Asymptomatic

I put my preliminary business card design online as the home page for owenw.com. See what you think.

Over the past couple months, and particularly over the last two days, it has become interesting to me what kinds of visitors I am getting to the site and where they’re coming from. There are a few stats packages, and I’ve been working out their benefits and flaws.

I was able to jump on the Google Analytics train before they closed their doors. I installed the required script in the necessary places and waited for stats to roll in. And I waited. And I waited.

Eventually they had enough data to play with (do I not even register in the Google Analytics world as anything but a blip?) and they started showing me some statistics. But. How do you use this thing? Even being a former Urchin 5.0 user, I was still somewhat confused by the interface. Suffice to say, I never really figured it out, and I started to suspect that using Analytics was affecting my AdSense adversely (though I can offer no evidence that this is anything but paranoia), so I simply removed the tags.

Isn’t there something that you can just push a button and get the stats you need? And exactly what stats do you need?

We pack lunches for Abby at school every weekday. Sure, she doesn’t eat a whole lot, but she does love her milk. She gets disappointed when the beverage in her lunch is not milk, complaining when we have to use a juice box.

We usually pack a personal-sized container of Parmalat in her lunch. It’s great because it doesn’t require refrigeration when stored. The only problem with Parmalat is the cost.

Berta was telling me after her recent shopping trip that it would be cheaper to go through the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru in the morning and buy a small carton of refrigeration-required milk than it is to buy the Parmalat. I don’t doubt it. The Parmalat is around $2.67 for three boxes, and it seems that the Chick-Fil-A milk is around $.60 each. Being that Chick-Fil-A is on the route to Abby’s school, it woudn’t be much of a detour, either.

I was thinking about this the other day while dropping Abby off at school with her Parmalat milk box, when I noticed a weird sign in the nearby open lot. The sign read, “Swiss Farm Stores”…

Here’s an interesting story about what John Lasseter did when he toured his new digs

Once again it’s time for… Is it just me? The gameshow where I complain about some issue that everyone deals with, and you all weigh in with your opinion on the matter.

This episode’s topic: Haircuts.

I know that there are many differences between the male and female hair treatments. Most men I’ve met would rather find the cheapest barber they can (“Uncle Lou only charged me $3 – Sure, he’s nearly blind and only has the use of one arm, but… cheap!”) and women seem to head for the more frilly places (“I was going to drive home right after my hair appointment, but I had too many of their free mimosas, so I went shopping instead”). This is a hasty generalization that I’m sure will earn me no respect for having written it.

Nonetheless, I must admit to a certain affinity to a $30 salon hair-do. As I was explaining to Berta, if you find the right stylist, there’s definitely something to the scalp kneading that occurs during the shampooing phase. It nearly triggers that blissful reaction in me that you see with some dogs when you scratch them in just the right spot. Moving on…

The reason I bring up this whole hair issue is because I had mine mostly chopped off yesterday. And during the process, as usual, the stylist wanted to know how I wanted my hair done. Allow me to pose this question to the guys in the audience: Do you really know what to say to answer this question?