January Analytics

I checked the Google Analytics for my blog this morning (31 January 2012), and I found some pretty interesting things that happened in January.

For the first time in history, there were more visits from the United States than South Africa. It seems I've gone international!

Also for the first time in history, Firefox beat out Chrome as the top browser from which people visit my blog, and Internet Explorer didn't even feature.

The most popular search term was zuma deluxe ubuntu lucid. I searched for that term, and I found that it leads to an old blog post I wrote back in June 2010, titled Running full screen games under Wine, with Visual Effects enabled. But, it only showed on the second page of the Google South Africa search results, so whoever it was, was obviously very desperate to find an answer to their question! I hope it helped...

Incidentally, I had forgotten all about that article, so I found myself wondering whether President Jacob Zuma was now using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx!

The most visited page for the month of January 2012 (not surprisingly), was the only article I had written in January, Thoughts on web apps, but it wasn't the first page that most users found. The first page that most users found (and thus ended up browsing to the web apps article) was in fact Gmail blocks my mail as Spam. I wrote that article in November 2010! Evidently, this is still an issue that frustrates users.

Google Analytics is definitely a very interesting tool....

Thoughts on web apps

I recently read this article on MyBroadband. It's all about the browser, and how it's evolved from a mere window to the web to the computing platform it is today. The author talks about how he accesses all his e-mail from www.gmail.com, he uses ChromeDeck for his social networking needs, and is using Google Docs more and more.

My response? I always did, I still now, and I think I will probably always, hate web apps!

In fact, I'm always looking for ways to spend less time in a browser.

• Why visit www.gmail.com when you can have the super-fast super featured Thunderbird (and use IMAP) running natively in your Operating System of choice?
• Why use an extension of your browser when you can have the super-fast TweetDeck running natively (well, under AIR) in your Operating System of choice?
• Why visit docs.google.com when you can have OpenOffice (or any number of other free office applications) running natively in your operating system of choice--saving to your DropBox folder, of course (for which you have the native client installed and never visit www.dropbox.com)?
• Why use a web chatting service when you can have KVIrc/mIRC/IceChat/whatever your favourite IRC client is, and chat on IRC servers?

The list goes on and on. It even grates me to have to open my browser to write this blog post, except that Linux does not yet have a suitable alternative to Windows Live Writer. This is not what the web was designed for!!

An (native) app for everything, and everything to its own app, I've always said!

Google+ Now Supports Google Apps

But there's no way to migrate back!

A couple months ago, when Google+ was still invite only, I got an invite from one of my colleagues. I signed up, using my Google Apps account at communicate.za.net.

A few weeks later, Google Apps "upgraded" their accounts, and we were all forced to migrate to the new account system, which would allegedly give us access to a wider range of Google's products. But Google+ wasn't available for Google Apps anymore.

I was told to create a normal Google Account (which I did, an account at gmail.com), and that I could migrate my Google+ profile from my communicate account to my gmail one. I did so. Last week, I get an e-mail from Google+, saying that Google Apps is now supported again.

But dash-nabbit, I cannot seem to find any way of migrating my Google+ data back from my gmail account to my communicate one!

Oh well, I never used Google+ much anyway. I guess I'll just delete my Google+ profile from my gmail account, and recreate it from my communicate one.

Phishermen are Stoopid

I was cleaning out my spam folder in my Gmail yesterday (I do it about once a week). One of the mails I saw as I was scanning through, was a mail from "IRS" with a subject of "Your Tax Return."

I'm not an American, so I didn't click on it. But I could see an American of slightly lower intelligence clicking on the mail to find out what it's all about.

Then I saw another mail (probably sent an hour or two earlier), from "Internal Revenue Service" with a subject of "Your Tax Return."

Hmm.... I've seen this before in my spam folder with mails trying to get me to confirm my banking details and such (by the way, in case you didn't know, you should never ever click on any links in any such e-mail!). I've often thought that phishing mails might have more success if they didn't send the exact same e-mail three different times on the same day, from three different "From" display names.

2011 South African ISP of the Year

MyBroadband just announced a poll to decide the 2011 South African Internet Service Provider of the year. The nominees are: Afrihost, Axxess, MWEB, Openweb and Web Africa.

If you are with any of these ISPs (or would like to be with any of these ISPs), then I would urge you to go here and vote. You do need an account to vote, but it's really easy (and free) to create one. MyBroadband don't ever send spam, and there are other cool incentives to keeping an account there.

My vote went to Afrihost. I guess I'm really biased, because the only other one of those ISPs I've ever belonged to was MWEB, and that was back when I was still on dial-up! Still, I have been thoroughly satisfied with Afrihost for the two years or so that I've been with them. I can't remember a time when they've experienced any downtime. I've had to deal with their call centre maybe three times (via e-mail), and each time--even over a weekend--my query was resolved in an absolute minimum of time! Plus, their CEO, Gian Visser (Follow him on Twitter here) is a great guy! He always responds to his mentions, and occasionally throws out Twitter competitions where you can win great prizes. He's always engaging with his followers.

I hope I've convinced South African ADSL users to go and vote, and I hope that I've given you some idea of who to vote for if you haven't already!

My, but people can BITCH!

I got a newsletter from Hellopeter.com yesterday. It was the first newsletter I'd received from them in a long time. Anyway, they said that they now had a Twitter account (@Hellopetercom). I thought "what the hell?" and decided to follow them...

Wow. Just... wow! They tweet every single report made on their site, as its made. Not only is this uber information-overload, it is really eye-opening. Since yesterday I've lost count of the number of reports that have come through my TweetDeck--and I think I've seen two compliments! People drone on about the most mundane, pointless things. I've used Hellopeter myself a few times to complain, I must admit, but only as a last resort. And I've logged a few compliments in my time as well. I understand it's human nature to complain, but why do people find it so difficult to say something nice every once in awhile? Obviously, any company's stats on Hellopeter will be heavily skewed, because of this phenomenon.

Honestly, I think they need to enforce some kind of ratio, where you have to write at least one compliment for five complaints or something. But then, the site will never get used.

Then of course, there's the exhorbitant fee that Hellopeter charges companies to allow them to respond to those complaints. Don't even get me started on that!

Mike's Kitchen Alberton: Nice try, guys!

My wife and I bought a Wicount for R115 off a meal at Mikes Kitchen in Alberton. It had been about three years since we'd last been. Our last visit had been really terrible, so we decided to give it a go again. Growing up, I had very fond memories of Mike's Kitchen because we used to go there every year without fail for my birthday. So, I really wanted it to go well. But it was not to be.

The Wicount said that booking was essential, so I phoned and booked. I spoke to Jean on the phone, and he sounded like a very nice man. We arrived about five minutes late, announced ourselves and were escorted to a quaint table in the smoking section. We were then greeted by a very nice lady (whose name I cannot remember), who was to be our waitress for the afternoon. She took our drinks orders and handed us two massive booklets: magazines which doubled as menus. The menu was very complete with lots of different options.

After pouring over the menus for some time, we ordered one "Mozzarella Mushrooms" to share. These are black mushrooms covered in creamed spinach topped with melted mozzarella cheese and bacon bits. When they arrived, they were brought by a lady who was not our waitress. She had not been informed that we wanted them "to share," and so she hadn't brought an extra plate. No matter; we used the side plate that our cutlery came on and shared them out.

First of all, the spinach wasn't creamed. Secondly, instead of bacon bits as the menu had promised, there were only a few strips of streaky bacon. Still, they were quite nice, and I was surprised by the quantity of food. I felt that they could easily have served as a light to medium meal for one person!

For the main course, we picked out crumbed pork chops, served with mashed potato and gravy. I love mashed potato, and I love pork chops! I'd never had them crumbed before, so I thought it would be a nice change. When we ordered, we were each asked the standard question: "Chips, rice, baked potato or mash?"
This was a bit strange, because the menu had stipulated that they came with mash and gravy. But it didn't really bother my wife; she doesn't like mash as a rule, and only ordered them because also wanted to try the crumbed pork chops. We figured that they'd had other people in the same position, which is why they'd started offering the dish with a choice of sides instead. I ordered my mash and gravy, while my wife ordered chips. The meal took a while to arrive, but it was pork, after all.

I found the mash to be very good indeed! And I had some of my wife's chips, which weren't spectacular, but really not bad for oven bakes. It was also a lot of food! I was expecting one or two small chops. What we got were four massive hunks of meat on bones. But it was far too dry! I don't know if it's just because I'd never had crumbed pork chops, but I found myself longing for dripping, juicy, fatty meat. Oh well, it was pork, after all, and pork is notoriously dry. We each ended up each taking two chops home with us.

We ordered coffee and tea to finish off, and started chatting. We kept commenting to each other that, while we couldn't find anything specifically wrong with the place, we just weren't able to relax. Maybe it was the slightly formal upright dining chairs that we couldn't slouch down in. Maybe it was the slatted wooden place mats. We just couldn't put our finger on it.... And then, the unthinkable happened!

By that time, we were pretty much alone in the smoking section. There were a few people in the lounge on the balcony, smoking and drinking and laughing. A few waiters came in. I heard one say to the other "Jean said that all the chairs need to come out of the smoking section! No, I don't know why. Just do it!"
While they were running amok all around us, frantically trying to remove chairs, we were thinking to ourselves, "Couldn't they wait until their patrons had left?"
Then a woman came in, quite aggitated: "Excuse me!" she yelled, trying to get one of the waiter's attention, "Could we please get some service?"
One of the waiters spun around and she led him away as he asked, "Sure! Where are you guys sitting?"
My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief.

The bill came. We worked out the tip on the total amount based on the total bill, even though it had been discounted by R115 by the Wicount, and wrote the tip and total on the slip. We wish we hadn't done that. We sat for a good five minutes with the bill open on the table and the amount written on it, waiting for our waitress to come and process my card. Eventually we decided that we'd best go to the front to pay. We got up and walked to the reception desk (where we could see that they did have portable card machines, so there was no excuse for our waitress to not have come to us to receive our payment). There was nobody there. We waited and waited, and we could've easily walked out without paying. Finally our waitress appeared, but she said that her hands were full, so she couldn't process our payment, and asked if another waiter who was standing there would do it. He put my card through the machine, and handed it to me without a word, so I could punch in my pin. All the while, he was chatting away to the other waitress.

When we left, there were no smiles, no "Thank you for coming, have a nice day!" Nothing. It was as if they were happy to be rid of us.

Nice try, guys, but never again.