Over the Thanksgiving break I started on a new web app and a tutorial. Not sure when either will be out though. I’ve been tired all week so I don’t expect to get too much work done on them until maybe Thursday or Friday (I’d put both at 50% right now).

As a distraction, I found myself re-discovering Half Life 2, the first person shooter game that won all those awards back in 2004. If you’ve never played HL2, let me just echo what everyone else in the world has been saying: It’s an AMAZING game. Possibly the best game I’ve ever played (next to maybe American McGee’s Alice). I don’t really consider myself a gamer either. The last game I was really into was Doom 3, and that was back in 2005. When I fall for a game though, I fall hard.

I spent my whole winter break playing Doom 3 all night. It was funny because I’d wake up around 4-5 in the afternoon, right as my roommate was coming home from work, and then I’d go to bed around 6-7 in the morning, right as my roommate was leaving for work. Well, I should get to bed, waiting until the last minute to write these things is always a bad idea.

I’m taking off work this week, and my plan is to make something of it, so hopefully I’ll have some fresh new content to post up. Ideas I’m currently juggling around are: writing a tutorial, writing a facebook game (I bash facebook sometimes, but it is something almost everyone uses), or making a new online app. Or possibly re-doing my color fader. I really don’t like its interface. But I’ll figure all this out later. In the mean time, here are some random bits of news…

Popular with the Ladies

I stumbled upon an interesting internet tracking site called QuantCast. According to its website its “the only open internet ratings service. We provide advertisers with audience profiles for millions of websites and services.” I’m not sure how it tracks websites, and I have never seen this site before today, but I discovered that it had data for my website, you can see it here:

http://www.quantcast.com/patorjk.com

According to the data they provide, this site gets more female visitors than male visitors. Interesting, interesting… hey ladies… j/k, actually, this is all kind of funny because I really doubt that, unless the majority of people who view TAAG are female. Though then again, maybe I just don’t know my audience very well.

The website also says “The site is popular among a 60-100k HH income bracket, more educated audience.” Which I thought was interesting.

As a side note to all of this, way back in the day I had a poll up on my main page that asked the viewer if they were male or female. The results came back 90% male, 10% female (I forget how many votes were cast, but it was a decent amount). So it’d be really interesting if the scales had tipped as much as that site says they have.

Google Trends

If you don’t know about Google Trends, you need to visit this site now:

http://www.google.com/trends

It’s amazing how much fun that tool is. I can’t believe digg is more popular than reddit, fark and slashdot put together. I was also shocked to learn that Pepsi was more popular than Coke (in terms of google searches). This site [NSFW!] has some more risque suggestions. But anyway, if you’re bored, it’s a fun tool to play around with.