Category Archives: weather

analytics, google, sex, weather

Tuesday Attacks

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(With apologies to Mars Attacks.for the title.)

Tuesdays seem to attract insane weather forecasts this time of year on the plains. Last week we had the spring blizzard, followed by warm weather so all the snow was gone in a day or two. Today it was cool all day and there was a nippy north wind making it feel even colder. I couldn’t resist checking the weather forecast and it has snow tonight clearing to cold on Wednesday followed by a major wind and snow storm for the weekend. It must be close to April on the plains!

A while back I promised to revisit the lack of sexual searches landing people on this site. As I expected, writing about it caused a skew of the droppees toward the sex queries. I have been tempted to do a post featuring variants of “that certain part of the male anatomy” and its female counterpart just to see how it would drive traffic. Back a few years ago when I followed such things in detail, searches for things sex related were more than a third of all searches and appreciably more during certain hours of the day. I suspect it says more about the human condition than about the level of purience of the users of search. After all, there is a reason that the primal drives are usually listed as food, shelter, and sex. (And usually not necessarily in that order.) For those who are curious, the original post is here.

With out further ado, I give you the revised top ten query list  that drives traffic from Google to this site:

  • googlesex – What can I say? People that omit punctuation can end up in very unsatisfying places when they search. Google kindly deposited them here and here most often. Note that Google took the places where I had the phases like “Google, Sex” and “Google sex” and made them a hit for googlesex. For a good time, click here to see who owns the domain name googlesex.com. Nothing like being one of the 36,079 domains owned by Google. {*grin*} 
  • googlesex vedio – Not only do they omit the spaces, they can’t spell video either. But they were all dumped here by Google. Note the overlap with the phrase in the number one position?
  • “comfort memories” – An old standby that moved up the ranks from last tme. 
  • “in retrospect, I wouldn’t say” – A new riser on the list, related to this post.
  • “the course of high school” – Yet another riser from this post.
  • robert reed – One mention of him being a veteran author led to the legions of his fans finding my words. At least I assume it was due to this post.
  • art innocence death – What a strange juxtaposition! And how it got people to this post is a complete mystery to me.
  • art two bicycles love – Another puzzler. Google dumped the readers here, but why I don’t know.
  • best sexi cartoon art – This seems to have come via the bogerella pointer back to this site from long ago. I think when they moved to their new how, the blasted all the past posts out in readers and that evidentally temporarily raise the rating of this site. That’s the best guess I can come up with.

So how is your site being read from the search engines? What do your analytics tell you? Inquiring minds want to know.

Jenners has suggested via email that a post on how search engines work would be of interest. Is anyone else interested?

Off to bed to since I have to head for the radio show in the early in the morning.

ice, weather, wind

Windy Tuesday

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If you saw the national news, you probably saw mention of the area out here. The winds came up yesterday and then got really strong last night and this morning. Coupled with a smattering of snow and rain and temperatures below freezing with wind chills near 0, it made for an interesting day. We lost some trees around town and had signs and other such things blow down as well. I took this picture of the ice hanging off the eves of the house from inside the kitchen.

 
You can see the big one in the corner out of the breeze. Note that contrary to the dull dark look of this picture, it was taken at noon with the wind howling and the temperature up to the 30s. It’s just that the day stayed gray, dull, and overcast. Yet another view of the surviving icicle is given by this close up shot.

It calmed down a bit by this evening for the city council meeting where we had a marathon session. In retail sales it is Thanksgiving through Christmas tat is the make or break. In municipal government in cold climes, it is the March – June time frame that is make or break. If projects don’t get started in time, they don’t get finished before the possible arrival of winter. So we had a two page agenda of items and contracts to go through tonight, along with several public hearings. Made for a fun time for all. {*grin*}

We did have a first at the meeting. A citizen actually came to speak at the unscheduled block reserved for people not on the agenda, and he was not there to complain! He came to tell us thanks for the hard work and good job we are doing. It rare to be hearing it from one of the people we serve, especially in public like that. The council and I were deeply appreciative.

Finally, amidst the wind and the breeze, Mom got to go home today. It was challenging when the van brought her in her wheel chair to the house and the wind was so strong that it took two of us to hold the door open for the wheel chair lift to deposit her on the side walk. It was likewise fun as I loaded and unloaded her stuff from my truck. But in spite of the ugly weather, Mom is really happy to be back in her house, able to do the things she wants, and eat the food she wants.

Time to head for the bed so I can get up and mosey down to the radio station tomorrow morning. I only got a few hours sleep last night with the wind and crashing and … so 6am is going to come early. After the show I’ll head over to Mom’s to get her grocery list since she can’t get out and about for a while yet. She’s learning that wheel chairs on thick carpets are very hard to push compared to the tiled floor at the nursing home. {*grin*}

computers, weather

I’m Still Here

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I know! I didn’t post yesterday, nor have I been able to comment on the blogs I follow for the last couple of days. When you replace the main interface machine, you can waste a lot of time trying to decide what to save and what to throw away to the bit bucket.

I finally decided (after booting 5 different linux distros) to go with openSUSE for the moment. (And I preserved at least some of my old XP environment by installing it into a VirtualBox VM.) So now that your eyes are glazing over and you are wondering what the blank the idiot is talking about, I’ll mosey on into the real post. (See – patience is a virtue!)

Today was a day of massive weather shift. This weekend, L and I got to enjoy mid 70’s both days, but then this morning the winds began howling and it spit a bit of rain. It never got above 45 all day and by afternoon it was below freezing with 50 to 80 mile and winds. I hate this kind of day because the windows rattle and anything outdoors feels like you are being chopped to death with little itty bitty blades. Needless to say, Molly was not overjoyed with the winds ruffling her coat amidst her mope over the departure of L early this morning for the mountains.

It was windy enough that Mom called from the nursing home and suggested I not bother to venture over to see her today. It wouldn’t have been a problem; I only live about four blocks from the nursing home where she is. I think it really had more to do with the fact that I’ll have to be packing all of her stuff up to bring over to her house tomorrow when she gets to escape back home. Although she’ll be pretty much house bound for the next 6-8 weeks, she clearly can’t wait to get back to *her* home. Can’t say that I blame her.

In other pressing news, I’m sure you will all be overjoyed to note that the vote came out in favor of keeping the the dubious LinkWithin widget at the bottom of the posts. The end result was 66% in favor of keeping the widget, 33% didn’t care, and no one voted to remove. So evidently some people like it and some don’t care, but no one was annoyed enough to want to see it go away.

My own suspicion is that 90% of the readers of this blog read via a reader like Google Reader or Bloglines or … and only click through to comment. That is backed up by the stats that say I get ~60 page views a day but closer to 150 subscriptions to the two feeds that come off this page. Thus they don’t care about the widget since they only see it when they are interested enough to comment. What do you think?

Along those same lines you’ll remember a while back I was disappointed about the paucity of sex searches landing visitors here at this site. Well, I may have interesting changes to report next time.  
(What A tease I am.) 

Well, off to get notes ready for the council meeting tomorrow night since it will be a long day tomorrow, what with getting move moved and settled.  

banquet, computers, weather

A Late Quicky

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This will be a quick post since I am struggling to avoid strangling a computer that runs everything OS fine except for Windows XP. And then it just kicks up its heels and dies. Actually I suspect it is more the SATA disk controller than anything else. XP is old enough not to have deep grained support for SATA so it may be time to say goodbye to XP forever and start running one of my favorite Linux distributions on it.

Tomorrow evening is the annual city employee appreciation banquet. It’s always interesting. Municipal employees tend to be somewhat clique driven by department. I.e. the sanitation people don’t hang with the street people who don’t hang with the water treatment people who … So you end up with a lot of smaller groups that sort of ignore each other. And of course the temporary blips on the radar like the city council members are usually given a bit of a cold shoulder as well. (I suspect more from awe than from dislike. Just kidding!) It’s interesting because we used to give awards and service pins and associated spiels, etc. The employees finally stood up and admitted they’d much rather just have a a good supper with casual dress and no hot air from the likes of me. So that is what we have done for the past several years and it really seems to work better and be considerably less boring.

It was close to 70 again today, so Molly and I took our walk later in the day to enjoy the twilight. Sometime in the next few days it is going to turn cold again. The forecast for Tuesday has a high of 40 and possible snow and rain. Of course that means believing the weather people are going to get it right; here in Colorado that is a rare occurrence. When L and I used lived in LA, we always joked about how it paid to be a weather person in an area where you could see all the weather coming at you from huge distances and the only question was sunny or real sunny. (It all came in from the Pacific Ocean with no land features to change it for hundreds of miles as it rolled in.) Made them look like paragons of accuracy. You don’t get the same luxury when there are mountains and huge land masses that heat and cool to drive the vertical circulation.

Back to the recalcitrant computer. It was the last of the machines here running a Microsoft OS natively, but that may be over soon. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

mom, weather

Short Report Tuesday

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The temperature reached above 80 degrees here today, well above normal for this time of year. Everyone just keeps hoping we get some moisture. This has been an extremely dry and warm winter, making it hard when we don’t get snow and it is warm enough that the mountains melt out early. That means that all the farmers around here will be hurting unless we get some rain timed just right and in sufficient amounts. Average annual precipitation here is less than 14 inches a year with half of it coming in the form of winter snow. Needless to say, this winter is at less than 0.5 inch. A worryingly dry year.

Taking advantage of the warm weather, Molly and I hit the park for our daily miles. (Molly was willing to join me today since the period of mourning L leaving was over at about noon when the squirrels got frisky.) I couldn’t believe the number of young mothers and kids at the playground. A literal explosion out of the house and into the park with the warmer weather. Another month or so and the young ladies from the college will be out sunbathing in the parks. That is always an interesting time of the year since it serves to preview what the prevailing swimsuit styles will be this summer at the city pool. Somehow, the older one gets, the less enthusing following swimsuit fashion becomes. It’s not like I spend a lot of time at the pool ogling like a slobbering teenage boy anymore. Besides, back then L was a lifeguard so there was something of interest for me to ogle!

Mom continues to do well and may be able to return home by the weekend depending on the therapists evaluation of the readiness of her house. She is starting to get antsy to be home. She got the surgical dressing changed and saw the orthopedic surgeon today. So it was a busy day for her, going over to the doctor’s office and then having physical therapy. When I got over to the nursing home a bit after 5pm, she and a few friends were sitting outside, relaxing and visiting in the late day sun.  She will still be in a wheel chair and unable to put any weight at all on her leg for at least another 6 weeks, but at least she will be at home. That will make her happy.

Other than that, not a lot to report today. Time to get some real work done so I can get ready to mosey down to the radio station for the weekly show in the morning. 6am comes early, but at least it is light out since the spring to daylight savings time.