A Photo Essay
At the end of January, 2004, I was rear-ended while waiting at the light on Bangerter and 7000 South by a driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel. The driver fled the scene on foot as his car was badly damaged as well, but he was apprehended. He did not have insurance. My first car lost its trunk, and I lost it. I was unconscious for at least 8 minutes as a result of this collision.
On 12 October, 2005, my dad picked me up from the airport returning from a business trip to Japan. Southbound on Bangerter Highway, we were rear-ended while in motion by a driver trying to pass a third vehicle. The driver made an attempt to make his vehicle fit into the space already occupied by ours, which propelled us across the median. When we came up the other side, a torque moment was created due to the net weight difference between the passenger side and the driver side. We rolled across the northbound lanes, at least three times. Some say it was less, but the first time was when my window broke, the second time was when I looked down out my broken window and saw the asphalt thinking, “If the car keeps rolling I’m going to die!”, and once more to land upright. The position and orientation of the car made it look as though we had merely pulled off the road, but for the car. The other driver fled in his car. They had to use the jaws of life to get my dad out. The mark of the jaws of life? No doors.
Continue reading
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.
Share this:
Leave a comment
Posted in commentary
Tagged curiosity, online stalking, web statistics