maybe i am slow – april 19 2007 edition

I might be slow – or maybe I’ve known all along…

• Geni.com – very cool, flash-based, geneology tool on the web. easy to add family members, invite them through the site (through their email address).
• Cool Tools – Kevin Kelly showcases some very neat and very useful gadgets. ranges from software, to gadgets, to soft goods.
• BoingBoing – i think these people might be geniuses. they cover daily news, inventions, trends, and many other things you should know. subscribe to them if you like the rss.
• Howard Forums – if you like your cell phone and want to know what else it can do. or if you want to find out which phone your carrier is feeding you a line of crap about, go here. a great community with tons of knowledge – and only slightly elitist, so look before you leap – er, read before you post.

web stats in tabbed browsing

Part of my responsibilities at work include managing our web stats. We had an interesting conversation last week about how visitors are tracked when they open links from our website in multiple tabs – as in Firefox, Opera, IE7, etc. We were particularly looking at paths people follow through our site and noticed people pogo-sticking a bit.

One hypothesis was that people opened another tab or tabs and then continued from the original location. Might that cause the pogo-sticking we were seeing? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any papers on what affect tabbed browsing has on web stats, but I’m curious if anyone else has seen anything.

A brief search revealed this, from ClickZ Experts, but not a whole lot else that seems relevant. Maybe JavaScript-based tracking tools (Mint, Clicky, WebTrends SmartSource Data Collector) take care of what seem like they could be discrepancies, but I think it might be a bit early to tell.

still good people in the world

Every now and then, people pleasantly surprise me. I recently got a rebate check back for my an LCD monitor. I had forgotten about it mostly, but it was a nice surprise because who doesn’t like a check in the mail? An even nicer surprise was the note I found inside.

Apparently, my rebate check was included with another person’s check – his name was Peter. He thought it better to send the check directly on to me instead of sending it back to Sceptre, where it no doubt would have been lost in the shuffle and never reached me.

So, Peter, whoever you are, I’d like to say thanks.

great backup software

I had a chance to try out Acronis True Image 9 – looks like v10 is available now – over the past few days, and have to say that I was very impressed. It was extremely easy to use and very full-featured. Some items which I particularly like, include:

• Ability to clone a disk drive (at least a working one) – I didn’t have a dead one to try it with.
• Easy tutorials/wizards which walk you through and keep you on track.
• Full, incremental, and differential backups.

I didn’t really try any of the other features, but was really happy with these features. Also, I’ve not really used backup software before, but have heard stories about difficult-to-use programs and this was not one of them. I actually think it would be pretty difficult to screw up with this software. If you need backup software for a pretty reasonable price, I would check this out.

maybe i am slow

so I guess I missed these things, which have been floating around for a bit. take a minute to check them out anyway:

• you can use your wordpress login as an openid
• there is a cool idea for a desktop interface – interesting, but I don’t see it coming real soon
• only missed it by a day, but it’s quite sad that Kurt Vonnegut has passed
• not so old, but wow, did you see this expert breakdown of SEO factors on SEOmoz?

nokia replacement parts

I don’t expect that I have many readers at this point, but maybe someone will come across this and be able to help. I have a Nokia 6256i for Verizon. It’s a great phone, strong (I drop it a lot so I should know), feature-rich – but has one major weakness. The hinge in the flip is crap. It’s been working up a nice crack for the last several months – which I’ve staved off with superglue thus far. I’m hoping someone can point me in the direction of rather inexpensive parts – preferably locally in Cincinnati to fix it. I can get the part online for about $40 – or buy a whole used phone for reasonably the same price, but if I had the ability to buy from Tessco, it would run me about $10 w/ shipping.

So I was writing the above post and did one last google search to find the part on Tessco to provide a link. Lo-and-behold, I found it on eBay via a link next to a shopping bag at the top of the Google results. I normally ignore those, but was really glad I didn’t in this case. Another case of the little things making me happy.