20050216   

Michael considered fate at 03:31   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

bloggers and site counters are sort of like cellphone fanatics and text-messages. Anyone who tells you different is either lying or doesn't know the whole truth. Sure, my site statistics fluctuate about as much as the tide of a fresh water lake, but I check them regardless, and almost every day. Everyone else does too, they just don't want to admit it. It's sort of like checking your message machine or your voicemail or even like having a phone at all. How would you know friends stopped by if you didn't have a doorbell? Anyhow who tells you they are doing it all for themselves are.. well.. telling it about as honestly as they can: they are doing it for themselves and that's exactly why they're checking their hit counter everyday. Some even go so far as to check who is linking them, hitting up technorati on a hourly basis. You non-bloggers think you have it easy, out of the limelight and nowhere to be made fun of because it's almost as if you don't exist - not in here anyway, in the "ether" - but you do.. and it's called email. My roommate, an almost grown 30-something professional adult to boot, refreshes his yahoo account about once every five minutes. Somewhere along the line we need to get over the fact that we're social creatures and just get on with things. No point in being dishonest or embarrased about it. No point in trying to change it. No point in trying to convince yourself any different - nobody likes a lier, especially themselves.

So numbers worry us. Numbers amuse us. We like to look at them and count them and see how many we can get. How many voicemails today? How many hours of productive work? How many instant messages? How many blog hits? I don't know that it matters much - one day I'll have 50 the next I'll have 8, it's almost as if it's as random as the lottery, with no ryme or reason. I'll get linked by the likes of tony pierce only to realize all of 4 hits from his site.. and then a month later I'll write three of the most snoozer posts you've ever read, followed by some wisecrack one-liners, and maybe am ugly picture of my gut, and voila - a traffic jam at my frontpage. I'm at a lose to explain it, I can't understand it, but that won't stop me from check everyday, just in case...

Just in case of.. what? I'm not sure what, but like the astrologist looking up to the stars for the answers to life, I am staring down at my hits. Only I'm looking for more immediate and concrete answers. Inevitably I find that someone was looking for information on Flouridex and someone else liked my picture of lightening. I'll find out that someone wants to know about hard nipples on a dog (I never did figure that one out) and then.. then every once in awhile there is something meaningful in those numbers. A site hit that was longer than the rest, a 20 minute stay. 8 page views, someone interested.. intrigued? Someone who knows me? Someone who has no idea who I am yet finds me as fascinating as anything they might stumble across.. at least for 20 minutes.

Bah. Most of the time it's someone I know. The daily-checkup hit, as it were.. a friend or a relative seeing what I've been up to today. Sometimes it's more occasional. Every week. Every month. I can understand the wait.. let a little build up grow, get some quality content.. some gems to find as you sift through the rubble.

Occasionally, though, there is an anamoly. A giant spike. A clear sweep of the archives. A total immersion experience. Those.. I wonder about those. They intrigue me as much as (I gather) I intrigue them. Perhaps it's vain, in some convoluted way, but it's curious and wonderful and exciting and odd and sketchy all at the same time anyway. It's, almost, why I do it. In a way it sort of helps me understand the passion of SETI researchers, searching for the unknown.. knowing they might not see it even if it passes right in front of their faces.. and knowing that even if they do, it will likely be fleeting and enigmatic at best. I will never know most of the people that look at this website.

Speaking of numbers, this one - hype or not - is a doosy:

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.