Unrelated Segments

This Week in Hockey...

... my beloved Boston Bruins handed the Vancouver Canucks their collective asses on a platter. After losing the first two games (of a best of seven) in Vancouver--games which were very close and they could just as easily have won, the Bruins won the next two in Boston by a combined score of 12-1. The Bruins kicked ass. With two of the last three games in Vancouver, the Bruins will have to win one away. The next game is in Vancouver tomorrow morning (Japan time). I'll be watching with a hangover. I hope the Bruins are feeling as nasty as I will be...

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Link Land

--Future events such as these will affect you in the future.

--You won't.

--I grow concerned for your craniofacial integrity.

--The most feared punctuation on earth.

--Top thirty Japanese emoticons.


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Rainy Season

It's generally a chore for me to find anything positive to say about rainy season in Japan... Wait, here's something: Because it's raining, I can't walk the dog. Because it's raining, I can't go out for my regular walk and exercise. Because it's raining, I can start drinking beer earlier. Because it's raining, I can post something on my blog. Because it's raining, you have to read this drivel... I guess it's all a matter of perspective...


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It's possible, perhaps likely, that Sitemeter sucks.

I'm not really one to dwell on how many page hits my blog gets each day or month or whatever. Considering the effort I generally put into this blog, I figure I get about as many visitors as I deserve--sometimes maybe more. I *am* interested, however, in how people (aside from friends) end up here. I'm interested in the search terms they use, what pictures or posts seem to draw attention, that sort of thing. Like most (maybe all?) of my blogging friends, there are no ads on my site. Just me blowing my own horn... Like most bloggers I know, I've been using Sitemeter to keep stats for this site since Day 1.

Anyway, of late I've been checking out Blogger's stats for my site and comparing them to what Sitemeter says happens in these parts. (In fact, it was only recently that I even noticed that Blogger offered a "stats" tab.) The screen grabs below are from earlier today.

Here's what Sitemeter says (from this afternoon):

And here's what Blogger says:

Now, the two numbers that jump out at me have to do with today's visitors and the total, or all-time visitors. The daily visitors numbers tend to be much higher according to Blogger. And, Blogger has only been counting for about a year, but Sitemeter has been counting for about 8 years. The two systems, whatever they are, don't even come close to matching up.

Common sense tells me that Blogger/Google has a much better handle of traffic on its own sites that any third party could. The two services measure somewhat different metrics, but if Sitemeter's actual hit count is as far off as it seems, then it is pretty much useless.

I've noticed that Blogger stats records a lot of spammy-looking page hits. But I've also noticed that Sitemeter misses a lot of really legitimate page hits from actual links. (I'm reminded a bit of Technorati--is there a more useless site on the web?)

I'm very close to dumping Sitemeter...

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Heartrippers: getting ready to rock Miyazaki this summer.

We changed the name of our band...

Back down to a 3-piece, a little heavier, a little jammier. Now if only someone besides our middle-aged ex-pat friends would come and see us...

Log(arithm) Jam

If you have a YouTube account then you're familiar with "Recommended for You," in which they offer a selection of videos for your perusal and enjoyment based on stuff that you've viewed in the past: because you watched "X" we recommend "Y." Everyone knows this is all computer-generated (or whatever the correct technical term is).

Sometimes I check out the recommended videos and enjoy them. It doesn't take much genius to figure out that if I watched "Cavalcade of Nuclear Test Explosions" there's a good chance I might like "Planned Implosion Disasters," after all.

Sometimes the recommendations are somewhat mystifying, if not outright stupid (e.g. because you watched "Patrick Kane Hat Trick vs. Vancouver Canucks" we recommend "Susan Boyle--"Memory" from Cats"; WTF!?).

Sometimes, though, YouTube's recommendations are wrong in very subtle ways. Sometimes the logarithms (or whatever) are a bit too clever...

Take the example below. YouTube's 'bots believe that because I viewed Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips"...



...I might enjoy The Carpenters butchering performing "Jambalaya."



At first glance it seems that you'd have to be from another planet to think there was any musical similarity between Slim Harpo and The Carpenters. It seems like a stupid recommendation, if you're a human being. Of course, YouTube's 'bots (or million gerbils running on exercise wheels hooked up to a million abaci or whatever) are not human. What do they know about music? Nothing! But they're pretty damned good at scouring text, and it's in text that they found the "connection" that led to the recommendation.

This one is easy, so I'm not going to tell you what the connection is, but feel free to speculate in post comments. (Glenn, Dave, and Sussah are disqualified! Damn, that's a clue!).

Tower of What?

Today as I was checking the hockey standings, I discovered that I can read Dutch:

Hockey: is there anything it can't do?

Y'all Come Back Now, Ya Hear?

For some reason, this post from last week (on those Evony ads that seem to be all over the web these days) has been responsible for the biggest spike in traffic in the entire history of this humble blog. Yesterday completely smashed my previous single-day record for visitors. (Hey, I'm talking like, way more than 30, OK!? Heh.)

This likely had more to do with the timing of the post than with its actual content. In fact, not one of the hundreds of people who clicked through from Google left a comment, and very few stayed for more than a couple of seconds or checked out anything else on this blog. Of course, the fact that I mocked Evony and anyone who would be interested in it might have something to do with that particular detail.

It's so hard to make friends...

Yuck

As a brief follow-up to some comments I made a couple of weeks ago about inept users of Google, I give you:

I WASH MY MOTHER FUCK

Yeah, caps and all... Whatever, dude...

Unrelated Segments

On the boardwalk: An interesting post by a Canadian guy covering Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan. "The boardwalk at KAF [I guess Kandahar Air Field--K] is just about the worst strip-mall you've ever seen." Strangely, reading this got me feeling homesick for Canada.

As a personal aside, I happen to believe that going to Afghanistan was the correct thing to do. It made sense to me, if only for the simple fact that, viewed realistically, somebody was going to get their asses kicked for 9/11. And if you're going to kick someone in the ass, well, it's probably best to kick the right ass. Al-Qaeda was/is in Afghanistan. Right ass, right war. Iraq, on the other hand...

As a Canadian I feel it was the right thing to do for us to support the US in Afghanistan. I think President Obama is entirely justified in reasoning that it's time to re-focus American military efforts. I hope, in this instance, that the Canadian government will follow his lead.

(Although it's generally true that I have an easier time associating with more left-leaning views, I refuse to allow myself to be pigeonholed. My father was in the Canadian Army, and he served with UN forces in Korea and Cyprus. He was a good, decent man, and he taught me more than a few things about the world. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do.)

[Link via: Daimnation!]

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Moving on to less serious stuff...

The other night I watched the movie The Number 23 on TV. It was the stupidest piece of shit I've seen in a while. (The preceding two sentences, by the way, are to be considered the official Kyklops "review" of that movie.)

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Playing The Beatles Backwards: The Ultimate Countdown: The writer has taken every Beatles tune, rather astutely reviewed all 185 of them, and then ranked them. I (or you) might disagree with some of the rankings but it's still a rather impressive bit of work.

[Via: Cynical-C]

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Some people just don't know how to use the Google. I mean really, if you're arriving at this site looking for English meanings for Japanese words (or vice versa), maybe you need a couple of lessons in an IT class or something.

In the interests of promoting international understanding (or some other equally stupid, vague sentiment), I thought I might write down a few of the more common Japanese words/phrases that have, through the wonders of Google, brought people from all over the world to this humble blog. You'll likely be bored by this list, but amazed that someone actually made it this far in their quest to find out how the Japanese say "penis." Without further ado, ten Japanese words/phrases and/or their English equivalents (in no particular order, because I'm like, just doing this from memory, dig?) that have brought inept users of Google to this site:

konnichiwa: "good day"
kombanwa: "good evening"
chinchin: "penis"
hajimemashite: "nice to meet you"
yoroshiku onegaishimasu: "you have no idea who the hell I am, but please be nice to me all the same" (generally follows hajimemashite)
gambatte: "do your best; try your hardest; break a leg; give 'em hell; etc." (basically whatever hackneyed phrase you personally would use in situations which should be clear from the preceding)
kanada: "Canada"
ohaiyo gozaimasu: "good morning"
hai: "yes" ("that's right" is probably more accurate)
o yasumi nasai: "good night"

I hope that wasn't as boring to read as it was to write...

That's Odd...

Did something happen while I was out...?