Blogging Stat Weirdnesses

Posted on 18 April 2013 by boryssnorc

I started this blog in mid 2005, I think? It started as a cathartic place to screen dump all my horrible feelings about IVF failures, slowly morphed into a place to dump funny stuff and nonsense, spent a couple of years as a place to complain constantly about chronic pain and the shit associate with that and now, ti’s main purpose seems to be a place to rail against things that just plain ol’ piss me off… and they are many!

But there’s weirdnesses that come with blogging. I’ve posted before (here and here) about how amused and amazed I constantly am, at the weird and wonderful and downright crazy arsed strange things that people search for and land on my blog! I’ve also posted (here) about how fucking funny it was to find that my blog is blocked and considered pornographic by the Qld Government. 😛 Blogging about the phenomena of blogging is somewhat tautological, but if you don’t keep a web log, I guess it’s stuff you’d never know about.

Another one of the weirdnesses that come along with blogging are the stats. This blog is ‘Proudly powered by WordPress’ (Just ask it! It will remind you so at the bottom of every page) and that means it gives me all sorts of info on how many people are visiting my blog… what they are looking at … what they were searching for… how they got there… it even gives you pretty graphs to show the traffic. This was from last month and shows an average of 100-200 pages get spooked every day:

But every now again I’ll do something unusual, like write something about IVF or chronic pain or something, and then post it to some relevant forum which has high traffic volume and then my graph ends up with a massive ‘Reddit Boner’ which hangs around for about a month making the regular traffic look pathetic and small, like this: 😛

Now, mostly I write shit just for me… if anyone else happens to find anything useful or amusing in these posts then, that’s really just a side effect really. You’d think that I’d be pleased about a huge day with 1521 hits on my site, but to be honest… it makes my OCD twitch, and as such, I’ve been waiting for that March 20th Reddit Boner to go away and give me back my neat little graph again. It should disappear tomorrow in fact.

One of the other things that I find amusing from time to time in the stats is the bit that tells you what search engines the traffic are coming from:

Now this, I always think is funny… mostly because it makes me wonder who is that one poor fucker out there using Bing, the world’s crappiest search engine ever!

Occupational hazards of being a court reporter.

Posted on 17 April 2013 by boryssnorc

How do court reporters keep a straight face?
These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while the exchanges were taking place.

ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, ‘Where am I, Cathy?’
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!
_______________________________
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can’t remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
_________________________________
ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget..
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He’s 20, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: She had three children , right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death..
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.
___________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I’m going with male.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: Doctor , how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral…
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?

______________________________________
And last:

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No..
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Four Pics One Word

Posted on 17 April 2013 by boryssnorc

Quite a few of my friends have been playing a little game on their smartphones lately called ‘Four Pics, One Word’ (which brings up immediate and somewhat alarming correlations with the ‘Two Girls, One Cup’ thing, which is no doubt deliberate, but I digress!) and I know this to be true… because when they run out of coins they are posting their harder puzzles to Facebook and asking the hive mind for assistance! 🙂

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Four Pics, One Word is essentially word puzzle game – you are provided with four images that are connected in some way, along with twelve letters that create a word which relates to all four images. Some of the visual clues are very straight forward and the answer will leap out at you straight away.

And then others tend towards the somewhat obscure and require a bit of lateral or abstract thinking to figure out the correct word. That, or putting it aside and looking at it with fresh eyes later and you can usually figure them out as they don’t seem to get more difficult as you go along.

So you sail through a few and then actually have to look at the puzzle for a few seconds. Personally, I find this game fairly straightforward and haven’t used the ‘coins’ you get for getting the words correct (they can be used to delete letters from the options or to purchase a letter in the word I believe). This is probably because many moons ago I did a Bachelor of Visual Arts degree where they inflicted things like ‘Reading the Visual’ and ‘Visual Perception’ and ‘Communicating using Images’ onto us, so dissecting art, symobls or visual imagery and relating to them as concepts and words has become second natur over the years.

But what I really love about this little game is the beautiful quality the game has about it. It’s very polished looking, the images are all professional stock photography, the letter tiles are very smooth and easy to read, and it’s a simple design and layout… it’s really just a rather pretty meadow, I guess.

But, (and y’all knew there was a big old ‘but’ coming!) there is something that is driving me absolutely nuts about this game. And it’s the advertisements. They pop up about every half dozen words guessed, probably more frequently than that in all honesty and given the little word puzzle game is free, the ads are inevitable yes? However, it’s not the actual presence of the ads that is annoying me… it’s the visual presentation of them! Here the developers are having spending considerable time and energy creating a game that is visually quite stunning on a little handheld device only to turn around and have it frequently polluted for their users by throwing in ugly looking advertisements for other cheap and nasty looking games. WHY? Surely they could be putting up more targeted advertising than this? Why something that is so incongruous with the quality of the game in which they are putting them?

Urgh… the ugly keeps interrupting my little game, setting off my OCD, and making me twitch like mad! I just know I’m going to cave and buy the Premium version of the game for the grand total of USD$1.99 just so I won’t be visually assaulted with these horrid cheap looking ads!

Two cow economics… E-cow-nomics!

Posted on 21 March 2013 by boryssnorc

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then
throws the milk away

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy
grows.
You sell them and retire on the income

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by
your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption
for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to
produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why
the cow has dropped dead.

A GREEK CORPORATION
You have two cows. You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds,
dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds.
You still only have two cows.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three
cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce
twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and
market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows,
but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive…

Pope Francis Tweets

Posted on 20 March 2013 by boryssnorc

I saw a tweet from Pope Francis on my Twitter feed this morning. A missive from the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God – it was his third tweet apparently and has been retweeted thousands of times already.

A humble and thoughtful sentiment from someone we are being told is a simple and humble person. So I clicked to expand it and see what sort of responses the Pope, head of the wealthiest and most influential organizations on the planet was getting…

I should have known. Of course the masses (pun intended) are going to be disrespectful to an extremely public figure if they are able to interact directly with that public figure. And not everyone is Catholic and/or Christian so why should they defer to a little old Argentinian man who lives in Rome who they’ve never met and are never likely to meet. But it made me wonder how many ‘followers’ (on Twitter, not in the Church) did the Pope have? And how many of his followers would be trolls like this guy, following along so they could poke fun from a safe distance.

Holy snappin’ duck shit! Over two million followers after barely two weeks in office and having barely tweeted twice before! Impressive. But I guess that’s to be expected though when you have a pre-existing, financially sustaining, membership of nearly 40% of global population. Actually I thought it would be much higher, but perhaps many of the Pope’s flock don’t have great wifi access.

Then I noticed that Pope Francis is himself only following eight people… now surely as the leader of an enormous Church, he’s not supposed to follow anyone, except perhaps maybe God, but I was curious to see who those eight were, so I thought I would check out who he was following…

Turns out Pope Francis is following only himself. Eight times. In Eight different languages. What a disappointment. I was kinda hoping he might be following eight influential world leaders, or eight important thinkers, or eight renown philanthropists. Or maybe as his tweet says he should be following, the poor, the weak and the vulnerable? Who knows. Anyway you look at it, the Vatican plus social media equals a veritable ecclesiastical minefield – open to direct and immediate backlash from people; believers, agnostics, atheists and aggressive antagonists. Glad I’m not on the PR team responsible for his Twitter feed.