KPAO by Dave Cortright

Two Minutes With Salmon

There are much worse ways to spend one hundred and twenty seconds than watching these three advertisements for John West Salmon. Sure, it's not the best link from a couple of vegetarian / vegan bloggers, but it's a slow news day. Besides, I'm still laughing from that first ad...

According to Wikipedia, I am probably the last human to be let in on this joke.

A Look at Reddit Traffic

A user with an especially attractive handle ("bleachedanus") posted one of my blog entries to Reddit. I didn't ask for this, but it was nice I suppose, and it did give me the opportunity to look at some interesting Reddit user statistics.

The story stayed on the "hot" (front) page for about 10 hours on the "overnight" shift, from approximately 20:00 PDT on a Friday to 06:00 PDT the next day. Because this blog gets comparatively little traffic (sigh) I could easily carve out some analysis by looking at the visits to that one page. I'm restricting my number to just the data from the first night (20h to 00h), as that let's me do an "apples-to-apple" comparisons.

The Reddit link produced about 14,500 unique visits the first night. Reddit visitors overwhelmingly use Firefox (68%), with Safari a distant second (17%), and IE (8%) and Opera (3.5%) behind that. Quite a few people also seem to be using mobile phones to read Reddit (2.5%). Most folks are still on a flavor of MS Windows (56%), but Mac OS X (29%) and Linux (12%) have respectable showings.

More interestingly to me, because I could count the number of times that page was served from the web server, and compare it to Google Adsense and Analytics data, I can make some guesses about the percentages of  browsers that use ad-blocking and JavaScript-blocking software.

The Google Analytics numbers are running about 15% behind the web server logs. Since Google Analytics uses JavaScript to track the visit, I'm guessing that means around 15% of Reddit users have JavaScript blocked by default (probably with the excellent NoScript extension, which I also use) or just block Google Analytics altogether. Probably about one-fifth of Firefox users blocked JavaScript.

Comparing the web server logs to the Google Adsense counts is a bit trickier, as I have to discount the 15% of the NoScript users who won't get the JavaScript-served ads. However I think it's probably reasonable to assume that if someone if selectively blocking JavaScript, they are also blocking most ads (I know I do that too). Only 65% of the visits resulted in a served ad. That means that about 20% of Reddit readers are running some sort of ad blocker without NoScript. (Or in other words, about one-third block ads).

Geographically, the results might be a bit skewed as the link was mostly on the Reddit front page overnight in North America. Still, just looking at the 8 PM to midnight numbers, the vast bulk of the visitors are from the US (79%), with Canada (8.5%), Australia (2.8%), and the UK (2.2%) making up most of the rest.

Finally, of the 18,000 new visitors, only about 2% clicked around the site a bit from the initial landing page. If this were a commercial operation, that would stink. But since we're just a little old country blog I don't mind too much. Also, 1.2% of you Reddit folks are still on dial-up lines -- WTF?

Recycling The Newspaper

or Gray Lady 2.0

I quote from and link to the New York Times a fair amount in my postings. I am not a subscriber of the newspaper, but I spend at least an hour or so a day reading their website.

The Times have done an amazing job revamping their online product from the days of posting a few of their print articles, to the "TimesSelect" subscription experiment, to the current, completely free-with-registration, ad supported offering. But in dropping their pay-wall, they have gone way beyond just going back to "online is a free version of print". The NY Times online is now a much richer experience -- filled with blogs from interesting people, reader contributed conversations, videos and slide shows, and of course the huge archive (the last 25-ish or so years of which are free).

Instead of the website feeling like a minor echo of the printed newspaper, it's just the opposite. The printed newspaper -- when I actually see it -- feels like it's missing something. Both have their place I suppose.

In contrast, I do subscribe to the printed edition of the San Jose Mercury News, but I can't imagine that continuing much longer. The SJ Mercury content I find interesting is the local news and a couple of columns. The New York Times represents a brand I trust and can count on to provide well written, interesting articles. The SJ Mercury News to me stands for nothing but wire reports, one local article about San Jose (I live on the Peninsula -- their coverage of that area has dropped considerably), and not much else. I get all that from the free Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Daily News and Topix.

To me, brand is very important in the news business. I don't live in New York, but with it's national and global focus, the Times is emerging as one of a handful of sources that I generally (though never completely) trust and regularly consume.

Secret US Airways Approach Checklist

The AP reports on the allegedly accidental discharge of the pilot's gun on board a US Airways flight on approach to Charlotte, NC. (Be sure to click on the pictures for extra fun!)

Wow, there's so much fun here I don't know where to begin. First of all, the gun was on the plane legally pilots are allowed to have guns (assuming they have had the proper training). I'm guessing the training doesn't include the part where the pilot says "hey check this out" while playing with the gun... Next, the plane was at 8000 feet on approach. Being at 8000 feet, and being "on the approach" are important, as it means the plane was in a phase of flight that requires complete and total concentration on the job at hand (flying the plane).

This is the so-called "sterile cockpit" rule -- and for US commercial flights this usually means below 10,000 feet. I'm guessing the flight crew was doing their approach checklists, and the conversation went something like this:

co-pilot: "approach localizer frequency 109.50"

pilot: "localizer 109.5 check"

co-pilot: "20 degrees flaps"

pilot: "flaps 20 degrees check"

co-pilot: "autobrake lock. please trigger"

pilot: "Glock. Squeeze trigger" <bang!>

co-pilot: "???"

or something like that.

Trebuchet – a good font ruined by two characters

Trebuchet is a font that Microsoft has licensed extensively a a “core font for the web” since the early days of Internet Explorer. It still comes on all Windows and Mac computers. It's a lovely font, and a beautiful san-serif alternative to Arial/Helvetica or even Verdana. It the font that this article uses for body text. There's a problem with it—actually two. The lowercase g and the ampersand &. These characters are too fancy and eye-catching to be a part of a good, readable font. I suppose the g isn't too bad at some (small) sizes. But at larger sizes, you can see how stylized it is. This is a bad thing for readability.
g

The ampersand is even worse. It needs to be decoded every time I see it, and I always end up feeling annoyed. It is horribly ugly and prickly.
&

Because of these two rogue characters in an otherwise attractive font, I cannot use it. I suppose I could swap in the Arial characters for these instead.

Pure Trebuchet: gaggles of gazelles & geese; pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs
Pure Arial: gaggles of gazelles and geese; pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs
Arial g and &: gaggles of gazelles & geese; pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

Hmm, not great, but then not bad. Certainly the ampersand is a welcome change.

Virtual goods are the future

I sat in a presentation yesterday by Lee Crawford, CEO of twofish.com. They're building a platform to enable others to embed virtual economies into their applications. Judging from the trends I've see with virtual goods on QQ, Gaia Online, Hot or Not, Facebook, and of course games like World or Warcraft, this is definitely a massive trend for the future. Asian countries like Korea, China, and Taiwan have already embraced virtual goods, and they are becoming a staple on both social networks (as Lee says, to give increased weight to certain connections; not all friends are equal) and within games. Here's what Gaia Online has to say about their collectibles market:

Buying Collectible Items is the best investment you can make on Gaia.

Since Collectibles are sold for a limited time only, they usually skyrocket in value. Many older Collectibles are now worth hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Gaia gold.

This month's Collectibles might make you rich!

TwoFish is creating a showcase application for their technology, a multi-player car racing game called EdgeRacers. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Money *Can* Buy You Happiness

The New York Times, MS-NBC, The National Post, Forbes and just about everyone else reported yesterday on a study on happiness from researches at the University of British Columbia and Harvard, published in this month's Science Magazine. Subjects were given a couple different amounts of money and asked to spend it either on themselves or others. Here's the money quote (pun intended) from the abstract:

"...participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves."

What amazed me about this story is not so much the conclusion, as one of the three authors -- Lara Aknin. Holy crap my little cousin -- who I remember holding as an infant -- is published in Science Magazine (!).

Next I'm sure she'll publish a study that proves that older cousins who are not yet published in prestigious scholarly journals get depressed when considering the accomplishments of their own lives...  just kidding Lara -- way to go!

Dana Perino: Stuff is Hard!

The White House press secretary Dana Perino just keeps the laughs coming. Long time readers of this blog (both of you) will remember she was a bit fuzzy on the details of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- like what it was, when it was, and even (wait for it) where it was ("Cuba, right?").

Now she claims that boys just naturally know more than girls about, you know, war stuff.

Here's the money quote:

Some of the terms I just don’t know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area.

Patriots and Scuds and Tomahawks, Oh My!

Upsidedown Writing

This little bit of Javascript demonstrates a clever hack using Unicode characters to generate upside-down renditions of your text.

¡spuǝıɹɟ ɹnoʎ ǝsnɟuoɔ oʇ ʎɐʍ unɟ ɐ sı ʇı ʇnq 'lnɟǝsn ooʇ s,ʇı ʇɐɥʇ ǝɹns ʇou ɯ,ı

Wanna hear a song? imeem’s probably got it.

While I touted SeeqPod before a good music search engine, I'm drawn to imeem more these days. I like them because it's really easy get a link to each song and share it with friends. Here are some songs I listened to recently:

The Sun Always Shines on TV – A-Ha
Butterfly in Reverse – Counting Crows
I Go Astray – Jason Falkner
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head – Ben Folds Five
The Blower's Daughter – Damien Rice