Month: September 2004

The northernmost valley holes at Glen Abbey

The golf course nearest where I live is the host of this year's Canadian Open championship. Driving to work yesterday, I stopped to take this pic and another in the photo gallery part of this blog of the course's so-called “valley holes”, a beautiful five-hole stretch that girdles Sixteeen Mile Creek. Competing for this year's championship will be the world's number one golf. That would be Vijay Singh, who displaced Tiger Woods from that top spot yesterday. Tiger held the ranking for a remarkable 264 weeks.

Aladdin Systems Inc. of Watsonville, Calif., the makers of the popular
Stuffit file compression and extraction utility and other handy software
titles, will change its name to Allume Systems.
Aladdin Systems says it was forced to change the name of the company after a
trademark dispute with Aladdin Knowledge
Systems of Arlington Heights, Ill., a maker of digital security
products.
Aladdin Systems' has a new Web site at www.allume.com where anyone trying to
access the old site, www.aladdinsys.com, will be re-directed.

August was a pretty good month for traffic at this blog, with more than 30,000 unique visits.
Traffic was way up because of two posts, one on problems with Apple's calculator and another on blogging at the Olympics. A post about some problems with the calculator built into Apple's latest operating system was viewed by nearly one-third of all visitors to this blog.
A post about a ban on blogging at the Olympics was number two — with about 7 per cent of all visitors poking around there. That post, incidentally, was “Boinged Boinged” and while a link from Cory's terrific blog certainly helped boost traffic over here, I was surpised to see that it was nothing like the tsunami you get when you're Slashdotted.

So here they are, for your review, the most popular articles and photos, in order of popularity, at this blog for the month of August, with their original posting date.

1. [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke 8-10-2004 
2. No blogging from Olympic village (?)  8-8-2004 
3. Who pays for this blog? Some disclaimers 8-13-2004 
4. Journalism ethics: Toronto police shoot a hostage taker. What do you show on TV?  8-26-2004
5. Participatory journalism — mid-day report 8-3-2004
6. How to spell Internet and Web   8-16-2004 
7. HMCS Haida 6-25-2004 
8. Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking!  12-13-2003
9. Sealing    6-14-2004
10. Sheila Copps on the job 6-25-20

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is reporting that better than four of every ten Americans who use the Internet or 53 million people regularly use an instant messaging application. In fact one quarter of that group say they IM more than they use e-mail, a statistic I find remarkable.
The new report from the Pew Center also says that instant messaging is especially popular among younger adults and technology enthusiasts. That's the part of the survey I find less remarkable, in the sense that you or I could likely have predicted that outcome.