Larry Hosken: New: Tag: site

Milestone: 44 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 44 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:

85.208.96.199 - - [22/Sep/2024:03:51:25 +0000] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/27_lobby.html HTTP/1.1" 200 849 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"

Semrush is a service for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) people. If you have a website, you can pay SEO people to suggest tweaks to your site so that it will show up higher in Google searches. (Some of these SEO people are legit; many are scammy. But that's a tangent for another day.) When you're trying to figure out the best way to tweak a site, it helps to have lots of data about it and other sites: text on the pages, what they link to, and more. Semrush has a bot to gather that data so that not every SEO nerd has to figure out such a bot on their own.

That bot was confirming that a page showing a picture of a photo I took back in 2009 hasn't changed since. It's not such an interesting thing to do; a good task to delegate to a bot.

Oh now I'm getting distracted by the photo.

selfie taken in a beat-up lobby mirror

I guess back in 2009, I was carrying a camera separate from my phone. Ancient times, I guess.

People are more interesting than bots. Glancing at "nearby" log lines, I guess that humans at around that time were playing Bewordled, my word-nerd idea of a "match 3" game. Anyhow, welcome to the bots, welcome to the humans. Have a nice time.

Here are three popular blog posts from 2023 (along with an honorable mention and a popular Mastodon toot):

Were you hoping for more than three blog posts? lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/2023/ lists all my 2023 blog posts, with more pithy observations than you can stand.

On my way to the supermarket, I paused to look at some advertising posters wheatpasted onto a building. These posters were advertising an AI dating app. The very concept was boggling. I made a face.
I realized I was making a face when I turned to resume walking and realized there was a Cruise self-driving car behind me. "No offense intended," I muttered.
Lemmy's RSS feeds don't embed images so I wrote a little program to embed 'em. Though the anti-Reddit protests have calmed, Lemmy still has a pretty cool meme-scene, and I still use this little program to follow part of it.
I chuckled at the Big Free Library that the Internet Archive has by their side door (Clement Ave/Funston), since the I.A. functions as a big, free library. But it wasn't until I got home and looked at the picture more closely that I realized that the library's door is decorated to look like the Internet Archive logo.

Honorable Mention: This year, I participated in #EnigMarch. That is, each day in the month of March, I responded to a prompt from the #EnigMarch organizers by writing a puzzle. These puzzle blog posts were consistently pretty popular; but no single puzzle broke out to "Top 3" status such that I'd normally include it in a wrap-up. One especially-well-liked puzzle was the one prompted by the word hazard which challenged folks to insert two-letter USA state codes into words to form different words.

map of the USA with two-letter state codes

Finally, I posted a silly picture on Mastodon that "did numbers on the socials" as they say; but I never posted that picture on my blog until today:

Strange doings this morning at the Pacific Overlook

#SanFrancisco

OK, now to go post this on Facebook, Twitter, and Post.news for folks who don't follow my posts year-round like the long-suffering denizens of Mastodon and Bluesky.

Milestone: 42 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 42 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Here are three popular blog posts from 2022: I got my second COVID-19 vaccine booster today…, in which I post a vaccine band-aid selfie and reflect on the trickiness of deciding when to get ...

Milestone: 39 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 39 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Here's three of my popular posts from 2021: I walked all the way around San Francisco Bay. Along the way I got to see some new-to-me parts of Richmond and a debris-removal boat in action near the n...

Wow, it's the site's 38 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Three Popular Blog Posts Once again, I'm posting links to three popular blog posts from 2020. In theory I'm doing this for Facebook folks, who don't have an easy way to view my blog. (On Facebook, I'll post a link to this bl...

Wow, it's the site's 37 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Wow, it's the site's 36 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Three especially-popular blog posts from last year: Some people think I went overboard writing an app and designing an elaborate ritual to tell me where to take my walks, but… In which I bel...

Milestone: 35 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 35 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Three especially-popular blog posts from last year: Book Report: Beautiful Trouble In which I advise approaching a collection of political action techniques with at least the caution you'd use when...

Milestone: 33 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 33 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

Milestone: 32 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 32 millionth hit.(Well, sort of… remember a few months back I whined about how my then-web-hosting provider had messed up some things? I lost a few weeks' worth of logs th...

paranoids rejoice! httpS://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us is now totally a thing. ☝ That green padlock means evil hackers will now have to work much harder to MITM the site, yay. ...

*tap tap tap* is this thing on? My site, lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us has moved. Thanks to the magic of the internets, its address is still lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us. It was running on one set of machines; now it runs on another...

Trying out this new hosting service I wonder how hard it will be to get my blogging scripts up and running on this beast. ...

Milestone: 30 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 30 millionth hit. (I'm a little slow to report this; it happened a few days ago and I wasn't checking the numbers. By the "usual" amount of traffic, I shouldn't have had to check...

Remember how I went sailing? I went sailing a few months ago. I just now got around to posting a write-up with photos. Yes, it took me a while. If it weren't raining, I probably still wouldn't have got around to it. Anyhow: comp...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco's Telegraph Hill Over the past few months, some folks and I put together a Telegraph Hill puzzlehunt, the Hill Hunt BANG, which you can read about. Thus we ended a three-year BANG dry spell, yay. ...

Milestone: 28 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 28 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits so...

The friendfeed social networking site is going away. My best experience on a public social network was a few months on friendfeed. But that was years ago, before they got acquired by Facebook and fol...

Do Not Be Alarmed I'm trying out a new way of syndicating my blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. Maybe everything will go smoothly. Or maybe I'm about to start spewing FB updates and tweets like an absurdly literate f...

Milestone: 27 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 27 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...

fantabular.py: already obsolete Remember a few days back when I posted about fantabular.py, a little computer program to convert Quip docs to spreadsheets? It's already obsolete: Quip now includes spreadsheets. Now I wish I'd procr...

Milestone: 26 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 26 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits so...

Puzzle Hunts were Everywhere, even Hayes Valley Behold, it is most of the puzzles from the 2014 #terngame, a.k.a. Twitter's annual puzzlehunt. I say "most" of the puzzles because there were a couple of "you had to be there" puzzles. Like the one t...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Marin County Behold, it is my write-up of Shinteki Decathlon 9! Read them to gain great insight into puzzlehunting a la "Oh man I wish the Army Corps of Engineers would install air conditioning in the Bay Model."...

Milestone: 25 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 25 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: everytime a robot visits som...

Milestone: 24 Million Hits As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: everytime a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human ...

Milestone: 23 Million Hits It's the site's 23 millionth hit! (As usual, this isn't as impressive a number as you might think at first: these "hits" include, e.g., one for each graphic on each page loaded, visits from search-en...

Link: The Animator Letters Project The Animator Letters Project publishes letters from experienced animators, letters exhorting young animators to keep at it, hone their craft, etc etc. It's inspiring; it might be especially inspiring...

Site Update: Updated Resume After a four+ year job hunt, I landed a new job. Thus, I updated my resume. To save you the trouble of clicking through: I quit Google; I started at Twitter. Frequently anticipated questions: Q: OM...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even St Louis You must enjoy this St Louis travelog, aka how I traveled to DASH4. And it's also my report on DASH4 itself. Remember when I micro-blogged about tornado warning sirens? I wasn't kidding. ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen in San Mateo Because the dream of the 80s is also alive at Paine Memorial High School, here's a write-up of the Doctor When Game, a pretty amazing weekend-long puzzle-hunt time-travel-story game a bunch of folks ...

Milestone: 20 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 20 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 207.46.12.178 - - [25/Dec/2011:22:21:57 -0400] "GET /new/atom.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 15073 "-" "msnbot-UDiscovery/2.0b (+http...

Seattle 2011 Write-up I wrote up February's Seattle trip. Astute readers will notice that it starts out very detailed, then suddenly becomes very sketchy. I started out writing something detailed. Then I got busy and back...

Site Update: Better Blog "Tag" Page You might remember a while back I made a "tag cloud" for this blog; now it's bigger. Before, it didn't show the tags labels tags thingies from the posts I imported from blogger.com. Now, it does. I...

Milestone: 18 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 18 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 66.249.67.228 - - [29/Dec/2010:07:30:11 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/200405_rwc/10_earth_mover_cliff_tank.html HTTP/1.1...

Concert Report: The Glowstick Story In theory, this web site has a concert report section. It's OK if you didn't remember that. I haven't written down any concert stories since... since 2001, apparently. (Except I guess last year I m...

Ghost Patrol BA'NG: some photos and a line chart I posted some notes about Ghost Patrol BA'NG, mostly some photos from one of the puzzle-construction parties. I attended two puzzle-construction parties. (But during the second one, I didn't work mu...

Zion Nat'l Park (et al.) I'm a little slow on the updating, but as of a little more than a week ago, I'm done with that cold. It's nice to breathe easy again, but I still feel fairly busy what with playtesting on Ghost Patro...

Photos from New Camera Since my old camera got me hypothetically (but not really) trampled by an ornery moose, I got a new camera this weekend. And I took some photos to try it out. Most of them turned out pretty badly! ...

Milestone: 17 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 17 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 70.38.64.234 - - [06/Sep/2010:02:36:30 -0400] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/42_golden_gate_bridge_halfway_along.jpg HT...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: 2-Tone Game GC Notes If you've played through the 2-Tone Game and emerged, thinking Wow, that was strange; I wonder how it turned out that way?—you're in luck. At long last, some rambly essays about how the game c...

Milestone: 16 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 16-millionth hit: 207.46.13.132 - - [08/May/2010:13:51:57 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/old_misc_sf/sffloat.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot....

Site Update: 36 Views, Some Different I'm finally looking at the photos I took when I was in Seattle a couple of months back. One advantage of waiting a couple of months to do this: I've had time to forget pretty much everything that ha...

Site Update: No Comment Today, I'm home sick. I've been sleeping; when not sleeping, I've been sleepy. Meanwhile, I have a long TODO list. Surely, some item on that list was something that I could take care of, even if s...

3.1464466 March 14th is Pi Day. Maybe that's why I'm seeing lots of hits on my website for people searching for information about π. You might be surprised that they'd come here. I'm no Eve Andersson; I'...

Life of Pi: Another Perspective You might have noticed that I changed my blogging software recently. Yes, I do go on about it. Sorry. As part of this, I shut down blogger.com's access to my web site's file system. Otherwise, it...

Site: Tag Cloud Tinkering with blog software is fun. I set up one of those tag clouds. There's not much there yet, but give it time. ...

Photo: Alarm Will Sound You can never have too many photos of me. So I uploaded a photo taken by Benjy Feen in scenic Kirkland, WA. Someone looking at this photo might think that I'd just set off a building alarm by blund...

Under Construction, as Ever Thanks, Blogger.com, for five wonderful years of managing this blog! Sorry that y'all will stop supporting FTP publishing, which I was using. I've been scrambling this weekend to throw together som...

Links to some Early 2010 Posts I'm switching blogging software. The good news is that blog posts made via the new system won't clobber my old blog posts. The bad news is that I didn't really try to "weave together" the old stuf...

I Didn't See Your Mail; Facial Hair Happy New Year! If you sent me email in the last few days, I maybe never saw it. My site's spam-detection software thought that mail dated 2010 or later was likely to be spam. (This was apparently a...

Milestone: 15 Million Hits I'm writing this in kind of a hurry. An out-of-town cousin is in town. There have been fun activities. There will be more. Thus, apologies. I write in haste. The 15 millionth item (modulo the us...

Tutorial: Closure Tools Javascript compiler and library There are some fine tutorials out there for using Closure Tools, but I wrote a tutorial anyhow. Go read Closure Tutorial: Displaying Friendfeed Items. Uhm, by "Closure Tools", I mean the set of rec...

Yosemite Photos I went to Yosemite earlier this month. While I was there, I took some Yosemite photos, which I now make available to you, the internet. Thank goodness, right? I mean, the internet totally suffered...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere simultaneously I posted some notes on DASH #1. There's a photo. This would be a good time for me to mention: "playdash". (My DASH photo is not as cool as the photo of Jack o Lanterns including one with a hi...

Posted Chicago Photos I went to Yosemite! But that was this week. Last-last week my parents and I went to Chicago. I posted some photos, some mine, some other folks'. They're more likely to interest you if you're related...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Stanford I uploaded a few photos from BANG 25.Labels: photo, puzzlehunts, site...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Marx Meadow, Hawk Hill, and other places around the San Francisco Bay Area Against all odds, I wrote about Shinteki Decathlon 5. I played the first weekend; the second weekend I volunteered. Thus, there's a pile of semi-related stuff in that write-up. It's mostly ab...

Texas Travelog A while back, I asked for Texas travel advice and y'all had good advice. Where by "y'all" I mean "Curtis" Thank you, Curtis! (I think Darcy told me to go to Austin; this advice was disqualified on t...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, which helps explain how we kept showing up at clue sites Behold my notes from the excellent BANG XX. Yes, that game was a while ago. Hey, if I publish the notes for BANG 20 before BANG 21 starts, that's not late, right? What's that you say? Something a...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even appearing simultaneously in Redmond and Palo Alto Behold, it is notes from Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 1[23]. I volunteered at the bay area simulcast. I took a couple of crappy cameraphone photos of the playtest. I dressed up as the angel of death and ot...

Site: Yet more Library Book Cart graffiti photos I uploaded more library book truck graffiti photos (scroll down to the section marked February 2009 for the latest greatest). Can you find the palindrome? I knew you could.Labels: libraries, photog...

Site: Updated Contact Info New Phone Number I have a new phone and a new phone number to go with it: 1 415 868 4629. So I updated the Larry Hosken Contact Info page and there was much rejoicing. I also have a Hello Kitty bag to hold the phone...

Milestone: 13 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 13000000th hit. (Sort of. Actually, it probably passed 13000000 a while back. I skipped counting a bunch of hits (most of them?) during October-November. Anyhow.) 124.185.38.69...

Book Report: Refactoring HTML This book is about cleaning up HTML, the markup language used to write web pages. It's a good book. I'm going to kvetch a lot about parts, but... kvetching comes easy. Anyhow. You know how liberal...

Site Update: It's like Web2.0, but three years too late to be considered cool You know how I had separate lists of Twitter updates and Blog updates? Like, on my home page, I listed each of those, but they were in separate areas? That was kind of silly. And unnecessary: Frie...

Misapplying Google Friend Connect I put a couple of "Google Friend Connect" gadgets on the site. These are little web gadgets that allow you to register your interest in the site and to leave comments on a wall. (That's "wall" in th...

Ghost Patrol: It was awesome, yes The Ghost Patrol Game was awesome. You just want to lock the creators up in a basement somewhere and force them to crank out more of these things. Uhm, but that would be wrong. Anyhow, there's a wr...

Site: Yet More Library Book Cart Graffiti Photos I went to Doe Library again yesterday and I had my camera with me--with some juice in the batteries this time. I snapped photos of the re-shelving carts, the ones which have been decorated. I guess...

Site: Library Cart Graffiti Photos Yesterday was a good day for a few reasons, few of which will make it into the permanent record. But one good thing was a visit to Doe Library. While there, I snapped photos of a few decorated book...

Site: New Photos for the Lyon St Page Last week, a few folks headed over to Pete's place to watch the movie "Appleseed Ex Machina", which was pretty good. Pete lives in the Marina district. Thus, this was a chance for me to once again ...

Site Update: The Smoking GNU: Back to Basics You are, of course, far too tactful to point out that it took me over two months to write up the wacky fun times playing in the Midnight Madness game with The Smoking GNU. It takes a while to write ...

Site Update: Los Angeles Photos I took some photos in Los Angeles, though they aren't exactly photos of Los Angeles. Instead... uhm, museum-goers. They're photos of museum-goers. I must have been in a weird mood that week.Labels: l...

Milestone: 12 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 12 millionth hit. Let's look at the log: 66.249.73.131 - - [27/Jun/2008:00:13:43 -0400] "GET /new/archive/2005_08_01_index.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Go...

Site Update: a Pretty Plain Code Cheatsheet I made a pretty plain code cheatsheet for puzzlehunts. It doesn't have all the codes you want, but it has the biggies and it's not too crowded. PDF is here: http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/friv...

Site Update: Extended Shinteki Decathlon 4 Kvetchfest The Shinteki series of games is so awesome that you can remain bitter about a van breakdown for several days afterwards if that van, you know, interfered with... Oh, I'm just going to go sit over her...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco I posted some notes on the excellent SF Minigame. There's one photo. Usually I have zero photos or many photos. This time, one. In other news, yesterday The Great Urban Race came to San Francisco...

Just Three Shinteki Photos I didn't take any Shinteki photos. That's not quite true. I took a photo of an easel while GC was still setting up. Then Brent put a cover over the easel, like folks weren't supposed to see it so ...

Site: Gratuitous Photos of 17th Street (Am I the only one who checked the coedastronomy site in case they meant March 3 Greenwich time?) I can post an admission that I'm half-done with a handful of projects, but I don't have to like it. ...

Site Update: Contact, more XFN than you can stand I've been marking my internet territory. That is to say, I've been federating my identity. That is to say, I added more rel="me" links to the Larry Hosken contact page. Do you remember my ramble a...

Milestone: 11 Million Hits (plus gratuitous Taft domain pestering) Wow, it's the site's eleven-millionth hit. 195.225.178.21 - - [20/Feb/2008:06:20:03 -0400] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/15/darcy_ian.html HTTP/1.1" 200 853 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT...

Site: Updated No-Name Sushi Menu I've been forcing myself to use the new computer, putting it through its paces. If there are important files/settings/whatevers that I forgot to copy over from the old machine, I'd like to know abou...

Site Update: Updated Tags for Old Blog Posts Blogger.com manages this part of my site, the /new/ part. In the long-forgotten days of 2006, Blogger.com didn't support labels/tags/whatever. In those dark days, I hand-made some tags, tags which l...

Site Update: Mini-feed on Home Page I continue to putter around with the computer. I did some programming this morning, and now this site's home page has a little mini-feed with links to a few recent articles on this blog. Not wildly e...

Site Update: I'm on Twitter. (Are you?) I signed up for Twitter. Yes, you can now get updates about my status much more often than you want to. You can see my Twitter status if you visit this blog's front page; if you resourcefully follo...

Site: Getting Started with CppUnit on Ubuntu I wrote a little hello-world getting-started guide for programming CppUnit on Ubuntu/Debian/Linux/whatever. CppUnit comes with a couple of tutorials, but I couldn't compile the code from either. I ...

Site Update: Food Photos That day when I ate at all of the cafeterias at work (a few weeks ago), I brought along a camera, yay! Uhm, but I ran out of batteries early on and I hadn't brought any spares, whoops. So I emerged...

Site Update: Contact, Links I updated the site's Contact and Links pages. A few months back, Gavin Bell gave a talk at work. He mentioned in passing how various folks are using hCard to say "this web page is about a perso...

Site: Seattle Travelog #13 The exciting news lately is that I've had free time and I've been keeping solid food down. Thus, I've finally put together travel notes from my recent Seattle trip. There are some notes from MS Puz...

Milestone: 10 Million Hits (including 26000 strange ones) Wow, it's the site's ten-millionth hit. In decimal notation, that is a very round number. Let's take a look at the log record of that hit: 219.142.53.25 - - [23/Oct/2007:08:33:47 -0400] "GET /friv...

Site Update: Updated Resume I updated my resume. If you know about any tech writing jobs in San Francisco, please let me know. Yes, in San Francisco. No, I don't think that's very likely. But it's worth asking!Labels: busine...

Site: Shinteki Decathlon 3 Notes I was talking with Matt A. at Paul and Anisa's wedding reception yesterday. He said that he read this blog, but he didn't make it all the way through most posts. He's not so interested in book revi...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including a Route Eerily Similar to BATH3's Route I finally finished writing up my notes from No More Secrets. You're going to wonder why it took two months to write up something so short. But, you know, the writing isn't the only step. There's a...

Milestone: Nine Million Hits Wow, it's the site's nine-millionth hit: 66.249.70.236 - - [10/Jul/2007:21:58:59 -0400] "GET /departures/monterey/0/3267_diver_tm.jpg HTTP/1.1" 301 376 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0" It looks like some G...

Site: Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but no longer Trapped in my Camera The Debian upgrade is not going well. OK, I kinda lost X Windows. "Where was it when you saw it last?" "On my monitor." "Well, did you look for it there?" "Yeah, it's not there now." Fortunately,...

Site Update: BANG 17 Writeup I know, you're bored of hearing about BANG 17, and now you're ready to read about No More Secrets. But I'm really slow, so all I have is a BANG 17 write-up. Featuring cameos by Paul of the BANG wi...

Site: Tauba Auerbach / The Alphabet Variations You may recall that I went to a gallery a couple of weeks ago. It was some art by Tauba Auerbach, including two that featured an alphabetload of overlapping letterforms. I'd wondered what they woul...

Site: Santa Monica / Venice Photos I posted some photos and notes from my meanderings in Santa Monica and Venice. The summary: there may be wonderfully exciting things going on in Santa Monica and/or Venice, but I didn't spot them. ...

Site Update: Photos of Library Book Trucks So far, this page of photos of library book trucks only has a few photos. But I'm setting it up anyhow. I've taken other photos of library book truck graffiti--and thrown those photos out because I...

Site Update: More Library Handcarts Yeah, I know you want a game report. Yesterday was BANG17, which was pretty awesome. Even if the game hadn't been awesome, it would have been a good excuse to hang out for a day with some folks who...

Site Update: Conversations Before the 2007 GC Summit Maybe you've already watched the videos of the GC Summit 2007 presentations, where folks talked about how they make The Game fun. I'm sure glad I watched it. I'm a Game newbie and it was pretty eye...

Site Update: The Basic Eight vs Lowell High School (Today is April Fool's Day, but this is not an April Fool's Day prank.) The Basic Eight is a novel by Daniel Handler. It's set in Roewer High School. Daniel Handler went to Lowell High School a ye...

Milestone: 8 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's eight-millionth hit! Please pardon me as I now babble on about web minutiae. Starting with... let's take a look at the log of that hit: 69.41.96.6 - - [02/Apr/2007:13:03:28 -0...

Site Update: Chicago Photos I finally typed up my notes and uploaded my Chicago photos. I don't know if they're coherent. But I'm calling them done for now, because I think I'm about to get distracted with other tasks. In ot...

Site Update: Fixed a Photo A little script runs over this website's visit logs each night, generating a pretty report. I think I wrote the original back in 1999. I rewrote it last night. Python instead of Perl now. Sorted ...

Milestone: 6 Million Hits [Update: I meant seven-millionth. It's seven. I'm not re-celebrating six. Sorry, I posted this in a hurry, didn't proof-read, didn't fact check, sloppy work, sloppy.] Good gracious, it is the sit...

Site Update: Hogwarts Inside Out I posted a write-up of the wacky fun times I had in and around the Hogwarts Game. Some of you puzzle-hunt freaks have already found this. Typical. Play-testing with Continental Breakfast: As an exp...

Site Update: Islais Creek Area Photos I'm still working on that write-up of the Hogwarts Game. Today was a milestone: I finished listening to all of the audio I recorded. I had an audio recorder on me for most of the time I was in the ...

Three More by Curtiss Anderson I typed in three more essays by Curtiss Anderson: Magic Island in the Mist The International Exposition on San Francisco's Treasure Island Stories from the Island of Nias off the coast of Sumatra O...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Auburn Pete extracted some more Shinteki Decathlon II photos from his camera, and I posted some of them in the write-up. In other puzzley news, Eric Harshbarger's running a puzzlehunt in Auburn in Sep...

Two More by Curtiss Anderson I typed in two more of Curtiss Anderson's essays: Same Time Next Year? Water Runs Uphill! Labels: site...

Two More by Curtiss Anderson I was out late last night at the Ozric Tentacles/Particle concert. I only stuck around for one song by Particle, didn't like it, and it was past my bedtime. This morning was the AIDS walk. Drivers...

Three More by Curtiss Anderson I typed in three more of Curtiss Anderson's essays: From the "Small World" Department He Met the Challenge Progress--Inch by Inch! Labels: site...

Site Update: The Curtiss H. Anderson File Lately, I haven't done anything worth writing about. Instead, I typed up some essays hand-written by someone else, namely Curtiss H. Anderson of Roseville, California. I've got a bunch of these han...

Milestone: 6 Million hits Today, this website enjoyed its six-millionth hit. That hit was all about Amazingly Big things up in the Seattle area. I'm talking about the Pier 86 Grain Terminal and Microsoft. Let's take a look...

Curtiss H. Anderson: Three more / Lea W., one for the Road I continue to type up these Curtiss Anderson essays which fell into my possession. Today, three of his travelogs: Kyoto Paris New England Speaking of travelogs, you might remember that the first ...

Curtiss H. Anderson += 3 I typed in three more articles by Curtiss H. Anderson: Chutzpah by the Bay Crashing Willie Brown's party Fun with Words double entendres Something about governors brings out irreverence... Tags: s...

Site Update: Notes on the Construction of the Triclops Headlamp Less elaborate than the Mystic Fish Hat or the Battery Bandoleer, today I made a sort of triple headlamp, and I kept some construction notes. Because the more I thought about it, the more I thought...

Not Exactly a Site Update While my innards re-assemble themselves, maybe I can distract you with some fun email that the site received recently. It's on the comment page, but I'd like to call out the two most recent emails, ...

Apprentice Zorg: Addenda, Erratum In the weeks since I did that write-up of the Apprentice Zorg game, new facts have come to light. Well, I shouldn't act like anyone was trying to conceal these facts. OK, I think most people involv...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including Fhloston Paradise Good grief, it's another game write-up. A few days back, part of Team Mystic Fish played in The Apprentice: Zorg, a fifteen-hour puzzle hunt game in the East Bay. In a lazy bold writer's move, I typ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Especially Petaluma. Furthermore, Petaluma generally has it Going On On Saturday, Team Giant Die Protocol played in BANG 15 (BANG Appetit), a puzzle hunt game in Petaluma. Then we played boardgames. These things are more fun to do than to read about, and yet I did a...

Milestone: 5 Million Hits Good gracious, it is the site's five-millionth hit. That's five million hits in seven years (plus a couple of days). Let's look at the log record for that five-millionth hit: 71.112.234.3 - - [12...

Site Update: McGuffin Ho! The Burninators ran a Bay Area Night Game last weekend, and I wasn't there. Looking at the BANG 14 puzzles, it was pretty awesome. What was I doing instead? Well, I was working on writing about a ...

Site Update: New York Travelog I went to New York for a couple of weeks. I didn't emerge with any exciting anecdotes. But you can read the travelog anyhow. The main thing I got out of the trip: the best New York pizza is not so g...

Site: Uploaded Sailing Story When everything goes right on a sailing trip, there's usually not much to tell. Maybe you've read some of my "very boring sailing travelog"s. They're not so interesting; not much happens. Earlier t...

Site Update: Shinteki Decathlon Write-up Posted It's late November, and NaNoWriMo people around the world are in the final sprint, churning out huge amounts of fiction. Me, I'm just horking up little bits of reportage. For example, I just posted ...

Site Update: More BANG 13 Photos, pointer to YABA photos Tom Lester sent in three awesome photos from the recent Bay Area Night Game. So I put them on the Bay Area Night Game 13 page. In other puzzle-hunt photo news, Wesley Chan posted his photos of YABA ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including Far From Redmond I typed up some notes about the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. No, I wasn't at this weekend's Microsoft Puzzle Hunt IX. I wasn't cool enough to get invited. So what did I write about? I finally type...

Site: Uploaded St Louis Photos Last weekend, I went to St Louis. I didn't emerge with any exciting stories, but it's an exciting time for St Louis--there's a lot of rebuilding going on. I took some photos of some old St Louis bu...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, including San Francisco's Union Square [ There was a blog entry here. It was kinda long for a blog entry. And then I added some photos, and it was even longer. So I moved it to its own article/web page/whatever: BANG 13 Notes ...

Site Update: Jan 05 Road Trip Report Just nine months after the fact, I uploaded a write-up of the road trip that Tom Lester and I took back in January. You could argue that in 2004-2005 span, I thus completed another unemployed travel...

Site: Milestone Wow, it's the site's four-millionth web hit: 66.249.64.68 - - [28/Sep/2005:23:09:05 -0400] "GET /self/MBrooce/MBbruce.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" Ah, t...

Site Update: Comments If you want to post a comment on this blog, now you can--even if you don't have a blogger.com account. To prove you aren't an evil spambot, you will need to identify a captcha. That is, you will lo...

site update: New Zealand 2004 Travelog Waaaay back in December, I went to New Zealand. I caught glimpses of puzzle hunts, looked at giant ferns, paddled kayaks, talked about old telegraph equipment, snapped lots of photos, rode a train f...

Site Update: Shinteki Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture Uploaded a write-up of the Lester-Tang Conjecture's Experience at Shinteki Untamed. That is, I wrote about a puzzle hunt. It's a big week for puzzle hunts. There is gobs of new info at the Genome G...

Site Update: Photo, Comments, Geo Happy Pi Day! I made some little site updates, no biggie. Tom Lester took a nifty photo of me, so I added a thumbnail link at the Portrayals page. New messages on the comment page. GeoURL snapped ...

Site Update: Fave Reads I finally figured out my Fave Reads of '04. Usually I upload those on New Year's day. But this year I was in Seattle. And then I went to Tahoe. And then I started a new job. Hey, at least I finish...

Outsourced the "New" page I started using the Blogger service to maintain this page. Now you can use your favorite RSS aggregator to keep track of how rarely I write! Tag: siteLabels: feed addiction, site...