Category: Blogging

Bookmark me, kids, I'm a reference!

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I’ve noticed incoming traffic on my blog from Wikipedia, of all places. This blog post from 4½ years ago is referenced in the English Wikipedia entry for ‘Movie theater’. Presumably they’re linking to me because, scofflaw that I am, I included the full content of the now-archived Globe and Mail article in my post.

Hey, if I’m the presumptive authority on the death of cheap Tuesday, then I’m ready to lead. Can someone grab their general a Tribute magazine on the way in please? Thanks.

.:.

In other news, this is the funniest thing I saw all day. Courtesy of John Moltz, by way of Joey DeVilla.

Over the last 30 days….

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

..here’s what the visitors to this blog have looked like:

Search engines they use to find their way here:

  1. google (93.21%)
  2. yahoo (4.15%)
  3. msn (0.94%)
  4. aol (0.75%)
  5. live (0.38%)
  6. netscape (0.38%)
  7. search (0.19%)

Keywords they use in those search engines (top 15):

  1. thundercats are go (15.07%)
  2. if god was a city planner he would not put a playground next to a sewage system (5.08%)
  3. michelle malkin (3.20%)
  4. give me a scotch i’m starving (1.69%)
  5. flickr song charts buffy (1.51%)
  6. kerry martens (1.51%)
  7. protestant whiskey (1.51%)
  8. max payne helicopter (1.13%)
  9. sh735026 (1.13%)
  10. fuzzy britches (0.94%)
  11. js bonbons closed (0.94%)
  12. skdoosh (0.94%)
  13. put out the fire boys don’t stop don’t stop (0.75%)
  14. jesus harold christ on rubber crutches (0.56%)
  15. monkey pulling turnip (0.56%)

Sites they link here from (top 15):

  1. imdb.com (43.03%)
  2. images.google.* (9.39%)
  3. google.* (7.42%)
  4. jenngoeswest.blogspot.com (6.97%)
  5. cgplace.blogspot.com (5.00%)
  6. quillandquire.com (5.00%)
  7. theplummetonions.wordpress.com (4.85%)
  8. modernlaundry.blogspot.com (4.39%)
  9. buddhacanvas.wordpress.com (2.58%)
  10. *.mail.live.com (1.67%)
  11. cbc.ca (1.52%)
  12. duartedasilva.com (1.52%)
  13. facebook.com (1.21%)
  14. cartoons.blogcarnival.com (0.91%)
  15. technorati.* (0.76%)

Countries they’re coming from (top 25):

  1. Canada (50.24%)
  2. United States (28.33%)
  3. United Kingdom (7.64%)
  4. Australia (1.83%)
  5. Germany (1.15%)
  6. Finland (0.81%)
  7. France (0.74%)
  8. India (0.68%)
  9. Norway (0.61%)
  10. Spain (0.47%)
  11. Estonia (0.41%)
  12. Sweden (0.41%)
  13. Romania (0.41%)
  14. Austria (0.34%)
  15. Chile (0.27%)
  16. Ireland (0.27%)
  17. Hungary (0.27%)
  18. Italy (0.27%)
  19. Russia (0.27%)
  20. Japan (0.27%)

Browsers they use:

  1. Firefox (48.07%)
  2. Internet Explorer (44.35%)
  3. Safari (5.95%)
  4. Opera (0.95%)
  5. Konqueror (0.20%)
  6. Mozilla (0.14%)
  7. Netscape (0.14%)
  8. Playstation Portable (0.14%)
  9. Playstation 3 (0.07%)

[tags]this blog’s visitors[/tags]

Currently…

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

reading: The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik and Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach by Charles Hill and Gareth Jones. Eye Weekly and Now Magazine every Thursday. Toronto Life once a month.

listening to: Saul Williams by Saul Williams, though any minute now I’ll move on to Death Cab For Cutie‘s Narrow Stairs or Visiter by The Dodos.

watching: almost nothing. I’m paying only marginal attention to sports (go Pens! go Celts!), The Office and 30 Rock are done for the season and The Shield hasn’t started yet. All that’s on right now is Battlestar Galactica, and even that’s on 2-week hiatus.

scanning: 190 news feeds, averaging about 509 articles per day. Of course, these are only my personal-interest feeds; I have just as many work feeds. I mainly skim the headlines here, and pay attention to maybe 50, flagging 5-10 to read later.

browsing: 6-7 websites per day. I rarely have a need to visit particular websites now (see ‘scanning’, above) but a few are applications (e.g., Google Analytics) or snapshots (e.g., the weather) that don’t work in an RSS channel. There’s also Bruce MacKinnon’s editorial cartoon every day which, despite my best efforts, I cannot wrangle into a Yahoo Pipe. Again, this is personal-interest only; there’re other work sites.

running: 3-4 times per week, 3 miles at a time. On a treadmill. Half flat, half slight incline.

eating: penne with sundried tomato pesto. Well…an hour ago, anyway.

looking forward to: our rockies/BC trip in June; Euro 2008; visiting Nova Scotia twice in August, once to visit with family and once to wrap up the MBA.

wondering: why the hell I started writing this blog post in the first place.

[tags]angel riots, ibi kaslik, toronto life, saul williams, death cab for cutie, narrow stairs, dodos, visiter,  google reader, bruce mackinnon, yahoo pipes, euro 2008[/tags]

I wonder how many guitar nerds are buying maps and hiking boots?

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Just for shits and giggles, here are the top ten search engine hits on my blog in the last year:

  1. coniption fit tim adam
  2. protestant whiskey
  3. “______ _______”
  4. this day is bananas
  5. sh735026
  6. “this day is bananas”
  7. upcountry bankrupt
  8. thundercats are go
  9. fucdown
  10. ode to lrc

Those are, in order:

  1. Something Tim pointed me to at ScienceBlogs that asked bloggers to find five search terms that brings up their blog as the first Google hit. This hits my blog first every time, probably because I misspelled “conniption fit”, but that was kind of by design. I guess people at ScienceBlogs must keep testing it, ’cause I keep getting hits for it.
  2. A line from The Wire, maybe one of Jimmy McNulty’s best. A good Irish Catholic/alcoholic/cop, McNulty turns up his nose at the offer of Bushmills from a bartender, replying “That’s Protestant whiskey!”
  3. A friend of mine whose name I’ll not display here. Apparently she’s being stalked. Awesome.
  4. A line from The Office (I tend to put lines from TV shows, songs and movies in the title field of my blog posts…just a habit). Kelly Kapoor sings it (to the tune of the the Gwen Stefani song) on the day she’s put in charge. I assume people search for it because they want the ringtone. That’s a recurring theme here.
  5. According to The Onion, “a Welsh countryside house known as Bron-Yr-Aur, at the rock-grid coordinates SH735026…contains the never-before-heard Jimmy Page riff, hidden for decades in a mythic, impenetrable vault…the planet’s last, best hope for saving rock music.”
  6. See #4.
  7. We bought a bed around the time that UpCountry went bankrupt, and I blogged about the massive problems we had. Apparently others had some issues as well.
  8. A line from the film Juno. I suspect these were also ringtone-seekers.
  9. A word invented, as far as I know, by a former co-worker. We were in a particular situation deemed so bad that he considered it even worse than a fuckup…it was, in fact, a fucdown. Perhaps the missing “k” is meant to indicate even more dischord. I believe that I am the only hit Google finds for “fucdown” (along with the pingback from my brother’s blog, Technorati, etc.) so I think I own this bad boy now.
  10. The title of a Band Of Horses song.

If you want to see messed up, you should see the bottom of the list.

[tags]top ten search results[/tags]

"I'm no monkey!"

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Esquire has a new column called “What the hell is wrong with people.” Based on the first entry (that I’ve seen, anyway) I think I’m going to like it. A lot.

.:.

Via OpenCulture I found this site called BigThink. Looks like lots of interesting podcasts.

Speaking of podcasts, I feel like I should be taking advantage of more. I spend 15 or 20 minutes each day listening to random music on my Zen on my way to work, and I could be using that time to, I don’t know, learn French or investigate Utilitarianism or something.

.:.

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5 last night. While it doesn’t change the appearance to you, Joe Internet, the admin looks awfully spiffy. One little problem though: a lot of stuff doesn’t work. I can’t add URLs, for example; none of the pop-ups work. Good thing I know HTML, otherwise it’d be a little tricky to post.

[tags]esquire, evolution, open culture, bigthink, podcasts, wordpress 2.5[/tags]

How to make snow look warm

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I don’t even remember where I saw it, but one of my site feeds recently pointed to a list of their favourite photoblogs. Of course the list contained ddoi, of which I’ve been a fan for years, and a few others I already knew. It also contained a few that I didn’t recognize, the best of which (in my opinion, anyway) is Julien Roumagnac’s photoblog. His pictures of Montréal make me homesick for a city I’ve never lived in.

Have a look at today’s picture of Rue de la Commune, for example. As cold and snowy as that looks, tell me you don’t want to be standing there right now.

[tags]daily dose of imagery, julien roumagnac[/tags]

Can I get a copy of that?

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Here’s how my life is gonna go for the next couple of days. Tonight I have to work on my finance assignment. Tomorrow I have to go to work, of course. Tomorrow evening we’re having dinner at Canoe with CBGB; Saturday I’ll watch the PVR’d hockey game and then we have to run a pile of errands and pick up our new chairs. Saturday evening we have people coming over before we head out to a holiday party. Sunday will be spent recovering, watching another PVR’d hockey game and finishing — hopefully — the finance assignment. It is at that point that I will collapse onto the couch, read the newspaper and give the middle finger to the MBA for two weeks while I focus on Christmas shopping.

Weird to have the next 72 hours of my life planned out like that. Kind of depressing too.

.:.

Today’s episode of What The Duck distills the troubling conundrum of “entertainment news” down to a three-panel comic.

.:.

I will be going to this:

Whipper Snapper Gallery recently announced an exhibition of Toronto’s top four photo bloggers for the month of December. It’s called The Too-Explicit Injustice of Kind Population! and it runs from the 6th to the 29th. The exhibition title is an anagram of the different website names. Don’t worry… I don’t get it either!

More info.

[tags]canoe, what the duck, whipper snapper gallery, toronto photobloggers[/tags]

Hey, "fucdown" works too

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I’m copying this from my brother (who, in turn, got it from Scienceblogs). The idea is to find five Google searches that return your blog as the first hit. It didn’t take me long at all to come up with these:

  1. girlfriend du jour
  2. skirl tiff
  3. fieramosca toronto orecchiette
  4. nellie lake oesa
  5. coniption fit tim adam

That last one might be cheating because ‘conniption’ is purposely misspelled both on my blog and in the search, but I didn’t see no rulebook.

[tags]fucdown, girlfriend du jour, skirl, tiff, fieramosca[/tags]