Recently a number of my blogger friends have posted the “statistics” of the hits on their website.  The beautiful thing about owning your own domain, is that you can use Google Analytics code and track a whole bunch of really cool things about the people who visit your site.  I check it out occasionally to see if anyone but us actually reads this, and see what posts have been more popular than others, etc.

So here’s a little snapshot into the last month of The Watson Highlands.

122 people have visited our site in 530 total visits. The majority of our visitors use Internet Explorer.  Firefox comes in a close second and a few Mac holdouts use Safari to read our page.  The USA sends us the most visitors, and the states of New York and Ohio have sent us the most visitors in the last month.  Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas pretty much tie for 3rd place, while we also have visitors from North Carolina and Virginia.  That is pretty expected considering where we’ve lived and where most of our friends live. Top cities that visit us are Clifton Park (NY), Waterford (NY), Cincinnati (OH) and South Bend.  (Remind me not to say anything bad  or scandalous about a certain priest friend that lives in New York.  Tee hee). The country of Honduras sent us 4 visits in the past month (thank you Erika and Michael John), and we’ve had a handful of visits from Canada, India (thanks Ajay and Priti), El Salvador and Australia.

I just now let us be categorized in google because I was a bit apprehensive about being so public.  In the last month, 16 people have visited us from Google, using these keywords (in no particular order):

• baptism homilies
• almond butter south beach
• bare sheep yarn
• behavior modification for rolling the eyes
• beofish
• breanna bogner (I don’t get this one at all)
• Calvinism david bentley hart
• david bentley hart john calvin
• happy birthday spiderman
• lion bran fisherman’s yarn review

Fun stuff!

How many of us have old cell phones lying around in drawers?  Yeah, probably everyone.  Just looking quickly this morning, I found two and could probably dig up one or two more if I tried hard.

I was reading in my Women’s Health Magazine this morning about an organization that takes donations of old cell phones, rehabs them, and then gives them to womens shelters for survivors of domestic violence.  And postage is free - they send you a prepaid shipping envelope or box.  What a great way to recycle your old cell phones and help out.

When I worked at Sprint Corporate Security in Kansas City, we had a whole group of Security Geeks that basically got to hack for a living. A bunch of them left Sprint and went to work for Alternative Technology and spend their life breaking into companies computer systems and physical locations for a living.

Fast forward about 4 years and I’m on a conference call with our rep from Alternative telling me we need to sell their services and Chris Nickerson, the guy I worked with at Sprint, got on the phone. I guess the info security world is pretty small!

Chris came to talk at our Network Security Revolution in September and in his presentation mentioned his show, Tiger Team. It debued on Christmas Day on Court TV. I HIGHLY recommend that you DVR it next time it is on. It’ll give you a really big wakeup call about how you are very vulnerable….if three guys can break into some of the most secured locations in the country, imagine how easily some amateur could break into your home/office, etc using blended threats of social engineering, network tools and physical force.

Check it out!  No wonder I’m so paranoid!

I love my iPod. I’ll admit it. It’s probably the coolest little geeky gadget that I’ve ever had.And very recently, I found out how very dependant I am on it…

Flash back to a couple of months ago….my wonderful old workhorse Gateway laptop started running slow. REALLY slow. Being the geek squad that we are at our house, Jonathan and I started running some diagnostics on it to see what the problem was. After an evening of defragging, and file cleanup, we decided to check the hard drive for errors and realized…oh duh, the hard drive is 89% full. But of what…I was stumped. Then I looked down at my scratched iPod and realized…oh…20GB of my 30GB hard drive was being taken up by music.

I decided to move my music to Jonathan’s laptop since he has a much larger hard drive in the hopes of speeding up my poor little Gateway. We had some network problems in our house and it was getting late, so I figured I’d just restore everything using SharePod later, and deleted all the music from my Gateway.

I went to bed…promptly forgot….and left my 20GB of music on my iPod, unsynced to any computer.

Flash forward to last week. I was charging my iPod at work. I disconnected it from the computer and it was dead. I about nearly freaked out. It might not seem like a big deal to you to lose 20GB of music, but this really was most of my music collection. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of CD’s in the past two years and took advantage of a few iTunes gift cards so I had a lot of music that was not on any hard drive that I thought was gone and lost forever.

What was I going to listen to in the car? All of those playlists? All of the veggie tales that keep Claire sane….

Then I took a deep breath and came back to reality (after moping about it for a while and calling Jonathan to whine). I just needed to reset it and although the music was gone, it was still working. Phew.

Most of my music was on my brother’s computer. I forgot that I copied nearly everything over to his portable hard drive months before.

Yesterday I hooked my non-dead iPod back to my trusty Gateway and transferred all the music back from my brother’s portable hard drive.

What this has to do with my family…very little. I just wanted to make a word to the wise that if you have an iPod…back it up. It’ll save you lots of heartache.

Looks like a good program, and it’s free today:

Libellus Organizer

-j.

For those of you who blog and those who read blogs, here are a couple tools I’ve found useful:

• Blog Desk - One of the best free blog editors / posting devices I’ve found. It’s easy, useful, etc., etc., etc.
• RSS Aggregators - Little programs that put all the blog feeds, etc., in one place. Those I’ve seen that are good (or used) are:
  • Google Reader (free)
  • RSS Popper (For Ms Outlook, etc., free)

Enjoy!

-j.