It’s very unlikely that I’ll be posting anything during Christmas. I’ll be back around next Wednesday. Until then, my God richly bless you and have a wonderfully merry Christmas.

Peace out!

It’s Wednesday, the unofficial cut-off time for posting a new white board quip. You’ll have to wait for next Monday. Sorry about that.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. I swear today feels like Monday. *Peeks around the corner to see if Rod Sterling is doing an introductory monolog about me.*

…Now I’m twittering. Good grief, what’s the matter with me.

For those of you who aren’t addicted to everything web allow me to explain. Twitter is kind of like a micro blog. It’s used to keep the people closest to you even more up-to-dater than a normal blog. Each “tweet” (that’s what you call a Twitter post, if you’re cool like that) can only be up to 140 characters long. You have just enough room to say what your currently doing or mention something funny from your last meeting or post a link to something worth sharing. You can even tweet from your cell phone with SMS or from a chat client.

Twitter is also cool because, using their web site, you can respond back to other people’s tweets and you can set up a list of folks whose tweets you want to follow. You can even have Twitter send you alerts via IM or on your phone when someone in particular has tweeted (I’m sure there’s a better past tense for “tweet”, but I could think of anything that didn’t sound vulgar).

The main reason I signed up is because a lot of the big names in web design and standards are on there and I can follow them and (maybe) do a better job of staying on top of my industry. As you may have noticed, my side bar links have been updated to reflect the fact that I’m trying to keep up with those guys’ blogs too.

As a handy-dandy side benefit, Twitter has a blog plug-in that allows me to display my last few tweets here as well (as you can see to the right).

Now the big question is, will I actually use it, or will Twitter just be one more thing that ends up stuck in the corner with cobwebs on it because I’m just “too busy”? Only time will tell.

The “man behind the curtain” is working on the side bar. Please ignore the mess. Carry on.

I upgraded WordPress (the software on which the blog runs) to the latest version today (2.2.2). I really like the new features and it takes care of some of the major annoyances I was facing in the last version.

I used BlueHost‘s Fantastico software manager to do the upgrade. One click, done. Easy as pie.

It looks like everything is running smoothly, but if you notice any weirdness (other than the usual weirdness) please post a comment and let me know.

Only 126 shopping days until Christmas. Which reminds me, I updated my t-shirt wish list today.

Subtle, huh?

Just wanted to let you all know I’m still alive. I have not read any news blogs in almost two weeks and have barely been able to keep up with two or three of my daily reads (including web comics). But I can say that my bug list at work has received some much needed attention this week.

I know. I know. That’s not much consolation. I’m trying to get used to blogging at night and it’s just not happening… yet. Hang in there folks. We should be back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

I’m not ignoring you. I’m trying something different. Something that, so far, looks a lot like I’m ignoring you.

My readers know well the struggles I have with productivity and self-discipline. Coming back from vacation, I was worried that I would have a hard time working at work. So, this week, I exported my “daily reads” bookmarks and emailed them to my home PC. The idea was that I could still do all my daily surfing and blogging, but do it at home after Tammy goes to bed. I think you can see how that turned out.

Other than some video links that were emailed to me at work, and PvPOnline, I haven’t surfed this week. While I was a little more productive during the week, I’m not sure if it was enough to justify the suffering. Plus, this morning, when I dragged myself out of bed, my brain was nearing the oatmeal state. I was babbling to myself all morning as I got ready, and most of the babble (that was coherent) had to do with going back to bed.

I can’t even blame my mood on “spring fever” because it’s been so hot and humid, I’ve had no desire to be outside. Pretty much just the desire to be on the my couch, drooling and staring slack-jawed at the TV.

I’m going to call this experiment, at least in the short term, a failure.

I must apologize for not announcing this before the fact. Tammy and I have just returned from a fantastic vacation, our first real vacation in five years.

We spent the week back in our old haunt, Colorado Springs, and the surrounding areas. We rode our mountain bikes down the ski runs at Snow Mass (near Aspen), we climbed Pikes Peak, we took over 300 pictures!! We … are … tired.

I need to dole out thanks to Raju for the use of his Canon Rebel XT digital SLR and mad props to Shane and Jen Weeks for their hospitality and very comfortable basement.

I hope to get some pictures and maybe even a little video up sometime this week.

Now back to your regularly schedule programming.

[Edit: Pictures from the trip are here.]

I’ve said before that I really like numbers. Numbers seem to give life some sense of order. They give guys like me a way to filter this analog world into a digital view.

I love StatTraq. It’s a plug-in for WordPress written by my good friend RandyPants. StatTraq breaks down my web site stats into easy to swallow tables and numbers. Since 2007 is half over, I thought I’d check out what the numbers look like. For 2007 so far…

The SYNS home page has been viewed over 47,000 times with over 4000 rss feed hits.
The top ten most viewed posts are…

Make note of that Mythbuster’s ranking. Even though the post is two years old it stays at the top and you’ll see why momentarily. The top twenty referrers (pages that link to my site) all come from google images, so the search terms are a better judge of how people find SYNS. The top five things that people type into search engines that end up linking to SYNS are…

In addition to over 600 search engine hits for Scottie, I’ve had about 100 hits from searches for Something involving “Tory Belleci” or “Kari Byron”, especially Kari’s silver bikini stunt. Looks like I’m not the only person out there who likes Scottie best. The Favorite Mythbuster post has been in the top three every year since it was posted.

Here’s a little graph I threw together for the growth of SYNS over the last two years.