Ok, so this is stupid and lame. I can accept that. But it's interesting.

Well, I suppose it should be comforting to know that my site (an thus me in turn?) is more good than evil. The results of this highly-scientific study are:

Bike? CHECK!!  Video Camera? CHECK!!  Sheer Cliff? CHECK!!  Parachute??? Uhhh...

Oh my my my my my.. It hurts sooo bad just to watch. Can't say I didn't warn you.

Note to self: Make sure parachute's properly rigged before riding off cliff.

I've been wondering exactly what happened to the Mars Spirit rover's computer when it crashed on Mars (the computer that is, not the rover). Now I know. Cool read (especially for geeks), and if you think about how they fixed it - and how far away that thing is... I'd have killed to have seen the pocket protectors flying out of the mister-random-computer-troubleshooter-guy's shirt just as he realized what the problem was and as he flew down the hall to tell his fellow scientists.

Realizing you can fix a radiation-hardened R6000 CPU from Lockheed-Martin Federal Systems with 120 Mbytes of RAM and 256 Mbytes of flash, mounted in a 6U VME chassis, with custom cards that interface to systems on the rover, running Wind River Systems' Vx-Works version 5.3.1 operating system, used with its flash file system extension? And all from 35 million miles away?

Priceless.

I decided I should set up a stats program and see who's visiting this web site, what's being read, stuff like that. Granted, one day's worth of stats are not much to go on, but there are some interesting things that came out of the first day or so of statistics gathering.

First is the search phrases that people typed into their favorite search engine (Google is by far the most common one used to link to my site in the stats) and then clicked through to find this site:

created with microsoft office onenote	28	63.6 %
greg hughes	4	9 %
xml office 2003 bill coan	2	4.5 %
word documents have no teeth	1	2.2 %
twins portland oregon	1	2.2 %
how did the united states get oregon	1	2.2 %
spinning tires ice hill blog	1	2.2 %
onenote tab .net control	1	2.2 %
acer c300 problems	1	2.2 %
houses sold on deer island oregon	1	2.2 %
onenote blog	1	2.2 %
ie toolbar visual studio	1	2.2 %
open in new window ms04-004	1	2.2 %

“twins portland oregon????” Hmmmmmm....

Keywords list:

office	30	14.8 %
onenote	30	14.8 %
with	28	13.8 %
microsoft	28	13.8 %
created	28	13.8 %
greg	4	1.9 %
hughes	4	1.9 %
oregon	3	1.4 %
xml	2	0.9 %
coan	2	0.9 %
blog	2	0.9 %
bill	2	0.9 %
2003	2	0.9 %

Fascinating stuff, really. Other interesting figures that amaze me (not):

• 14% of the people who viewed the site added the page to their favorites (I have no idea how this gets logged, but I guess it does). 
• I'm indexed by a whole bunch of search engines - many of which I never heard of.
• A lot of people who view my site content do so via the RSS feed. Only one or two people appear to be syndicating the site via the Atom feed.
• My OneNote blogging entries are popular, and people are also clicking on the OneNote .one and .wma audio files.
• I am nowhere close to reaching my bandwidth usage limit, so if you need a site hosted and you happen to know me personally, feel free to ask - I have a reseller account and so far I don't charge my friends. Oh, and you can use your own domain name or piggyback on one of several I have registered. And if you want to register one, you can do so here for only $10, and the customer service is at least ten times better than [cough cough] Verisign/Netsol [cough hack cough].

If you do - time to clean up and rake in the prizes. Microsoft has a contest running for businesses that can tell a great story about how Windows Server 2003 addresses challenges and makes a difference in the real world. It's the Windows Server 2003 Challenge, and the prizes are pretty sweet, so if you have a story, give it a shot! I'd enter, but they already wrote a case study about ours, so we're not elligible. Be sure to read the complete rules, too.

... To be eligible for judging in Round Two, online entries must be received no later than 11:59 PM PT on March 28, 2004 (07:59 GMT March 29). Multiple entries from the same person will be disqualified. By entering the Contest, you agree to allow a Microsoft representative to contact you regarding potential Solution Brief/Case Study development and reference opportunities.