This process made me realize just how many gadgets I’ve got. Here’s the current inventory that’s not on the recycle list:

• iPod Touch (current favorite)
• Macbook Pro (close second)
• AppleTV
• Mac Mini
• Dell 2407WFP
• 5th Gen Video iPod
• 2nd Gen iPod Nano (the one before the fatties)
• Nintendo Wii
• Dell Optiplex 745
• Dell Optiplex GX150
• Dell Inspiron 600m
• Blackberry Pearl
• Sharp Aquos 32inch 1080p LCD TV

I wanted to get a new video card with this month’s allowance, but I realized that 2 of my 3 pairs of jeans now have holes in them and I better get some new ones before they rotted in tatters from my body. It was a little disappointing to realize that the video card would have to wait, but I made the right choice (I think) =)

Clothes shopping has to be one of the most boring things in the world, but I figured I had to power through it. The trip to Target for jeans wasn’t a total loss though, because I was able to pick up Super Smash Bros Brawl for the Wii while I was there! Falcon Punch!!

Last week, the wireless device suddenly disappeared. It wasn’t in the Device Manager, it wasn’t in my Network Connections Properties window, it wasn’t anywhere. I didn’t tell it to disappear. A few days later, it came back, but had lost it’s driver, so I had to go to the Dell Support site and download the wireless driver, which also installs an application, which I hate, but I need wireles.

Then, the first day back in the office after Summit, I undocked my laptop for a meeting and when I redocked it, the video completely crashed and I had to reboot. I didn’t tell it to do that either. And then when I rebooted my Windows profile was corrupted, and then when it was all finally working again, this picture sums it all up nicely.

I’m no good at Photoshop, so you know it’s true =)

For those who attended the event, I imagine that Lance Armstrong’s keynote and the Flight of the Concords performance will be top-of-mind and tip-of-tongue, but the keynote that really made me think about things belonged to Seth Godin.

First of all, his delivery is fantastic.  He’s entertaining, he’s funny, and he’s spontaneous, but his subject matter is also fascinating.  He didn’t talk about analytics.  He talked about how marketing is changing and how it’s no longer enough for marketers to shout at people and expect them to listen.  We don’t have to listen to marketers anymore, because we have so many other things we can pay attention too.

A marketers new role is to make a remarkable product.  He defined remarkable as something worthy of making a remark about.  That’s all.  People talking about your product means people are spreading your idea.  Ideas that spread win.

I haven’t done any real programming since leaving school and even then it was Rails or Java. I’ve dabbled in PHP, but I’ve never done JavaScript. Ever. Turns out that programming languages are just programming languages. The logic is the same and the syntax is all that changes (this is obviously gross oversimplification, but served my purposes tonight). I looked at the JavaScript on a few of other sites and whipped up my own solution for naming pages and recording internal search terms.

Now there’s no QC department on my MacBook Pro, but I spent about 45 minutes to code, debug, and test my implementation.

I don’t get mail like this on my Gmail account, but every once someone like Mr. Patrick K. Chan, Chief Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of the Hang Seng Ltd. Bank in Honk Kong makes it past my Hotmail spam filter.

I realize that phishing is serious business and some of the scams are quite convincing, but this one was just laughable. Any email that starts like this is going to be good:

Good Day,

Greetings to you please do not be surprise by my mail to you as all information contained is real which you will find out for yourself that is why I need your co-operation of which I am rest assured that I will get from you. You should be aware that this mail did not come to you by mistake but rather, meant for you as this project would be mutually benefiting to the both of us. I must advice that you keep this very confidential to yourself and do not disclose it to anyone.

Now I didn’t think I knew Mr. Chan, so it was reassuring to see that his email in my inbox was not an accident and that he had actually sought me out personally for this business deal.

Apparently before the Iraqi war got in a full swing, Mr. Aadheam Ali was a successful merchant and personal client of Mr. Chan. Mr. Ali bought 18 Million Euros worth of bonds, and upon maturity, the bank tried to contact him but found out that he and his whole family had been murdered in a “missile bomb blast.”

Mr. Chan did his due diligence to discover that Mr. Ali never declared a “NEXT OF KIN” and he’s had a lawyer prepare a document that will legally turn my into Mr. Ali’s next of kin so that I can inherit the 18 Million Euros. If nobody claims the money, then:

at the expiration 4 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong Government if nobody applies to claim the funds as the(NEXT OF KIN), this of which is very unjust as the Government will cease the funds and use for themselves and do not account for anything good from such Funds.

Mr. Chan feels that this is unjust, so I should step forward to claim the money, but not tell anyone. In return for all the effort he’s put forth to track me down and for the use of his attorney, all that Mr. Chan wants is a negotiable percentage of the 18 Million Euros. Best of all Mr. Chan guarantees that there is no risk involved. How can I pass this up? This is the deal of a lifetime!

Alison and I are saving money to buy a home. Alison shops around online and keeps an eye on prices in different neighborhoods around the valley. I rule the monthly budget with an iron fist to make sure that a few hundred dollars goes into a house savings fund every month. We’ve never bought a house before, and it’ll be awhile before we can afford it, but for anyone who finds themselves in this situation, this article at Get Rich Slowly offers some advice.

Some of my favorite tips are:

• Get pre-qualified for the mortgage and spend only 75% of that amount
• Make a list of priorities
• Buy less than you can afford

I thought it was a cool idea (though I’ve never done it myself), but didn’t understand the focus on PlayStations. Now the PS3 has scientists all excited again. Apparently, the calculations required to show the intense gaming graphics in today’s games are quite similar to the ones required by physicists and chemists the world over to model their moving particles (whether atoms or stars). According to the article and the folding@home site, the Cell processor in Sony’s (mildly successful) new console takes the cake in terms of scientific usefulness.

Sony’s latest version of the PS3 software now includes an official folding@home client that allows your game console to perform work in 8 hour chunks called work units. So it’s probably not something you’d flip on during the day, but why not help out at night? Tell mom you need a PlayStation 3 to help make the world a better place.

So I was delighted when I read this article by June Dershewitz over on the Web Analytics Association’s blog. June created a list of the “Top 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started In Web Analytics.” She says a few things that I often think about, but resist the urge to write about. Some of my favorites are:

4. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Numbers won’t match, they won’t add up, they won’t make sense, sometimes they won’t even exist. Know how much dirt you’re willing to live with, then accept it and move on.

5. You will learn to love the query string. You will come to see it as a beautiful haiku…

8. Don’t fall into the “report monkey” trap…

I also got a laugh when she said that CSV files don’t have to be comma-separated. That’s wrong. CSV files still have commas in them, even if they don’t show up in Excel. Those mysterious commas that you don’t see are performing a wonderful technology magic to keep your data organized.

What do you wish you had known before you started doing web analytics?

Next in line is Ben Robison the director of an aircraft carrier fleet and then third on the list is me. Then you’ll find a link to Ardesco’s site and find out that Benjamin Robison the violinist is also a director (no wonder I can’t top him).

Then there’s the Blue Dwarf’s blog talking about my visit to the Web Analytics class at BYU. Whoever the Blue Dwarf is, he must be an SEO expert, cause my name is only on that page one time, and I was surprised to see it ranked so high.

The there’s ISLand where my blog gets resyndicated, followed by a few more blogs mentioning Ben Robisons that aren’t me. And finally my LinkedIn profile rounds out the top 10.

So that gives me 40% of the top 10. Not too bad, I thought until I googled my neighbor’s name just for fun. Dang Him! All top 10 results are relevant to him. Sure he’s got his own photography business. Sure Apple has spotlighted his work. Sure he’s got movies about him on YouTube. Sure his photography rep links to him. But does that make him more special than me =)

Anybody want to make popular movies about me and post them on YouTube? No takers?!

When two cables got caught, we chalk it up to coincidence. The third was a little strange, but still possibly explainable. When the fourth was cut, suspicions arose. Today, a 5th undersea cable was cut, and now it can only be explained by the super-secret government James-Bond-but-US-style agent.

That’s my theory anyway. Five cut cables is a little too much to chalk up to coincidence and given the strategic location of the cuts, someone had something in mind, when they got out their industrial strength underwater internet cable cutters, climbed into their robot-armed submersible, and took it down a few thousand feet.

No terrorists have no reason to cut internet access to their hidey-holes do they? It’s a guessing game of who would have a motive to do something like that. Maybe we (the US) are testing out new forms of warfare. Somebody in the Pentagon said “I know, let’s cut off their Internet access and maybe they’ll just give up.”