Rag Hand

Since my site crashed a while back I don’t get anywhere near the traffic I once got.

In spite of the timing, I honestly don’t think that the crash was the primary cause of the falloff.
I think this phenomenon is due in part to the content and it’s generic direction, and partly because I’m boring. There is very little controversy in what I write. —People want the dramatic headlines, the unconfirmed gossip and pretty pictures. (As the Romans put it. “Cake and circuses.”)

Fortunately I don’t particularly care if large numbers of people read this. I’m not selling anything and I’m not participating in a popularity poll.

I did get curious, so I installed Google Analytics on my site. This gives me data that is presorted, making it easier to read than server logs. The results were interesting.

I only get a few hundred hits a month, but those come from a dozen or so different countries, most of which are a hit and run.
However, I discovered that I do have a number of regular readers, a small number admittedly, but regulars none the less. Including two from the UK and one from Austria.

Google Analytics provides me with detailed information about my visitors. Including, country, state, browser, what pages they viewed, length of time on site, did they arrive directly, through a search engine or a referring site and a thousand other details.

Realistically, for most of us, the majority of this data is useless, but it tells us what sort of visitors we get, and it gives us something to use as a comparator if we happen to have more than one web site.

I also found that I had one visitor who came in on an OC3. —-I’m seriously jealous.

The Bhutto assassination has officially been blamed on al-Qaeda by the Musharraf administration.
They say they intercepted a phone call from a high ranking member of al-Qaeda congratulating someone on the successful operation.

The Ministry spokesman also said she died from bumping her head on her car’s sunroof and not bullets or shrapnel.

While the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Musharraf government itself are all viable suspects. This intercepted phone call seems awfully convenient. Especially when you consider that there is no agreement on the cause of death.

And why do I have trouble with the “she bumped her head and died” explanation? That would rank right up there with struck by lightning. Not impossible, but not real believable.

Al Jazeera English – News – Turkey Bombs Northern Iraq
Turkish warplanes have bombed an area inside Iraq near the border with Turkey, an Iraqi Kurdish border official said.

Colonel Hussein Tamar, director of the border guard command in the Iraqi Kurdish province of Dahuk, said no one was hurt in the strikes on Tuesday, which targeted an area that was evacuated earlier this month.

The US says that this did not happen solely because Turkey promised that they would notify American authorities before they attacked.

What? We have no sources in Turkey, because we’re back to “we don’t spy on our friends?” ….Right… That was what they said about the lack of intelligence reporting just before the Kuwait invasion back in 89-90.

So we are left to assume that this never happened, because our erstwhile allies wouldn’t lie to us.
….Wait a minute. Aren’t the Kurds also our erstwhile allies?

Personally I don’t believe any of them, starting with the US source. They consistently lie to us and I see no reason to expect a change.

“I’m not going to let them get away with it,” he told the emergency operator. “I’m going to shoot.”
“I’m going to kill them.”
These were the words, Joe Horn spoke to the 911 operator, when he saw someone robbing his neighbor’s home.

He then took up a shotgun, stepped outside and when they ran he fired three shots. Both men died.

This is a line from the NYT:
Mr. Horn, 61, is white; Mr. DeJesus, 38, and Mr. Ortiz, 30, were dark-skinned Hispanics described by Mr. Horn to 911 as black. Both were Colombians in the United States illegally, the police said.
“If they were two white boys,” Ms. Storey said, “he would have given them the opportunity to stop.”

His girlfriend (Ms. Storey) said she knew that DeJesus had another identity and false Puerto Rican papers; his real name was Hernando Riascos Torres.

In Texas there is a law that allows you to defend your neighbors property, just like you would your own.

The questions this raises for me has to do with the reporting.
What has any of this got to do with race or immigration status?

A white man shot and killed a pair of dark skinned burglars. Now everyone wants to play the race card.
The immigrant bit seems to be some sort of an excuse for their behavior or something, I’m not quite certain what the point is, nor do I really care.
What does annoy me is that the press knew DeJesus’ real name and yet insisted on referring to him by his alias.
Was this to mitigate his criminal record? To make him seem more of a victim?

The way the reporting is slanted in most news reports has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with selling a point of view.
Or perhaps this is just my personal distrust of the press coming out.

Mike has started writing his blog (Hostility) using an older version of Dragon Naturally Speaking. It seems to work fairly well, but it evidently doesn’t include any sort of punctuation. —So much for my drinking game.

Version nine says it does punctuation without the need for the user saying period or comma. It also also comes with a noise canceling head set as a part of the price.
The cost for the standard version is $99 on the company website and $84.99 (standard version) / $167.99 (preferred version) from Newegg.

They say no voice training is required, yet I found several mentions of this feature in reviews.

All in all, it looks like fun so I think I’ll buy a copy and give it a go.