March 14th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Apologies for the light blogging this week, but it’s the first week back, you know? My calendar is positively blue with appointments, etc. It’s been great, but a shock to the system after a year of precious little socializing.
The other thing that’s weird is that, over the past year, I had maybe three time-specific commitments a week. We’ve been very busy, but most days I could choose what I wanted to do when. Alas, no more.
Anyhow, being busy and lame, I’m going to cheat and highlight an old blog post that lives on in comments. It’s a short little thing called “Worst Baby Names Ever”, but it’s accrued 30,000 visitors and 130 comments since I wrote it three years ago. People seem to love coming by to complain about their own name, or mock other people’s.
The most recent comment made me laugh:
Ok I’m dating a man named Richard Panek. (Dick Panek) And if we get married my name will be Kayla Mae Panek.
Given my last name, I shouldn’t throw stones. But that’s a classic.
5 Comments »
March 10th, 2008, 9 Comments »
After a year away.
- There are so many cars. This has been my overwhelming first reaction.
- Our commerce gets so bizarre, so fast. Riding the Airporter in from YVR, I passed a 7-11. There was a big banner hanging above the front door. I can’t remember the exact phrase, but it read something like “Cheesetastic Big Bite Hot Dogs!”. I found that troubling.
- Trees! Yay!
- Man, it’s really dark for 3:00pm in the afternoon.
- Rain! Yay!
- I’ve been hopelessly converted to a cash-only consumer. Credit cards were pretty much useless in Malta and Morocco.
- I can drink the tap water! Yay!
And now the jet lag cometh.
9 Comments »
October 9th, 2007, 11 Comments »
I’ve been doing some reading about ebooks recently, and enjoyed a Copyblogger post about creating ebooks that sell. Brian references an ebook site featuring a book on, uh, writing ebooks.
When I visited the site, I was reminded of a phenomenon I’ve observed in recent years around ebooks and similar digital offerings. You can also see it on GoogleAdSecrets.com and the prolix URL SearchEngineOptimizationStrategies.com.
It’s a particular (and peculiar) kind of website. Really just one very long page, it features a single, centered column, few images, and many bold offers, claims and testimonials. It pretty much defies every major web design trend of this millennium. To the sophisticated web surfer, it looks profoundly tacky.
Clearly it must sell ebooks, though, or people wouldn’t use it. Did one person prove this was the optimal selling strategy, and everybody emulated them? I’d imagine so. The pages certainly don’t inspire confidence in me, but I guess they’re not selling to me.
11 Comments »
July 26th, 2007, 13 Comments »
Here’s a charming story from the CBC about Oscar, a cat that lives in a Rhode Island nursing home. Oscar apparently has an unusual skill:
Oscar makes his daily rounds, waiting patiently outside rooms if the doors are closed, wrote Dosa. Once inside, the grey-and-white cat jumps onto beds and appears to inspect patients by sniffing the air.
If Oscar leaves the room, the patient isn’t likely to die that day, said Dosa.
But when the cat curls up on the bed, staff notice. They start phoning family members because the patient usually dies within four hours.
Experts are uncertain about how Oscar makes these calls–they cite scents given off by the patient or the behaviour of the nurses as possibilities.
Poppycock! Clearly the cat is secretly knocking off these poor patients when they’re not looking.
13 Comments »
July 4th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I have a pretty good grip on how web stats work, and what metrics I should be paying attention to. However, I’ve observed a couple of peculiarities in the Google Analytics reports for iPhatigue.com:
IPhatigue is a one page site. The only links on the page go off the site. So:
- Why the huge difference between page views and visitors? Surely those numbers ought to be quite close together, unless 1 in 3 visitors is loading the page twice? That’s probably not happening, because 96% of visitors are unique.
- Google says that the bounce rate is “is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page)”. Shouldn’t that number be 100%, given that the site only has one page?
Do any of the stats-heads out there have some insight?
4 Comments »
June 28th, 2007, 10 Comments »
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the newest plastic surgery on the market is a, uh, shot to your g-spot. Somewhat mundanely, they call it the ‘g-shot’:
By 4 p.m. she sat inside Dr. Justin Salerno’s office, readying to become the surgeon’s first patient to receive an injection called a G-Shot, also known as G-spot Amplification. With a 3 1/2-inch needle, Salerno would pump a small dose of collagen into his patient’s Grafenberg Spot and make it swell to the size of a quarter…
The procedure, which has been performed on approximately 250 women nationally in the past two years at a cost of $1,850 each, appealed to Roberts because she felt life’s rigmarole had left her fatigued by the end of the day, hardly in an amorous mood. Even when she felt the surge of excitement, reaching an orgasm was a time-consuming endeavor that took more effort and energy than she and her husband had to offer.
Well, that’s a bit of a sad commentary on one’s work-life balance, isn’t it? And the subject of the article is only 22 years old. The, uh, climax of the article reports that things went well when she took her new collagen injection for a test run:
Just as she hoped, she could reach climax within a few minutes, and with little effort.
“Just like a man,” she said.
I really wanted to come up with a great, punny title for this post, but I failed miserably. Who can do better?
10 Comments »
June 4th, 2007, 11 Comments »
While en route from Gozo to Budapest, we stayed overnight in Malta’s capital city of Valetta. We also took the opportunity to watch Pirates of the Caribbean in the local very modern and pleasant multiplex.
It’s modern in all respects but one–there’s an intermission in the film. I’d read this online a few months ago, and didn’t really believe that it was true.
And yet, during a tense scene between Kiera Knightley and Chow Yun Fat (that’s not a spoiler as far as I’m concerned), while Kiera (who’s beautiful, but always looks like she has too many teeth for her mouth) was in mid-line, the film stopped. The screen displayed one groovy graphic that read “Intermission”, and most of the audience wandered outside for…what…cigarettes, refreshments and the toilets.
In the middle of a scene. The intermission seemed more or less randomly selected. Or, maybe it’s stipulated that it’s exactly two-thirds of the way through the film. In any case, it struck me as utterly ridiculous.
There are plenty of times when you shouldn’t judge another culture’s practices, but this ain’t one of them. Nearly all films are created to be viewed in one sitting, uninterrupted (the only exception I can think of is Kenneth Brannagh’s four-hour Hamlet). I’d have no complaints if filmmakers planned on intermissions the way playwrights do, but they don’t.
I must ask some of my Maltese colleagues what the deal is with this practice, and whether they prefer it.
11 Comments »
May 4th, 2007, 21 Comments »
Three thousand karma points for the first person to identify this peculiar vegetable that we accidently bought at the local grocer. It smells like broccoli.
Bonus marks for instructions on how to prepare it.
21 Comments »