Foreign Hits

I use a website called SiteMeter to monitor the traffic on my blog. I put this in back when I thought I was going to be a rich and famous blogger one day and would need to know the traffic patterns of the millions of my adoring fans. If I'd gotten an agent instead, he would have told me that going months without posting would kill my readership to die hard friends and family. So now, instead of analyzing traffic patterns, I just use SiteMeter to spy on my visitors. For anybody who still thinks 'anonymous' and 'web-surfing' belong in the same sentence, let me tell you that you leave far more than comments when you stop by my blog. I can see your:

• Domain Name
• IP Address
• Service Provider
• Physical Location
• Computer Operating System
• Web Browser
• Size of your Monitor (I have no idea why that would be important)
• Time of Visit
• Length of Visit
• Number of Pages Viewed
• The Web Page Where you Clicked the Link to My Blog
• The First Page you Looked At
• The Last Page you Looked At
• The Link you Clicked on to Leave my Blog

One thing that's really neat is that I can look at a map of the last 10/20/50/100 visits. I usually just see the dots in the places you'd expect: California, Utah, St. Louis, Indiana. Every once in a while, though, I will be surprised to see dots in Brazil, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands, India, Japan, or the United Kingdom.

I can't help but wonder what brought them to my blog. Enter the spying. I can click on the dot to get details about their visit. Most of the time I find that they linked from a list of Google Search results, in which case, SiteMeter also tells me what their search terms were. The word, 'nerd' is always present.

This has led me to some interesting conclusions. First of all, 'nerd' is a slang term. This means that for all its ubiquity in conversation, it is used only rarely in written communication. Thus, the fact that I use the term so often causes my blog to rank highly in searches where 'nerd' is in the search string. This post seems to be the most often stumbled upon: it is usually on the first page of results for the searches that bring foreigners to my blog.

Secondly, I can't help but wonder if some people in some other country are taking me seriously. Perhaps I need to put a warning up in several languages that the writer of this blog is rarely serious and that nothing contained within it should be used in research papers of any kind (This post got a hit by somebody looking for sources about the medical benefits of vapor machines).

I've also realized that I'm not being very helpful to the international community, as evidenced by the fact that most visitors spend only a second or two looking at my blog before they hit the 'back' button. I never seem to be what they're looking for. This would probably hurt my feelings if I still had any.

Kid's got chops!

In case there were any doubts remaining as to my nerd cred, I played trombone in the high school marching band. I never took my trombone to college, though, so it sat unused in my parents' basement for 10 years. In January, I happened to be passing through with space in my trunk and so brought the instrument home where it now sits unused in my house. I pull it out every few months and play some of the songs from a book of John Williams music my wife got me. My son has lately been asking if he can play it. To him, it's just one of daddy's toys and aren't we always telling him to share?

Last night, I let him try it, thinking he would be disappointed when he couldn't make it work.

When he found something to hold it up for him, things got easier.

Yes, a trombone does sound like a fart. No, I haven't grown out of laughing at it either.