I hesitated posting this today, because I already posted just two days ago, but I felt the timing was significant. 😉
Copyright © 2013 H.K. Longmore
Others have said it, and they’ve said it well
But an accusation that mine ain’t swell
(What is wrong with his timing? Everything.)
In jest, perhaps, is the reason I fling
Words out in iambic pentameter
As I ponder timing’s role, dear reader.
When the timing’s right, it is the reason
Your motorized vehicle runs at all,
Why your chainsaw prepares for cold seasons;
We call some graceful dancers at a ball.
When it’s off, some jokes fall without a laugh,
Some musicians will have to hide their gaffe;
But set it right and accidents avoid,
Catch your tongue before slips described by Freud
Escape your lips to cause social mishaps,
Stop a spill before it lands in your lap.
By your good timing, crimes in progress stop
Whether by interference or a cop.
Good timing is required for conception,
Fast friends form from well-timed introductions.
Apply right timing and head over heels
Can calm until you hear wedding bells peal,
But if you delay or the timing’s wrong
It may be that all you’ll hear is “So long”.
So it would appear my words at me yell
To fix my timing, if what’s wrong he’d tell.
Musings of a Kunderian Monster 
Web Stats and the Stalker in Me
I finally shared a link to a blog post on my running blog yesterday, and I got a decent number of hits. According to WordPress’ stats, there were 30+ views, and 12 visitors. I was pretty excited that at least ten people were interested enough to check it out, out of all my 230+ FB friends. Then I wanted to know more. Who viewed it? What pages did they visit? Back when I had my website hosted with a shell account, I could access the Apache web log and see IP addresses, referring urls, user agents. I wrote a script to convert IP addresses to hostnames where possible, filtering out my own IP addresses, and enjoyed analyzing the results.
Usually there would be a bunch of lookups by various search engines, some of which respected my robots.txt, some that didn’t (they weren’t major search engines, so I didn’t really care about blocking them). And every now and again I’d get entries that were clearly someone that was interested in either me or what I had to say (perhaps stalking me?). Those were the fun ones. Who is the domain name registered to, or if the IP address could not be converted to a hostname, what entity is the address assigned to? Occasionally I was able to get enough information that if needed, I could have built the beginnings of a court case about someone stalking me.
Sadly, the web stats offered by WordPress just aren’t as comprehensive. Maybe they have an option to pay to be able to view the access logs, seeing how they like to charge for just about everything else. (What? seriously? you want me to pay how much per year just to be able to edit CSS? Okay, fine. Maybe I will.) But whatever the case is, you, my readers, are safe for now. I doubt I’ll be paying to read access logs anytime soon; the stalker in me will simply have to go back in the closet.
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Posted in commentary
Tagged curiosity, online stalking, web statistics