09:09 – Spring arrived here as expected on the 20th, with sunny skies and warm temperatures, but it’s disappeared again. Our highs over the next several days are to be in the mid- to upper-40’s (< 10C) and lows near freezing.
Colin and I almost got into a fight yesterday afternoon. I was walking Colin on the 10-meter roller leash and he was sniffing around in Kim’s front yard when we spotted Jack, a neighborhood dog, approaching at a dead run. Jack is a full-size poodle, roughly Colin’s size. Jack circled around a large bush in Kim’s yard, came to a stop between me and Colin, and then snarled and lunged at Colin. Colin’s hackles rose and he responded with a snarl of his own. It was looking like a serious dog fight was about to break out, and I was getting ready to kill Jack with a snap kick. I yelled as I began the kick, and Jack took off running toward home.
09:50 – I’ve never paid much attention to visitor stats. I write this page for myself. If people visit and comment, great. If they don’t, I’d still write it. But I just checked my visitor stats this morning, and the contrast between now and the Good Olde Days is striking. Nowadays, I get maybe 30,000 visitors per month, and maybe 1,200 on a good day. Back when I was writing computer books, I got much more traffic. Days with 8,000 to 10,000 visitors were routine, days with 15,000 to 20,000 visitors weren’t uncommon, and I think my best day ever was more than 30,000 visitors. In other words, back then I got about as much traffic on a very heavy day as I get nowadays in a month.
“In other words, back then I got about as much traffic on a very heavy day as I get nowadays in a month”
Quality is more important than quantity.
What an elitist comment. I counter it with, I wouldn’t set foot in a club that would have me as a member.
Nowadays, I get maybe 30,000 visitors per month, and maybe 1,200 on a good day.
And half of those are probably bots of some kind. The google bots hit you hourly nowadays if you have any kind of daily change.
Looking at my visitors by operating system type, I get the following for yesterday on http://www.winsim.com:
Listing operating systems, sorted by the number of requests for pages.
# #reqs #pages OS
1 1237 550 OS unknown
2 4609 430 Windows
3351 306 Unknown Windows
1177 88 Windows XP
21 21 Windows 95
6 6 Windows NT
48 5 Windows Server 2003
6 4 Windows 98
3 337 289 Known robots
4 263 34 Macintosh
5 47 9 Unix
47 9 Linux
I suspect that many bots are masquerading as Windows, etc. The browser report actually lists some of the bots by name:
Listing the top 20 browsers by the number of requests for pages, sorted by the number of requests for pages.
# #reqs #pages browser
1 432 432 libwww-perl
432 432 libwww-perl/5
2 384 335 Netscape (compatible)
3 1729 244 MSIE
312 153 MSIE/7
476 34 MSIE/8
40 22 MSIE/6
724 16 MSIE/9
13 11 MSIE/5
164 8 MSIE/10
4 2096 128 Safari
1818 97 Safari/537
28 16 Safari/6531
121 6 Safari/536
83 3 Safari/533
9 2 Safari/535
35 2 Safari/8536
1 1 Safari/594
5 994 106 Firefox
59 35 Firefox/1
575 33 Firefox/19
19 16 Firefox/3
51 4 Firefox/13
67 3 Firefox/11
61 3 Firefox/17
31 2 Firefox/4
2 2 Firefox/5
3 2 Firefox/6
57 2 Firefox/15
6 131 18 Opera
131 18 Opera/9
7 14 14 Hatena Antenna
14 14 Hatena Antenna/0
8 4 4 Update-Scout Scan Agent
9 4 4 SeznamBot
4 4 SeznamBot/3
10 3 3 Sosospider+(+http:
3 3 Sosospider+(+http://help
11 3 3 FlightDeckReportsBot
3 3 FlightDeckReportsBot/2
12 4 3 Sogou web spider
4 3 Sogou web spider/4
13 3 3 Yahoo! Slurp China
14 3 3 http:
3 3 http://www
15 2 2 DoCoMo
2 2 DoCoMo/2
16 55 2 Mozilla
17 1 1 findlinks
1 1 findlinks/2
18 1 1 hiva
1 1 hiva/Nutch-2
19 2 1 AppEngine-Google; (+http:
2 1 AppEngine-Google; (+http://code
20 1 1 ia_archiver (+http:
1 1 ia_archiver (+http://www
627 4 [not listed: 8 browsers]
BTW, one of the guys on “Duck Dynasty” is now using a full size, known as a Standard, poodle as a duck retriever.
Well, poodles were bred as water dogs, back before women started doing those ridiculous clips on them.
They’re also supposed to be the second-smartest dogs after Border Collies, although in this case second is a long, long way behind first.
SteveF wrote:
“I counter it with, I wouldn’t set foot in a club that would have me as a member.”
Please remember to put something in Groucho Marx’s tip jar.
Lynn wrote:
“21 21 Windows 95”
WINDOWS 95?!?!?!
Here’s a picture of our lovely prime minister:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-24/gillard-greets-voters-in-melbourne/4591078
Note the guy on her left praying for a miracle next September… 🙂 If she does retain office that *will* be a certified, gold plated miracle.
“21 21 Windows 95″
WINDOWS 95?!?!?!
Robots masquerading as real people is my guess. Surely no one is using that piece of dinosaur dung anymore.
I suspect at least 2 things are at play: 1) the old forum was much easier to read and respond to; 2) Facebook was only for enrolled college students. Also, your switch from computer emphasis to chemistry probably limits interest.
As to Facebook, my kids enrolled me when it opened membership to the general public, but I find it increasingly difficult to use, violates my privacy, and useful user configurations are actually removed as time moves on; thus, if I visit it once a month, that is a lot. Quite a number of people I corresponded with via email, notified everyone that henceforth they would only communicate via Facebook. Therefore, I have not heard from many of them in years. Their decision, not mine. I have my Facebook set up to email me on personal messages, and on anything from my high school class page.
Probably just as well I do not receive as much communication as earlier days of the Internet, as I really do not have much time these days. I am just now getting to Wed thru Sat here.
Big blizzard on the way from the Gulf up through Tennessee and east from along the Mississippi. Normally we get tornadoes on Palm Sunday, but it is going to be a 3 day snowstorm. We had a warm snap a couple weeks ago, and I doffed my long underwear, which has been a mistake. I have been freezing during the last couple weeks of below freezing weather. Nine inches of snow to be dumped here by Tuesday, then sunny and mid-40’s F/~8 C for the rest of the week. My body is ready for spring.
Meanwhile, Europe has been getting blasted with Arctic air. I have the Android smartphone home page set to show me temps where there is family: Berlin, Brussels, London, Indy, Chicago, and San Diego. At this moment (04:00 Berlin time) it is -11°C in Berlin, and they have been below freezing even during the day for the last several weeks—very cold for this time of year. Brussels and London are also in negative territory C. San Diego a nice warm 16 to 18 C night and day.
As I understand it, that ridiculous cut was because they were water dogs – the puffs of fur kept their joints warm. Have I been misled by an urban legend?
It wouldn’t surprise me if poodle clubs and the AKC claimed that, but there weren’t a lot of electric clippers around in Germany in the 1300’s or 1400’s, where the breed originated. Poodle are water dogs/retrievers, and it would make no sense to remove their protective coat, leaving bare skin exposed to the water.