Category: General

You know you live in northeast Ohio when it’s 48°F out and you’re ready to put on some shorts before you go outside.

For most sane people, temperatures below 50° usually means their heaters are turned up to full and everyone’s bundled up in thick parkas. All because they were smart enough to move to a part of the world where Winter means dipping into the upper-40s and Spring actually comes on March 21st, rather than sometime late in June.

February was a busy month for the MeisterPlanet.com server:

Total Hits	222,862
Total Files	183,225
Total Pages	58,051
Total Visits	21,637
Total KBytes	2,821,690
Total Unique Sites	20,250

Activity for the site was up sharply around the 14th as people wishing each other a happy St. Valentine’s Day linked to the family photo gallery of our house decorated for the holiday. In particular, this image was linked to and visited 8,234 times during the month. The photo made it’s way onto a number of other blogs and websites, even ending up as the background for several of them.

According to the logs, incoming links from Google searches centered around either the Valentine’s day images, or the entry about the Volkswagen commercial with Gene Kelly’s face superimposed on a dancer doing modern dance routines to an updated version of the music from the classic “Singing in the Rain”.

Another interesting statistic from the month came from which browsers were used to view the site. Of all the pages accessed, 72% were from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with Mozilla’s Firefox taking up an impressive 18%. These figures aren’t all that far off from the browser statistics collected by the W3C which has been following these trends for some time. The growth that the free, open-source web browser project has made in the last few months is staggering.

It was a good month overall, with all this traffic weighing in at 2.8GB, though things should slow down now that February 14th has passed by.

Today was very cold, wet and rainy, with temperatures hovering around 40 to 45°F.

Frankly, I loved it.

I’ll take some liquid precipitation over snow any day, particularly in an area where spring weather sometimes seems to wait until at least June to show up. Only 33 days to go until Spring is officially here, and probably another month after that until the northeast Ohio winter takes the hint and leaves us finally.

For most people February 14th immediately brings to mind St. Valentines Day, with thoughts of those they love or have loved or even hope to love.

For me, on the other hand, the first image that comes to mind when the 14th is mentioned is a Drill Sergeant yelling at me to get a move on while exiting an old green bus.

Yes, St. Valentines Day marked my first day of Army basic training years ago, so instead of thoughts of chocolate and roses, my mind is usually filled with nostalgic remembrance of what I thought was the worst day of my life, yet now see as one of the best.