Ted's Blog

I was checking out my web site statistics today. Lately I’ve been averaging a little less than 300 hits a day and it drops to about 200 on the weekends. So I was surprised to see I was up to 217 already this afternoon and even more surprised to see 35 hits in the last hour. Usually 25 is the highest I get and at this time of day it is usually around 12. I knew something had happened so I checked to see where the referrals were coming from. They were all from a site called Make: or Makezine. It seems to be mostly electronics-related do-it-yourself projects. Once I went to the referring page, I scrolled way down and found the entry linking to my page. It is titled Every freaking way to charge an iPod. The description is very short “Ted has a round up of just about all the ways of charging an iPod and/or making a DIY battery pack,” with a link to my battery pack page and a picture of my Band Aids battery pack.

It’s nice to be appreciated, but like the time someone posted the page on Digg.com I am sure the increase will be short-lived. Originally posted at 3 AM, it is already the last post on the home page, with obscurity soon to follow. Still, by the end of the day the counter was up to about 780 with a peak per hour of 96, the biggest traffic day ever. Similar to the Digg experience, it resulted in no ad clicks.

With the end of the regular TV season, I figured it was time to try Netflix out again. They tried to raise the price from $20 a month, but competition from Walmart and Blockbuster forced them to actually lower the price to $18. Still, I decided to go for the $15 per month plan that gives you only two movies at a time. That should still allow me to see three movies a week which is about the most I was ever able to watch the last time I joined.

I really do like Netflix. I enjoyed going through recommendations and finding some obscure movies and movies that I would probably never pay to rent, but would still like to see. Also, I decided to rent the first disc of Season 1 of 24 to see if I like the show and would like to buy the whole season. I came very close to buying the Season 1 DVD today, but then decided it was too big a risk for a show I had never watched and didn’t know if I would even like.

Anyway, my first two movies should arrive Tuesday.

Continue reading “Netflix Again”

The story behind the game Freecell that comes with Windows is interesting. The help file includes the following mysterious line: “It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable.” The game lets you choose the number of the game you would like to play, from 1 to 32,000. So it wasn’t long before an early internet project started where people divided up all of the games into 320 batches of 100 games and tried to solve them all. And not long after that they came up with only one game that couldn’t be won, game number 11,982. I’ve always suspected that the programmer did that on purpose and 11-9-82 was an important date for him (probably not his birthday since it was written in 1995). I found this out a few years ago.

What I didn’t realize was that when Microsoft introduced Windows XP, they increased the number of games you can play up to 1 million, good news for the people who had played all 32,000. At this point the game was popular enough that people had written computer programs that would try to solve different games, so rather than doing parallel human processing, computers chewed through the games and found 8 more that are unsolvable.

Wikipedia’s Freecell article

My yard was looking seriously parched this weekend. I don’t usually water the yard, but it was needing it. I wasn’t sure what the rules were on watering so I checked Dekalb County’s website. I had thought the rule was if you had an odd-numbered address you could water on odd-numbered days. However, the current rule is that odd-numbered addresses can only water on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Even-numbered addresses can water on Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday. There is no watering on Friday.

I told this to Susan and said how ridiculous it was that they took something so easy to remember and made it much harder to remember. Having vented about that I gave it no further thought. However Susan wrote to me today after thinking about it during her drive to work. She calculated that a year has 7 more odd-numbered days than even-numbered ones and that 3 of those are from May to August. Under the old system an odd-numbered house could water on May 31 and again the next day, June 1 while the yards of even-numbered houses would wither and become dust bowls. She blames a misplaced sense of fairness for the more complicated rules, probably by someone with an even-numbered address. But, like I told her, if people don’t want to abide by rules against even-numbered addresses, then they need to buy a house on the other side of the street.