Month: August 2005

I packed my bag today: 41 pounds. It doesn’t feel heavy, but I worry that for the budget airlines’ baggage weight restrictions I’ll be dangerously over their max tonnage. I fit all my gear into a Gregory pack (Whitney) and I’m using a Jansport (Solstice 33) as a daypack. I’m going to have to get rid of some stuff as I fine-tune what I need and what I don’t.
Because planning a European vacation is something no one should do alone, I got a couple books to help me out: Rick Steve’s Europe through the Backdoor and ‘Rick Steve’s Best of Europe 2005.’ I’ll probably accidentally loose one of these huge books, or give it to someone down the road because they’re like two Bibles, except with more maps.

I’ve been collecting addresses and emails of folks I hope to see when I’m in Europe. Because my plan so far is so flexible, It’s not easy yet to make dates that are too specific. My loosey goosey itinerary is this:
London: September 18th. Two weeks
Go North to York
And bus up to Edinburgh
Ferry to Copenhagen
Or Get some more UK time in Dublin
Oh damn, I feel like hanging out in Rome now. £15 plane flight gets me there like a sack of oranges
Damn Rome is cold how about some
Amsterdam in December…. and so on and so on.
I honestly couldn’t say that I’ll ever leave London. But I should.
In honor of the times to come, please check out this culturally-charged music video.

In a couple days I’ll be swimming in a spring-fed pond in Dover Plains, New York. And I’ll be visiting dear Vassar soon as well.

And so you see, to old V.C.
Our love shall never fail.
Full well we know that all we owe
To Matthew Vassar’s ale.

Because I major in ‘Science Technology and Society,’ I should have some desire to understand the Japanese models of scientific inquiry, their superior system of ‘lean production’ or some other wordy academic-sounding thing. As it turns out, I love their robotics, and especially how they demonstrate their advancements. Here’s a beautiful video of some knee-high robots dancing like knee-high school children from the Quian Province on a breezy Monday afternoon.

click here for more vids

I used to be a real web nerd stats troll. To translate, I had a bad habit of almost daily checking the latest statistics regarding moneydick.com’s worldwide visitors. To be completely honest, this would excite me, and in a strange way made me feel like I had 300 thousand people coming through my house each month.
Besides the quasi-emotional feelings, I also felt like I had an audience to impress and work for. If 3 thousand Japanese businessmen were seeing my site each week then surely I had an obligation to throw up some crap onto my site. It didn’t matter what it was… they were lookin’ and downloadin.
For a wee history lesson, Moneydick.com was “farked” after being online for only a month. This instantly sent me 25,000 hits within a day, and 9,000 more trickled into that one page over the next couple weeks. After a ‚Äúfarking,‚Äù my site had a continued barrage of unexplainable hits. From then on, I was freakin hooked. I logged the average farker’s location on this page.
As I slow down my website upkeep, I find myself checking the stats once again. As I was amazed back when I was getting thousands of hits a day, my new obsessions is with the volume of data that’s pouring out of my current server. In the month of August I suffered 258GB of outgoing data! This is not to say my ‘visits’ or ‘hits’ are suffering. I received 10,090 visits last month, and 131,115 hits. If I was a site devoted exclusively to video, this would be ok… but I’m a random crap collector, an antiques dealer of the net… my crap isn’t even fresh!
But the punchline of this post is this: I passed the 1 terabyte mark! The world has downloaded 1,000 Gigabytes of my crap! I’m currently at 1,392,981,894 KBytes = 1,392 Gigabytes. Gimme a kiss, sweet electric goddess of internets!