watches a screen where the “simulation” is projected from—I kid you not—laserdisc. Laserdisc! Aside from thrift stores, I haven’t seen a live laserdisc player since the late 80s. And it’s just a movie, basically, no real interaction—you simply “drive” the console in accordance with what’s on the screen, and the indicator lights flash if there was an error of some sort (too fast or slow, no turn signal, etc.).

    All very basic. Embarrassingly so.

    Modern video game systems are more advanced than this. In fact, with how affordable technology is these days, there’s almost no reason you couldn’t put together a simulator out of a PlayStation or Xbox, cheap LCD monitor, and driving controls (which I’ve seen for racing games), and have the entire system come in for well under $1000.

    Laserdisc! I’m still shaking my head.

  • In the air

    I don’t know what it is, exactly, but these last few days really seem like summer is done and autumn is just starting. No, it’s not the colder weather we had today… perhaps it’s like Jennifer’s husband said, about the quality of light changing so that it looks like fall.

    Actually I think that’s a large part of it. The days are shorter and the sun has been shifting southward again, and the light has a fall quality to it. I can smell it in the air, too. Something crisp. It feels like the harvest season, or at least feels like it should be.

    And then school’s starting on Tuesday… both are kids are in this year (first grade and kindergarden). That plays a factor, I’m sure.

    So, even though we officially have nearly another month of summer remaining, it seems to me that it is now (informally) the beginning of autumn.

    Did everyone remember to bring in or cover their plants tonight?