Alright. After some personal difficulties I decided to take off the rest of the semester (drastic move, but it needed to be done.) I am also going to be staying in Milwaukee for the Fall 2006 semester, hopefully going to UWM and taking enough credit hours to classify myself as a full time student. This means much lower tuition and no room and board costs (I can stay at home.)

The other obvious advantage of this is I can get my feet wet in the 2006 campaigns. Right now I am thinking of volunteering for the Jim Doyle for Governor Campaign, but I’m not sure yet. There are a lot of interesting races, especially on the state level, going on this summer and fall.

Then it’s off to Loyola in the Spring of 2007, so I can finish up my Jesuit studies… at least until 2008.

I loved last night’s new Southpark “Smug Alert!.” It was a perfect spin of the whole “why the hell do Americans do this shit” and in general a social commentary.

— SPOILERS BELOW —

The general idea was that people who buy Hybrid Cars tend to be very “smug” about it, in that they consider themselves better for it. It is an obvious play on “Smog alert.” The creators have two different ideas behind this show: note that a lot of hybrid users are too proud of their hybrids, and also that hybrid cars damage the environment. At the end it goes through the obvious that what the students really learned (and the parents ignored) is how Hybrid Cars are great things that may save our planet someday, but driving them smugly is almost worse.

There is a funny George Clooney bit in there too.

— END SPOILERS —

Karl Zimmerman left for Vegas without telling me. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t get the notice, (perhaps he didn’t want me calling his cell phone?) Nevertheless, he tells an amazingly boring interesting tale of being pulled over by the cops in the middle of Utah. (mormons?) The only part of his story that sucks is that he didn’t take a picture with the cops. This is my new rule: If you are pulled over by the cops in a remote location during the day, make sure you have a camera and take a kickass photo with the ticket. My friend has a few of these and every one of them is just classic. I would put it on Facebook in a heartbeat.

Oh, and speaking about Facebook, the spiffy Ray Tetzloff blogs about how Facebook wants 2.0 BILLION dollars for it’s site. Evidently Viacom (which owns the massive MTV Networks) is interested. The price point sorta makes sense, college students are addicted to it. Loyola’s residental network is run off of one T3, but there are squid caches that cache commonly used pages/objects. That cache is like a rehosted facebook. There are some students that if you monitored their port it would be Facebook and AIM (just walk down the hallways and look for yourself.) But 2 BILLION…. Not sure what I think about that.

Big stuff happening today, time for sleep.

I have a lot of stuff going on. Meetings or appointments that I really fear I will miss. I guess it isn’t the quantity of stuff, it’s just that I can’t remember exactly when all of this stuff happens.

So, supposidly, Google is coming to the rescue with Google CL2. They say it intergrates with Gmail Contacts (which is great) and iCal (which I don’t use, but still cool.) Someone, somewhere, mentioned that it was going to come out by the end of March. Well, it’s the 30th, and I don’t see Google CL2. Bah, maybe the 1st (ZDNet Thinks So, they did launch Gmail April 1st). Until there is a release, I will stick with business cards, notecards, and post-its. I just pray I don’t miss something until there is a calender. At least not having an organizer will be an easy thing to blame. Bah!

It’s almost time for the one year anniversary of NickCatalano.com and I have to say, it’s been an interesting ride.

I have a statistics system setup here, and it works out rather well for me. Most of the time the system just sees bots from various search engines and news aggregators visiting the site and RSS feed, but sometimes it picks up individual users (there are so many different user agents that having any one category is difficult.)

One thing I noticed after reviewing the statistics is how much Yahoo Slurp! is pulling from this site. Today alone Yahoo pulled 114 pages from my site, more than double Bloglines (48), and triple MSN (35.) Googlebot didn’t even visit the site in any real quantity today (5 total). But the overall statistics (since the beginning of the blog) are very interesting. Here is a rundown

Top Ten Pages:
RSS Feed – 17043 hits
Ghetto Prom Pictures – 13805 hits
Homepage – 10967 hits
ATOM Feed – 7798 hits
Firefox Hits 50 Million – 2752 hits
Second page of May 2005 Archive – 1999 hits
Redvines and Mr. Pibb are not crazy delicious – 996 hits
I close the night with a Wordpress update – 927 hits
On Google Talk with Trillian NOW – 891 hits
Comments RSS Feed – 832 hits

Top Nine Users:
Yahoo Slurp! – 13770 pageviews
Googlebot – 7905 pageviews
MSN Search Bot – 6031 pageviews
MSIE 6.0 Users w/.NET in User Agent – 3551 pageviews
Google Feedfetcher – 3138 pageviews (for Google Customized Homepage)
Ask Jeeves/Teoma – 2583 pageviews
MSIE 6.0 Users – 2155 pageviews
Firefox Users – 2105 pageviews
Mediapartners-Google (Google Adsense) – 1456 referrals

The top five referring pages are:
MSN Search for ‘Ghetto prom’ – 1321
Fark’s ‘Top Viral Videos of the Year’ Coments Page – 1020
MSN Search for ‘ghetto prom’ – 590
Slashdot’s Apple’s 500 million songs -248
Applexnet’s – Google Talk With iChat Now – 200

Note: These statistics leave out my visits to the site