web-goddess

An iPod Experiment
A couple people have asked me recently whether I’ve had any trouble with my iPod battery. In short, nope. My iPod is one of the original 5GB ones and was purchased in a California Apple story in January 2002. I wouldn’t say I’ve been a heavy user over the past two years, but I’m fairly certain I’m in the fat part of the “normal usage” bell curve. I listen to it on-and-off at work and on my commute, and a full charge generally lasts me two days (but runs out on the third). I tend to leave it set on “song shuffle” and fast-forward through songs when necessary. I don’t do anything special to prolong the battery and in fact I do things you’re not supposed to (i.e. leave it plugged into the computer for extended periods of time, let it run down completely). I’ve even dropped it a couple times.

So what’s my actual play time from a full charge? I have no idea. I’d guess probably around eight hours but it’s hard to tell. Therefore today I’m running an experiment to ascertain this once and for all. I started it up at 8:00 this morning and it’s been running ever since. I’ve got it set to play random songs but I haven’t been using the fast-forwarding at all. No backlight or sounds or anything like that. The first of the four “power bars” disappeared at the three hour mark. I’m now up to five and a half hours and the remaining three bars are still visible. (For the record, I don’t think they’re necessarily a very accurate guage of battery life, but it’d be nice to have proof.) More updates as the day progresses…

How to Make Modeling Clay out of Dryer Lint. That’s the coolest, grossest, gosh darn craftiest idea I’ve heard in a long time!

The milestones just creep up on you, don’t they? Today is web-goddess’s third birthday. There are now earlier posts in the archive from my first attempts at a blog, but the inaugural w-g post was made on January 4, 2001. As I did last year, I’ve compiled some statistics for 2003

Number of posts: 868
Number of comments: 3279
Most commented posts: Sydney Peace Rally, Celebrity Identification Quiz, Mensa “24 H in a D” Quiz, Advice on Getting a Cat, Apple Discussion
Unique commenters: 287 (of course, a lot of those are people like Ferret who never use the same name twice, so the real number’s probably like 200)
Frequent commenters: see here
Number of posts mentioning “Snook”: 212 (that’s nearly 25%!)
Number of posts mentioning “Apple”: 27
Number of polls: 15
Number of poll votes: 484
Most popular polls: “What did you do on your 21st birthday?”, “Can you lick your own elbow?”
Site designs: two (I’m averaging just one per year!)
Sock animals created: 10
Harry Potter Scarves knitted: 6 (that’s nearly forty feet of knitting!)
Hits Per Day: Ranged from 3000-6500 throughout the year (though it’s already over 9600 for January thanks to the Sock Monkey tutorial)

Congratulations to Tracey (who organizes all those cool photo projects) as she’s getting married today! I seem to remember her saying it was being held in the Sydney Royal Botanical Gardens. Judging by the sun streaming in my window, she’s going to be have some beautiful weather.

Since my Dad couldn’t believe that I have actual sweetcorn growing my Australian garden, I took some pictures this weekend as proof. Things are really going nuts out there. The corn tasselled about two weeks ago and we’ve just noticed the first two baby ears of corn starting. We lost our first crop of green onions (due to an extremely hot day) but the second batch are coming along nicely. We hit the gardening store this past week to stock up on seedlings, pots, and soil. We also finally bought ourselves a hose but we try not to use it too much. Snookums even got this stinky fertilizer made from seaweed to spray on everything! Our thumbs aren’t green but they’re getting there.

You know what’s even more annoying than people who directly embed your images in their webpages? People who directly embed big honkin’ sound files from your site. Case in point. (Be sure to have your sound turned on to hear my revenge.)

In addition to Kurt’s victory, hobbits around the world have another reason to cheer: Several of them have taken Roger Ebert to task for his comments about Return of the King. Hmmm, Uncle Rog looks a bit like a hobbit himself…

Hooray for Kurt! I was predicting his victory all week based on the buzz from the ‘Net. Too bad for Guy, but he really didn’t choose the best song to show off. I don’t think he’ll mind losing very much though (as opposed to Kelly and Will, who both looked a little shell-shocked to see some of their scores). I was happy to see how well Peter did but a little surpisred that Ryan didn’t score more highly. I guess protest folk songs don’t play too well outside the western hemisphere.

Commentary from our house…

Me: “Elton John? He hasn’t been a legitimate popular music star in, like…”
Snook: “Twenty years!”

Me: “What the hell is up with the Pan Arabic scores? Did they try to use my super sneaky voting strategy?”
Snook: “I think they messed up and voted backwards.”

Snook: “Frickin’ Heinz again! Stupid fourteen-year-olds voting…”
Me: “Heinz. Winkler. Two names no person should ever have.”

Me: “Alex looks like your nephew Kurt on a bad hair day. She’s like a toddler who can’t grow proper hair yet.”

We had an interesting debate over whether Shannon Noll (the Aussie runner-up) would’ve gotten more votes than Guy. On the technical side, he’s just not a great singer. He doesn’t move really well on stage. But on the “x factor” side, he’s kinda cute in a big-white-guy-with-a-soul-patch kinda way. He definitely would’ve been more what people expected as the “Aussie” Idol (i.e. way more Steve Irwin than Guy). He probably would’ve worn jeans and sang “Workin’ Class Man”, for example. So I reckon he would’ve picked up the teenage girl vote, plus the Crocodile Hunter and country music fans. As much as it pains me to say it, I think he’d have scored higher overall.

Lastly, I’m still not getting the Will Young thing. He’s just so… weird-looking.

Happy frickin’ New Year. The Snook and I went to the pool today and I thought I did a good job of protecting myself from the sun. We were out there for two hours and I had sunscreen, a shirt, a hat, the works. Afterwards I was sitting on the couch at home and I suddenly noticed that the back of my thighs felt uncomfortably hot. A mirror soon revealed the horrible truth… My bum is bright red! It’s sunburnt from my bikini to my knees. It hurts so badly I can barely sit. And this is my last two days of vacation! I had a lot of sitting-on-my-bum planned! Awwww… I’m going to have melanomas on my ass.

Later: Thank God for ibuprofen. Seriously.