ilovecode

Apparently I missed the release of the new IE and FF browsers over the past two weeks. I suck. I have now downloaded them and so far the FF looks pretty nice; as expected. When I opened IE the first time, it automatically closed from a serious error and then it worked fine when I opened it again. Opera is still the sexiest browser out there.

It has been 16 days (yes I’m counting!) without the Internet. My short jaunts to the local cafeteria just don’t count considering I am typically online 10+ hours a day. So how the hell have I been surviving?

I have been studying up on my French. I now know about 15 very unuseful phrases and am trying to learn more. Why couldn’t it at least be a phonetic language?

Most of my time has been spent playing my Nintendo DS. I’ve had this game called Brain Age for a while now but until I boarded the plane for Belgium, I never really had time to play it. Now, I’m a complete junkie. They have a “training” session which lets you do things like simple addition/subtraction/multiplication problems (I guess they figrue division is too hard),  reading aloud, word memorization, etc. Then it tests your brain. The best score is to have a brain the age of a 20 year old. Well my friends. Before I started playing this incredibly addictive game, my brain was as old as a 45-year old. Well, I am 30, so I demanded a brain of at least equal age. Now I have the brain of a 21-year old.

There is also a Sudoku game within brain age and I can’t get enough of it. I’ve joined the Sudoku craze and now want to buy the Sudoku game for the ds. I haven’t resorted to old-fashioned pen and paper, but that may be the next step!

Even though I’m not as active in SitePoint’s .NET Forum as I once was (a couple of years ago , something I’ve wanted to do is to help grow the programming community there as well as the .NET community. I used to frequent the ASP.NET forums but it lacked that community feel that SitePoint brings so I quit going. Someone would ask a question and you helped and that was the end of it. SitePoint has always been seen as one of the best forums for web DESIGNERS, but I’d like it also to be one of the best sources for web DEVELOPERS.

Something that is great to see is that one of SitePoint’s best .NET developers has taken over their .NET Blog: the Daily Catch. Wyatt has been blogging for a couple of weeks now and have enjoyed reading his posts. Hopefully some of the .NETters will pop on over and lend some feedback and encouragement to him.

Today is the 1-year anniversary of this blog. When I started this blog I had no idea what I wanted to do with it and what focus it would take. It seems after a year it is a mish mosh of tech things with a little bit of me mixed in. I figured now is as good a time as any to point out some trends in the blog and see how far it’s come.

To date, I have 105 posts with 705 comments. This is minus the 150 comments from a Microsoft post that I lost when I erased my DB… sigh. Something I learned to like was when people commented on my blog. I had never really thought much of it, but when someone comments, it typically means they find the topic more interesting. I have numerous posts without a comment and I’ve learned that most people don’t really give a crap about the topic at hand. I try to file that knowledge for later use.

Some of my favorite posts are the:

• Too Much Anti-microsoft - this post got attention all over the web and I was getting over 1000 uniques a day for a while there. It was prety insane. I wish i still had the comments from this one. There was a lot of debate on this post.. over 150 comments. What I learned from this post was if you want to get a lot of readers to your site fast, but something that doesn’t attack Microsoft and all of the slashdooters and linuxjournalites will come to play.
• Geeks do it better was a popular topic among the readers. I still say that yes.. geeks do it better.
• Happy Birthday To Me - Such a great post . I love my birthday and so far this year, while its been one hell of a roller coaster ride, it had been unforgettable. Thanks to those that have made my 30th year so fantastic!
• Technology Rocks - this post wasn’t anything profound but I remember hooking up the webcam so my husband, who was in iraq, could watch his kids open presents and we could wish him a merry christmas. That moment was profound.
• Get Random Search Terms Plugin was a cool post for me. I made a little script for myself, but then i turned it into a plugin and i have seen many people use it. That’s pretty cool when other people can find use out of something you made for yourself!
• Starting Over - This was a big turning point in the life of my business and things have been only been progressing.

Some of the most populr search terms are:

geek quotes

olly needs

useless info

its sarah time

lorem ipsum

Traffic to my blog has slowly but steadily increased over the past 12 months. I”m averaging about 450 uniques a day right now which isn’t too bad for a little blog with no direction. Let me know if there are more topics you’d like to see or what your favorite topics are. Thanks to all my readers and those that link to me! You know I troll on your blogs too

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