Okay, so this isn’t the coolest gift and there’s no real sex appeal, but with all the recent rain playing havoc with HECO, how about an uninterruptible power supply for your home computer? Protect your (Mac) investment from brownouts and give you time to shutdown your computer during a blackout.
A very practical gift that will definitely come in handy.
Technorati Tags: gift guide
Last night, my new Extreme iMac was acting up and did a hard freeze. After turning it back on, it started beeping at me. Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep. Wouldn’t startup as normal.
According to this Apple Support article, it sounds like the iMac has bad RAM. Got an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar to see what’s up.
Technorati Tags: Apple
With SiteMeter’s outage over the weekend due to Black Friday traffic, I had to check out the other stats tracking services I have installed on Pulpconnection. That’s right, others. While I primarily rely on SiteMeter to count visits, I dabble with other services to see how they compare.
For a quick and dirty comparison, here are the stats provided by SiteMeter after they came back online. Notice the goose eggs for Saturday and Sunday.
Scoping Google Analytics to similar dates yields the following visits. Look at the difference in visit counts between the two services.
And lastly, here’s one more from 103bees.com. This service emphasizes search engine traffic, but counting visits is a side effect. Their numbers match more like SiteMeter results.
I also have MyBlogLog tracking enabled thanks to their Recent Readers widget. But since I have this widget so far down in my sidebar, I don’t think it creates enough impressions to accurately track visits.
So while SiteMeter was down on Saturday, November 24, Pulpconnection received between 112 and 225 visits and for Sunday, between 110 and 160 visits.
Not sure what happened, but I can’t get the SiteMeter stats for Pulpconnetion. The tracker logo/code is not showing up on the page and when trying to log into SiteMeter for reports, I’ve been getting this message:
The Site Meter database for your account is currently unavailable. Please wait a few minutes and try again.
Only thing is the few minutes has been a few days. Wonder what happened?
Update: SiteMeter confirmed technical issues with their system.
Update 2: SiteMeter is saying all the traffic from Black Friday made their servers crumble. In either case, Pulpconnection SiteMeter stats tracking is working again.
Well sorta anyways. Dell’s YoursIsHere site went live today, and I gave it a roll. Here’s what I accomplished with 2 minutes of work.
Ooops, sorry. If you want to see and hear Brooke give her pitch why you should donate to Pulpconnection, you gotta go here.
And feel free to donate… seriously!
Today’s been a slow day so I decided to take advantage of the downtime to run some errands during lunch. What a star studded lunch it turned out to be!
Starting off on a not-so-starry note, but I happened to pass by Mitsu-Ken where business was slow. After recent incidents, the okazuya had been closed for a few days but reopened yesterday. Business was flat. Even though it was lunch time, there was no line of hungry customers like there usually is and there was plenty of street parking. I tried taking pictures with my iPhone, but… hey wait, I don’t got an iPhone! 🙁 I guess their garlic chicken isn’t so tasty anymore…
Back to the stars. I trekked down to the Apple Store at Kahala Mall since the Ala Moana store was closed for renovation. While looking for the boxes of AppleCare, I noticed two familiar faces. Local news stars, Guy Hagi and Kim Gennaula of KGMB9, were there picking up a brand new Mac and HP printer. Cool, Mac fans! Dang it where’s that iPhone for pictures?!
While waiting in line to pay for my AppleCare, this guy comes up with a broken HP printer. It’s none other than Andy Bumatai who does his Night Time with Andy Bumatai talk show on KFVE. Another Mac fan and another missed iPhone photo opportunity! I wonder if Andy’s broken printer is the same one Guy and Kim got?
As I was headed back to my car, I saw yet another star. Work superstar Susie was cruising and about to get lunch from CPK.
A star studded lunch indeed!
I know 35,000 visits is kind of an oddball milestone to track, but I needed a random way of getting a winner for the Pulpconnection Blackout Giveaway. Anyway, it was a good run to 35,000 visits, amassing 5000 visits in a one-month time span staring in early October.
Here’s the timeline for visit milestones.
Where did the activity come from? Let’s take a look at what Google Analytics reveal…
Top performing content.
Top keywords.
Top referring sites.
The biggest reason for the sudden surge of traffic was being shown on Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors site. Thanks to NOE & NEENZ of Infinity Productions, the post about Julianne Hough farting on Dancing with the Stars brought in a deluge of traffic. Thanks NOE & NEENZ! And again, thanks to all the readers addicted to passions and pulp.
Went to a lunch buffet at Tsukiji Fish Market and Restaurant that recently opened at the Ala Moana Ho`okipa Terrace. A big interior with lots of tables, lots of people, lots of space to walk, and lots of food.
The restaurant opens at 11am, and there was a line waiting to get in. Good thing we had a reservation and got a big table. Interesting interior design. Quite a bit of variety of quality food that sure beats Makino Chaya. Though the selection of protein was limited to kalua turkey, kal bi, and teri chicken, but if you’re a sushi lover, you had a choice of sashimi. The salads and desserts were limited but then again, I didn’t come to a Japanese buffet to eat salad and dessert. After stuffing myself, I did get a shave ice with condensed milk which was actually pretty good.
Some random scenes from the day. Club 939 is featuring the ultimate adult-themed Halloween party on Halloween night. Cinnamon Girl has a new exterior facade. I hope their terrible exchange policy has gotten better.
Saw this older gentleman chillin’ on the Ho`okipa Terrace listening to his iPod (see them distinctive earbuds?), but check out his socks. Is that a Jordan Jumpman logo? Young at heart baby!
And Catherine “Cat” Toth was out shopping.
See all the pictures in my .Mac gallery.
I’m getting my recent iMac ready for a Leopard install/upgrade. I already missed out on getting an big external drive for Time Machine. 🙁
To make sure my software is up-to-date, I found AppFresh that makes sure all your junk is updated. It’s pretty cool and fast. AppFresh not only notifies you of available software updates, but it can download and install the software for you. Very nice. Yikes, I have 72 apps out of date!
I hear making a complete backup is the way to go for a Leopard upgrade. I’ll have to look at the free Carbon Copy Cloner and see if I have an external drive big enough to clone my drive.
Technorati Tags: Apple
By now, I hope you’ve heard about and checked out WeGoEat.com, a directory of all the best restaurants in Hawaii. But what’s the deal with WeGoEat.com and where is this site headed? Luckily, head developer Ryan Kanno was willing to answer a few of these questions for Pulpconnection readers.
Why did you create WeGoEat.com and how did you come up with the name?
I contribute to the Django project (look for me next time you download it). It’s a Python web framework very similar to Ruby on Rails. I wanted to write technical articles to educate others on how to use it, and I figured that I better practice what I preached. Once I figure out all the Hawaii IP addresses, I want to restrict registration to only people in Hawaii. Everyone else will only be able to read reviews. I’m hoping two things: 1) The people of Hawaii will take it for what it’s worth – A forum to voice opinions about their favorite eatery and that 2) People outside of Hawaii will realize that though places like Yelp are neat, but what better place to get an opinion than from the people who live and breathe the culture. The local market is something that Googs/Yahoo have a tough time competing and I’m hoping to fill a niche. Also, since I’m pretty accessible, I can turn pretty much anything into a reality in terms of functionality/features, etc. Try requesting Yahoo to change their Fantasy Sports or a new feature to Gmail and see if that goes anywhere. 😉 Whew.
And of course, WeGoEat for obvious reasons… just something said a lot @ my family parties. 🙂
Where did the idea for WeGoEat.com come from and what makes this site different?
I just chose a market that I thought needed help. I haven’t really thought to differentiate it feature wise (yet), but I am hoping to differentiate it community wise.
What’s the long term vision for WeGoEat.com?
I’d like it to become a forum for Hawaii people to voice their pleasures/concerns/etc about places to eat. Ideally, restaurant owners will check it out to see what people are saying and improve, damnit. 🙂
How many active developers are working on this project?
Ahahahahahha. You’re kidding right? 😉 1.
What features are planned for the future? A Facebook app? Embed into blogs? Integration with software like IconFactory’s DineOMatic?
All of the above is viable. I’m tracking how people are using the site in Googs Analytics now and wanted to let the usage dictate the features. I figured the first thing I’d write is a little Javascript to embed your favorite restaurants into your blog. DineOMatic looks neato. I just emailed them to see what it would take to integrate. I wanted to work on a “magic-wheel” where you put in criteria and out comes a random restaurant, but I wanted a Flash developer for that (hint, hint). Ideally, I’d like to display menus as well, but that’s seriously time consuming unless I can get buy in from the restaurants to input their own menu. Finally, I’m always reading about ‘Hawaii’s’ best restaurants by some random questionnaire conducted by the Advertiser or Honolulu Magazine – I’d seriously love to audit their results especially since there’s usually some serious conflicts of interests (the people you are paying to advertise with are saying you’re one of the best in Hawaii)… I’m hoping this site will let the people speak volumes about what really is the best in Hawaii. 🙂
Thanks Ryan and good luck with WeGoEat.com!
Blogger rolled out a new feature today, letting blog readers follow comments via email. For each post, there’s now a “Email follow-up comments to:” field where you specify your Gmail address to receive updates of the post’s comments.
Yes, you can only use a Gmail account for email subscriptions. Still though, very useful for tracking active conversations like what’s going on at Easier Said Than Done.
Technorati Tags: Blogger
