Joanne « JoNova

The Monster has arrived. Thanks to friends… : – )

The Monster is in the house. I haven’t actually laid a finger on it, but I’ve been introduced.

It is currently being fed with special monster baby food — heavy windows, slow drivers, stuff like that — it is pacified with shiny plastic discs and drip-fed digits from far-distant lands.

At a hundred-billion-tera-flops a gargle-second, it’s learning fast. A lot seems to be going on.

In the meantime, sorry for the silence. I’ve been working as fast as I could on a tiny coaster-sized array of pixels with unfamiliar software, no mouse, and no ability to load up pictures to my usual storage site, or read my usual emails (except one at a time with 14 keystrokes of complexity and a 20 second wait for the next – I gave up). I dream of graphs I can’t make. I reboot the old machine, and sometimes feel normal for a half hour. Then it goes.

Space-time is being warped in my head. Things I used to do in five minutes take me all day.

Some futurists have waffled on prophesizing about the coming integration of hominid brains and silicon chips, blah-de-blah. I always thought they were bonkers. But I was wrong. [...]

On blogging

With Jeff ID sadly shutting down the Air Vent, it’s worth a comment on comments, on blogging, and on the strange lifestyle that this is. But given that it’s 11:22pm 12:35pm here, and my office is still full of packed boxes (thanks to the marvellous newly laid wooden floor) tonight is not the time to try to eruditely capture the conditio sine qua non of blogging.

Instead I’ll say I completely understand why Jeff wants some time out (indefinitely). There must be a way to maintain a blog without it taking over all the spare moments in a day, and I’m going to find it, though the compass on my desk is just pointing at the magnet in my hard drive, and there is no GPS in the house.

Thanks for the patience of all the regulars out there who are turning up this month to find an erratic rhythm.

It’s a case of positive feedback

Due to the immediate feedback nature of comments and emails, once a post goes up, it’s easy to… keep posting, in the sense that ideas flow, questions that desperately need answering turn up, things that need debunking arise, and people send in good ideas [...]

Two million pageviews

Well, well, well. Google Analytics clocked up 2 million pageviews for joannenova.com.au in the last 12 months:

2,032,353 Pageviews 340,000 unique visitors coming from 199 countries* and leaving 38,000 comments

(*If anyone has a friend in Chad, Niger, or Zaire, you could email them and we could bump that country tally up to 200. Similarly, I’ve bombed out in Turkmenistan and North Korea. I guess there are places where “climate change” is not even a question they would ask in phone surveys … if they had surveys, or I guess, phones. Those are lands where esoteric debates about carbon footprints are irrelevant.)

All up, around 3,000 visitors drop in each and every day, and it often spikes to 5,000 – 7,000 (many of the unique visitors visit more than once).

Just for comparison’s sake, Quadrant online announced it had one million plus page views per annum, back in September. Coincidentally Quadrant and I both started out at about the same time, they with 156 supporters, and me with with one (thanks David. ).

Along the way lots of others have helped with the Tip Jar, some repeatedly, and I do so appreciate it. Even spare change. (If most [...]