Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • Resonate

    I think Jennifer almost always has insightful things to say about Bend (and is a fine writer to boot), but last night’s post was really remarkable, I think. She points to the Bend 2030 website (the project of which I was only really tangentially aware of until the past few days), and drops the bomb on a couple of the hard questions:

    What’s the most significant issue facing Bend?

    Well, an increase in growth threatens two of the three things I value most about living here. So Bend’s biggest issue is limiting growth or, if that’s impossible, limiting the damage.

    Also: this town has a severe divide between rich and poor with almost no middle class. That gives my kids a wacky sense of how the world works. First, it’s not a reflection of most of the United States; and second, they don’t see a model for success — except, of course, in real estate. People grow up here and disappear for awhile, then come back as doctors and lawyers. Or they grow up wealthy and never work for keeps. Unless Bend changes, my kids won’t have much opportunity to watch someone start out on a low rung and work their way up.

    So, to answer question four:

    What is your personal vision for the future of Bend?

    I want growth in Bend to slow way, way down, so that we can get a psychic grasp on what’s happening here. And then I would like Bend to work toward becoming not a resort town or a retirement mecca but a normal city, where people work and go to school — and just happen to climb mountains or ski or run rivers whenever they get a chance.

    Dead on. I really couldn’t have said it better myself, and I find myself nodding in nearly perfect agreement with this.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about Bend and its growth and what it’s been turning into lately. In light of my rant yesterday, I think it’s safe to expect more rants and thoughts on this topic from me. In the meantime, keep watching Jennifer. She’s going to be a force to be reckoned with.

  • I am Snarky Bend!

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

  • 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.

  • ’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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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. :)

  • Happy Solstice

    Happy First Day of Winter. I know I haven’t been posting here much this month, I guess it’s kind of been winding down as Christmas approaches and the year ends. On the other hand, I’ve been posting to The Brew Site every day, so that’s good—I’ve been doing a “Beer Advent Calendar” series of posts each day, which has been a lot of fun and in keeping in good habits of posting something every day somewhere.

    To give you an idea of what kinds of things I have on the plate for when I start writing here more often (which could happen tomorrow… or in a few weeks…), here’s a totally non-committed list:

    • Some more Scooby’s at the Front Door fun (you just know I have to)
    • A series of stories/anecdotes/recollections of growing up in Central Oregon. I told Simone at one point that I’d be writing these, so I guess I have to eventually :)
    • Book reviews… nothing major, just notes on things I’ve been reading
    • Thoughts about “Lost”… odds and ends that occur to me about the show, theories, whatever… I’ve actually considered starting a blog on one of the free services for this, as an experiment
    • A third blog… I’m not gonna say much about this now, but I will say that at some point in the near future I’m launching another blog—a “real” one, not a free-hosted one.

    Anyways, Happy Solstice to everyone!

  • Design by Simone (we’ll see what she comes up with)

    So Simone was telling me that the design here on the blog was getting stale, “too much green,” things like that. Okay, I said. Come up with a new design for me, and I’ll implement it.

    Her eyes got big. For like, one day? she asked.

    For as long as I like it, I said (or words to that effect). I’m not a designer; I came up with something I kind of liked, but if someone wants to make me a better one, I’m all for it.

    So we’ll see what Simone comes up with for me.