Daley Ponderings

I just updated Usermin, and so wanted to make sure that my custom modules didn't break.  And in the process, poked around through my webalizer module, which shows the things that people type into search engines to end up at our blog as well as the number of hits for certain pages.  Some of them aren't surprising, but quite a few are interesting to see.

All of the following are just for march, 2008.:

The most popular searches were for my krypto script which was accessed 4163 times by 457 people.  I always get a kick out of seeing people use software that I wrote years ago.  (A potential customer just asked me about the 3-D driving simulator I worked on when at CMU years ago, and in the process of explaining it, I happened across a recent article that mentioned they are still using that software, and as far as I know, they haven't had a developer for a long time, and only a couple changes were made after I left 6 years ago).

Next most popular is the difficult sudokus, which I suspect people aren't reading the article and comments carefully enough to actually find the really hard ones, or else aren't really looking for puzzles that are that hard.

There are lots of hits for Verizon and Test Director, which aren't particularly interesting to me.

I did discover we are 8th on the list in google for "mindless entertainment", which is pretty entertaining.

I do wonder what the people who were searching for "daley dinner march 20 2008" were looking for.

There were a handful of hits for people trying to fix their furnaces, looking for specific parts, and my sympathy goes out to them.

cleannet looks to be making lots of people mad - various searches for class act lawsuits, and violations of the do-not-call list.

And how about "falling in a lake"?  Perhaps they should have searched for, "how to avoid falling in a lake"...

I like the searches where people treat the engine like a person:

• "hi i have installed td 7.2 on win xp prof but when i click on f"
• "i have als and can laugh out loud but cant talk out loud why"  (different parts of the brain work separately from others - and functions can fail independently from each other -- check out the devices from dynavoxtech.com)
• "should i pay a verizon collection account?" (if you owe money, yes, you should pay it, if you don't owe it, and it is a mistake, no)
• "whats does taking god's name in vain mean"

• "fetal delivery in the 60's" (Linda's contribution)
• "how god makes little girls"
• "japanese spelling of noah" (no-ha?)
• "kids learn approval voting"
• "little ears are listening"
• "spam meat safe pregnancy" (I don't think they found what they were looking for)
• "stats on how many christians take god's name in vain" (research project? or trying to ease their conscience?)
• "pediatric dentist wanting x rays" (too bad, I guess our dentist isn't the only one)
• "the video photos of pregnancy big bellies" (I always wonder if this is new moms wondering what it will be like or someone else...)
• "vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv" (Jonathan's contribution to upping our stats (12th on the list in google))
• "what i wish i'd known about childbirth" (hopefully some good things - I am somewhat careful to not talk to people who are in their last trimester)
• "will dot matrix printer obsolete in 10 years" (I use old hardware, but even I don't use dot-matrix printers)