10 Years
It happened before Facebook. It happened before YouTube. It happened before the iPhone. It happened before Wi-Fi became widespread.
But the news of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center spread across the country probably faster than any of us could have imagined.
I remember waking up that morning to go to school. My mom already had the news on. It was shortly after the first tower had been hit, and as such there was still a great amount of confusion amongst the news reporters about what exactly had happened. Yes, the tower had been hit by a plane, but there was still speculation regarding whether it was an accident.
I personally remember thinking that’s all it was as I packed up my stuff to walk to school (8th grade). I think my most distinct memory of the day was when I first got on campus a little bit later. Students were rushing into the building, parents exiting the parking lot quickly. I saw my friend Amy, also in a hurry, pass me on her bike.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The second tower just got hit,” she said. “Big news. Everyone’s talking about it.”
I really don’t remember much else from that day. School didn’t happen, that’s for sure; every TV in every classroom was on, every pair of eyes in every grade watching silently as the events unfolded.
School didn’t happen for the rest of the week, either.
I think if I had been a few years older I would have remembered more. I actually remember September 11, 2002 more vividly because of how afraid everyone was about a similar even occurring on the one-year anniversary.
I guess there’s really not much I can say that hasn’t been said by anyone else today. I hope all those killed (yes, ALL those killed), both on that day and from events resulting from that day, rest in peace.
That is all.
Oh hey
Hey, guess what? Today marks my 1-year anniversary on WordPress after freeing my blogs from the tyranny of MySpace.
WOO!
Stats:
Number of views
2,599
Top posts
Scrabble Letter Values and the QWERTY Keyboard
TWSB: Well, it certainly would make the cartographer’s job easier…
Some pretty funny stuff
Claudia’s 365 Days of Music – A Review
An analysis of statewise uniform population density (according to Craigslist)
Top search engine terms
“eigenblogger”
“scrabble letter breakdown”
“scrabble letter values”
“science plushies”
“le seul mot juste”
Here’s to another year!
Madness?! This…is…BLOGGING!
Well, it’s that time of the year. The anniversary of my blog. But this isn’t any regular anniversary.
This is five years.
That’s right. I started blogging five years ago on May 1st, 2006.
At one blog per day, that’s 1,826 blogs. Doesn’t seem like that many when put like that, in my opinion, but there you go.
Anyway. Here are the last five years of my life as put down on paper (note: that’s a 7” thick binder):
Stats:
- The last five years of my life weigh a total of 10.4 pounds and stacks up a little bit shorter than a Red Bull
- Total word count: 479,955
- Total number of pages (1.25” margins, 10-point Times New Roman): 1,552
- Year with the longest daily entries: May 2007 – May 2008
- Number of people who actually care about these stats apart from myself: 0
Whatever. It’s my blog, I can post what I want!
And you know what I want. Stats!
Here’s a month-by-month line graph of word count:
Here’s one of the Gunning Fox Index rating of each month:
And one of the average number of words per sentence for each month:
A Wordle cloud for all the blogs:
A Wordle cloud for all the titles:
I was hoping to have transferred all the “friends only” blogs from MySpace by today (they didn’t automatically transfer when I moved to WordPress, so I’ve been doing it by hand), but that unfortunately wasn’t possible. They’ll all be here soon, though.
Yay!
T-minus 15 days
DUDES, I will have been blogging for five years come May 1st. I’m not quite sure what magical stats I’ll have in store for you (assuming, you know, I’m still sane and/or alive in a half a month), but it will be snazzy regardless.
OH, and I’ve also printed the majority of the archives, so I’ll take pictures of the massive binder for all to enjoy.
Working on a redux of this blog’s feel as well. All will be revealed…soon.
Haha, celebrating 5 years of not having a life.
I’m awesome.
And yes, I AM ignoring my present situation to preserve my mental “stability.” Sometimes you have to do just that.
I’ve been on WordPress for 6 months now
Ha, cool, I’ve been on WordPress for 6 months now. I must say, I’m much happier here than on MySpace, though the old, crappy social network will always hold a special place in my blogging heart (I know, I know, gag).
Views: 1,083
Posts: 1,423 (this doesn’t count the couple hundred that were private/friends only on my old blog and thus weren’t transferred; the total number of posts thus far not counting this one is 1,765).
Comments: 80
My top-viewed blogs:
Home page (658 views)
Scrabble Letter Values and the QWERTY Keyboard (36)
Who wrote all this drivel? (29)
Some pretty funny stuff (18)
Recur, recur, recur! (13)
There’s a tunnel! And there’s a light at the end of it! (13)
This Week’s Science Blog: The Robots are Getting Creepier (10)
Claudia’s 365 Days of Music – A Review (7)
A Blog for Jim LaFortune (7)
An analysis of statewise uniform population density (according to Craigslist)
The Scrabble one’s so popular because apparently people really like to search for Scrabble letter values on WordPress. Here are a few searches that brought people to that page:
scrabble letter breakdown
scrabble how many points is qwerty
all scrabble letters
scrabble letter ranking
letter ranking on scrabble
“frequency of use of letters” scrabble
And here are some more amusing searches that brought people here:
jokes about leibniz cookies (whoever searched for this is my soulmate)
le seul mot juste
geometric multicollinearity
mice smelling photons
Fun times! I’m bored.
1,500
Blog #1,500, yay! That’s about 1,450 more than I thought I’d ever do back when all this insanity started. And because I did a Wordle of my actual blog for the 4 year anniversary, I felt it only fitting to do one for the titles:
I like how “damn” and “MySpace” are in such close conjunction there.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I don’t have much to say today. So I bring you this. The fact that there are four more articles concerning this topic listed under “PREVIOUSLY” made me laugh. All the comments are pretty great, too.
Claudia’s blogs: bringing you the strange and obscure parts of the internet since 2006.
I also calculated that I’ll hit 5,000 (!!) blogs on January 8, 2020, assuming I’m still alive then. Distant and pointless goals are what I live off of (hell, that’s why I’m in grad school, after all), so don’t think I won’t go for it.
Today’s song: On My Mind by Damone
Please fasten your seatbelts and secure your belongings as we descend into YEAR NUMBER FIVE
Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the fifth year of Claudia’s blogs. I’ve been looking forward to this day since about July because having nearly 1,500 blogs allows for copious amounts of stats insanity, most of which I’m not going to post here (messing around with regression? DON’T MIND IF I DO).
Anyway.
PART I. NO ONE CAN RESIST THE EXCITEMENT OF TREND ANALYSES!
As you know, I dig graphs. Hence, here are a few graphs. The light red straight line on each one indicates the mean value. Doing this was massively enjoyable.
Ordered from lowest to highest. This one surprised me. I was expecting to see some sort of trend—like maybe lower word counts in general for the summer months or something. But no. Haha, it’s interesting that the first months of living in the house with the boys have such low word counts. I guess I was too busy playing Rock Band and killing mice.
Average word count overall: 7,348
I think the sheer number of surveys I do dragged this down for most months, but who knows.
Ordered:
Average words per sentence overall: 9.52
GFI is the Gunning Fox Index, which tells you the number of years of formal education a person requires in order to be able to understand the text in one read. For comparison’s sake: the GFI of one of my phil papers was 16.67 (average words per sentence was about 22), so obviously I put “school writing” and “blog writing” in two very different categories. As it should be.
Ordered:
Average GFI overall: 7.26
PART II. WORDLE!
PART III. THE TITLES, THE TITLES!
You know I couldn’t resist.
The “Waiter!” ones
- Waiter! There’s a hippo in my Taco Grande!
- Waiter! They’re a Pythagorean Theorem in my Pi!
- Waiter! There’s a Creationist in my Primordial Soup!
- Waiter! There’s a quadriplegic in my Jazzercise class!
- Waiter! There’s an Intergalactic Star Cruiser in my Bran Muffin!
- Waiter! There’s a Hard Rock in my Cafe!
- Waiter! There’s a Leper in my Ant Colony!
- Waiter! There’s some fuzzy logic in my dryer’s lint collector!
- Waiter! Why the hell do you always bring me crappy puns?
- Waiter! There’s a tree falling in my forest and I can’t tell if it’s making a sound!
- Waiter! There’s some Plato in my Play-Doh!
- Waiter! There’s an abominable snowman in my snow cone!
- Waiter! There’s a Pisces in my Tropic of Capricorn!
- Waiter! There’s a Matt Farnsworth in my Blog!
- Waiter! There’re four and twenty blackbirds in my pie chart! (Confused? Understandable.)
- Waiter! There’s kurtosis in my bimodal-distributed data!
- Waiter! …Waiter? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGLHALSKFDJSL!!!
- Waiter! There’s a circular argument in my logic!
- Waiter! There’s an e in my pi (thus meaning he brought me pie! Sweet!)
- Waiter! There’s a Super Nova in my ANOVA! How in the world…?
- Waiter! There’s a god in my universe!
- Waiter! I JUST WANT SOUP, DAMMIT!
- Waiter! There’s an Ego in my Eggo!
- Waiter! There’s a hippocampus in my zoo!
- Waiter! There’s heteroscedasticity in my samples!
- Waiter! There’s Godot in my post-modern humorous play!
- Waiter! There’s an…aw, screw it, can I just get some pasta?
“If a tree falls in a forest…” and other sayings ones
- If a tree falls in the forest, can we still have sex later?
- If a tree doesn’t fall in the forest and no one is around, does the universe suddenly implode?
- If no one falls in the forest and a tree is around to see it, does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPEN?
- If a tree farts in the forest, do all the other trees fall over?
- If a sound falls in a tree and no one is around, does it make a forest?
- If Newton falls in the forest and Leibniz is watching, does he throw a party?
- What is the sound of one tree falling?
- If an apple tree falls in the forest, does it still keep the doctor away?
- If you lead a horse to water and nobody’s around to see it, does it take a drink?
- What is the sound of one horse being led to water?
- You can lead a tree to a forest, but you can’t make it fall.
Godot jokes
- Why doesn’t somebody buy Godot a watch?
- Silly Godot…Watches are for PUNCTUALITY
- If Godot falls in the forest and no one is around…
- If Godot falls in the forest and no one is around, do we have to wait even longer?
- You can lead Godot and Vladimir and Estragon, but you can’t make him show up
- Godot jokes will continue until he arrives.
- Godot Divides by Zero
- *insert Godot joke here*
“I shouldn’t title blogs when I’m hyper” ones (aka “The Caps Lock Series”)
- CLAUDIA’S INSANELY HYPER SURVEY OF INSANE HYPERNESS
- I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANSISCO OH SHI—*collapses*
- How long can these subject headings be, anyway? I mean can you just ramble on and oh here it is
- Oh-ho-ho! Somebody left the water running! I guess all we can do now is count the sunflowers
- It’s Tuesday and it’s late and I don’t have a life or plans or a soul or a taco or five tacos
- HELLO GOOD SIR JUST STOPPING IN TO TELL YOU HOW AWESOME LEIBNIZ IS PIP PIP TALLY HO
- Sometimes I have the answers. Other times I’m just a toaster.
- BLOG: APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD
- IT’S NOT THAT HARD, GET IT RIGHT *frustrationfrustrationfrustration*
- I AM IRON MAN…DERRNERRNERRNERRNERRNERRNERR, IRON PANTS
- “DURRRR WHAT’S A STAPLE”
- Blah blah ah-ah-ahhh, blog-ah, blog-ah-ah! MySpace, ooh la-la! Want your bad blog post!
- If Captain Planet isn’t your hero, you’re a COMMIE
- CRAIGSLIST YOU ARE MY ONLY COMPANION MAKE HOT SWEET LOVE TO ME YOUR PIC GETS MINE – 22 F
10 more that don’t fit into any other category
- If you want to eat an apple pie, you must first consume the universe
- Jimmy crack corn one more time and I’m referring him to a specialist
- Yo blog title, I’mma let you finish, but this entry holds one of the best blogs of all time
- This just in: geophagists across the globe are biting the dust!
- I used to teach a failing fly-tying class until I realized my efforts were all for knot.
- I used to work at a bridal shop specializing in headdresses. My work there was to know a veil.
- Hello, I’m Erik Erikson and I have a silly name
- Indiana Jones and the 25 Credits of Doom
- Do philosophy departments have Causal Fridays?
- I think it was Socrates who said, “Hello! My name is Socrates!”
No, I don’t have a life, thank you for asking.
Blog on why Facebook can suck it will come tomorrow.
Hooray for 4 years of blogging!
Today’s song: My Skin by Natalie Merchant
Blog the OH GOD THREE YEARS
HOLY FREAKING CRAP, I’ve been blogging for 3 years straight now. Craziness.
I don’t really have anything amazing to post, mainly because I’m ridiculously busy at the moment (you’d think I’d chill now that I’ve already graduated, but noooooooooo…).
Anyway. Just thought the anniversary should be acknowledged.
Blog the 1000th
(EDIT: because I suck at counting, this is actually NOT the 1,000th blog. It’s the 993rd. I’m awesome. Disregard all the following content)
HOLY FREAKING CRAP 1,000 BLOGS!! That’s 2.74 years worth.
Haha, never thought it would happen, huh? Neither did I. I even said so on my first entry. But here we are, aren’t we?
I’m at a loss for words.
NO I’M NOT!
Here’s what 1,000 blogs has brought us through:
– High school graduation
– College graduation
– Me learning Flash
– A lot of stupid cartoons
– Heartache
– Song parody
– The 25 credit adventure
– Hatred of the U of I
– Band geekery
– MSN conversations
– Finals freakouts
– A few jobs
– A lot of books
– A LOT of attempts at being funny
– New friendships
– Enlightenment
– The greatest semester of my life
– The worst semester of my life
– Papers. Tons and tons of papers.
– Puns. Tons and tons of puns.
– Intellectual exploration
– Internet exploration
– About eight different majors
– Probably a lot of other things, too
OMG 2 YEARS
Holy crap, people, I’ve been blogging for two years straight now!
Back on May 1st, 2006, I started blogging. Who knew it would turn into this? As per usual, I shall present you with my top titles, broken down into a couple of sections. I’d give you the best blogs, but that hasn’t changed much (yesterday’s was pretty good, though). Plus, it’s dead week and I want to shoot myself, so this is what you get.
Onward!
The “I pick some random dude(s) and ascribe to them some sort of personality quality in my blog title” titles
- Orson Welles, put your pants back on!
- Parmenides, is it really necessary to philosophize sans pants?
- No, Mark Twain, I don’t want to see your “Huckleberry Finn,” now put your pants back on!
- Mr. Gorbachev, first put your pants back on, then we’ll talk about the wall, okay?
- Ronal Reagan was a mean child, always destroying the walls of his playmates’ Lego creations
- John Adams, I do not feel you have the necessary capabilities to bring sexy back
- Machiavelli! No more bran muffins for you, young man!
- Spinoza! Descartes! Am I going to have to separate you two?
- Henry David Thoreau, get out of my pool!
- Blog 660: Leibniz, Leibniz, Leibniz! (Get out of my pool!)
Stupid puns, jokes, or plays on words
- This just in: geophagists across the globe are biting the dust!
This is one of Claudia’s blog titles if and only if it contains a bad joke about biconditionals
If Genghis Khan, You Can, Too! (Too Bad Immanuel Kant)
That’s the one good thing about standard deviates—they’re never mean
I used to teach a failing fly-tying class until I realized my efforts were all for knot
I used to work at a bridal shop specializing in headdresses. My work there was to know a veil
Hyperbole is the best thing EVER!!
I tried flying by the seat of my pants, but I couldn’t get them certified by the FAA
Silly Rabbit…Trix are for Magicians
A Dutch man once touched an electrically-charged French Petri dish. It was a culture shock.
The “If a tree falls in the forest…” series (I thought I had more of these)
- If a tree falls in the forest, can we still have sex later?
If a tree farts in the forest, do all the other trees fall over?
If a tree doesn’t fall in the forest and somebody is around, does the universe suddenly implode?
If a summer falls in the winter, does it spring back?
If a sound falls in a tree and no one is around, does it make a forest?
The “Waiter! There’s a…” series
- Waiter! There’s a Pythagorean Theorem in my Pi!
Waiter! There’s a Hippo in my Taco Grande!
Waiter! There’s a Freudian in my Id!
Waiter! There’s a Quadriplegic in my Jazzercise Class!
Waiter! There’s Voltaire in my English Book! (what’re the odds of that?!)
Waiter! There’s a Creationist in my Primordial Soup!
Waiter! There’s some Plato in my Play-Doh!
Waiter! There’s a Super Nova in my ANOVA! How in the world…?
Waiter! There’s an Intergalactic Star Cruiser in my Bran Muffin!
Waiter! There’s a Pisces in my Tropic of Capricorn!
Waiter! Why in the hell do you always bring me crappy puns?
Waiter! There’s a Matt Farnsworth in my Blog!
Waiter! There’s an e in my pi (thus meaning he brought me pie! Sweet!)
Waiter! There’s an Ethiopia on Djibouti!
Waiter! There’s kurtosis in my bimodal-distributed data!
Waiter! …Waiter? AAAAAAAAAAAAAGHDLFHGSLHDSL!!!
Waiter! There’s four and twenty blackbirds in my pie chart! (Confused? Understandable.)
Waiter! There’s a tree falling in my forest and I can’t tell if it’s making a sound!
Waiter! There’s some fuzzy logic in my dryer’s lint collector!
Waiter! There’s an…aw, screw it, can I just get some pasta?
Ones that I just like
- Jimmy crack corn one more time and I’m referring him to a specialist
Choco Leibniz: The Best of All Possible Cookies
The day that Camus backed into a sumac was the day the palindrome was born!
I think it was Socrates who said, “Hello! My name is Socrates!”
At first I was just friendly to the environment. But now we’re dating!
Sometimes I have the answers. Other times I’m just a toaster.
Where do the quadriplegics stand?
Get confident, stupid!
E = MC Hammer
Drugs: the anti…oh wait.
Hope to entertain you people for another year or two. Or forty.
Blog 700: Dear Lord, it’s Blog 700
Holy crap, I’ve blogged 700 times. That means only one thing (and when I say “one thing” I mean “list of things that it means”)…
There’s only 300 blogs left until I hit 1,000.
I have way too much to say.
I think I have way too much to say but really don’t, so a good ¾ of my blogs are total crap.
There are too many surveys out there.
I should never, ever set such goals as “I’m going to blog every day.”
I have no life.
Neither do any of you, cause not a single one of you has ever deterred me from blogging.
In fact, you people seem to like this crap.
Therefore, I shall continue on, at least to 1,000!
Ad astra!
Good lord, I blog a lot
Well my friends, today is blog number 600.
And in honor of this, both because I’ve blogged 600 times and because I’m bored out of my mind, I’ve compiled a bunch of statistics for you. Thank Microsoft Word and the Spell-check feature.
Total words: 160,978
Total sentences: 16,107
Words per sentence: 9
Passive sentences: 2% (or about 322 sentences)
Flesch reading ease: 79.1 (fairly easy)
Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 4.4
And there you go. I hope this brightens the shortest day of the year!
400 blogs!
Hey people, guess what?
Today’s my 400th blog post.
Commence with the celebrating.
Oh, and here’s another blog train. Now it’s got cars!
o
o
o
____ _____ _____ _| |_
| |_| |_| |_| |____
|___ | |____ | |____| |________|
o o o o o o o O
Teehee.
1 year anniversary!
(I am rather pissed at MySpace, considering I couldn’t post this until Thursday night. Gr.)
Hello faithful readers! Right this moment I am typing my 366th blog, meaning that I have been on MySpace for an entire year now! Wee!
I’m a happy camper.
This week will be filled with pointless celebrations, pointless random tangents, and even more pointless lists. But hey, what else is new?
Anyway, here are the 1 year stats:
Page views: 1,280
Blog views: 3,884
Blogs: 365
Comments: 104
Kudos: 4
How insane is that?!
Anyway, thanks for reading guys. You help me make sure that all these rants and random expressions of…well…”strangeness” don’t go entirely overlooked.
Number 11!
Guess what, people? Today’s my 11-month anniversary at MySpace. You know what that means? Next month at this time I will have been here a freaking year. Sad, wonderful, and surprising, all at the same time.
I want an award.
Overcompensating with two anniversaries at once due to a miscount
Now we’re up to nine months of this. The years’ll just fly by, won’t they? Wait…
May-June: 1 month
June-July: 2 months
July-August: 3 months
August-September: 4 months
September-October: 5 months
October-November: 6 months
November-December: 7 months
December-January: 8 months
January-February: 9 months…
February-March: 10? 10 Months?
Dammit! I miscounted somewhere! It’s the 10th month now! 10 months of this! Where the hell did I miscount?!
Give me a second here (this is a live blog!)…
-I had eight months written for February…that’s wrong.
-January: “I’m not even keeping track anymore, dangit.” (Liar!)
-December: 7. Ha! That’s correct!
Stupid January had me messed up. But I’m not going back to change it cause that’s just the way it is. I’m changing the title to “Overcompensating with Two Anniversaries at Once Due to a Miscount.” Or I could just title it as “Florida does Blogging” but I feel that is too subtle for many. Is that too subtle?
10 months yay.
WOO! BLOG NUMBER 300!
HAPPY 300th BLOG POST TO ME!!!
o
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o
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| | | | \
|__|__|__|____|
o o o O
(Yeah. That’s a blog train.)
8 months?! WHAT THE HELL.
Alrighty then. 8 months of this crap. Here’s a status update:
~Total number of blogs: 276 (not counting this one)
~Total views: 2,819 (70% of those were from me, I can almost guarantee that)
~Total number of comments: 76 (that’s shameful, people!)
~Total kudos: 27 (that’s even more shameful!)
I’m confused…should I be proud? Or ashamed?
(…or mad that you people don’t comment/kudos enough? )
OMFG ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY!!!!!!11
Number seven.
Seven freaking months of this crap.
Why haven’t I gotten MORE COMMENTS? HUH?? ANSWER ME THAT! Well, 214 number of blogs later, I’m still here. Me=no life.
6 FREAKING MONTHS OF THIS!
Today is the 6 month anniversary of my Myspace/blog.
184 blogs.
54 comments.
1734 views.
13 kudos.
What a life I lead.
…I was hoping this would be more exciting…
5 month anniversary!!
Holy crap, I need a life. 154 blog posts in 5 months.
How many made sense? I’d say, optimistically, 4.
And about 20% actually deal with the events of the day, not just ramblings.
Eh…that’s all I got. Next month looks promising!!
5
Just a remembering day.
4 month anniversary!
Hoorah! I’ve had my Myspace account and blog since May 1st!
Time for some statistics!
-Number of blogs I’ve posted (not counting this one): 123
-Number of blog views: 860 (40% of those were by myself in moments of ego-boosting self-indulgence. Dork. )
-Number of comments: 41 (that’s a pretty crappy posts/comments ratio, people…pick it up or I’ll start commenting myself…and you don’t want that.)
–Number of Kudos: 10 (10?! WTF?!? Somebody call a doctor…my butt just had a seizure!! Give me kudos or I’ll start kudos-ing myself…and you don’t want that.)
‘Kay, I’m done. And you people’d better start getting online more often, or I’ll start talking to myself.
…and you don’t want that.
Eigenblogger 