Signing off for a few months. . . . .

My camera died.

I am sort of sad.

But I got good pictures, and now can get a better camera . . .

. . . . . . . . . someday

A few days ago I found an amazing deal on a Canon G9, 283 dollars. I bought it only to find out that it was a scam, only when they called me asking to verify my shipping address, and started trying to sell me a battery, a charger, and a version of the camera that had English and not Japanese menu's did I realize that I did not want to be doing business with these people. I buy stuff online all the time, and the sight did not set off any real radar. I did some digging after canceling my order and found out that they have a great history of this sort of bait and switch. I canceled the order with them, which was surprisingly easy. This ease worried me, so I called the bank putting a stop on the charge if it should still come thru, canceled the card, and ordered identity protection. All in all it cost me 50 bucks to not buy this camera.

So I'm waiting till the two new Canon DSLR's announced earlier this month to hit the market. Hopefully their presence will drop other older DSLR's into my price range. So it will probably be mid to late September before any pictures show up after today's post. Which makes me sad, this blog has been so much fun, in a few months it's gone from a small blog that I only I look to something bigger than I thought it could ever be. How big? Let me tell you how much you people visit.

I installed Google Analytics's internet traffic analyzing software a few months ago and it lets me see the number of visits, their duration, the number of page views, the countries and city's people visit from. No names, nothing personal, just interesting numbers.

For instance:
24% of visitors click on a Facebook link to get to here.
The 11 pm is when most of you visit.
But the people who visit at 2 in the morning stay the longest, three times longer than the average.
In the last three months over 1,200 of you from 29 countries, and 168 city's have logged 2,890 page views. Generating a view time of 8,814 minutes, stop trying to do the math - it works out to a little more than 6 days of face time!

!You people are great!

Seattle accounts for 24% of the sites, which is not odd as I grew up in the Seattle area, no what is odd is that Hayden makes up 12.8% of site traffic, and is the third most visiting city! Apparently I've got a friendly stalker in Hayden (at least I hope you are friendly) I say stalker because I don't even visit the blog 12 times a day, like you did on . . . . . let me check . . . . June 17th.

You've visited a lot Hayden stalker - and yet you never write - you make me sad.
Just kidding! I'm glad that somebody likes this stuff.

What other weird trends do your fellow viewers exhibit?
Well I can tell you are an awesome, savvy, and smart crowd, 68% of you use Firefox - give yourselves a big hand. 1% are using Safari, and sadly a little over 30% of you are still stuck with IE. There is even the lone Opera user! 96% of you are on a windows based systems, 4% are on Mac's and there are three of you Linux users.

Google has translated the blog into over 17 languages, which I don't pretend to understand how that works, or how it even looks.

The busiest day was May 1st with 112 visits, the slowest was May 10th with 3 visits. On May 24th you averaged 14 minuets per visit. Most of you have visited between 9 and 14 times, 29 of you have visited over 50 times. Hayden stalker - you are at 150 :)

You dear reader have visited some posts more than others, "What is Love" appears to be your favorite, followed by "Morning on Moscow Mountain" and "Another Walk Home"

Because of you, people who type "hike moscow mountain" into Google looking, not for pictures of my nostrils, but rather a more wholesome form of entertainment are being sent to this blog, and when I last checked it was the 9th hit from the top.

Seeing all this growth I took the time to register the site with Alexa, registration is free - if you have a blog do it - its lots of fun to see the numbers. Alexa is the company that ranks websites globally, you dear readers have driven this blog up from a global ranking of 10,658,965th to - at the time of writing 1,525,039th!!!

I need to thank those of you who have taken the time to comment on the blog -

THANK YOU

Unless you have a blog you have no idea, just how encouraging commenting can be, my favorite posters in no particular order are:

James - Thank for all the encouragement, you were the first to write and that means a lot!
Lance - I love you man! I have much more to say and will have to come and visit.
Caleb - You crack me up, I really enjoy your blog, keep at it
Shane - You were not afraid to leave a real comment, I poured myself into that post, and really appreciated your response
Lorna - Sister - you are fresh breeze in my life, thank you so much!
Sarah - Your comments tend to inspire, I hope you realize that.

~ Thank You