I find myself thinking “so how many cool new things am I missing out on today, simply due to ignorance?” quite often these days. I don’t nearly spend as much time with the computer as I used to, and the time I spend I sit on “DND” on Pidgin studying kanjis about 99% of the time, but even when I was using the computer for more or less most of the day, I still had that feeling that I am missing out on cool things.

And thus, a meme. Make a post on your blog listing up to 5 sites or services that amuse you/intrigue you/help you the most at the moment. This list (at least for me) always changes, as I tend to discover new things, or grow bored with old ones.

Or as in the case with dictionary.com … I had enough of the god damn ads. It’s as if they added a new banner or “text-ad” once a month for the last year. I used their dictionary service very very satisfied for I can’t count how many years (from before my Skotos days), but now my faithful “di” keyword in Firefox went from dictionary.com over to dict.org, which is quite ad-free, thank-you-for-asking.

So my list of 5, backwards because I’m hip that way:

5. dict.org — a free dictionary, and by free I mean very free, as in free of ads and stuff

4. smart.fm — I have been lagging behind recently, because I’m nearing closure on my kanji studies and that’s taking up most of my spare time, but this is a cute site for hammering Japanese (or whatever language it is you wish to study) vocab into one’s brain.

3. gmail — boring, I know, but gmail is actually sort of new to me. I went with POP3 for the longest time, but when my move to Japan started drawing near, I realized that it was just stupidity not to stop with the POP.

2. VISA exchange rates page — call it a blessing, call it a curse, but at least it tells the truth. Most of the time*. Oh and yes, this is above gmail. That says something about my economic situation, I’d say.

1. Zero Punctuation — this guy makes my day. Totally. He reviews games (PC, console, etc) and as the title suggests, he speaks very very fast and very angrily, most of the time. You’ve gotta see it to understand. Even if you don’t know any of the games on the list, just check one out anyway.

Now your turn. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel all gooey about having started a meme, I’m asking you to do this because I’m honestly curious about what the people I know are entertaining themselves with that I have yet to discover. Call me a greedy bastard.

*) Once about a month ago I went there and saw that the yen had dropped like a rock in the ocean. It had happened overnight, and it was a matter of something like a 30% difference in “price” for me right there. So I scampered off and withdrew money, and when I got home, the amount withdrawn was not at all matching up with this new, glorious number. Turns out the Visa site screwed up somehow, because the day after it was all back to “normal”.

Meme
Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
–

“通学鞄を肩に引っかけて俺は気乗りのしない足取りで文芸部に向かった。”

I was looking at the web server stats for kallewoof.com and saw the various search terms which have lead people to this site. There are hundreds unlisted, but the most common 20 ones are. Some are completely out of the blue. I had no idea why someone searching for “ass show” would end up here, but they did, and you too will know why if you read on! Excited yet?

#1 + 10. Guguru

Guguru is the Japanese romanified version of “to google”.

#2-4, 6-7. javascript stack trace

Well, code stuff. I wrote code sometime ago that imitates stack trace in javascript, and it seems to be a very needed feature. Hopefully Firefox implements a real feature soon, as I’m not entirely satisfied with what I wrote.

#5. allinurl: admin/install.php
#16. inurl:wp admin/install.php

Ah right. Some fucking retards kept going in and “installing” my blog when I tried to move it over to DreamHost. (I had to wait for NS stuff to update before *I* could access it myself.) Note to self (and others): When moving a blog or similar from one domain to another, put up a simple html page on the receiving end saying you’re undergoing a transfer and to check back later. When the DNS stuff has updated, do the blog installation stuff. People are literally hunting for blogs they can “take over” by running the WordPress install script.

#8. we real cool
#11. we real cool theme

Random poem I posted called “we real cool”. People keep searching on that sentence (well, 3 searches this month) though I don’t know why. #11 suggests it’s a movie maybe? IMDB does not ring a dinner bell, nor do the dogs salivate.

#9. it.works wired keyboard update

Someone had trouble with their keyboards and unfortunately ended up on my Windows-debunking spree. Ouch.

#12. foggy window

I think this one is because of my fog picture I threw up sometime ago. ‘Cept I can’t find that picture.

#13. firefox arguments
#18. firefox keywords

A tutorial on the feature in question, which Keith (in comments) notes is a lot easier than what I am describing there. (I should update that tutorial.)

#14. ass show

You knew it would come sooner or later. This in fact refers to the expression “kick ass show” that I use in this post. Sorry to disappoint, but no ass shows here!

#15. spammers speak crank calls

Ah yea, that thing a year ago where some weird recorded message was replayed to me on the phone EVERY MORNING about me having evaded taxes and crap. Luckily I’m a law abiding lad (cause it’s so tempting in a socialist country to evade taxes “a little”).

#17. online cinema

Hope they found what they were looking for. (In other words, hope they went “omfg i dun wanna be here i wanna be HERE“.)

#19. mou xinsheng

This is The Mystery Guy. No clue who he is but he keeps appearing, and in fact, he seems to be waging a war against himself.

#20. ano ne means

“Ano ne”, or 「あのね」means “you know…?” or is a simple prompt to make the listener listen up, sort of like “hey…” before a sentence. It somewhat softens what is being said depending on how it is being said.

Most of these searches have only 2 entries except the top ones, but I keep seeing them over and over. I guess part of the point I want to make here is the amount I as the administrator see. With some deducting, it’s easy to figure out a lot of things about the visitors. For example, I see a lot of hits from a Google translation page into Japanese, which indicates my girlfriend is reading this blog (she hasn’t told me straight out that she does, but I have given her the URL, so nothing odd about that). It could also mean that some completely different person is for some reason intrigued by this blog, but I haven’t a clue why that would be.

Those of you who can, would love to see what people search for on your sites (and why you think that is). You livejournalers probably can’t access that kind of information.

I’m a packrat. Especially when it comes to email and logs from conversations, I’m obsessive. I’m like a Gareth on steroids when it comes to these things. I have no idea why, but for instance, my email right now takes 613 megabytes. I have email dating back to July, 2001 (I did have email dating back to the 1900’s but unfortunately I lost it). In fact, here are the subject lines and dates of the 10 oldest emails I have — by topic (i.e. I’ve excluded all the replies and replies-to-replies on some of the entries):

1. [Tue July 31, 2001]: Re: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: Historia.
2. [Sat October 20, 2001]: Welcome to Skotos! (No, that email was actually for a second account I created, because I’d forgotten my first account’s login info)
3. [Mon October 22, 2001]: XYZ account
4. [Mon October 22, 2001]: test banner
5. [Tue October 23, 2001]: Prelim rooms
6. [Wed October 24, 2001]: marble texture
7. [Thu October 25, 2001]: loki_update-full-… issue
8. [Thu October 25, 2001]: SV: And the hunt goes on…
9. [Fri October 26, 2001]: TWiki – Registration for SerConvoitise
10. [Wed October 31, 2001]: Your login details for Skotos Forums

Phew. Some of those seriously made me twitch. Let’s see if anyone can beat me (I bet Nino can, maybe, but not sure).

That’s… huh. I didn’t think that’s what I sounded like. I betcha it isn’t, either.

This is because I’m curious and want to know what the people I interact with like, more than anything else, but here goes:

The blog* that,
- entertains me is BoingBoing.
- educates me is GrokLaw (‘educates’ in the loosest sense) and Nihongo.3yen.com.
- impresses me is GrokLaw (again).
- concerns me is JJ Sutherland’s (NPR People).
- yowls the loudest is SixDay’s (in Swedish).
- isn’t, is Darby’s.

*) Replace blog with “RSS-enabled site” if you want to be picky. I know most of the ones I mentioned aren’t actually blogs.

What about you?