Kool Aid Served Daily

My computer crashed and the first two real pieces of software I want to install are Thunderbird and Firefox. I do not want Internet Explorer - ever again.

Thunderbird must not be as popular - the search for it took me straight there, I downloaded it and there it was.

Firefox was a different matter - the top searches from Live and google.com both took me to sites which wanted me to register for Firefox. If you see this, exit the page immediately - it is phishing in its worst form.

You can always go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. They don't pester you for your personal details, you just download.

Today is not my day - the accident last night, the falling branches (really mini-trees) on the house due to ice, and the roaming brown-outs. I decided to turn off my WinXP desktop. When I turned it back on, it wouldn't load the OS. It would boot off of the DVD drive, but not off of the disk. Well, every tool I used told me that the partition was bad.

Now I'm in a quandary with the machine - I'm ready to go to a Linux distro except for the facts that:

• I just paid for VMWare Workstation for Windows.
• I'm not too sure that I'd like the gaming performance under VMWare Workstation for Linux.

As much as it pains me, I can't have Solaris as the main OS - the system is designed for gaming first and foremost. It is a nice home desktop as well.

The good news is that I was ready for this to happen. I had been toying with getting more memory to push me past 4G and running Vista as the host OS. I just couldn't choke down all of the reviews I've read on Vista. But, I had made backups of everything I cared for - except those two Dan Hart Christmas songs I got two nights ago.

I'm also suspicious about whether or not I had an IM virus on the machine. Every night a IM chat window would pop open with some XML looking code in it. My virus scans and spy ware scans turned up nothing.

So I'm ready to put the full power of virtualization to use to protect my system. I'll run pidgin from inside an Ubuntu VM.

I'm always surprised when I don't write new entries for a while and for some reason check the Popular Blogs at blogs.sun.com and find myself listed. I want to think it is because of my witty views on technology, but I think that is far from reality. Also, all of my attempts to artificially boost page hits have failed.

I think I end up writing about what people want to hear about - and when it comes to a technology blog, that is about facing problems and solving them. Figuring out your target audience is critical. Most people would view my blog entries as not being very interesting. I'm not trying to reach out to them, I'm trying to reach out to myself. Also, since I want this blog to have 1 identity, it is why I'm pushing the Serialized Science Fiction to a static web site and a blog at Behind the Scenes.

I'm not afraid to write an article about some braindead mistake I made in configuring a system. I'll also make sure to write something if I can't find an existing answer on the web. Going back to my earlier statement, I'm reaching out to myself - next time I have this problem, I know where I can find the answer.

I've suspected I had hit a target audience for some time and I think I can confirm this from reading the latest summary of page hits from whatever tool we use to track them. (Okay, I'll confess, it is SiteCatalyst from Omniture http://sitecatalyst.omniture.com).

About 10% of the hits were just to the root of the blog. I guess that means people read the new stuff. But the single most called page was grub: error 17, cannot mount selected partition - type 0xbf. Indeed, if I search on grub error 17 in google, it is the 9th returned page.

That article is from Feb 19th 2007. It has to be something that people are encountering enough. About 5% of my traffic from Fri. 1 Jun. 2007 to Fri. 30 Nov. 2007 was this single page.

So my summary on how to get the page hits would be:

• Don't worry about getting page hits.
• Write about what you would want to read.
• Write about a lot of stuff.

The more interesting content you have, the more page hits. And the more people come back, the more they will reference you in their blogs, or tag you at del.icio.us, or pump you up at Technorati, etc. You may never hit the top tags at Technorati, but you can carve your own niche.

It rained all night and it went below freezing. I had to scrape my windows before I went to get donuts this morning. And the Crispy Creme worker said it really hurt their business.

Anyway, my wife called me at about 4 and wanted me to meet her for dinner. I threw on a new TU hoodie and started off. I took I169 to avoid the holiday traffic. I was rounding the huge corner by 91st (right where it merges with the Creek Turnpike). I was in the lefthand lane. There were some cars ahead of me in the right and some behind me in both lanes.

Before the turn, you could see that there were emergency vehicles on the right side. As we got closer, we were slowing down. That wasn't enough for the person right ahead of me on the right. They decided to shift left, straight into my safe breaking zone. As they shifted, I started to slow. And that was when I realized we were on the overpass and the only patch of ice.

I spun into the left hand concrete barrier. I don't know which hit first, the front or back. I then ended up going across two lanes of traffic, missing every one of those cars. I pulled over to the right side, stopped the car, and got out. A guy in a truck asked me if I was okay. I don't think he was the driver who started to cut me off.

I said sure, looked at the back, the light and panel was hanging down. I couldn't get it back in. I went to the front, it just looked a little crooked. Well, I was also 5-10 feet behind a police car. The officer came over, asked me if I hit his patrol car, and I said no. I told him what happened and said I'd be on my way.

I got back in, started it (I should have checked for a gas leak first.) and figured out that the front end was jammed into the tire. I got out and there was no room. I told the cop, he asked me if I had Triple-A and if I wanted him to call a tow truck. I said, sure, if they can get here fast. He said Storey Wreckers were fast. Bzzt, he was wrong.

My cell phone's power ran out and I stood there for 45 minutes waiting on them and my wife. She showed up, wanted me to leave and I wouldn't. They had come and picked up the car which was there when I had my accident. She had to pick up her cousin (whom she had left at the restaurant). She left me her cell phone and I ended up calling my insurance company. 45 minutes later, still no wrecker, but I've finally got Farmer's to send me out a wrecker. They chose Allied, who quoted us 90 minutes and showed up in 15.

The truck is at the dealer and the rain is coming down harder. The roads will be bad in the morning.

The police always chose Storey. And this is the second time it has bitten my family. I'll pass on them from now on.

Also, I want to send a shout-out to that kind person who started to cut me off and didn't stop to check on me or admit to causing my accident.