Tag: wordpress.com

April’s #WordPrompt

WordPress.com’s WordPrompt for April is:

Green.

How about some green in the woods behind our back yard.

Also, how about a green monster.

CIMG0344
CIMG5734

Speaking of the Green Monster, yesterday was the Red Sox home opener. It was also my father’s 80th birthday. Happy birthday, dad!

When I called him to wish him a happy birthday I was hoping the Sox would have had a comfortable lead over the Minnesota Twinkies. Instead, the Twinkies were kicking their ass. I complained to him that the team was letting him down on his day. He said he figured they were just shooting for a dramatic comeback, but they were overdoing it a little.

After we hung up and I went back to work the Red Sox did indeed mount a bit of a comeback. They scored a few runs in the 8th inning to at least make it a game… then the bullpen gave those runs back in the top of the 9th.

Stupid Red Sox.

Anyway. #WordPrompt

Bridge- #WordPrompt

WordPress.com puts out a newsletter. I usually don’t really read it. I maybe give it a glance and then trash the email. Today there was something about a new feature they’re playing with to give a monthly word prompt. The first month’s word is bridge.

When I read it I did what I always do for word prompt type thingies. I went to Flickr and searched for it. These are a few of the things that came up:

The Sands Bridge is Collapsing
Covered Bridge in Jackson, NH.
bridgeedited

That was fun, wasn’t it? Let’s see what they dish out next month.

Discord Doesn’t Like Me

I don’t like Discord. I know that makes me sound old, but it’s just an AOL chat room so it’s not that I am old, it’s that I’ve been there and done that and don’t want to do it again.

The RPM Challenge forums no longer exist as they have been replaced by a Discord server. Okay. I’ll play along.

There I was, typing in a post to the random chat board, and either the app on my machine crashed or the server went down. Like… right in the middle of typing!

Okay, we have established that I don’t like Discord. Now it seems that Discord doesn’t like me either. Well screw you, Chuck!

On an unrelated note, Bellana and her roommate posted another video. They went to Belgium. Just a spur of the moment trip to Brussels. How cool is that? How cool is the EU?

Maybe I’ll share the video one of these days.

On another unrelated note, why is the last post I made last night displaying in a box? Is this post going to display in a box? Did I accidentally click a put-your-post-in-a-box button? I don’t know. Let’s publish this puppy and see what happens!

ADDENDUM: I didn’t click a put-your-post-in-a-box button, but I did post the previous update while I was about 95% asleep and I did accidentally click a stick-this-to-the-top-of-your-page checkbox. It should be fixed now.

Seventy-Nine Minutes

I have seventy-nine minutes to go until the long weekend. New Years is so close I can practically smell Times Square.

Two unrelated things come together in this post. First, I am curious how many of my loyal readers and only friends are planning on going out for New Years Eve. By going out I mean going someplace where more than 10 people will be present. Doesn’t matter if it’s inside or outside, I just want to know if you are going to an actual party. Second, WordPress.com has just given us access to a third party plug in/embed thing that lets us add polls and surveys and stuff like that to our posts. I add ’em and no one response to ’em, but I keep adding ’em!

I posted one of these polls the other day before I knew how to see the results without actually adding a response. Once I figured it out I found there were seven responses. Six of them were me. Wheeeee!

73 minutes to go.

What percentage of the work day is left? It’s 4:18pm. I work from 9:00am to 5:30pm. I have worked (7 * 60) + 18 = 438 minutes. There are (8 * 60) + 30 = 510 minutes in the day. I have worked ((7*60)+18)/((8*60)+30) * 100 = 85.88% of the work day. Fuck yeah, math.

Answer the poll! Polls are fun! Specifically, polls are fun when you’re a lame blog poster like me so let me have fun!

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.

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.

Wasted Opportunity (Also, blog Stats Review)

I’m serving another 24 hour prison sentence. Dinner has been served to both of us, the doors have been alarmed so she can’t wander off without making a huge noise (I can’t either of course, but I know how to turn the alarms off so there’s that at least), her meds have been delivered, and my intermittent fasting period has been kicked off for another night (a little early, but that’s okay).

If I were smart I would be using my prison sentence to work on some 50/90, but the SyFy channel is running both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and how can I not watch that? The only horcrux left is the snake.

We only have one more day in July, and lately that means I have been paying attention to the hit stats for this blog. I created this account in March of 2017 and the monthly counts for 2021 so far have (with one slight exception) destroyed every other month since the account was created. I’m not sure why (though I do seem to be posting more than ever before) but the numbers have been way up since last November and they skyrocketed starting in January. As always, please remember that skyrocketing monthly numbers for me look more like terribly bad afternoons for real blogs. All of you folks paying me visits are my new best online friends, but there aren’t that many of you, you know? Select company, right?

This is not my first wordpress.com account though. The first ran from December 2012 to July 2016. I was curious how my current stats compared to the old account’s. Turns out I am generally getting more hits now than I did then. Mostly. There were two months, December 2015 and January 2016, where the monthly hit count was higher than anything I’ve had with this account. Every other month was significantly lower than what I have been consistently getting in 2021. Why were those two months so much more popular than any other months since I started? No idea. I look at the summaries and I don’t see anything resembling a spike. There wasn’t one post that somehow, magically, drew in the people in droves. Nope, everything looks normal. I just had way more hits in those two months.

I set the record for this account last month, by quite a bit. This month has a chance to come close, but it’s going to take a crazy good night tonight and a really great day tomorrow to set a new record. Also, July has one more day than June so even if I do set the record it should have an asterisk. Roger Maris like a mutha, right?

Okay, I am going to ride out the rest of Deathly Hallows 2 for the next hour or so. Maybe I’ll try to write some lyrics, or a bass riff, or something. Anything, just so long as my mother doesn’t have a bad night.

Please don’t let her have a bad night. Pretty please.