[via giz]

Akamai just published their 3Q09 state of the internet report, and it’s interesting reading with lots of stats. A couple stands out. Globally unique IPs grew by 17% yoy, but China alone grew by 30%. Yep, my opinion that China is a self-sufficient single market still stands.



The other stat is the average broadband connection speed. Growing in the technologically advanced countries like Korea, Japan and in Scandinavia. But decreased in the US. Another sign of decline that unfortunately no one seems to be surprised about.

OMG, why has it taken me so long to find it. I so have to start doing this!! via bb, over at quantified self, Alexandra Carmichael explains how she keeps a record of 40 different things in her life every day, and what she’s learned about herself from studying the data.

I track these things about my health and personal patterns every day:

- sleep (bed time, wake time, sleep quality, naps)
- morning weight
- daily caloric intake (each meal, total calculated at end of day)
- mealtimes

• mood (average of 3 positive and 3 negative factors on 0-5 scale)
  
• day of menstrual cycle
  
• sex (quantity, quality)
  

• exercise (duration, type)
  
  

• supplements I take (time, dosage)
  

• treatments for vulvodynia (a chronic pain condition)
  
• pain of administering the vulvodynia treatment I take (0-5)
  
• vulvodynia-related pain (0-5)
  

• headache,nausea (0-5)
  
  

• time spent working, time with kids
  

• number of nursings and night wakings (I’m a mom)
  
• weather
  
• unusual events (text)
  
  

The mood factors I measure every day are:
1. Happiness
2. Irritability
3. Calmness
4. Sadness
5. Feeling beautiful / self-love
6. Feeling fat / ate too much

She used google spreadsheets initially, and this came out of a project of setting up cure together, a platform for open source health research.

I don’t think it’s difficult to set up a spreadsheet for this, and in a way I’m kinda sorta tracking some stuff in different places. I can see myself tracking things like:

• time I wake up, leave for work, arrive at work, arrive back home
• meal times and what i ate
• calorie intake and expenditure (something that daily plate does well)
• exercise — daily plate again, plus I now record my runs on both nike plus and twitter
• weight
• blog posts made
• google reader posts read
• books read
• words written
• IM convos
• emails read and answered (home and work)
• number of facebook requests received

Alexandra analysed her data by looking at correlation between moods and certain activities like exercise. I can’t quite see myself tracking moods, cos it’ll be “meh” almost all the time. My motivation for tracking will be for the sake of getting data and putting them into pretty graphs.

And no, I won’t be tracking
- sex (quantity, quality)

I’m still worried about bandwidth. I learnt from terra that her domain host gives tons of bandwidth, and when I checked, even the economy plan offers 250GB. I’m jealous now. Unfortunately I’m with icdsoft for another 1.5yrs, and they’ve been good to me.

It’s the 10th already, and looks like I’m under control. 1.36GB, so projecting to the end of the month, I’ll be at around 4GB. That’s more than usual but yeah, it’s okay. For now. I’m not seeing the wild spike from last month. I don’t think I was hacked or anything, it was probably the large number of graphics and movies on this page.

I changed the # of days shown on the main page from 60 to 30 and it loads so much quicker now. This should help too.

I planned this website to be a small scale personal project. I didn’t sign up for an expensive hosting plan and I’ve always thought that I have more than sufficient for my needs. 500MB storage and 7GB transfers a month seemed to be numbers I’d never reach.

I’ve had this since September 2003 now, and I’ve managed to keep it small scale. Imagine looking at the site stats today — 120MB used, 380MB remaining. But the shocker — 3.4GB transfer, 3.6 remaining. My usual bandwith hardly get over the 1GB mark. Look at the red graph at the bottom right.

When did I start using almost half my bandwidth????? No. of visitors is as low as before, 100ish a day. What happened to the bandwidth usage? It must be the images and movies I’ve been posting because number of visitors and pages haven’t changed significantly.

Stats are in better control now, after making stats password protected and adding the referer controls in htaccess. Only one suspect referer source this month. Most other referers are from kb, plus a few from the 404 webring, now that one’s FUN.

And I’m thinking this should go in shiny parts. Hmmm.

I was a bad student today, doing something else during training. Our PC training room has 12 desks and I was sitting at the last row, while the others listened during the training. Got a bit bored and distracted so I was looking at website stats — I’m getting more hits, over 200 some days. Still puzzled at the hits from obviously spam sites, the poker, viagra and annoying other sites that show up on the log, I think it’s MT Blacklist doing me a fantastic favor. Added more to my blacklist, I hate these spammers.

Checked email after lunch, had to use webmail cos we don’t have enough machines, but that’s fine.

Went to Lau Pa Sat for satay with my colleagues. One has her husband and young boy with her for visit, it was a nice dinner. Had a couple of mugs of beer, it’s a while since I’ve had beer, I now have a headache. I was right to cut it out.

I'm checking stats everyday, both on the website and my Common Areas hits. Website is averaging around 70-80 hits a day, according to awstats, but that's again probably me and the CA avatar. So it's a bit overstated to say I have more visitors. CA has reached 9,300+ since first post, but if I don't update within about 3 days it stagnates.

I'm still my only subscriber on bloglines. Imagine people like Dave Shea getting 2,500+ subscribers and even antipixel has a few hundred, I'll be happy if one day I manage 10.

Now I see people's obsession on hit counters and the like. Though I've always said that I don't want to be know and want this space to be quiet, I do wish more people can come visit this little garden occasionally and enjoy a little quiet thoughts here.

Depending on which site stats I look at, the website had either 100 or 190 visitors on 14 Dec, that's the most it's ever had. Now whether or not these visitors include search engines, spiders, links to my public images (eg the nano winner jpg I use as avatar), I don't know. I'm thinking the 100 figure is for human visitors cos that's what awstats claim they can do, and the 190 from Webalizer includes bots and non-humans.

A few of those "visitors" is me of course, cos highest on the list of external links in is the MT login, followed by the home page and I think I'm the only person who uses the homepage.

But, yay! I've had 60 clicks from Miss Elizabeth's LJ already (thanks Miss E!). Wow, talk about a being shoved into the spotlight.

Do I want these visitors? I dunno. Time will tell. I just want to reiterate what I've said in the faq that no, I don't want to tell people where I live or whether I'm a teenager or adult or even if I'm a real person at all.

Most people just want to be themselves and enjoy the internet experience in the privacy of their home or school or office, but there're too many unscrupulous sorts out there who spoil everyone's fun. I remember when I first set up my other websites on wordpress, I got hit by the stupid poker guy comment spam almost immediately and had to quickly learn how to do preventative measures. It was a good learning experience but I'm bitter that the reason I had to learn wasn't because I wanted to, it's because some jerk paid money to another jerk to waste people's time and energy.

Anyway to those of you new here, which means everyone reading except the one person who reads this weblog regularly, welcome. This is my small private garden, but if you are able to find a little enjoyment here, then I'm glad.

Remember though, this is a quiet space for quiet thoughts only. :)