«a href="link to the article" rel="nofollow"»This article is wrong.«/a»

You're robbing the article of gravity, and your contribution to the success metric of the site (almost always number of clicks) is going to be tempered by the fact that whoever is doing analysis will see that they are getting traffic from a link that explains why they are wrong, and does not give their article any credence. That rel="nofollow" basically says "I'm sending you here but not because it is good."

First up, screen resolution. Over 85% of people accessing my site did so at a resolution at or exceeding a width of 1280px. That's a change from even a year ago, when only about 65% of people ran at that resolution. It's nice to see upgrades happening.

Next, browsers. IE comes in rocking about 15% of total hits, which made me go SQUEEEEEE. That's an awesome number to see, and even better: IE6 usage at 0.87%.

Operating System was interesting - the overwhelming majority of people were using Windows (80%+) with Mac a "close" second at a little north of 15%. The other 4% was split roughly between linux and android. Of interest amongst Windows users, though, was the almost even split between XP and 7 (41% to 38%) with Vista a distant third.

Location was perhaps the most interesting thing for me, with nearly 40% of all traffic coming from the USA. Canada was a close second, and then the UK. From there, the list gets very interesting: India, Brazil, Phillipines, Russia, Australia, Malaysia, UAE.

Specific content that was accessed: mostly photos (about 80% of traffic was for photos).

So, I guess I'm going to aim at doing the following:

• More future-facing (HTML5) website. Most users can handle it
• More expansive design - I'll aim for 1280 wide but degrade nicely.
• Better mobile version - some people are looking from mobile, should accommodate them.
• More photos! I haven't touched my camera since my most recent familial addition. I should take more photos.

There, I said it. I put it out there. The Leafs, they are my team. My jersey is a blue one. Every year, I hold on to the faint glimmer of hope that my team will make it into the playoffs. Not that they'll win; just that they'll get into the playoffs. That's life as a Leafs fan.

However, they're not my actual favourite team. Like most everyone else in the Leafs nation, I am mildly ashamed to say "I'm a Leafs fan," especially during playoffs. Most of the time, I seriously dislike how they're coached, managed and dealt with. Ron Wilson and Brian Burke are two of my least favourite hockey personages. Overall, my fandom is proximal and is also a result of marriage; I was a Leafs fan before I got married, but my wife's family is a Leafs Family. I felt capitalization and boldness were both required there.

There are two other teams that I cheer for. My proximal fandom extends to Vancouver Canucks, as Vancouver's the only other place I've lived. The Canucks have some of my favourite players, including my favourite line in hockey: Sedin, Sedin, and any other guy. I'm also a big Luongo fan, mostly because he always looks so surprised that he's a hockey player during interviews. The second team is probably not a surprise if you have read the title of this post: it's San Jose. Thornton, Marleau and Setoguchi are amazing to watch, and Niemi does everything he can to keep pucks out of his net. Moreover, San Jose is a tech town, supported by tech companies; what's not to love?

This series is probably the pinnacle of the playoffs for me; I don't really care about the other matchup. I don't like how Boston plays (booooooooring), and Tampa Bay just seems like they shouldn't have a team. It's all about the Western Conference Final, and if the first two periods of this game mean anything, then it's going to be an exciting matchup.

I do remember taking a picture similar a while back. While it was similar, you are right that it might not have been the same one. Sorry about that. I'll try to dig up my picture for conformation.

Five minutes later, I received this:

I have found the picture on my old computer. While it is extremely similar, there are not any trees at the bottom and there are less clouds.

I do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, but accidents do occur sometimes.

Interesting way things turned out.

For all you crazy kids out there, I have one small piece of advice: it is better to hold your tongue and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. When you think you have found copyright infringement on things that you own, double check to make sure that the person in question has actually infringed on your intellectual property before accusing them of thieving and lying. It is good to check your facts so you don't end up looking truly foolish.

And Mr. Birchett, if you are reading this, there are no hard feelings on my end of things.

I believe we have been in contact before. My picture, "Sunny Skies" is still up on your website. I would appreciate this being taken down, or at least some credit given. The reason I am ticked off about this is because that everyone on your comments page thinks that you took it, when we both know that is a lie. If this is not taken down within the month, further action will be taken.

Thanks,
Trevor Birchett

There are a few things wrong with this email.

1. I took this picture. I still have the camera somewhere, and I definitely have the original. I'm anal about pictures - I never delete them.
2. I have never heard from Mr. Birchett before. Sounds scammy to me.
3. I hate vague threats about copyright infringement, especially when there's no infringement.

I hastily penned a response, and just as hastily deleted it. It takes a bit of effort, but it doesn't hurt anyone to be polite, right? Here is my response:

Hello Mr Birchett,

We have not been in contact before; this is the first I've heard from you.

Unfortunately, I think there is some kind of confusion. While you may have a similar picture, Sunny Skies is one of mine; I still have the original and the camera that it was taken on, and the memory card that it was originally written to. I take false allegations about copyright infringement very seriously, and I do not appreciate being called a liar.

If you wish to pursue this matter further, please note that I will be making all contact between us public on my blog. I will take further contact to mean that you agree to my publishing of emails, letters, or any other form of communication.

Sincerely,

Andrew Phoenix

I hope that stays within the bounds of civility. I was pretty angry when first reading; getting a take down notice regarding a photo that I took is aggravating, and it is even more so because this is one of my most pirated photos. It is used without attribution a lot - TinEye highlights just how much.

I guess it is time to wait and see what happens.

Jenn's New Piano website

Probably the things that are most of interest to highlight: I used some free icon packs, which I will be attributing in the next version of this website, which I found via Smashing Magazine. I found the repeating background image using AVA7 Patterns which I will also be attributing (they also do not require attribution, but I like attribution when it makes sense). I've got a contact form ready to go using Jquery Contactable but I was trying not to do any PHP for this site, so I haven't actually made it happen yet. I guess I could replace the PHP with something else. For the font in the header, I use a Google Web Font, which is awesome.

The breakdown on time spent is as follows:

• Write the html and content. ~10 min
• Come up with design. ~15min
• Find icons / fonts / resources. ~10 min
• Write the css. ~5 min

Altogether, I'm happy with how this microsite turned out

I was recently working on a problem for Project Euler that starts off like so:

An irrational decimal fraction is created by concatenating the positive integers:

0.123456789101112131415161718192021...

The constructed number is made in such a way that you count from n to infinity, and add whichever number you are on to the decimal expansion. This fraction has several interesting properties. It is normally distributed, but not random. It is a transcendental number, like pi or e. It can be constructed in other bases (2, 3, 16) and holds the same properties in those bases. While each of these is mindboggling enough (if you think on them) the thing that drove me to title my post in this way is pretty simple: since this string of numbers contains within it's infinitude every single number that could ever be, and because anything that we have transcribed or copyrighted can be expressed as a sequence of numbers, then every single copyrighted piece of information in the world is merely a subsection of this string of numbers.

As an example, let's look at something pretty safe. Here's the first paragraph of the preamble of the GPL:

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

Using a binary encoder, we can see that this text is represented in binary as:

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000111 01001110 01010101 00100000 01000111 01100101 01101110 01100101 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100000 01010000 01110101 01100010 01101100 01101001 01100011 00100000 01001100 01101001 01100011 01100101 01101110 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00101100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110000 01111001 01101100 01100101 01100110 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100011 01100101 01101110 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110011 01101111 01100110 01110100 01110111 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101111 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100100 01110011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 01110011 00101110

Since this is just a number, it will occur quite naturally somewhere within the string of this constructed decimal. What's even better is it will occur an infinite amount of times. This is just a loose and fast example - you could convert this encoding to decimal, and see it again, also an infinite amount of times.

So, if you write a function to express this number, you are, in effect, breaking every restrictive copyright an infinite amount of times. Really, just thinking about this number probably makes a lot of companies gnash their teeth.

By the way, I was not the first to find this or think it interesting. By doing a bit of research, I found out that this number was something called the Champernowne constant.

Edit: Also a note: I said "Almost Every Copyright" in my title, because I am neither a Copyright Lawyer or Mathematician.

So I emailed the operations department for the city. Within what I would call "one business hour" (I sent the email one evening, and got it returned the next morning by 8 am), I got an email back telling me that they'd read my email and sent it on to the specific person for whom this was pertinent. I was pleasantly surprised that they'd made the effort to get back to me so quickly.

About an hour and a half later, I got a second, very polite, email addressing my concerns, apologizing, and saying they would take it up with the organizer of the event. I was again pleasantly surprised that they would make the effort to get back in touch so quickly. They addressed each of my concerns, and told me that local access was a priority during events like this. I figured that this was probably the end of my contact with the city over this issue, so I thanked them (because I was 75% satisfied) and forgot about it.

About an hour later, that same person got back to me, telling me that they'd checked up with the organizer of the event, and heard that there had been other complaints similar to mine, and that they would address the issue in a variety of ways before the next event happened. They also again thanked me for my feedback.

I'm so happy to live in the City of Guelph, where a complaint (even a fairly minor one like mine) gets heard and addressed within a day. What a great city!

View Larger Map

I live on Hamel Avenue. The Walk for the Cure always goes down London Road. And, in case you didn't know, Guelph has been torn apart for Guelph Remastered where the city is (thankfully) doing about 5 years worth of road maintenance and upgrading in 4 months. One of the roads that is currently closed is Westmound Road. If you look at the map, you'll see that if both Westmount and London are closed, I cannot drive anywhere from my house, and this is indeed what happened on Sunday morning. It was not possible for me to legally drive away from my place of residence and get anywhere.

That morning a lot of "What ifs" ran through my head before I tried to lodge a complaint. What if one of my elderly neighbours (or my pregnant wife!) required a trip to the hospital? What if the people on my street wanted to head out for 9am Mass? What if I had a contractor coming in to do work on my home?

I got answers to at least two of these three questions. If you wanted to go to church on Sunday morning, you were out of luck. If you had a contractor coming in that morning to work on something, you were similarly out of luck. There was no detour or workaround to get to my home. I'm thankful that we didn't need to find out what would have happened if a trip to the hospital was required.

Trying to lodge a complaint with the organizers was not particularly productive. Each person that I talked to made me feel as if I were being unreasonable. I admit that this is subjective, but I was made to feel that it was unreasonable to complain about an event to raise money to fight cancer. Then came the rub; one of the gentlemen that I spoke with told me that they had already had to change the course of the event to account for some of the construction. This means that someone looked at the route and reviewed it, and changed the route because of construction but they didn't consider the two streets that were cut off from the rest of Guelph.

Nothing really bad happened. Some of my neighbours had to stay home from church and the work that I'd scheduled to start early in the day started later. Couldn't we move events such as this into some of Guelphs amazingly well maintained parks or through the downtown core? Residential areas don't need to have this kind of event blocking them off from the rest of the city. As frustrating as it was for me, it must have been even more frustrating for those who lived on London and couldn't even leave their driveways. 10 minutes of playing with Google Maps and it's easy enough to devise a route that brings people through the downtown core instead of through residential areas.

View Larger Map

Twitter and YouTube were created so that @OldSpice on a horse man would have a place, nay, a kingdom. It's his internet, I just live in it.

In all seriousness, I have never seen an ad campaign as effective as this one. I now have 3 bars of Denali at home. Two of them are open, so I can do both sides at once.