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).

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle after the ad below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: S