Well, That's a Stunning Increase in Popularity ...

... but entirely artificial.

Yesterday, I received an "account suspended" email from the banner exchange I use (I run other people's banner ads, they run mine):

Our monitoring systems have detected a **sudden spike in traffic coming from your website**, generating more than **30,000 banner impressions within a few hours**.

For obvious reasons, banner exchanges don't want people running bots to generate a bunch of impressions on their sites so that they can earn impressions on other sites.

So, I went to look at this blog's stats.

Yesterday, 224,983 visits. This month, 2.2 million visits. All time, 11.9 million visits.

It took this blog a few years to get its first million visits. And a few more to hit two million. I'm pretty sure it passed three million last year.

So yeah, something doesn't look right.

And hey, all of a sudden this site has  now had more visitors, ever, from Seychelles than from any other country. Slightly more than from its previous source champ, the US. With "other" more than those two sources combined.

And all other browsers than Chrome now account for a combined less than 1% of all visits (until recently, Chrome was the biggest, but Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc. had noticeable percentages).

And almost all of the recent visits seem to be related to indecipherable (by me, anyway) keyword searches.

I suppose it could be an attempt at a DDOS attack, but if so the attacker isn't too bright. This blog is hosted on Google's servers and sending massive traffic to my blog won't get that job done.

I'm kind of wondering if it isn't AI bots scraping all my stuff in a race to finally leverage my wisdom to create The Singularity.

Sigh ...

I was so happy with the $10 watch. In fact, just the other day, I mentioned to a friend that I didn't see any need to buy a more expensive watch because after a couple of months this one was keeping good time, to within a few seconds at most, and supposedly has a three-year battery.

Yesterday, I was carrying a box onto our porch when I caught the band on the rail.

The band didn't break, the watch did.

At first I thought that it was just that one of the spring bars had bent or compressed.

But no, the actual lug broke, right at one of the holes where the spring bar attaches.

Now that the Fitbit is working again, I may go back to that. But more likely, I'll spring for a higher-quality analog watch. Although I've used a Fitbit for several years, I think that not having all those stats on my heart rate, blood oxygen, step count, and sleep quality is less stressful than having, and feeling a compulsion to look at, those stats.

I'm not going to spend several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars for a "luxury" or American-made watch. I could go through 50 of the cheap $10 watches -- most of which would likely last far longer than this one before a freak accident -- before having shelled out that much. But I suspect a sub-$100 Timex or Casio will have stronger case casting and significantly longer accurate movement life than the el cheapo.

And hey, the band from the el cheapo is still fine and can be kept as a spare for the next watch as long as I stick with a 20mm-22mm lug watch.

Wordle 1878 Hint

Hint: Shoot Carlos Hathcock style (i.e. from cover/concealment/camouflage).

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First Letter: S

Wordle 1877 Hint

Hint: If your car is a lemon, you might also call it something else based on this dispiriting sound.

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First Letter: C

One of the Weirdnesses of Deadheads ...

... is that every year, around the country, they "meet up at the movies" to watch a Grateful Dead concert from decades ago, in honor of Jerry Garcia's August 1 birthday (but for some reason this one ran a week late).

Naturally, Tamara wants to go every year, and I always have at least as much fun trying to figure out which of the old hippies attending might be the oldest as I do watching the show. One thing we've noticed a lot in recent years is that there are a lot of young Deadheads these days, which is cool.

This year it was their June 17, 1991 performance at Giants Stadium. Good concert, with Bruce Hornsby guesting on piano and accordion. It lacked the one song I really always want to hear in one of their recorded live performances -- "Me and My Uncle" -- but quite enjoyable.

Tamara saw them many times in the '80s and '90s. I wasn't at all into them until I met her, so the closest I came was when I purchased pay-per-view of the final "Fare Thee Well" show featuring the surviving members in 2015, on pay-per-view, as a "yay, you survived cancer" present for Tamara.

I Really Am Feeling Kind of Old

Yesterday I hopped on the Lifan KP Mini 150 and rode about 35 miles, in good weather, to Otter Springs.

There, I met up with reader GregL. We kayaked the mile down from the spring to the Suwanee River, up the river a little, watched for jumping sturgeon (there were several, only got a really good look at one), paddled back up the spring, and did a little bit of snorkeling.

Very nice outing.

The ride back was in rain, sometimes fairly heavy, with intermittent gusty winds. I pulled over a couple of times to wait the winds out. A light two-wheeled vehicle on a 60-mph wet highway does not, to my mind, mix well with lots of wind.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the ride. But it was pretty tiring, especially after the ride out, the kayaking, and the snorkleing.

Thirty years ago, I'd have probably arrived home, changed clothes, and headed out for a night of drinking and dancing. But not anymore. Went to be early, and slept deeply.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #31

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." (Zen Buddhism, Proverb)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Feels a little predestinationish, doesn't it?

But Buddhism in general, and Zen even more so, is kind of tricky when it comes to the usual distinguishing feature of a religion, theism, and the saying might just as easily be treated as epistemological rather than metaphysical.

At the individual level, even pre-Internet, it's always seemed to me that if I became interested in something, it was easy to find people who were also interested in that thing, knew more about it than me, and were happy to share what they knew. And that has included interest in particular schools of religion, philosophy, etc.

So perhaps the Zen proverb is metaphysical and is pointing out an observable, if not particularly explicable, feature of reality.

Wordle 1876 Hint

Hint: An outhouse (or the status of being in on a secret).

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First Letter: P

Wordle 1875 Hint

Hint: Fake it (maybe even until you make it).

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First Letter: F

Wordle 1874 Hint

Hint: My view of today's Wordle is an attitude of complaint.

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First Letter: G

Linux Mile Marker

Per ZDNet:

[A]ccording to StatCounter, a web analytics company that's been tracking end-user operating systems since 1999, desktop Linux has now reached an all-time high of 10.65% in the North American market.

It passed MacOS some (which isn't based on Linux, but is based on other "Unix-like" OSes, Darwin and BSD) some time in the last month or so.

And it's actually 12.72% if ChromeOS (a Linux fork that only loads a web browser) gets lumped in there.

One big driver of that seems to be Windows 10 users finding out their machines can't run Windoze 11 and switching to Linux instead of buying new computers.

I suspect not wanting to buy new computers in general is a factor. With RAM and CPUs getting a lot more expensive, so are the machines they get put into. So many people who would have bought a new computer five years ago aren't doing so in the same "my machine is a little behind the times" situations now. One nice thing about  Linux is that no matter how old and (by today's standards) slow or RAM-anemic your old machine is, there's a distro that will make it at least usable, and likely pep it up to the levels you want.

Wordle 1873 Hint

Hint: A third, shorter, way of saying "propose" or "postulate."

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First Letter: P

Wordle 1872 Hint

Hint: A recurring pattern in art ranging from the visual (e.g. a decorative theme) to the musical (e.g. a note sequence that keeps showing up) to the literary (e.g. a novel with a plot that keeps returning to betrayal as a central idea).

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First Letter: M

Wordle 1871 Hint

Hint: A conversational or written response.

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First Letter: R

My Latest Coffee Preparation Find

I've mostly been drinking English or Scottish breakfast tea instead of coffee lately, but last week I came across this, nearly new, in a thrift store for $2.50, new price $13.19:

It's the Takeya Deluxe Cold Brew Coffee Maker (not an affiliate link).

Since I know the pseudonymous troll will ask, it is "proudly made in the USA, reflecting over 55 years of Japanese design excellence."

Normally I make my cold brew in a French press, but this is a lot easier to clean after use, and you don't risk grounds getting around the plunger screen, because the grounds just go into that center screened canister.

It works very nicely. The screen also seems to be a finer mesh than the French press, and I like using an espresso grind (Cafe Bustelo, which is roasted, ground, and packaged in Florida but sources its beans from countries where coffee actually grows well). Drinking a cup right now, and for those who enjoy a strong cold brew beverage, I highly recommend both that coffee and this device.

If I go back to drinking coffee more often -- I may get tired of the tea -- I'll eventually invest in one of the higher-end consumer-grade espresso machines. My AeroPress is a reasonable substitute, but neither it nor my moka pot quite satisfy the craving for real espresso, which I prefer to regular ol' American-style coffee.

Wordle 1870 Hint

Hint: A more concise form of "punitive."

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First Letter: P

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #30

"God is the light of the heavens and the earth." (Islam, Quran 24:35)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

The thing about God (or gods) is that we can only hypothesize as to their existence and nature. Not theorize -- a theory has to be testable and falsifiable -- just hypothesize.

Or, rather I can only hypothesize. Perhaps there really are prophets and so forth who have firsthand interactions rising to the level of justified certainty ... but I'm not in a position to truly test their claims, either.

Do I have ideas on the matter? Sure. But those ideas are more about saying "if such entities exist, then here's what I think I can plausibly infer from the characteristics of the reality they've created."

And such inferences necessarily suffer from assumptions such as, say, the assumption that an all-powerful being would not be so perverse as to demand that its creations rebel against the rules implied by the created reality on pain of e.g. eternal punishment in an afterlife.

Based on the history of religious claims, I don't think the above assumption is necessarily a safe one. Consider, for example, the arbitrary and capricious members of the ancient Greek pantheon.

I have no interest in attempting to dissuade believers on any particular claim on the existence or nature of deity, and find many such claims interesting for various reasons, and I don't begrudge a Muslim's acceptance of this week's aphorism. But when it comes to actionable material, the claims don't really mean much to me.

Wordle 1869 Hint

Hint: Part water, part ice. Nice as a snack, not so pleasant on a post-winter-storm road.

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First Letter: S

Thanks For Asking! -- 08/01/26