Tag: blogging

November 18, 2008

Today is a special anniversary for Mr Nerd Boy, your humble narrator. 13 years ago today I started my first public blog. Aww, isn’t that sweet? I started on Yahoo 360 and then moved to myspace. Both of those blogs were private though. Only friends or followers could see my posts. The Yahoo stuff is long gone and will never be recovered. The myspace stuff, about two years worth, was all ported here. Then on 11/18/08 I started a blogger account. A few days later I split it into two, one public and one private where I could include pictures of the kids and control who could see them. All of the posts from both blogger blogs have been ported here. Weirdly, many of them were uploaded twice. No clue how. In December 2012 I moved to WordPress.com. Eventually I moved to Medium but that didn’t last long. Then in March of 2017 I moved to a second WordPress.com account, which included all of the previous account and all of the Medium posts, and we’re still going strong.

So what have I learned after 13 years of this goofiness? I’ve learned that I suck at proof reading. I’ve learned that 13 years worth of multiple posts each day is a pretty decent data set for playing “this day in history” games. I’ve also learned that I am not a good writer. I’ve also, also learned that I really don’t care.

What haven’t I learned? I haven’t learned how to accurately predict NHL playoff series results more accurately than a coin flip. I also haven’t learned what the point of it all is. I haven’t a clue.

So happy 13th birthday to the public blog! You’re a teenager now. Try not to become a stereotypical middle school dick, m’kay? Now go play with your little friends.

Over-sharer Fail

What’s a clinical over-sharer to do?

I have four things going on that the clinical over-sharer in me wants to talk about but I can’t. Well… I can, but I just don’t want to… even though I want to. Ugh.

Three of the four things are related to being a home owner. The fourth is a personal healthcare thing. One of the home things is pretty huge, another is kind of huge but dependent on the first thing and after the first thing is squared away there are two other things that have to happen before we get to it… confused? Me too. The third is pretty minor but still nice. The healthcare thing has the potential to become utterly gigantic, in a really positive way, but at the moment is just a teeny tiny thing.

The huge thing will never be discussed directly, the big thing will be, but not until it happens and maybe not until after it happens. The small thing probably won’t be, but in oversharing other things you might get a clue. The healthcare thing is probably going to be discussed in excruciating detail, but not until the process advances quite a bit further than the baby step I’ve taken thus far.

I want to talk about all of it! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

On a completely unrelated and unimportant note, I just asked a HomePod to play a specific podcast episode and it worked. Nice! Hey Siri, play the newest episode of The Walking Dead ‘Cast. It worked!

It’s November All Right

It’s November. In terms of weather and seasons that blows chunks. In terms of music… get ready to be bored to tears, boys and girls!

One song underway. 7/8 time and it has a keyboard part. I must be completely insane. Keyboards? Blah!

On the blogging nerd front, I mentioned about seven days ago that we broke the record for page views in a month with a whole seven days still to go. Well, those seven days are up now and did we ever destroy that monthly record. Boy howdy, did we ever! September broke the record at the time. The September count was 3% higher than the previous record. The October count though… holy shit, the October count was 31% higher than the September count. THIRTY ONE PERCENT! I don’t really know what happened. Sure I posted more than any other month, and sure I was bombing the universe with baseball playoffs and Red Sox panic. Still… a 31% increase? How the fudge did that happen?

Okay, I still have seven minutes of exercise to finish. I think I’ll get to it now.

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, it’s fun on the bun.

Stats Nerd

This is becoming like a thing around here.

Stats. Blog stats. WordPress.com doesn’t give us a lot, but what they do give us provides endless fun for a stat nerd like me. I assume I could be lamer if I tried, but I really don’t see the need. I am already pretty much as lame as it gets.

So last month we set the blog’s records for most unique visitors and for most page views. A couple of days ago October topped the unique visitors record and then earlier today October also topped the page views record. The interesting item of note here is that both stats have new records and there are still seven days left in the month.

Holy shit snacks, folks. Thanks for coming by! I assume a lot of it had to do with the Red Sox in the playoffs. Also, a lot of it may have something to do with the fact that this month is also going to demolish the record for most posts in a month. The goal here, when I started back in November of 2008, was to post once, maybe twice a day. Over the last few months I’ve been hitting more like six posts a day, and this month it’s even more than that.

I wonder… should I calm the fuck down a little? I probably should. I don’t think I will, but I probably should. Also, how much of the crap this month would have gone to facebook had facebook and I not decided to spend some time apart from each other? Red Sox-ily speaking, probably a lot of it. Otherwise, probably not a lot.

Oh well. I really do enjoy crunching the numbers they give us. All like… four of them. Also, I get to see which countries the IP addresses that visit the page come from. All sorts of fun and interesting places. Do I have regular viewers in far flung locales? Did I spell locale correctly? That would be cool. Do I have American viewers who are connected to VPN’s that show as coming from the farthest reaches of the globe, and if so are they spam? How many of the page views are russian bot farms trying to trick me into voting for trump in 2016? I’m guessing a few, at least. Not like twitter where it seems like 3/4 of the place is russian propaganda bots.

But what does it all mean in the end? Nothing. When all is said and done it means nothing. Do I care? Nope. I don’t. So why do I keep writing about it?

Ummmm… I haven’t got an answer to that one. Let me think on it for about a month and get back to you.

Sunday Thoughts

Let’s be clear, this post is procrastination.

It’s Sunday, I have some chores I want to get done. Instead I am sitting at my computer. The Red Sox game is less than four hours away. They are on the MLB network today. I’m trying to find a way to stream the game to my computer so I can watch it while I clean stuff in my room. No dice. I do not think our cable package includes the network so that kills pretty much all of the legit streaming options that I know of. I wonder if youtube is doing anything. Hmmm… Nope. It doesn’t look like it. Unless MLB is going to add something closer to the start of the game.

I try not to talk about blog stats too often as that feels like cork sniffing and maybe pandering for hits or some shit and that’s not what it’s about. I just like stats. Baseball stats, hockey stats, covid stats (though “like” is the wrong word there), and blog stats. I was curious how close last month came to matching the highest month on my old wordpress.com account. I looked that up a few months ago and thought I remembered the ball park figure. I didn’t. The number I remembered was quite a bit higher than the reality. Turns out last month destroyed the old account’s record, and so did the month before. Okay, I guess I never have to go look at the old account again. That’s good.

Speaking of blogging… is it coming up on time for a new theme yet? It could be. We’ll see.

I still haven’t played the guitar. I am 3/4 (approximate) through a four day weekend and I haven’t taken it out of the case. I keep looking at it. I keep saying I’m going to do it. Sigh… soon.

Okay. I need to get my shit together today. Let’s go, fat boy. Let’s get some stuff done, then listen to the game on the radio, then play the guitar, then watch The Walking Dead and World Beyond, then go to sleep. You can do it, fat ass. You can do it.

Bed Time

I took Friday off this week, not to extend the long weekend but because there was talk of possibly going to VT and I wanted to be free to go. Now we are not going so I am left with a mostly unplanned four day weekend. Such is life, I guess.

The good news is I’ll be able to stay up late Thursday night if game one of the Red Sox/Rays series requires it. Bonus!

I haven’t played my guitar in the month of October yet. That is bad, mental healthily speaking. Friday might get some serious therapy time. We will see.

I’m really tired right now but I feel the need to overshare some personal life shit. Okay, here goes: I trimmed my toe nails today. Really, what other sites give you this much detail? You’re welcome.

Okay, good night everyone.

Monthly Record

Once again this blog has set monthly traffic records. September 2021 set the site’s record for most page views and most unique visitors.

Thanks, everyone.

I can see that a lot of the traffic is spam, but not all of it. If you’re an actual human being who reads this stuff… thanks, and I hope it’s not too boring. If I had to guess I would say that some of the traffic is people laughing at the fat old guy and his shitty music, but whatevs, thanks for coming. You’re all awesome (even the robot spam viewers) and clearly smarter than everyone else, and better looking too.

The Empty Lunch Break Post

My lunch break is ending. Time to throw up a post.

I got nothing.

Nothing at all.

The last three days have felt like the longest six months ever, har har har.

Jen asked me a question about a Lizardfish show from a few years ago. I had to go to the Lizardfish website to get the details she wanted. Turns out the domain has expired. Did I know that? I think I did. lizardfishmusic.com is no longer a thing. Lizardfishmusic.wordpress.com is though. Turns out I never added the 2/1/20 show to the list of past shows. There’s a post for it, but I never took the next step and added it to the list. I’ll fix that. While I was there I took a second to add a new post saying that we’re missing it. Because we are.

My back is killing me. My neck is killing me. My shoulders are killing me. My legs are killing me. My feet are killing me……. and I still have 28 minutes of exercise to do today. Yikes!

We are planning a drive up to Vermont to check in with the kids and deliver some seasonal clothing. The closer we get to the weekend the more excited about it I get. I’m really looking forward to it, even if it requires me to do a shit ton of laundry. Can’t wait.

See? I had nothing to talk about.

Catching Up

One hour of bad sleep on Saturday and six hours of bad sleep on Sunday. Yeah… it’s catching up with me. I am one sleepy red head right now.

15 minutes to go until I log out of my work computer. I’ve been logged in since about 4:00pm on Saturday and it’s 5:16pm on Monday. Well… I was out for a bit as I rebooted once this morning. I figured the lappy needed it after all the work I made it do this weekend. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I took tomorrow off to recover from the weekend. What should I do? Besides sleeping of course. Well there was mystery*… no, that’s not right. How about well there is music. I need to do car music. I have eight songs that need singing. Actually, I have 11 songs that need singing. I added two new song ideas to the list yesterday in a very not successful attempt to calm my ass down. There is also one little music memo thing that I added to the song list but it’s not very good so I will probably drop it. So…. eight songs ready for vocal tracks, two songs that still need to have their vocal parts written. Maybe car music in the morning and then more car music in the afternoon? Is that possible?

What else? Well there’s my desk. I have made the (likely temporary) decision to keep my work day desk setup in Harry’s room, but move my MacBook back to the desk in our bedroom. I like it better in our bedroom, but I have also found I really like working elsewhere. It was starting to feel like I never left that room. Now I will definitely be leaving it for 8.5 hours a day, five days per week.

Okay, work time is up. Time to go cook dinner for my love.

*There is a song by Bill Bruford’s fusion band, aptly called Bruford, called Fainting in Coils. It opens up with a quote from Alice and Wonderland where Dr Bruford reads the passage with his voice sent through a harmonizer and lowered an octave or so. There’s some other sauce on there too. Someone else reads some narration and then the good doctor’s voice comes in louder and right up in your face and the first thing he says is, “well, there was mystery.” In my massively sleep deprived state, that’s what I was thinking of as I was typing that paragraph. There. You’re in the know now.**

**Am I the only doofus who puts footnotes into meaningless blog posts? Yeah, I thought so too.