Today is our third (wedding) anniversary!
I will see Shannon for the first time in a few weeks this Friday and I cannot wait. I miss my wife!
Yesterday was my birthday - I am now just two years away from 30. I celebrated the day with Heather and Bob, who surprised me with a cake, ice cream, and beer (yum!). Thank you Bob and Heather!
To address questions that may arise from my lack of “birthday spirit”: I personally don’t like to celebrate my birthday. Nothing bad happened to me during childhood or anything (in fact, I have a lot of great birthday memories from my youth). But these days I find the most satisfying celebration to be laid back and relaxed. I’m sure I’ll have a big blowout party one of these years, but for now this was more than enough for me.
To address questions that may arise due to my scruffy looking face: No, I did not forget to wash my face. Yes, I am trying to grow a beard (it has only been a week). Yes, I realize it looks silly right now.
One popular route to pages on this site is through the ubiquitous Google search engine. In general, everytime you click a link your browser not only tells the site what page you want but it also tells the site what page you are coming from. So when the link you click is on a search result page the recieving web page also gets a peek at what you were originally searching for.
I love looking over our log files for this site because it tells me interesting visitor information. Using these logs I can also check out what queries people are using to find this site, and today I present to you some of the weird, funny, or interesting queries I have seen over the past couple months (links go to a google search for the phrase):
- ear wax removal using string
- potato bug known as satans spawn
- can the cable company detect when i’m getting free cable
- strobe light dripping water
- floating necklaces for weddings
- girlfriend hypnotized
- do potatoe bugs live with ants
- barack obama in secret society
- michael barron’s point in life - my personal favorite
My Dell 1100 laptop’s charging cable developed a short again recently and I had to order a replacement. This is the second time that I’ve had to replace this laptop’s charging cord; it’s tough to work on your laptop when the cord is making crackling noises and smoking (not to mention the fact that it was not charging my laptop’s battery at all). Piece of crap!
Anyway, I am using this as an excuse for why the Maine albums haven’t been posted. All of the images are on my computer at home waiting to be synced to my laptop. I could technically SSH into the home box and do it all over the command line, but I’m a bit too lazy for that.
The site traffic here has really grown over the past few months; we’re averaging 10-50 visitors each day (half of which are usually search robots). If you’re interested you can see the last few months of traffic here (the program that generated this page, called visitors, clusters together hits based on user-agent strings and time stamps to form a more accurate count of actual site visitors).
As a consequence I am going to start using the excellent WordPress plugin “Post Levels” developed by Fil Fortes to filter out my private posts. You can still read the site as a normal user, but if you decide to create an account then you can also see any private posts that I make.
The reason I am doing this? I just have a few things that I need to post and, at the same time, I don’t want these posts available for just anyone to see.
Shannon (my wife) has finally decided to jump on the internet blog bandwagon. She will probably cover everything from the domestic to the exotic; I expect cooking, knitting, entertaining, and travel to be prominent.
In some ways this was inevitable. A frequent comment between us is “why don’t you blog about”, which is a surprisingly applicable phrase in many different situations:
- Our recent trip to Montreal
- The discovery of some new website
- Stubbing my toe on the chest at the foot of our bed
- My thoughts on shampoo, and why I shouldn’t eat it even if it “smells like sweet sweet mango”
Anyway, enjoy her site.
Short post because it’s late: After more than a year of mooching off of Fil’s generous (thank you again Fil!) web-hosting service I have returned to DreamHost. This move has brought with it a new blog (you’re reading it) where I can post things without disturbing the pages I share with my wife (http://shannonandmike.net). I’m going to sleep now.
