Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Blog

  • Traffic

    When I originally wrote the Matrix Name Generator, I always thought in the back of my mind how cool it would be if the thing took off in popularity, but I never really believed that would happen.

    Yesterday, the 9th, traffic on my site jumped from around 1500 hits per day to over 41,000 hits all in one day—I was floored with this jaw-dropping fact this afternoon, when I reviewed the site log files, and disconcertingly noticed that the log file jumped from 1.5 megabytes (for Saturday) to 19.5 megabytes (for Sunday).

    Holy. Shit.

    Nothing—and I mean nothing—has happened like that before. Totally out of the blue. I thought at first I’d been Slashdotted somehow, but when I started reviewing the gargantuan log file, I noticed that it was all for the Matrix Name page.

    Where are they coming from? Three main sources:

    LiveJournal sites. Apparently I’ve been picked up by some sort of LiveJournal community, where everybody is on everybody else’s friend list and is linking to the page. I haven’t been Slashdotted, I’ve been LJ’d!

    Forums. Similar to the LJ sites, people have been posting the link to the page on various forums, and everybody reading that post has followed the link to see what their Matrix Name is.

    Webmail, like Yahoo! Mail and EudoraMail. This tells me that a lot of people have been emailing the link to friends. Likely the same LJ users and forum readers.

    I guess it took a few days for the latest Matrix movie to hit critical mass, and I’m now prevalent enough in the search engines that I’m getting hit, hard. For instance, my page is the number 1 result on Google for “matrix name” and “what is my matrix name“.

    So what do I do? Ride it out, I guess, and hope my bandwidth stays affordable in the meantime. Otherwise, welcome, Matrix name seekers!

  • Book Blog

    Adam Curry has announced his new Book Blog:

    I’ve been interested in the Gutenberg Project for some time now, and find it fascinating that so many really well known titles are available online and free from copyright. As an experiment I’m going to upload selected works to a this new weblog, in all available formats (html, rss) as well as a speech-synthesized version in mp3 format. These files are attached to each posted chapter as an RSS enclosure and can be automatically downloaded to your hard disk or mobile mp3 player.

    Cool. Along the lines of my ebooks page. I’d been doing some thinking lately about offering the converted books I’ve done in HTML format as well as Palm Reader format.

  • Church Sign Generator

    This is too good: The Church Sign Generator.

    Church sign

    Obviously, I’m going to have way too much fun with this.

    Church sign

  • Coffee

    Funny entry today on Scripting News:

    I don’t like Starbuck’s anymore. Too strong…. Yesterday I bought a can of Chock full o’ Nuts coffee, and it’s just fantastic coffee. Lovin it. And get this, I got the pre-ground kind, because it’s too much of a hassle to grind my own beans. Maybe it’s the west coast Reality Distortion Field flickering off.

    There definitely is a Reality Distortion Field out here, especially when it comes to coffee. Too many coffee drinks, too many gourmet whole bean coffees. Know what? I’m sick of grinding my own beans—I hate cleaning out the grinder. Should look into pre-ground.

    When it comes to drinking coffee, I’m a minimalist: I like it hot, strong, and black, no additives, the way it was meant to be. If I’m buying coffee in someplace like Royal Blend, I’ll either buy black coffee or a café au lait, which is as close to a latté as I typically get. One day someone I was having a meeting with offered to bring me a latté. I told her to get me a café au lait. Her reaction? She seemed offended, so I relented and let her surprise me with some syrupy-coffee-drink-or-other.

    The worst part? I had to explain to her what a café au lait was. Jeez, get some culture, people.

  • Portable Electronic Society

    I must be having a Luddite moment or something, but it’s getting ridiculous, the number of rechargeable and portable electronic devices we have these days. I mean, just in the past few days I’ve had to charge my PDA, charge my cell phone, charge my cordless razor, charge the digital camera (only to find out the battery was dying and useless), charge the video camera battery (only to plug the camera into the outlet directly anyway), and charge up my mom’s laptop as I worked on it.

    And it gets worse: flashlights, a portable handheld vacuum sitting on my desk, remote controls for the TV, VCR/DVD, digital cable, and stereo, myriad battery-powered toys the kids have, the cordless phones. Don’t yet have a portable music or DVD player, video game system, or my own laptop—but I suspect it’s all a matter of time.

    Okay. All done. Back to coveting electronics, rather than disdaining them: I’d kill for a camera phone and a WiFi-enabled laptop…

  • Cold!

    Damn, why is Halloween so cold anymore? It seems like when I was growing up, it was never this cold. Now, every year we just about get frostbite trick-or-treating. Seriously, it was in the teens Friday night. Last year was colder.

    Global warming, my ass. :-)

  • Happy Halloween

    Happy Halloween to all of you who celebrate it!

  • Correction

    Whoops! In my Oregon Bloggers post yesterday, I incorrectly said that Jake at Utterly Boring was giving away free TypePad accounts. Jake commented to correct me; they’re not free accounts, just discounts for new signups.

    Still, it’s a good deal. Go get a blog!

  • Oregon Bloggers

    If you’re a blogger in Central or Eastern Oregon, or you’d like to try it out, head on over to Utterly Boring and check out Jake’s offer for a free TypePad account. We want to see more Oregon bloggers east of the Cascades!

  • Sony Bend Redux

    It’s funny how the world works. Hot on the heels of my blog article on Sony Bend Tuesday of last week, our local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, publishes a story in Saturday’s business section about Sony Bend and the latest version of their Syphon Filter game in development.

    “Sony filters out separatist group from Bend designer’s video game” is the article. I don’t really need to comment on the story as the opening sentence covers it: “Sony Computer Entertainment America has pulled a fictitious Quebec terrorist group from the latest in a series of hit video games created by John Garvin….”

    Basically, I just thought it was very interesting to see this article show up in the paper less than a week after I had initially blogged about the company.