Category: Miscellaneous babble

My ‘People Visited From’ block (courtesy VisitorLocation) has been up for a little while now showing where the last 6 or 7 people have surfed in from since the last rebuild. Some of them are from pretty far away places: Australia, Iran, Peru, The Netherlands. Most are from the US. So it makes me wonder…how do people make their way here? How did they find this little blog of mine and what are they looking for that brings them here? I see a lot of Google and Yahoo! referrals in the logs. What do they think of what they find here? Not many of them leave comments, so they’re all just silent visitors.

Browsing through my MT activity log, I notice some people searching my blog for some unusual items. Here’s a small selection of some of the search words being entered.

• dragonball
• gundam (what’s a gundam?)
• jawn
• milkshake
• bling bling
• grundy puffs
• cheese monkey (huh?)
• sphyncter (sic)
• godzilla
• neng
• clitoris

Leaves me wondering what it was these people are looking for here, and how the heck they got the impression that it could be found here?

of course, now that I’ve listed all these words, it should only be a matter of time before my blog starts showing up on search engines, which will lead to more people coming here searching for strange things that will only show up here because I’ve posted about people searching for strange things.

On another note, MT-Blacklist seems to be working as expected weeding out comment spam here. I probably don’t get nearly as much as other more visited sites, but it has blocked 4 attempts since I installed it about a week ago. Hooray!

Eudora 6.0’s new SpamWatch and POPFile are also cutting down significantly the amount of spam my eyeballs get subjected to.

The Gematriculator. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this site, or this Gematria thing.

ou submit a passage or URL, and it analyzes the words to determine how good or evil it is.

nteresting…

Found at Cynical Tyrant

Added the new REM cd, In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 (Special Edition) to my collection yesterday. I decided to go with the 2 disc set with the rarities and B-sides CD. It was just something I had to have. So far it’s excellent. It’s a pretty definitive collection of some of their best songs. I would have added a few others, but at 76 minutes on the main CD, it’s already got plenty to listen to. If you’re an REM fan, I heartily recommend getting the Special Edition, mostly for the 2nd CD. Chances are you’ve already got most of the CDs that the music on the 1st CD comes from.

I was also tempted to add the new Tragically Hip CD, but I decided I ought to save it for another day. Besides, $19 seemed a little much to pay for a CD.

Sadly, my wife is none too fond of REM for some reason, so I’m relegated to listening to their music at work, in my car or when she’s not home. She says I’m lucky she didn’t know that I was an REM fan when we first met, otherwise she might not have looked upon me with as much favour. I guess some things are just better left in the closet.

I’ve come to the realization that serendipity ([definition: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for] from Merriam-Webster) rules my life. Things happen to me. Things happen to everybody. That’s what life is all about…getting things to happen to you.

There isn’t a lot that happens to me, but I’ve noticed that most of the things that do happen usually tend to be good things. I’m always stumbling onto a lot of things. Most of the time blindly, sometimes while doing or looking for other things. But always unexpected. Usually it turns out the a good thing. Not always, but mostly. Maybe I have a lot of good karma built up from a previous life or something. Maybe I’ve just blocked out the bad things so I don’t remember them anymore. Whatever the case, I just seem to remember a lot more good things than bad things happening to me.

Today for example, I happened to be heading down to the cafeteria for lunch. Every year, the MUSC cafeteria people have a pumpkin carving contest. They supply the pumpkins, and people from all over the hospital pick one up and make some kind of neat and clever carved pumpkin. The day before Halloween, they get displayed in the hallway outside the cafeteria. It’s always an entertaining event. Anyway, back to the story.

I was checking out the pumpkins, along with all the other people destined for the cafeteria to get some grub. I thought to myself, “Self, you have your camera here. It might be cool to get some piictures of the more interesting pumpkins.”. So I turned around and asked one of the cafeteria managers, who just happened to be standing behind me, if it would be ok to take some pictures. “Sure,” he said, “in fact, do you have a pumpkin entered?” I told him I did not, and he said “Come with me.”

I followed him into his office, where he handed me a meal ticket, a clipboard with a form on it, and asked if I wanted to judge the pumpkins. “Cool” I said. So he explained the judging process to me and off I went. Judging was simple. Only two criteria, originality and creativity, scored out of 5. As usual, there were a lot of good pumpkins around. Some were pretty ordinary, others were more elaborate. So I judged, and then went to get lunch with my meal ticket. And all for asking if I could take some pictures.

There are others. The way I met my wife, the summer job I got during undergrad that led me onto my current career path and the job I got after I finished my master’s degree are probably the most recent significant events. Maybe I’ll write about them in future entries. It’s not always big good things happening to me. Those happen very rarely. Mostly it’s little good things, like today. And those are the things I enjoy most.

I’ve always been a firm believer that whatever happens to me, good or bad, things will all work out in the end. And you know what, they almost always do. At least for me anyway.

[UPDATE]: If you want to see the pumpkins, head on over to the gallery and have a look.