Chinese Food?

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I am amazed by what some people will eat.

The other day, when my husband asked what I wanted for dinner, I told him “Chinese food.” Unfortunately, without a real Chinese restaurant in the area, Chinese food is not something we can easily get. We had grilled steaks instead.

Yesterday, my husband came home from the supermarket with a surprise. “Chinese food,” he told me, removing a can from the grocery bag.

imageI stared. It was La Choy Chicken Chow Mein.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this stuff. It comes in a pair of cans — a tall one and a short one — attached together to make a really tall can package. The small top can contains the chicken and sauce. The big bottom can contains the vegetables, packed in water. You make dinner by heating up the contents of the small can, then dumping in the drained contents of the big can and heating it back up. Dinner in about 8 minutes.

When I was a kid, we used to eat this stuff. We used to eat SpaghettiOs and Hamburger Helper, too — but that doesn’t mean I eat it as an adult. I had no desire to eat La Choy Chicken Chow Mein. But Mike was kind of excited about it. “I want to see if it’s the same as I remember it.”

I prepared dinner while he fed the horses. I opened the small can and caught a whiff of something that smelled remarkably like cat food. There was a brownish gravy in there with small tidbits of a meat-like substance. Mike had instructed me to add a can of regular chicken (which we buy to make chicken salad), so I drained some of that and added it. Now it had chicken and tidbits in it. I tried not to breathe through my nose as I put it in the microwave to heat up.

While I waited, I opened and drained the big can. It contained mostly bean sprouts, but some small pieces of baby corn, water chestnuts, and microscopic pieces of red bell pepper. At the proper time, I mixed it all together and popped it back in the microwave. The odor was beginning to permeate the kitchen. Oh, and the finished product looked nothing like the photo on the packaging.

I mixed us some vodka and plum wine on ice and took a good long drink, preparing myself for the worst.

We had dinner a little while later. The best part about it was the plain white rice I’d made to go with it. I had two small scoops of goo over the rice. It was horrible. What was worse was putting the leftovers in the fridge. Now I have to look at it and remember it every time I open the refrigerator door.

I think I’ve discovered a new diet: the prepared food diet. That’s when you heat up prepared food that’s so bad you can’t eat it.

Does anyone other than me remember the little jingle for the La Choy commercials on TV? “La Choy makes Chinese food…swing, American!”

And can someone explain to me how a food product that tastes this bad can survive all these years?

Vista Support Sketchy

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Upgrading to Vista isn’t something to dive into.

To complete my two Excel book revisions for Excel 2007 on Vista, I’ve had to install Microsoft’s new operating system on a new computer capable of running it. The install wasn’t difficult and the configuration wasn’t hard, either. What is though, however, is getting support for non-Microsoft applications you may need to run on your computer.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t run much software on my PC. I run Microsoft Office and FileMaker Pro, which I write books and articles about. I run a Web browser, primarily to check on the appearance of my sites in a Windows Web browser. But I also run some unusual software, such as Garmin Mapsource (for putting maps on my GPS), Jeppesen Skybound (for updating GPS data on my helicopter’s GPS data card), and Citrix Client (for connecting to the FAA service and managing my OpSpecs).

Microsoft Office 2007 installed without problem on Vista. No surprise there. I haven’t tried installing FileMaker Pro yet. Garmin MapSource installed immediately and, with the TOPO map set, seems to work just fine.

But SkyBound wouldn’t install at all — tech support says they might have a Vista compatible version available in the first quarter of 2007. They claim they were unable to get the Vista beta in advance to work on an upgrade. So if you’re Vista only, you simply cannot use this software. Which is really a pain in the butt, since the database is updated every 28 days, so the software must be used monthly to get your money’s worth.

I asked the Citrix folks if their software would work with Vista. The tech support person said, “I don’t even know what Vista is.” I explained it to her. I told her that come January 30, it’ll be available to the world and that people who like to run the latest and greatest operating system software will be calling and asking the same thing. I told her I’d try installing it, but since I have so much trouble running the software on XP, I really don’t think I’m going to waste a day or two trying to get it to work on Vista. (Of course, it might work perfectly on Vista; I’m just afraid to try.)

Another tech support person I called — I can’t remember who or why — also didn’t know what Vista is. Which makes me wonder whether these people just have real lives that don’t keep them abreast of upcoming developments or if Microsoft is failing miserably at getting people excited about Vista.

My advice: make sure the software you need to run will work with Vista before you upgrade to Vista. And if you have to buy a new computer just to run Vista (as I did) you might want to make sure your software will run on Vista before you make that very large hardware investment. Waiting 3 or 6 months might save you a lot of grief — and a lot of money as hardware prices continue to drop and systems get more powerful.

Article Hits

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An aberration?

I don’t want new readers to this site to think that I’m consumed by stats. I’m not. I just find stats very interesting, whether they’re baseball stats, voting stats, Web site stats — or just about any kind of stats you can think of.

That said, I noted another interesting thing related to stats on this Web site. I recently installed a WordPress plugin called Readers Post by Stefan Groenveld. The plugin has several features that track when and how many times a post has been read and I’ve been implementing them one by one. The other day, I “turned on” the reader count feature, which displays the number of times a post has been read (since the plugin was activated). I use this in the sidebar to list the most popular articles and in The Loop to display a reader count at the end of each article.

The result, of course, is more stats.

What’s fascinating to me is how many times the top post has been read. Vancouver Waterfront (1643 readers) has almost twice as many readers as the second most popular post, On Blogging (874 readers). (Remember, the count started on November 15, 2006.) This baffles me because the Vancouver post is a short “About the Photos” article that displays a nice (if I do say so myself) photo of the Vancouver waterfront and tells a brief story about my 5-day stay in that very nice Canadian city. There’s really nothing terribly interesting in the post, only one photo, and not very much info for readers to take away with them.

So why is the post so darn popular?

At first I thought it might be Google. For some reason, my posts seem to rank very highly on Google. So I did a search for “Vancouver Waterfront” to see where the article placed. It placed at the top of the second page. Not very good placement, but perhaps enough to get some hits from Google.

I then attempted to go through my server log, which is not an easy task. I don’t use any log analysis software on my server, so I have to look at the logs prepared by GoDaddy.com, which cover all of my sites together. There were a lot of lines. I gave up.

I then looked at the logs prepared by W3Counter for my site as part of the counting service. I went to the Search report to see if lots of people had searched for Vancouver or Waterfront. The answer was no.

At this point, I’ve run out of research options. I’ll probably never know why the post is so popular. But it will be interesting to see how long it takes for other posts to surpass it in reader views. It can’t possibly stay at the top of the list forever.

And this brings up another question. Is it good to have so many stats? After all, I just wasted about 45 minutes researching this particular issue and writing about it. When does information become too much information?

Hits

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I review my weekly hit levels for my two most popular sites.

I use W3Counter (thanks to a recommendation by someone who commented here) to keep track of site activity. I don’t use their pay service — the features it adds are not worth the money to me — but I do use their standard service to keep track page visits (which appears in a tiny graphic on each page) and page hits.

Stats for two of my sites.W3Counter, among other things, creates customizable charts for site activity. What you see here are the charts for my two busiest sites: wickenburg-az.com and aneclecticmind.com. I set up these charts to display results for each week for the year. Since I installed W3Counter in late June, that’s the first week that displays. Those nasty dips in July and September are for periods when my server was down for a few days (one of the reasons I moved the sites from my own server to GoDaddy.com). And this week isn’t looking too good because it’s only half over. And in case you’re wondering, W3Counter does not track my visits to the sites — I’ve installed a cookie on all my browsers so it ignores me. (Don’t want to get an inflated count.)

I wrote about the importance of statistics in “Site Stats and Why They’re Important,” which is also available as a podcast. I’d been looking at stats on a daily basis, primarily because that’s the default view W3Counter offers. Seeing the stats on a weekly basis is much more interesting. I can clearly see the trends. For example, in the top illustration, which is for wickenburg-az.com, hits go down in the summer. Why? Because it’s so darn hot here, fewer people are interested Wickenburg. Not only the people who might visit — at least 90% of the site’s visitors are from out of the area — but the people who live here part of the year and have abandoned the town for cooler climates.So you can see that flat line or dip (depending on which line you’re looking at) that ramps up in the fall. It’ll be interesting to look at this chart when I have a whole year’s worth of data. My personal site’s activity (in the bottom illustration) has been growing quite steadily, but has peaks and troughs from week to week. For a long time, its weekly hits exceeded those for wickenburg-az.com, but now that the high season is upon us in the Sonoran desert, people are more interested in the town than me. I can live with that.

What’s interesting to me — and what prompted me to write this piece — is that both sites have approximately the same level of activity, hovering around 2500 page hits per week this time of year. I find that interesting primarily because of the differences in content and appeal. wickenburg-az.com is a local Web site with information and commentary about Wickenburg, AZ. aneclecticmind.com is a combination blog and support site that offers everything from general commentary to highly technical how-to instructions for using certain software. Yet they’re equally popular. Don’t you find that odd?

In any case, I’ll be playing around a bit more with W3Counter to see what other oddities I can find.

And if you’re a Webmaster or blogger and are looking for a nice statistics solution that’s easy to set up and use, I recommend W3Counter. Many thanks to Dan from that company for suggesting it.

R44 Pilot Finds Missing Family

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Another example of how private helicopter pilots can help their communities.

A friend of mine e-mailed me this story from the San Francisco Chronicle last night: “PILOT HAD HUNCH: It led him to wife, kids.”

The short version: James Kim and his wife and two children went missing in the mountains. John Rachor, a private helicopter pilot and owner of an R44 helicopter (like mine), decided to follow up on a hunch he had about where they may have made a wrong turn. He found the wife and kids alive and safe. Sadly the husband was later found dead, having died while trying to walk for help.

Wickenburg is lucky to have not one but three privately owned helicopters. The three pilots — Ray, Dave, and I — know the immediate area better than 95% of Wickenburg’s population. We know about canyons and trails and hidden ruins that most people couldn’t imagine. Certainly better than the APS or Sheriff’s office helicopter pilots — after all, we fly around here all the time.

Although I hope we’re never needed to help out with a search, I also hope that the local authorities wouldn’t hesitate to ask us to help out if they needed a few more eyes in the sky. After all, since we can each take four pairs, that’s twelve more people that can help save a life.