Having recieved an iPod for Christmas (thanks Sherri!), tonight I began updating my music library. For a number of reasons, many of my CDs are not loaded into iTunes, and so not available to my iPod. In addition, my CDs were scattered – some at work, some in my car, some here in my home office. Today I gatherered everything up at work and brought it all home.
Many are still missing. Among those that are not, I’ve found several things I haven’t seen (or listened to) for a long time. Rediscovering them has been great. I’m particularly pleased to have found my copy of the Police boxed set. Some of these songs I haven’t heard in years- like “So Lonely” from Outlandos d’Amour or “Invisible Sun” from Ghost in the Machine or so many others… Man, there’s a lot of good music in there.
Once I get the whole library up-to-date (as much as I can… I think a sizable part of my CD collection from high school/college is still back in Virginia somewhere), I need to start rating everything. Eventually I want to create smart playlists that play things I haven’t listened to in a while… more frequently for higher-rated stuff, less often for lower rated stuff. Put it all on shuffle and see what shows up.
Something else I rediscovered… I find it interesting how slow it feels to rip a stack of CDs. Even though the average import speed is north of 10x, which means 5 or 6 minute imports, I’ve been spoiled by broadband, fast processors and plentiful memory. Waiting just seems so old fashioned.
Uncle Roger has again laid down the gauntlet, establishing the January challenge for posts about resolutions:
…come up with an evaluation of last year’s goals and a new set of goals for this year.
This should not be a facile collection of cliches like “I will lose weight” or “I’m going to save some money” but carefully thought out, significant goals for your life. Don’t just list indefinite, non-specific platitudes, but specific, achievable goals. Include a plan for accomplishing each goal with concrete milestones and dates.
And:
…this challenge includes a review of your goals from last year (if any).
I’m pleased to say that I’m half finished with the challenge, as I’ve already reviewed last year’s resolutions. I’ll be posting this year’s by the end of the week(end).
These challenges have been alot of fun… I encourage you to join in this one. Be sure to link to Roger’s post, and comment over there (and here if you want). If you’ve already posted your resolutions, go link them to the challenge.
This post is for Googlebot. Go follow these links, and index them:
Thanks pal.
For the rest of you, who are probably wondering if I’ve hit my head (not that I remember), I’ll explain. While checking my referers briefly (whole other post on that topic forthcoming), I noticed what looked like a search engine hit for a topic I don’t normally post about, of an adult, or more likely a teenage male, nature. (I’m not a prude, but listing the search terms would defeat my purpose). A quick check showed that the site was a non-English search engine powered by Google.
It seems that Googlebot stopped by the day I was hit by over 2000 comment spams. Although I took the entire comment system offline to remove that crap as soon as I saw it, Googlebot must have indexed a few of the pages. Those pages linked above are the pages it indexed that day and has apparently not reindexed since. I like website traffic as much as the next blogger, but I’m really not in the market for search engine hits for animated attacks on women. I certainly don’t want to be the number #6 Google hit for that search (which I am, for the moment). The sooner Googlebot indexes the clean versions of the pages above, the better.
Also of interest, Googlebot found those pages via www.jclark.org, instead of jclark.org. They are the same, but I omit the www as it is unnecessary. Other people who link to me occaisionally use the www, which is why it is indexed both ways. Of course, it shouldn’t be indexed twice, so I’ll be adding a mod_rewrite rule to my .htaccess file to permanently redirect all www. URIs to their sub-domain-free equivalents. Just to be safe, however, I think I’ll wait until Googlebot reindexes the above links.
Last month, I posted my [browser stats for November 2004][1]. It was so much fun I decided to do it again. No [fancy graphs][2] (yet), but maybe one of these days. :
Browser Hits %age
------- ---- ------
FireFox 36593 40.1 %
Internet Explorer 28143 30.8 %
Safari 9464 10.3 %
Unknown 7236 7.9 %
Mozilla 3490 3.8 %
NetNewsWire 2453 2.6 %
Netscape 1106 1.2 %
Opera 936 1.0 %
Konqueror 549 0.6 %
OmniWeb 462 0.5 %
Others 774 0.8 %
Of interest- while Firefox usage is up from 37.9% to 40.1%, IE usage is also (slightly) up, from 30.4% to 30.8%. Safari usage dropped just over 1%, and Camino disappeared. I guess Mac users just [get it][3]
. However Windows users are still 59% of my December stats.
One caveat- while the above stats don’t include errors (like the 403’s I’m handing out to abusive bots and a few spamtastic IP addresses, they do include all the spam that isn’t IP banned- whether my comment filter catches it or not. Maybe I’ll work on that this month.
[1]: http://jclark.org/weblog/Miscellany/About/stats200411.html
[2]: http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/12/12/BMS
[3]: http://getfirefox.com
Last January 1st, I decided to break with tradition and make a few resolutions. Last night at midnight, time ran out. So how did I do? Let’s check the score. I’ll also give some thoughts for the upcoming year’s resolutions, but that will be a separate post, after I think it out a bit.
Personal
-
Spend a little extra time with my kids. I don’t think I do too badly at this now, but why not improve anyway?
This one’s an unqualified success.
-
Have at least one weekend getaway with my wife… and no children. We’ve been planning this forever, and never seem to get it done.
Another success. Sherri and I spent a weekend at a B&B near Lancaster, PA last winter. It was wonderful; we’re hoping to do it again this year.
-
Play more Chess (and hopefully improve).
A qualified success. I definately played more in the first quarter of the year, and I think I was even starting to improve. Since that time, however I’ve played next to none.
-
Write some fiction.
Utter failure… never found the time or inspiration. A good goal to keep for this year, however.
Professional
- Finish every last piece of the Client Reporting project.
This turned out not to even be plausible, as business needs changed. This was a poor choice of resolution, in the future I'll keep any professional resolutions project-nuetral.
- Make the whole thing obsolete with a ground-up rewrite, using no VB (build directly in XML via Office 2003 native XML formats).
This turned out not to be possible because Micro$oft once again over-promised and under-delivered; this time promising a native XML format for Excel and delivering a crippled XML format with no support for graphs.
jclark.org
- Add timestamps and notifications for comments.
[Success.][2]
- New design. Something a bit less… understated.
Failure. I began work on a new deisgn, but couldn't decide what I wanted to do. I still want to redesign for this year.
- Hit the 300 posts milestone.
70% success. My first post of 2004 was number 100, so I needed to write 200 posts. I managed to deliver 142- in spite of a lengthy blogging hiatus over the summer. Big thanks to [dugh][4] for the [October Blogging Challenge][5] which helped get me back on track.
- Re-organize the categories. Use permanent redirects for moved posts.
[Success][6]. For 2005, I want to think about restructuring the blog... moving away from strict categories, and using a 'tag' system like [del.icio.us][3] uses. This may mean a move away from Blosxom. Also, whatever I do can't break existing URIs. Still some planning to do.
- Add a second, topic specific blog. Potential topics are astronomy, chess, or writing.
I cancelled this one. Having less time for any of my other interests, let alone less time to write for this blog, convinced me of that. Instead, for 2005, I want to start writing some more personal, daily-summary/thoughts posts in addition to the more topical stuff I usually post. More on that idea in another post.
All in all, not a terrible first attempt. Later today, or during the next few days, I’ll post my 2005 list.