If you’re not a geeky web stats guy or if you aren’t interested in sniffing around some very intimate numbers associated with this blog, Because the Medium is the Message, then you don’t really want to click through.  This will mostly be just source data but I might made an editorial content once in a while.  This data is all from the AWstats report running on my dedicated server.

Monthly History

Days of Month (Aug 2010)

Days of Week

(Is Sunday really the highest-traffic day? This is really interesting.)

Operating Systems

Browsers

Keyphrases Used for Discovery via Search

Top Pages Visited in August 2010

All the Sites that Link Through to ChrisAbraham.com

Watch this first and then read my little rant and feel free to comment.

Any time anyone says, “I want to do something new and modern with theater — people think theater is long and boring, and we want new and cool” that’s red flag for me — because Directors have been saying this since the late 50s, arguably the 20s, and have been making asses out of themselves and alienating even more people ever since. Modern theater pieces are generally the result of Directors who have not learned from the past or are trying to fix something that is either not broken or too broken to fix.

The “so new it’s been done a million times” production is called “The Moon is to Live On,” a Meow Wolf Production. Thanks to Amanda Congdon for the fodder for thought.

I am studying German and have been told that it helps if you listen to German radio so I ordered the Logitech Squeezebox Radio on the recommendation of my friend Scott. I find the Squeezebox Radio to be perfect for the night stand, where I will be listening to the radio before I got to bed.

I set the presets with Berlin radio stations and linked via Wi-Fi and it sounds great in both spoken word and also music.

PRO: The set up was so easy and it even made the WPA/WEP key entry for my Verizon FIOS Internet.

I was also able to easily find all the stations I listened to in Berlin when I lived there and I was also able to find local stations and I could easily “install” BBC and CBC and even a Facebook and a Flickr applet. I am very pleased. I got a red one.

The date and time is awesome because it is updated via Internet so I didn’t even need to set the date or time — so I also have myself an atomic clock, I guess.

There are multiple alarms and also a line in so I can run my iPod and my iPod shuffle through the device, too, which is great for my German homework (a CD I burnt to MP3).

CON: A little expensive but you get a lot more than just a radio. It doesn’t come with a rechargeable battery pack or the remote — an additional $50.

BOTTOM-LINE: Small and deceptively powerful — it is basically a little Linux box in a small boom box/Internet clock radio — and it is the most modern of the Squeezebox line so you can do very cool stuff with the device. Easy to set up and to start using.

It can work as simply as a clock radio with presets or you can get all geeky and install apps and podcasts and you can connect to SIRIUS and all those other paid streaming services. I love it. It is my new favorite thing.

My dad, Bob Abraham, was a photographer who produced multi-projector slide shows. As part of his office automation, he came home in the very early 80s with an Osborne 1 ‘portable computer.’ I did lots of homework on the WordStar word processor, which I thought rocked and spoiled me for other word processors.  It was really something special and, I think, was the seed that spawned into a lifetime of hardcore computer-use, including programming, developing, and Linux and Windows system administration. Man, I am kind of hankering for a game of Colossal Cave Adventure — one of the seminal games on the Internet that we just called Adventure.

Osborne 1 – Considered to be the first portable computer (1981) Price : $1,795 (32K RAM)

Via Wikipedia:

The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer, released in April, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighed 23.5 pounds (10.7 kg), cost US$1795, and ran the then-popular CP/M 2.2 operating system. Its principal deficiencies were a tiny 5 inch (13 cm) display screen and single sided, single density floppy disk drives whose disks could not contain sufficient data for practical business applications. Its design owed much to that of the Xerox NoteTaker, a prototype developed at Xerox PARC in 1976. There were ten prototypes produced, as described in an email^[1] to PBA Galleries, a San Francisco auction house, by Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the Osborne computer, on February 12, 2009, “I can confirm that this is one of the first ten prototype units built, known as the “metal case” units. I don’t think they had serial numbers. The cases were made by Galgon Industries in Hayward but their quote for production was prohibitive, so work immediately commenced on the plastic cases. The circuit board was ready in January of 1981 and these were built shortly thereafter. They were used in the first ads (“the guy on the left doesn’t stand a chance”) in which the veins on the hand of the guy on the right bulge as he struggles with the 30-pound weight of his transformer-powered luggable. These were the units we took to the West Coast Computer Faire and the National Computer Conference in early 1981.”