Rob's Rants

I’m receiving a couple of hundred page views a day from almost a hundred unique visitors (on average) but have very little comment traffic to show for it. And that kind of bums me out.

So I’ve decided to allow anonymous comments on this blog. So go ahead and say something, I’ve made it even easier!

As is my New Year’s custom, I reset annual totals on my home weather station last night. And in case you’re interested, here were the local highs and lows for my backyard in 2009:

As always, you can see the data on the Weather Underground. The 2009 graphs are at http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KMANORTH12&day=1&year=2009&month=1&graphspan=year. Also, my weather quality information can be found at http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/search?site=as792;Get%20information=Get%20information;tile=10;days=3#Data. My station reports to the National Weather Service via the CWOP/MADIS program. My station ID is AS792.

Mother Nature whipped out her big ten inch … snowstorm. That’s not really a big one for this area, but it was enough to get the family outside to play in it.

Happy Holidays …

The East Coast is bracing for a winter storm — hopefully a good old-fashioned Nor’easter. My family is on the way to a Christmas Party in New Hampshire this afternoon, but we should be able to time our return to make it back before the weather gets bad. Here’s the map we’re looking at as of 9:45 AM:

This Morning's Weather Map. Created with Weather Defender (http://www.weatherdefender.com)

Looks like it will be a fun day! The National Weather Service forecast for today predicts between 7 and 13 inches of snow. Hopefully I’ll get some good pictures.

Here’s the NWS forecast:

Tonight: Snow, mainly after 10pm. The snow could be heavy at times. Low around 20. Blustery, with a north wind between 11 and 20 mph, with gusts as high as 38 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 5 to 9 inches possible.

Sunday: Snow, mainly before noon. The snow could be heavy at times. High near 23. Blustery, with a north wind between 15 and 21 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 2 to 4 inches possible.

One of the things I look at periodically is how people are finding my blog — it helps me understand what’s popular and what isn’t. Over the last 30 days though, one set of search terms pops up way more often than I would expect: “what will i look like in 10 years generator.” Now, I admit that I’ve written about my whole house backup generator, but into what search engine are people typing this string to find my page? I mean I’ve tried Google and Bing and I don’t even make the first few pages … and exactly who is searching for some application to help them artificially age a photo of them selves and then gets sidetracked into reading about my 12 KW backup generator. Weird. Here’s the proof:

Top Searches

Since I’m always looking for feedback, I just implemented a post rating/voting plugin. Please — even if you don’t want to leave comments, click a star or vote thumbs up or down. Thanks!

Anyone who’s visited this site before has noticed that the theme changed thos afternoon. I’m just experimenting with something that displays columns while in posts, while remaining clean and relatively light. Feel free to comment. I’m not sure how I feel about the message under the title though …. I have it set to remind people about my T-mobile reviews, but I could just as easily do without it. Tell me what you think.

So I finally got around to installing WordPress tonight — as a “one click install” from my hosting company Dreamhost. Where this is going to go over the next days, months, or years, I have no idea. But I am finally tired of editing HTML by hand and was looking for something easier than Joomla to manage content on the site. We’ll have to see how this works out. Stay tuned…