Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Blog

  • 2004 Zeitgeist

    In the spirit of the Google Zeitgeist, I’ve pulled together some interesting stats from chuggnutt.com for the year 2004. On to it!

    • Number of blog entries: 306
    • Approximate total number of words: 45,537
    • Average words per blog entry: 148.8
    • Total visitors: 242,433 (includes bots, spiders, aggregators, all that junk)
    • Average visitors per day: 687
    • April was the most active month, as LiveJournalers found my Matrix Name page; April 1 alone showed 6,122 visitors
    • Most popular phrases people searched this sitefor:
      • matrix name
      • matrix
      • mysql
      • html2text
      • ebooks
      • php
      • amazon
      • kermit
      • netoffice
      • black butte porter
      • sony
      • spokane
      • beer
    • Most popular phrases people entered on search engines to get here:
      • free palm ebooks (and tons of variants on this and “palm reader,” “pdb reader,” “palm ebooks,” etc.)
      • boba fett
      • matrix name
      • scary picture
      • darth maul
      • kermit the frog
      • what’s in a name
      • name generator
      • html to text conversion
      • a-team movie
      • zach braff blog
    • Internet Explorer accounts for about 62% of all traffic. Mozilla/Netscape, about 14%. Blog- and RSS-related “browsers” are running at about 17-20%.
    • People made 566 comments on this site (not counting comment spam I deleted).

    Interesting year! Can’t wait to see how 2005 will shape up.

  • 2005!

    Happy New Year everyone. So far 2005 is turning out uneventful: we cleaned the office, watched some movies. What to expect for this new year? I don’t know, maybe for it not to go by so quickly. My grandma was right, the older you get, the quicker time passes.

    At any rate, I’m not making any 2005 predictions, it seems like everybody else on the internet is and I’m pretty sure anything I could come up with is already covered somewhere.

    I will do some stats, though. Those are always fun. :)

  • Emachine freezing

    Okay, this is fun. Our two-year old eMachine keeps periodically freezing up, typically at least once a day or more, and I was hoping someone might have some ideas as to what to do about it or what’s causing it. I can’t seem to ferret out the problem, but it often seems to freeze when doing something graphic- or sound-intensive (playing games—even Flash games, or using the scanner), or when using SpyBot, for instance (though other spyware killer software runs fine). It just freezes up, non responsive, nothing gets written to the event logs or anything like that. I’ve seen it do this in normal mode and safe mode. Often after a freeze, and a hard boot, it will freeze again while booting, right after the Windows XP splash screen and before the login screen—when the mouse pointer appears on a black background.

    It’s an eMachines C2160, running XP Home SP2, with an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ chip running at 1.72 GHz, and 256 MB RAM. Some thoughts I’ve had are problems with USB (the mouse was on USB, the scanner, printer, digital camera are all plugged in), or low power issues. Needless to say, I haven’t had any luck.

    Any ideas?

  • Oregon tsunamis

    This article on Bend.com is interesting, about the occurence (and likelihood of) tsunamis off the coast of Oregon.

    Some time between 9 and 10 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700, a similar great earthquake, with the same estimated magnitude as the one in Asia, struck the Northwest, rocking the region with strong shaking for several minutes. The specific time can be told through a variety of evidence closely studied by scientists in recent years, such as land levels, sand deposits, the rings of ancient trees and historic records….

     

    Geological evidence indicates that mega-quakes have occurred in the zone at least seven times over the past 3,500 years, meaning they happen, on average, every 400 to 600 years.

    With a little digging, I found out this was the Cascadia Earthquake (thank you, Wikipedia), a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake that slammed the Pacific Northwest. I also found this page which has a somewhat more consequential description:

    The earthquake collapsed houses of the Cowichan people on Vancouver Island and caused numerous landslides. The shaking was so violent that people could not stand and so prolonged that it made them sick. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the tsunami destroyed the winter village of the Pachena Bay people, leaving no survivors. These events are recorded in the oral traditions of the First Nations people on Vancouver Island.

    Freaky. I knew the area was geologically active—volcanoes and such—but I had no idea it was this active.

  • The Fortune blogging article

    Fortune magazine has a big article about blogging out (here, via Joi Ito), it’s pretty good. There’s a few quotes I really liked that I pulled for everyone’s enjoyment:

    • “If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie” — quote from Steve Hayden of Ogilvy & Mather
    • “Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world.”
    • “E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs.”
    • “Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist’s notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened.” — quote from Marissa Mayer of Google

    Email is for old people? What about if I use email to notify me when I get a blog comment? Hm.

    The Google comment about timestamping ideas in blogs in especially interesting; I touched on similar issues and themes nearly a year ago in my RSS as Poor Man’s Copyright post. (I don’t know how patentable an idea from a blog might be, though.)

  • PHP Suggest

    Over on php.net, they announced a full implementation of a search field suggestion box:

    The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.

     

    Whenever you type something into the search field, while having the function list search option selected, you will get a list of suggested functions starting with the letters you typed in. You can browse the list with the up/down keys, and you will be able to autocomplete the function name with the spacebar.

    Couple things I find interesting about this. First, it predates Google Suggest by a year (prior art that everyone heralding Google Suggest seemed not to notice); did Google get the idea from the PHP site, or is this more common?

    The second point is a bit more trivial, but I noticed when I was trying it out by typing in “date” that there are two additional PHP date functions that appeared in the list: date_sunrise() and date_sunset(). These are new to PHP 5. They take a timestamp, latitude, and longitude and return the respective time of day for sunrise or sunset. What’s interesting is that they are remarkably similar to two functions I had written well before PHP 5 came out. (“Written” is subjective, more like “adapted,” probably from a Java function somewhere.) However, from the looks of the manual, these new built-in functions only take a Unix timestamp, which limits the results to dates between 1970 and 2038, while my functions take any combination of month, day and year. The point? I just like to toot my own horn sometimes. :)

  • Barney on TV

    Last night on News Channel 21‘s (gack, Z21 to us locals) “Hometown Forum” program, I was surprised to see none other than Bend.com‘s own Barney Lerten as the guest! Did anyone else catch it? It was about the year in news, I think, but I was also finishing up dishes and enthralled in an exciting game of Chutes and Ladders with the kids, so I wasn’t able to pay close attention.

    Came off good, though. Go Barney! :)

  • Post Christmas

    Yes, this is the post where I detail what I got for Christmas, etc. I’ll even throw my birthday gifts in there for good measure.

    It was a good Christmas, too. (First Christmas in our new house.) After we got up and opened up presents, I made some giant French toast on my new griddle (got it for Christmas), wearing my new bathrobe (Christmas). I also got two cookbooks, Quicksilver, a fifth of Jagermeister, several bottles of McMenamins beer, a Jack Daniels gift set (whiskey plus playing cards and dice), a Barnes and Noble gift card, The Return of the King DVD, and A Charlie Brown Christmas (the book adapted from the original TV special).

    For my birthday two days earlier, I received a Peanuts daily desk calendar, a photo Christmas tree ornament (with the kids’ picture in it), an unusual sculpture/pen holder for my desk at work, several bottles of McMenamins beer (this was kind of a boozy holiday, I think) along with an Old St. Francis School pint glass, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books (the local comics shop), a personalized keychain, and cash. Cold, hard cash.

    All in all, a nice haul.

  • Merry Christmas!

    Some Christmas Eve wishes for everyone. I likely won’t be online much tomorrow, there’s just too much fun to be had in realspace. So, Merry Christmas, and I hope Santa Claus brings everyone what they want!

  • Happy birthday to me!

    Yeah, a straight-up ego/vanity post. I’m off from work today, the first day of a five-day weekend. How’s everyone else’s day going? :)