In a previous post where I listed some of the crazy searches that were bringing people to the blog, one of them was "beaten with a shoe".

Well I just wanted to let you know that a spike in traffic has led to this blog being #1 on the Google results if your search is "beaten with a shoe". It is also the #10 most popular search that leads people here now.

Congratulations, you depraved weirdos.

I've been always been fascinated by how people out there in Cyberspace find my blog. Many find it through Google and Google Image searches. And I always want to know where people are coming from.

It seems as though they are coming from the four corners of the world to my blog. That's the beauty of the Internet. A search, some so far off the beaten track lands people here. I get a lot of Red Sox fans naturally, but I get a lot of "Mighty Quinn" searches, all kinds of trivia searches, and also many on the other subjects I write about, such as 9/11, The Twilight Zone and autism.
People from just about every major country of the world have come here at one time or another. The UK continues to be the foreign land that most are from. But I've seen countries like Mongolia, Benin, Fiji, Estonia and Bolivia pop up as well. I'd seen Iraq, Iran, Syria and just about every other Middle Eastern hot spot here, too. A few months back I realized that there were three major countries I had never seen come up on Site Meter: Afghanistan, Cuba and North Korea.

In a chat earlier today with the LastBestAngryMan, he informed me of a new drug that may be sweeping the nation.

Perhaps the cat's pooping habits may be of some use after all!

I don't want to think about what two straight posts on feces is going to do to my search statistics.

In two days it will be National Novel Writing Month again and I encourage readers to participate if possible.

Last year was my first year in NaNoWriMo and I crossed the finish line with a couple of days to spare. Problem was that after 50,000 words, the novel I was working on wasn't close to finished. I had resolved to finish before moving on to other things, but the truth is I wrote myself into a corner and I can't figure out how to get the characters out. It is said that Tolkien took years of time away from writing Lord of the Rings while thinking of ways to get the Fellowship out of Moria, but in the time in between he invented like half a dozen languages. I don't think battling pixellated zombies is quite on the same level.

Thus we descended into the fourth chasm,
Gaining still farther on the dolesome shore
Which all the woe of the universe insacks...

Here saw I people, more than elsewhere, many,
On one side and the other, with great howls,
Rolling weights forward by main force of chest.

They clashed together, and then at that point
Each one turned backward, rolling retrograde,
Crying, "Why keepest?" and, "Why squanderest thou?"

Thus they returned along the lurid circle
On either hand unto the opposite point,
Shouting their shameful metre evermore.

  -- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy - Inferno

About a month ago Jules and I moved into a new place. I'd use that as an excuse for not having posted in awhile, but the real reason is that I've just been extremely lazy.

With the wedding now 12 days away, as you can imagine things have been a little busy. Add to that the fact that I'm trying to get a big project done at work in the middle of all this and you basically have a situation where when I do have some free time available I haven't been spending it blogging.

In lieu of some meatier updates, I'm just going to do a real quick rundown of some things I've wanted to blog about but haven't done so yet.

***

Last weekend I spent about an hour or so putting a bookshelf together. It's one of those "no tools required" bookshelves so that anti-handymen like myself may end up with something that has an outside chance of actually holding up books when completed.

In between furniture shopping and wedding planning I've been playing a pair of games that I heard about on various blogs I read. These two games aren't topping any best selling games charts, but I'm having as much fun with them as I've had with any games this year (certainly more consistent fun than Resident Evil 4).

This is my 683rd and final post of 2007, and the 1,160th post in the history of The Mighty Quinn Media Machine. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to come over to my blog. It's really been such a pleasure to see it grow the way it has this year, and to see my readership here increase the way it has.

The Red Sox World Series championship was definitely the highlight of 2007 for me, and it brought so many people here. It was a fun watching the Sox lead the AL East from nearly start to finish. There were a few bumps in the road, but it was so gratifying to see them now have two titles in four years.

I originally had this post wrapped up with the CraigCon 6 post, but I decided to break it out in its own separate space. I didn't want it to get mixed up with the great fun that was had there.

While hanging around outside discussing a game with some of the folks at CraigCon this year, some people drove by and actually screamed "NERDS!!!" out their window at us.

Now, being almost 29 at this point, I figured it wouldn't bother me.

But I saw some of the folks, old and young alike, clearly wince a bit. Obviously they laughed it off with some remarks, but you could kind of tell that it still stung to hear the word, to be called a name for no reason by somebody you didn't know.

It would actually happen a few more times during the weekend, including one tirade that was checkered with plenty of profanity.

dupreNme
Originally uploaded by benbarren Interesting what googlers elevator pitch each other about the Social Graph when they leave their mountain view townhouses on their way to a booking out disneyland offsite : Via 'truth shall set u free' engineering mgr niniane pronounced like "Vivian" with a N at google, from her personal this blog* does not reflect my employer but is friendfeed famous..

Niniane : '..."If only there was some service that collates people's breakup stories. I want to know the details."

I ran across this post as I was working on my Much Ado About Marketing blog (a daily summary of interesting blog bits concerning marketing, branding, corporate leadership and other things of interest -- at least to me).

This post, by Edelman's CEO, Richard Edelman, discusses how different "experts" on the teen market view the potential, attitudes and future of today's youth.

Surprise,

I've gotten a couple of emails since I posted about the poop machine, er, I mean cat.

To quickly recap, Jules and I got a previously traumatized cat with some wacky problems. I even went so far as to drop some money on a cat behavior consultant, thereby earning myself some of the most palpable shame I have felt in years.

Anyway, the update is this: the cat has had two teeth extracted by the vet, one which was cracked and the other which was abscessed and was one of the most gnarly things you will ever see. Pumpkin also is constantly on some kind of medication for her ears which get this gross goopy buildup if left alone for a couple of weeks.

Perverts of the world rejoice! A UK-based grad student named Joe Malia has invented a device that will allow you to post to your sports blog at work or view online porn at the public library. It's the Techno Privacy Scarf!!

Who needs dignity and self-esteemwhen you have porn and privacy?

At the end of last year, I did a top 10 list of my favorite things that was probably of interest to no one but me. Well tough noogies. I'm doing it again.

Before I do though, it's kind of interesting to take a peek at last year's list and see that some of those things still rank pretty high. I still play Dwarf Fortress (#10) and Guitar Hero (#6) like crazy. I haven't read a book this year that was better than last year's conclusion to the Prince of Nothing series (#3). But there were plenty of highlights from 2007 that made it the greatest of years so far.

10 - Armageddon Empires

Okay, it's pretty well known that I'm not real good at golf.

Yesterday gaming website Kotaku announced that Konami would be porting terrible coin-op game Target: Terror to the Wii as what is apparently a never ending parade of horrific third party ports continues.

What these two things have to do with each other is that in the spirit of Wii game publishing standards, the port will include several mini games (nobody loves mini game collections like the Wii). One of those is a golfing game that looks like this:

Ars Technica (Art of Technology blog) reports that Google is prepping it's own entry into the field of Virtual Worlds, potentially named "My World". Students at ASU (a school Google has a strong working relationship with in the past) this weekend received questionnaires that "hinted strongly" at the possibility that they would be among the first to test such an app later this year.

(Screengrab of the questionnaire courtesy of the MacRumors forum).

10 Things Marketers Should Know About Social Networking.

On March 26th, 2008, Aki Spicer, strategic planner at Fallon Worldwide, conducted a presentation about social media, using social media, live, across a mashup of social web touchpoints including Fallon Planning Blog on Blogger, Yahoo! Live, NetVibes, Plannersphere on Ning, and Facebook. View the accompanying slides at Slideshare or download the pdf directly to your desktop at Dropio.

I'm starting to see the following expression used more and more in various publications these days, particularly by journalists:

Searching for X on Google produces Y results in Z seconds.

If you haven't seen this before, let me give you a couple of examples:

From Law.com:

Online virtual worlds are wildly popular, attracting millions of people every day, and a recent Google search for MMORPG yielded approximately 32 million results.

From the Toronto Star:

Partner new Blue Jay shortstop David Eckstein and the word "scrappy" and a Google search will advise you of some 5,300 possibilities. In just 0.38 seconds, too.

From Jose Canseco's new steroid book, Vindicated:

Put in 'Alex Rodriguez' and 'infidelity' and you'll get like fifty thousand hits.

The gist I guess is that there is supposed to be some correlation between X and Y.

A little while back, I wrote this post, wondering how much I should respect media snackers. But since then, I've been thinking I may have pulled the trigger too quickly on that one.

Because really, how can I not (or at least try)? After all…my name is Avin, and I am a media snacker.

RSS has been a godsend for me. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read, and do so as often as possible (latest: the world without us, very interesting exploration/thought experiment). But when it comes to online content, its truly amazing how much RSS lets us get through in a day. Sometimes I don’t know what the hell I did before it.

And lately, I've been thinking about whether I, as an admitted media snacker, feel respected by companies I deal with.

Did We Just Witness a Twitter Marriage Proposal?
Originally uploaded by emilychang I definitely agree with Loic Le Meur re where I want my content centralised : "The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it's not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody.."

I'm backtracking on my earlier post that soccer's got a brand problem. If we use Kathy Sierra's love/hate model, I think soccer - specifically soccer in the U.S. - will be just fine. MLS fans are showing up, teams are starting to make some money and the soccer-haters are besides themselves.

Did you see them come out of the woodwork in the aftermath of the Men's National Team 0-3 drubbing in their World Cup opener. They fell all over themselves announcing that this proves that soccer will never make it here.

On a recent post, I added a note about respecting media snackers. It wasn't until a few days later that I actually had the time to think a bit more about what it meant and why (or why not) I should be trying to respect snackers.

During my Christmas visit to my parents in Georgia, I saw my second movie in the theater of 2007: Sweeney Todd.

Now if you like Broadway musicals you should just go ahead and see this immediately. Ever since Chicago it seems like Hollywood rolls out a couple of musicals during Oscar season for folks who can't make the trip to New York City to see one in person. Sweeney Todd is getting great reviews and if singing is your thing you will almost certainly dig this.

I, however, fell asleep about 20-30 minutes into it. I think it was right around the time that Johnny Depp starting singing a love song to a razor blade that my brain just shut down defensively. I remember bits and pieces because it is hard to sleep completely soundly in a chair and I think I snored myself awake once or twice, but in one man's opinion this thing was about as dull as it gets.

And release...

Long, very busy weekend with a not completely satisfying conclusion but on the whole it was nice to get back to Cambridge for a little while and it was great to see a bunch of old friends. And, amidst all the other madness, the Red Sox won the World Series!!!!11 I didn't even get to see most of game 4, and it was a little anti-climactic but it was still awesome.

We'll be returning to your regularly scheduling programming tomorrow, but for tonight (in honor of the first real frost of the year) a song I've posted before, but which can never get enough love:

Antarctica - Antarctica Takes It!

fathersday 2pm
Originally uploaded by benbarren So, coz we're agile, and all 2.0 downunder, we like a bit of wiki as much as the next index carder. But the annoyance of the wiki market (since google acquired jotspot which we'd been using and put it into deep google apps.goffice r+d) is the cheap/free products dont work (literally, or u need to be a programmer to use) and u get no customer service, aagh why cant I login.

After a tactical lesson on how to properly play the game from one of my kindly neighbors, I managed to finally get past the opening sequence of Resident Evil 4.

I racked up somewhere between 50-100 pitchforks to the face before making it into the first town. I then racked up about a dozen chainsaw decapitations before finally finishing the sequence.

All told it took me a little over a month to get past the very first combat sequence in the game. The satisfaction was palpable.

And then, like the beginning of a movie, the words "Resident Evil" appeared on the screen.

Yes folks, the sequence it took me all those hours and deaths to get through was the INTRODUCTORY SEQUENCE, designed to take a few minutes to get you acclimated to the controls.

This is going to take awhile.

The Mitchell Report comes out at 2 PM today. It's possible somebody will get an early, leaked copy of it, but really, can you even trust that until 2 PM?

Seriously though, last night I was like a kid waiting for Christmas. The latest reports say that 60-80 names will be on the list, including All Stars and MVPs, names that will rock the baseball world.

This is worse than the Christmas when I snuck a peak at my presents and knew I was getting a Nintendo.

All I want for Roidmas is Roger Clemens.