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Monday, February 26, 2007

Play it again, Sam (for the first time)

Last night, rather than sit through hours of awkward acceptance speeches and glimpses of Jack Nicholson's shiny bald head, I opted to spend my Oscar night watching what has come to be one of the greatest films of all time, Casablanca, for the first time. That's right, I've never seen it before. Shocking.

Of the top 100 films on the list published by the AFI in 1998, I've seen 60 of them which isn't bad. But you know what is bad? Of the top 12, including Casablanca, I've only seen 3.

Oh, and by the way: Rick never says "Play it again, Sam." He says: "You played it for her, you can play it for me. Play it!" Ilsa says "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By.'" But no "Play it again, Sam."

Saturday, February 24, 2007

My love for tacos and music

As a quick follow-up to my previous post, this morning I discovered another recent referrer to my site through Google. I think I have a new favorite: "bringing tacos back song."

This raises all sorts of interesting questions:

Is this a real song?
If so, what does it sound like? It must be awesome.
What genre of music could it be?
Where have tacos gone? I wasn't aware they ever left us.
I'm sure there are many, many more questions I should be asking here, but my brain isn't awake enough yet to think about the unlimited possibilites of tacos and music.

[UPDATE: I have a new new favorite: "twin peaks audrey's dance free download freshly squeezed." OK, so this would be much more random if "Freshly Squeezed" wasn't a track on the Twin Peaks soundtrack. But still, you have to agree that this is a silly search done by someone in Finland.]

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Get Clicky with it

If you have a website and you're interested in finding out more about your visitors, I recommend Clicky. It's free, it's simple to implement and it offers feeds on visitors, referrers and pageviews that you can subscribe to. My web host offers some basic stats on my website traffic and every couple months I take a peek at the top downloads. I know there's probably only about ten people that read this site on a regular basis, so why do some of my mp3s and podcasts have 60-70 unique downloads a month?

So I turned to Clicky for answers. People have arrived to my site through the silliest searches. And I'm sure the same thing is happening for your sites too. So it's fun to check it out.

United Kingdom - Google search for footy footy footy
Finland - Google search for footy footy footy
United Kingdom - Google search for Mr T's commandments blog
Greece - Google search for Origins Skin Diver Body Wash
Spain - Google search for can I keep you november blessing unknown album
France - Google search for nervous music
Singapore - Google search for nervous songs
Spain - Google search for morricone "dedicato al mare egeo" blogspot
Serbia and Montenegro - Referred from searchlores.org
Brazil - Referred from killingfloorblues.blogspot.com

And a whole ton of strange ones from the United States.

Google search for saxaphone music to copy off your computer
Google search for floogie silliest
Google search for music about sloths
Google blog search for white faced capuchin
Google search for then along come two they got nothing but their jeans
Google search for Kids these days, they listen to the rap, with their hippin' and their hoppin' and their bippin' and their boppin', so they don't know what the jazz is all about!
My personal favorite: Google search for "christopher walken" "white paper"

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Hey! Google Reader

Since the post from Jess a while back, I've been eyeing Google Reader but I haven't had the time or energy to make the jump. I was a devoted Bloglines user for many years, and then I switched, on a whim, to Newshutch. Newshutch was more web2.0-y and "nicer" looking with its logos and AJAX-ified behavior. But it really isn't much above what Bloglines can do in terms of functionality.

Now it's time for me to make the leap to Google Reader. It gave me the excuse to finally organize my pile of entangled feeds into categories. Up until now, I've just been reading down the list. There was nothing wrong with that. I liked jumping from one random bit of news to another - like, "hey! the shins have a new one coming out in january!", "hey! i can buy a 1GB flash drive with rebates for $8!", "hey! firefox has an addon to strip out unnecessary exclamation points!!"

Yes, I begin almost all thoughts with "hey!" these days.

Hey, anyway, Google Reader will still let me browse this way with its nifty "All Items" link to display all of my unread feeds in one view. So I trolled through my 400+ feeds and did some housecleaning. Chucked the expired feeds (in some cases replaced them with the newest feed if it existed), and took a hard look at those feeds that I never read. Whoosh...into the trash they went. So I'm down to a slimmer 248 subscriptions at this writing.

Two articles in particular are responsible for pushing me over the edge to switch: LifeHacker's Getting good with Google Reader and the Get More From Google Reader Guide that I stumbled upon.

If you haven't at least given Google Reader a test drive, I'd recommend that you try it out. The Greasemonkey script that inserts a "Feeds" link into your Gmail menus is ingenious (and I'm sure Google is working on an official release) and the Firefox Notifier is another way that you can make your feeds a part of your day without them getting terribly in the way.

And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's OK too. Hi.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Costa Rica coffee

Lots and lots and lots of coffee beans. It'll take me a while to get through all these bags. There's no point to this post. I'm just playing with the cameraphone.