A hundred thousand hits. Wow. The 100,000th page hit came in sometime in the last 30 hours or so. There was no fanfare, it just happened. During the night probably.

On the one hand, it’s not too great an accomplishment when you consider I’ve been counting hits since around autumn 2005. On the other hand, over 60% of the hits have come in the last year or so!

My memory is not the greatest, but I think it was around this time last year that I migrated my whole site over to Wordpress. Then it was some time after that, when I built my Simple Counter plugin. I didn’t bother to make note of when I had the 0.1alpha version up and running on my site, but it was probably in spring of 2009.

Whenever it was, my counter was around 37,000ish, when I moved it over into the Simple Counter plugin. So however you slice it, that’s over 60,000 hits since moving the whole shebang into Wordpress. Pretty nifty.

Some other interesting numbers:

• My Lasers subsection has gone over 400,000 hits. Lots of geeks out there like shiney, dangerous things. I know, I’m one of them.
• Much to my surprise, my Knife-Making page has proved to be rather popular; indeed it is second only to the Lasers section in popularity.
• Since I started using Akismet, it has blocked over 10,000 spam comments.
• I’ve published 678 posts, and 65 pages on this site.
• There have been 328 comments posted.

Other pointless info: Lately most of the spam has started with the word “Porno!” which is wierd, you’d think spammers would have guessed this word might raise alarm bells. Unless it’s reverse psychology…

So that’s about it for the gosh-numbers I guess.

Thank you all who come and read my crazy babbling. I invite you to leave comments, sign the guestbook, or share your opinions on whatever posts catch your interest.

Just don’t open your comment with the word “Porno!”

Cheers!

Uncategorizable because I don’t really know what sort of heading to use, or where to file them, or how to respond or react or what to do, really. Sometimes things happen and I guess reactions are deferred or just fail to trigger, because it’s either far enough outside the comfort-zone so as to be a bit un-processable, or gets lost somewhere between being startled and denial. Or, maybe I’m just a bad person and don’t know how to deal with stuff.

Anyhow, in the last month or so, my dad was diagnosed with cancer, but from the sound of it, they’ve found it early enough. There’s a lot of questions still. He’s going to have surgery to remove it, but first he might have chemo to shrink it, then radiation later. Or maybe there’ll be radiation first, and chemo after. Or maybe radiation and chemo first, and surgery later. As I said, lots of questions, particularily what’s and when’s.

Today they installed a valve in his arm so that they can plug the chemo in. I think they call it a pic line or a stint or something like that. 18 inches of tube though, they snaked in through a vein in his arm, leaving a little valve thingy on the outside. So he has that, but doesn’t know if they’re actually going to start the chemo this week, next week, come summertime, or whatever.

My dad seems fairly calm, but I’d like to have some of the whens and whats filled in.

The other wierdness is that my aunt has seemingly disappeared. She lives in BC so it’s not like we see her or speak with her too frequently, but from what I understand, she has vanished and been missing for several days now. My dad called the RCMP out in BC to ask them to start looking into the situation, but they have decided that she isn’t really missing.

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Here is a photo of one of my snail babies, laying her own clutch of eggs. This little girl is less than 3 months old, and already she’s on her way to being a momma.

This was supposed to be impossible; I’ve read that they don’t start laying eggs till they’re at least 5 months old. Appearantly, this snail doesn’t know how to read.

BTW that white crud on her shell and to the right of her, is the remains of an older clutch that I hadn’t got around to cleaning off. This was always Shelly’s favorite egg-laying corner. Like mother, like daughter I guess.

After all the hype last month about the winter olympics, I was contemplating maybe getting this Vancouver Olympics DS game that I had seen advertised.

I was midly interested, but not enough to plunk out the cash. So I more or less forgot about it.

Then just the other day I was over at the post office, and in the parking lot I spotted an abandoned DS cartridge! I picked it up and turned it over and surprise! It was the vancouver winter olympics cart I had been thinking of getting. Coincidence? Hmm…

Well, when I got home I popped it in my DS and then found out why it had been abandoned. It didn’t work – not recognized. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the plastic casing had a bit of damage – nothing obvious, but just a slight ‘dent’. I pried the cartridge open and pulled out the board inside, and then I could see the real problem.

The precious mask-ROM chip was cracked. Maybe the cart got slammed in a car door or something. Just enough to crack the ROM chip but not enough to really disfigure the cart or damage the circuit board.

I tried some different tools but the ROM was most-assuredly deceased. The EEPROM was still alive and accessable though, and I was able to retrieve the game saves from it. So, 222 and shadow, whoever you are, I have your game save data. The game itself though is toast.

Anyways then I was reading about the game, and found that there’s this bit where you have to try and save winter because some bad guys have stolen the snow spirits and it isn’t going to snow any more anywhere ever. The one little snow spirit who escaped is all like begging for help to save his friends so they can make it snow again…

No more snow? Yeah… see I’m kinda ok with that. Good luck though.

Usually, I don’t take blood in my coffee.

This morning though, I discovered my water dispenser has a sharp bit of which I was previously unaware.

Maybe the child safety thingy wasn’t to protect kids from hot water after all, maybe it was there to protect kids from the painful finger lacerations.

Blink and it’s like four days passed… I’m still here, but the pain comes and goes. A friend has suggested that it might be what they call a ‘dry socket’… she had this when her wisdom teeth were removed. What happens is the gums don’t fully close where the tooth was, leaving a bit of the bone exposed. Then any time some food or whatever gets into the socket, it touches that exposed bone and causes pain. If it’s there for a long time it can lead to infection. So I have to talk to the dentist again this week and ask if this could be what I’m experiencing.

When something gets in there, the pain starts within a minute or so, then in about 10 or 15 minutes the pain has spread to include my ear, and then it continues to spread till it’s encompased the entire side of my head. Then it just stays like that, till I can get the bit of food out – which can take a long time, the only way to remove it is by doing lots and lots of rinsing with water.

It takes all the joy out of eating.

Anyhow, so I’ve been trying to keep my mind off that with other distractions. I don’t remember if I ever officially stated in the blob that I had no intentions of learning to do coding for the Nintendo DS, but I definately officially had no intentions to learn how to do coding for the Nintendo DS.

Unsurprisingly, 3 months later, I’m learning to do coding for the Nintendo DS. Nothing pretty or fancy – I’m no gamer, I’m terrible at playing games and have no interest in trying to make them. But simple things, exploring the technology and whatnot, making it do things, making stuff happen. That’s where I’m at.

Test Inputs Screenshot

So I wrote a simple utility that tests all the inputs (i.e. buttons and touchscreen) and does a few funky things, plays sounds and moves a ’sprite’ around, utilizes the two screens, and so on and so forth. The screenshot makes it look very lame and boring, but I had lots of fun making it, and it kept my mind off the pain and hunger for a few days.

There’s already lots of other little utilities that do the same thing as this, but this one is mine and does things my way. Aside from doing the obvious, it also has some fun little things that it can do, by pressing the right keys.

It was also a good primer for moving on to try doing some other things with it. Maybe like graphics – I understand people enjoy graphics, these days.

So that’s about where it’s at, right now.

Cheers.

Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring – Tinitus!

Ok, it’s not as catchy as the Bananaphone song… but I’ve got a wicked case of the Ringing Dizzies this morning.

Doesn’t make sense though, I’ve been taking my meds like a good girl, I got into a new routine that helps me not forget. Except over the last few days it’s like they’ve just totally stopped working. Or maybe they were secretly replaced with sugar pills or something. It’s like the codeine last week, it was great the first day, then it just stopped having any effect.

Aside from the intense dizziness and ringing in my ears, the depression has come back hard recently. Things I enjoyed doing last week have lost their appeal. Food I liked to eat is now bland and uninspiring. I can’t sleep. My motivation and what little energy I had, has drained away. The only thing that hasn’t faded or dulled is pain.

Pain where my last wisdom tooth was recently removed. Headaches. Back pain. Pain is the only constant. To steal a line from HHGTTG, “I hurt, therefore I am.”

For now I’m still going through the motions. Trying to do things that were fun, desperately hoping to find some of the enjoyment that was there before. Eating because of hunger, but hoping that it will taste good or be enjoyable. It doesn’t work though, whatever I try, food, activities, etc. just leaves me tired and disappointed. I just want to lay down somewhere dark and quiet.. like a wounded animal, let me hide just undisturbed for a while, and I’ll either get better and re-emerge, or I won’t.