Statistical Anomalies

My standard morning ritual includes answering my email, reading a bunch of Web sites, and checking the statistics for things like the number of Take Control ebooks sold, visitors at Interesting Thing of the Day, AdSense revenues, sales from affiliate links, and that sort of thing. While going through my email this morning, I saw a message from an ITotD reader who had information pertaining to the article on Non-Human Farmers, which was written a couple of weeks ago by guest author Rajagopal Sukumar. The message basically said that in addition to the animals cited in the article, there was a type of jellyfish that also farms algae. Since I didn’t write the article, I said I’d forward the comment to the author in case he wanted to make any changes.

Moments later, when I checked today’s Web stats, my eyes popped out of their sockets when I saw how many visitors we’d had today. Even before noon we were just a few visits short of a record day. (Because of this increase, AdSense revenue is also way up for the day—always a nice bonus.) A quick glance at the referrers showed me that the spike was coming from BoingBoing, and all these folks were following a link to the article on Non-Human Farmers. I wrote the author a congratulatory note, but I couldn’t help being slightly chagrined that the site’s biggest day wasn’t due to one of the hundreds of articles I wrote myself!

Meanwhile, another faithful reader wrote to tell me she found today’s article on Cascading Style Sheets completely incomprehensible, and my Backups article on Macworld.com dropped down to a less prominent position on the page. So…good day for statistics, bad day for my ego. Ah well. As my mother would say whenever a minor misfortune befell me, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

February 15, 2005 by Blogging

Front-Page News

Last week Adam Engst sent me an email in which he mentioned that Macworld magazine was going to have an excerpt from my latest ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, on their Web site. Apparently there had been some discussion about putting it in the printed magazine, but for a variety of uninteresting reasons everyone agreed that it made more sense just to put it on the Web site. I was not part of those discussions, and I really didn’t think about it much. I’ve had articles published in the print edition of Macworld, and excerpts from all my ebooks have been made available in many different forms. This didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I didn’t even bother to visit the Macworld site or ask which portion of the ebook had been excerpted.

A few days ago, I began noticing that sales of the ebook were up significantly, and I also started getting email messages from folks who had read the article. These are both normal occurrences anytime I have something new published, so again, I didn’t really think about it. Then I got a message from a company whose software I’d referred to in passing; they felt that perhaps I’d given their product short shrift. Before I could reply I had to go over to the Macworld site to see exactly which portion of the text they’d published. And there, to my surprise, was my article at the very top of their home page—the equivalent of front-page news in the Macintosh world.

On the one hand, I was delighted: publicity is always good, and the extra sales don’t hurt. On the other hand, I was a bit embarrassed—I hadn’t updated this blog in a long time, and readers have been checking it out. D’oh! It’s like having company on a day your house is a mess. Oh well. I guess that’ll get me typing. It’s not as though I have a shortage of things to write about, only a shortage of time.

February 14, 2005 by Books Mac Stuff

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my 38th birthday. My father’s birthday was yesterday, January 8—the same day as Elvis (who would have been 70 this year). I, on the other hand, have the dubious honor of sharing a birthday with Richard Nixon.

This is, intentionally, one of those low-key birthdays. No party, cake, cards, or presents; maybe we’ll go out to see a movie or something, but that’s about it. Morgen and I put all our holiday/birthday efforts into the Patagonia trip instead, which is perfectly fine with me. I had a big celebration when I turned 30, and another when I turned 33 1/3—a third of a century! But these years between significant milestones don’t seem to require much fanfare.

This is a milestone of sorts, however: my official transition into my mid-late thirties. Morgen, having just turned 30, doesn’t need to say she’s in her early thirties; it’s just plain 30. In our family, we say that the “early” years of a decade are the ones ending in 1, 2, and 3; the “mid” years are 4, 5, and 6; and the “late” years are 7, 8, and 9. But then we subdivide further for clarity: the earliest year of any triplet is “early,” the middle year “mid-,” and the last year “late.” Thus a 21-year-old man would be said to be in his early early twenties; a 46-year-old woman would be in her late mid-forties, I’m in my mid-late thirties, and so on. It’s the late late years I think none of us looks forward to, but the reward just ahead is getting to use “early early” again.

January 9, 2005 by Bricolage

My New Year’s Resolution

Morgen and I have returned from a fantastic trip to Patagonia, about which I’ll be writing a great deal more in the coming days and weeks. We got back on Saturday, but haven’t had much of an opportunity to write yet because of the time change, jet lag, general travel weariness, and the 3,789,431 pieces of email, snail mail, and voicemail waiting for me.

However, I did want to say that I’ve settled on a New Year’s resolution. This is a bit unusual for me; I usually don’t make resolutions because when I do they’re always far too ambitious and I end up failing at them within a week or two. Even so, at the end of the year I habitually think about all the things in my life I’d like to be different in the coming year—you know, be healthier, earn more money, spend more time with family and friends, and so on. This time, it occurred to me that by changing just one thing I could potentially solve a great many problems. So my resolution is:

I will get plenty of sleep in 2005.

I’m leaving “plenty” as a vague amount because I really can’t quantify it in hours, but I do know for certain that I got far too little sleep in 2004. This, in turn, led to stress, grumpiness, inability to concentrate, and probably contributed to my getting sick a couple of times. There was also a story in the news a few weeks ago about how lack of sleep was found to contribute indirectly to weight gain because certain appetite-suppressing hormones were not being produced in sufficient quantities or something. So I think that if I get enough sleep this year, my waking hours will be happier, less stressful, and more productive. (“Like taking a vacation every day!”) I’ll probably be able to remember my dreams better. Maybe I’ll lose a few pounds, which would be OK. And with any luck my energy level/ch’i/mojo/overall health will increase too.

Of course, I’ve not done so well on this in these first few days of the year because I’m still trying to reset my internal clock five hours back (and 14+ hours of flying time didn’t help either), but I’m still hopeful of achieving success.

January 3, 2005 by Travel
Joe Kissell is a best-selling, award-winning, hyphen-overusing author and technologist, and the publisher of Take Control Books. He enjoys making complicated topics easy to understand. He’s also a husband, dad, and dreamer. Having lived in numerous places in the U.S., Canada, and France, Joe has now settled in Saskatoon.

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