Time for some stats

When I first started using the internet, back in 1990something, I connected to my ISP with a dial-up modem and I was happy if I managed to get 14kbps. Because the town I live in had really crappy phone lines back then, most of the time I only got 10 or 12kbps. Even after buying a new ultra-fast 56kbps modem, I still only managed 28 or 30kbps

Pat and I would play Quake or Doom with each other and comment on how bad the lag was. Back then, the word "lag" was tossed around by us digit-heads like it had real meaning. It didn't have any meaning but we used it anyway. It made us look cool.

Loading those new-fangled "webpages" would happen at a reasonable speed as long is it was just text. The minute some "webmaster" added an image, the load time dropped to 30 or 40 seconds as I sat and watched the picture paint itself line-by-line on my screen.

Man, those days sucked.

I ran a speed test this morning:

The screen shot above was taken on my laptop which is connected via WiFi to a router in my basement.

To paraphrase the old Virginia Slims cigarette commercial: We've come a long way baby.

Who knows what we'll be looking at for down/up speeds in 10 years. Maybe it'll be measured in gbps and I'll be complaining about how bad it was when I was "only" getting 100mbps speeds.

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I also took a snapshot of the weekly activity on this blog and found that Firefox seems to be winning the browser wars.

Looking at the total numbers during the past week I see it was a little under 400 which sounds like a lot until you realize it's the total number of page views, not the number of unique visitors.

For instance, when Pat visits the blog to find out what dumb things I've done lately, he opens the main page. Then, for shits and giggles, he might click on one of the links to a posting for a single day. Then he might click on a link for an entire month of postings. That counts as three pageviews for one visitor.

I don't, for one minute, think there have been 400 individuals visiting my blog in a week. I personally think there are less than 100 visitors clicking on 4 or 5 different pages. Maybe there are only 5 visitors who click on 100 pages.

Who knows.

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So anyways, both my wife and myself are feeling better today. We've decided that maybe the pizza we ate the other day didn't really agree with us.

I'm thinking the combination of the over-cooked sausage, the under-cooked onions and the raw peppers may have contributed to the overall "not feeling all that great" thing we had going on yesterday.

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You can enjoy these links if you want:

• Only in Florida.



• Also only in Florida.



• I assume these kinds of things happen at Waffle House and Deny's all the time. They are, after all, the go-to places for drunks.



• Is there such a thing as an Expected Python?



• If you like guitar, you should listen to this young lady.