About the Blog

Ten years ago today, I wrote my first post on this site:

Today’s Weather in Tokyo: hot and humid. (It is summer after all!)

Thus began a decade of online diary entries, essays, rants, whinges, and celebrations. I am so very glad that I created a record of so much of my life.

You've received 2,999 entries including 237 recipes, 27 audio recordings, 37 tutorials, a 3-year series on creativity, a one-year series of forty word portraits, and hundreds upon hundreds of other bits and bobs in the ever-changing landscape of my existence.

From my perspective, some of the best parts are unwritten: all the thoughts rattling in my head, the emotions I did not pour onto the page, the associated memories of times and places described. I can relive them any time I read through the mediatinker archives. You know a lot about me, but those unwritten memories layered over the entries are my own special secrets.

Now let me mark this anniversary entry by sharing one little interior vignette with you. At the time of the very first entry, I sat on the floor facing the air conditioner in the upstairs back room of the Marble House in Sendagi. My pasty white legs were glued with sweat to the scratchy tatami and I had a glass of water at hand. The sun beat down on the veranda; the metal steps to the playharbour were too hot to climb. I sat on the floor because my computer was propped up on a box; I had no desk then. I felt sticky and cranky and quite uncertain that Blogger was going to work for me. I wondered if blogs might just be a fad that everyone was going through and maybe I'd be better off keeping up my mailing list and regular website. But I wrote the first entry anyway, laughing to myself that someday I'd regret having written something so banal for the premiere entry to my new website.

And that's the story behind the first post. I'll bet you didn't realise one dull sentence could hold so much information. If you don't keep a journal of some sort, I hope this encourages you to do so because even the mundane can trigger special memories to the author.

Lots of things have changed since 2000: the technology, my passions, my goals and certainly my hair color. And as it turns out, some things haven't changed. It's hot and humid ten years later; I'm still sticky, pasty white, and have water at hand. And I'm still a little cranky.

"Hi, Kristen. Nice to see you here again."

With that warm welcome from myself, I return to a life of regular weblog updates.

I've fallen out of the habit of sitting down and writing about my life and surroundings. I've still observed the world around me, but only long enough to upload a keitai snap to my Flickr account. This year, I will make time to reflect more thoroughly, or at least to dash off a quick missive every day.

Although it is a New Year's Resolution of a sort, I hope to keep this one without too much trouble.

To celebrate my 40th year, I've joined in Dan's x365 project. Today and for the next 364 days, I'll be writing 40 words about someone I know. There's a link in the sidebar to 40 x 365, so you can go visit whenever you like. You never know when you might turn up there...

Today's entry is, of course, my mother.

Cheers to Tod and a big thanks to MJ for today's upgrade to the most current version of Movable Type, the weblog software that underlies this site and eight others.

Though I believe that you won't see anything different from this vantage point, under the hood we have lots of new bits to play with--including the ability to automatically junk comment spam. So I hope that from here forward you'll stumble into fewer comments touting the latest trends in alchemical wonders and the world's oldest profession.

If you do have any trouble with the site, or discover an oddity, please mail me.

This will be terribly dull for most of you, but Tod needs to prune the site's access logs, and I'd like to have some record of the statistics for mediatinker. So forgive me, but here's a lot of boring detail.

2002 (jun-dec): 12,223 visitors (19,912 visits)
2003 (jan-dec): 100,650 visitors (177,214 visits)
2004 (jan-dec): 244,393 visitors (430,647 visits)
2005 (jan-date): 200,929 visitors (462,593 visits)

The most popular pages on the site are:

Gingerbread CPU 137,216 views
Illustrated MT Templates 65,651
Thai Fisherman's Pants 24,389
History of Zero 20,209

The most popular videos are:

Hello Tokyo Intro 1,555 views
Hello Tokyo Title Sequence 1,516
Let's Make Umeshu 796

Excruciating monthly detail below:

Is it appropriate to apologize to an unknown, unseen, and (frankly) only assumed, audience for my recent lack of daily posts? I'm not sure. And yet I feel I ought to.

So I'm sorry. I just haven't felt like writing much. Recipe Thursdays and Creative Perspectives have taken a hit. When's the last time I posted more than three days running? It feels like weeks. After my existential meltdown, I had not much to say. 130 hours of video editing in less that two weeks, topped by my father's sudden illness, kept me distracted from the observations of daily life.

But I leave for the States tomorrow and I am sure that I will have plenty of culture shock to write about. Stay tuned. I'll try to post recipes, too. American food...

It's the 3rd Wednesday of the month and the Japan Bloggers meetup. Always fun to catch up with everyone, even though we read one another's weblogs. `A big crowd tonight but people are starting to pack up and leave to make their trains home. It's an early night in Tokyo, as usual.

I'm trying my first ever bluetooth file transfer with Andy even as I write this. I will have some nice jazz for my collection in just a few minutes.

I brought my iSight, but nobody else has theirs, so we can't videoconference around the table. Maybe next month...

It's the time of year I feel compelled to tidy my computer world. I really ought to be scrubbing the apartment, but my online house is pretty scruffy.

One big project: I'm simplifying the website. Features have been removed, slashed away like old boots off a fishing line. I've instituted a monochromatic color scheme. Everything's pared down. I'm working towards XHTML compliance.

For the next couple of days I will continue tweaking the layout, and more importantly the content, to get things where I want them. In the meantime, pardon the stray pages and any oddities you might discover.

(P.S. If you are still using Internet Explorer, may I suggest you try Firefox instead? It's free, easy to use, a breeze to switch to, and won't make my nice website look all bizarre.)

Last week's Gingerbread CPU post was noticed by popgadget, then engadget then Boing Boing. It's funny how these things get passed around. I even made the Daypop Top 40:

Then it got translated by a number of non-English website in Japan, Iceland, Hungary and Sweden. The number of visits increased to more than 5 times my usual daily rate. I was having a lot of fun looking at my stats, though a bit disappointed that I wasn't being recognized for something I'd done myself. Such is the trouble with reporting on things.

By Day 3, [H]ard|OCP and Blue's News picked it up and traffic went up further. I was seeing more than 10 times my usual traffic.

On December 23rd, five days into this increase in popularity, Slashdot noticed what was going on. Tod & I had just returned from stocking up on cookie-making ingredients. While the butter was softening, I checked my mail to discover a comment from the blog: "Haha! You're getting Slashdotted!"

Hahahah! Wow!

Oh, hell! This was going to be trouble. We host my website on a server here at home.

Our server was doing OK. Tod's built a robust machine—it was found in the trash and sits at the end of a home-use 8 megabit DSL line. At the time of the slashdotting, the server had been up for 54 days continuously and it had no trouble keeping up on the CPU and memory side of things.

But our bandwidth was another story entirely. Pegged for a little while, then so flooded it was dropping packets or something because traffic was reduced to about a third of our usual 1.5 megabit upstream pipe. Uh-oh.

Tod used our little remaining bandwidth to chat with his friends on IRC's perl channel.

"Holy shit, my home webserver is slashdotted!" he wrote.
"Why?"
"EXPLAIN"
"Devin, what’s the URL?" came the instant, insistent, and not entirely useful replies.

But on a more helpful note, Mugwump saved the day by mirroring the gingerbread image for us. Thank you very much, you kind stranger from New Zealand and your council-sponsored fibre optic LAN.

About 20 minutes later, Mugwump asked if we could split the mirroring between his server and another one. It was a lot more than he expected--about 10 requests/second. So I tinkered the post and the header on my website and it make a huge difference for everyone.

Things calmed down quickly after we moved the images offsite and it wasn't long before I was able to surf for cookie recipes even while we were being slashdotted.

At about 6:30 pm, Jim called. He'd just seen it; did we know we were slashdotted? It's nice to have friend who are paying attention. He had a brilliant suggestion--I video’d a bit of the action.

The Slashdot Effect 1'06" 1.8 MB MP4

"You're famous now, what will it be like when America wakes up in 6 hours?" cautioned MoSH, one of Tod's colleagues in Switzerland. I bit my nails a bit.

Sure enough, after dinner as we started baking the cookies we'd mixed up, traffic started to increase. America was waking up. It was 11:30 pm in Tokyo. I expected a long night of watching and waiting.

"I have never seen an access logfile scroll so fast," Tod declared. "…in all my years staring at log files, which is a lot."

We were back up to 10 requests/second. The bandwidth was getting strained again. The traffic was only getting heavier. The east coast of the US was awake. And Chicago. But we seemed to ride the crest of it and by the time we woke up the next morning, things had settled down and the peak was over.

We're so lucky we don't pay by bandwidth used.

Thanks the the insistent and relentless behavior of comment spammers, I have turned off commenting on all entries older than 21 days.

I wish JayAllen (or someone) had made MT Blacklist work with mod_perl, but nevermind. My solution isn't optimal but at least I won't be deleting a score or more of raunchy and irritating comments every day.

So my apologies to those who want to comment on my old writing. Take your complaints to the Blog Spammers Union.

I've turned my weekly columns into XML/RSS feeds, so now you can read just the Recipe Thursday or Creative Perspectives entries, without the rest of the daily chatter. Or get it all together as always. The choice is yours.

Recipe Thursdays: https://mt.mediatinker.com/blog/recipe.rdf
Creative Perspectives: https://mt.mediatinker.com/blog/creative.rdf
Mediatinker: https://mt.mediatinker.com/blog/index.rdf

Q & A
Who are you?
I'm a kindergartner who was excited to learn that she'd be a grown up in the new millennium.

Why do you live in Japan?
It was a six-month job assignment back in 1998. Japan suits me so well that I haven't left yet and don't intend to.

Why do you have a weblog?
I use my weblog to entertain (and sometimes enlighten) friends and strangers. It also anchors me to my computer. I started out with a regular website (1994) and a mailing list (1998). When weblog software reached my radar in 2000, I converted.

You come across as such a know-it-all sometimes...
I used to be a know-it-all but now Google knows more than I do. Fortunately, I'm only one search away from knowing it all again. Don't ask me for facts when I'm not at my computer.

What do you do?
I make videos. I write stuff. I do web things from time to time. I'm for hire, so please take a look at my resume and portfolio, then contact me if you're interested.

What else do you do?
When I drag myself away from the virtual world, I am usually swimming, cooking, taking long walks, scratching in notebooks, or reading. I also run around doing stupid things with my very smart friends.

What do you like?
Vanilla. Strong coffee. Black. Good words. Water. The sound of wind through pines. The night sky. And Tod--I like him very much.

Can you recommend what to see in Tokyo?
Yes, I can. Check out the Hello Tokyo page. Buy a copy of my DVD. Please.

Can I send you an e-mail?
Of course, but no guarantee of a reply. kristen@mediatinker.com

About Mediatinker
It's been more than ten years since I helped to found Telerama, one of the first public ISPs in the US. I answered phones, offered tech support, wrote documentation, taught online classes (using IRC and Screen!) and was general dogsbody to the tech boys. Good times with lots to learn--in those days, the Net was new to almost everyone. But being excluded from the hard-core tech back then, I've never considered myself much of a geek.

In the mid-nineties, I was working for a university, teaching faculty and administrators how to use e-mail, ftp and telnet with lots of time devoted to writing how-to manuals and tip sheets. Eventually, I became university webmaster and launched into developing online instructional materials, video, audio and interactive tutorials.

A three month trip to Japan in 1996 ushered in a new era of international living. In 1998 we moved to Singapore for six months, followed by a move to Tokyo and a short term assignment as Year 2000 Test Center Manager for Perot Systems Japan/UBS Warburg. Going on seven years later, we're still here.

These days, I sit at my desk in Tokyo in front of a Mac G5, a PowerBook G4, and several Unix boxes. My work is more diverse, with several corporate videos under my belt, a year of leading an IT non-profit (DigitalEve Japan), assorted classes and workshops taught, and lots and lots of writing. In addition to the paid work, I've drafted a book which will probably never see the light of day and written a play that I hope to produce someday.

I chose the name 'media tinker' because I can't decide what I am--writer, filmmaker, photographer, web guru, general know-it-all, or empress of everything. I work with media of all types, and maybe not always successfully, so media tinker seemed most fitting. And a bit of self-deprecation is always good to keep the ego in check. (If you know me, you are laughing right now.)

I am not sure how I spaced out so badly, but Thursday and Friday both passed without the vaguest flitter in my mind that I had columns to write. So for those of you anxious about Recipe Thursday and Creative Perspectives, never fear. They will be back on schedule next week.

And in the meantime, I'm going to post twice today because I realise that nowhere in the weblog do I have a bio or summary of the author. Who am I, anyway? So I'll be writing up a little Q&A style "about mediatinker" thing today. Check back later--and feel free to suggest some questions. I'll do with the answers without the aid of my peanut gallery (and yes, UltraBob, I do mean you. ;-)

Heading down the stairs towards the Hanzomon line at Shibuya, I hear a voice call "Excuse me?" and I turn.

"Are you, uh, Kristine?" asks a young man with short dark hair.

"Kristen. Yes, that's me," I reply, trying to place this stranger in my cast of characters...I run through all the faces I recall, but no match.

"I recognised you from your weblog."

"Really? Freaky!! Wow."

I am nothing if not utterly cool and collected with a huge vocabulary at my disposal when greeted unexpectedly by fans.

Ben, visiting from Gifu-ken, and his friend Yuki were charming and well-spoken. They brightened an already good day. I hope they enjoyed their evening out.

I wonder if other people recognise me from my weblog but don't shout out. Have you ever seen me on the street and not said hello?

"All junk mail?" I asked as Tod pulled the papers from our box.

"The library? Huh. Oh wait, it's the National Diet Library...this is Japan's Library of Congress...Oh! It's my ISSN!" I jumped up and down.

A few months ago, I applied to the Japanese registry for an International Standard Serial Number for mediatinker. I didn't hear back from them, so I wrote again a couple weeks back. They'd had a question about my application, which I answered and now I am the proud publisher of an internationally recognised serial.

Here is ISSN 1348-7752 at your service. You can use this number to refer to my weblog or to look it up the the international serial database.

I even have an official EAN-13 barcode for mediatinker (Tod generated it; he loves barcodes). It's not much benefit online, but if you ever wanted to take me to the checkout line with you...

Yesterday, Media Tinker rolled into the 2nd millennium of comments. Sajjad posted the final comment of the first thousand, and Jeremy's beautiful essay on nice frames was number 1,001.

I'm sorry that I don't have prizes to give out...

Enabling comments was a difficult decision. Did I want to open myself and my writing to potentially harsh criticism? Scary! As it turned out, most remarks are friendly and in those rare cases when they aren't, I'm more thick-skinned than I imagined.

Thanks to everyone who leaves comments. I always look forward to reading them. Very soon the comments will be more numerous than the entries.

It's unusual for me to take a day off from blogging but as regular readers may have noticed, I didn't post yesterday and today's entry is quite late.

I had planned to have a Video Saturday entry prepared, but didn't get it done. I'm making quiet progress in the background on the Hello Tokyo project but there's nothing to show yet. Keep your eyes peeled next Saturday when I do hope to have something spectacular for you.

Yesterday I was also in a black temper. I'm not sure why but everything seemed bleak and impossible. It was the sort of self-pitying, self-indulgent mood where I see all humans as the gross organisms that we are--giants bags of water spending their time ingesting, digesting, reproducing--and question the point of my existence. Definitely not a good emotional space to be writing from.

So instead of inflicting any of that bile on you, I broke down to my dearest darling and then went to visit friends in Zushi where my mood lightened and I was (I hope) better company.

And tomorrow I will return to being a better entertainer. But for now, to bed!

This is the photo I didn't submit to the Mirror Project. The one I sent in was added yesterday as number 16,449.

According to their website, "The Mirror Project is a growing community of like-minded individuals who have photographed themselves in all manner of reflective surfaces."

In blunt words, a bunch of narcissists and exhibitionists. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I've been reflecting lately about the nature of people with personal websites. Why do they have them? Why do they choose to reveal themselves (or not)? Why do they keep up the effort?

All I can do is answer for myself.

Why do I have a website? My first website was an experiment in 1994, when the web was new and we were still inventing Telerama. My site incorporated my resume, some recipes, and a reading list. It's morphed into this site over the years, but I've always aimed to use my site to educate. For now, that includes Hello Tokyo, course materials I've developed (like the DW4 workshop), and recipes.

Why do I reveal myself? My goal in life is to express an experience so that the audience understands it and relates to it. Perhaps this site remains an experiment because I find it interesting to see which posts resonate with comments--usually the ones where I reveal something about myself or ask questions. I have a thick skin, so people saying my site sucks or they think I'm useless really doesn't hurt (anymore).

Why keep up the effort? Because you can't build a body of work without expending effort and you don't earn a good reputation in your field without a body of work. I spend from 10 minutes to an hour every day writing, photographing and preparing entries. Maybe it's a compulsion or perhaps just a habit. Judging from my site stats, it's an effort my audience approves and from time to time an e-mail saying thanks buoys my spirit.

My 1000th entry inspired me to keep on cleaning up and changing things around here.

There's a new tabbed layout at the top of the page. It's part of my "move to CSS layout, old browsers be damned" campaign. The tabs are done in CSS, but I can't take much credit; I'm standing on the shoulders of Dive into Mark's Pure CSS Tabs.

And I've finally decided on my categories. I've got 19 of them now (sorry, Tracey, no toilet category) and old posts are slowly making their way into the correct categories. If you click on the category displayed at the end of each entry, you'll jump to the archive of everything in that category. Thanks, Kurt, for the suggestion.

Also, my RSS feeds are corrected and should work with all the RSS readers. That prompting to upgrade from the broken MT2.5 templates came via Gabriel at snydic8 this morning. They want to list the Zous, so I did us both. Maybe mediatinker will get picked up as well. (5/21: it did!)

I've also added a section to the navigation at the right that points to some of the stuff I've done and interesting projects I've contributed to. May as well promote myself to my 650 daily visitors. OK, I do realise that a lot of those 650 visits are by RSS readers and robots, but still...

Today marks my 1,000th entry in this journal. I've reviewed the past 999 entries to bring you some of my favorite highlights, full of typos as always.

23 August 2000. Sometimes I'm surprised at who reads this weblog. We discovered our neighbor is a foreigner after he figured out he lived next door and came over to introduce himself.

1 December 2000. Black toothpaste is not a joke.

5 December 2000. There are not 2000 body parts, but maybe 2000 uses for Lever 2000 soap. This thread continued on December 6, 9, & 10 but only 23 uses so far.

12 April 2001. Neighborhood plumbing projects begins; is inspected (30 May), and corrected (22 June).

14 June 2001. Personal rituals gone awry on a summer holiday.

12 July 2001. A little portrait of domestic happiness.

23 June 2002. An all-nighter in the poolhall with MJ.

4 October 2002 & 5 October 2002. A Two-day haircut blog.

2 December 2002. The sighting of the mystery weasel and an announcement on the local noticeboard. (4 December )

I wonder what the next 1,000 posts will hold?

If you look to the column at the right, you may notice a change. I've moved the Archives off to their own page and added a list of the five most recent comments.

This has been a long time coming. For the past couple of months, since a discussion at the first Japan Bloggers' Party in February in fact, I've been thinking about the archives of this weblog.

But I have a quandary.

When I began my weblog, I just lumped all the entries together each month. Now that I've accumulated 35 months of writing, maybe monthly archives are not the best way to go.

When I converted to Moveable Type last year, I started categorising my posts. But even so, I'll make my 1,000th entry later this week and I have only 5 categories.

Some weblogs have scores of categories with just a few posts each. My topics range far and wide, so I've opted for just a few broad categories: Work Updates, Japan Commentary, Personal Reflections, The Wider World, and Food & Recipes.

Since I have to go through and categories the first two years of Blogger-created posts, I'm trying to think carefully about my categories. What other categories make sense for this weblog? Should I have a separate category for video, instead of putting it under Work Updates? Should I subdivide the Japan Commentary category into, I'm not sure...Japan Nature, Japan Society, In Tokyo?

What do you think? Have you ever looked back for things in the weblog? What would have made the experience better? What do you do on your weblog that you think is worthwhile for me to adopt?

When I opened my weblog for comments last July, I knew I'd get some stupid ones and feared I'd take a lot of criticism. Happily for me, the comments I get on fresh posts are generally positive.

But on older posts, ones that people have found via Googling, I get some extremely strange notes. I thought I'd leave them in situ just for kicks. But really, what's the point? Today I went through and culled out some of the lamest ones. Oddly enough, they centered around 3 posts.

Rebuilding Afghanistan had seven comments with weirdness like "We wish you a merry Christmas" and "hello, buddeee." Beginner's playground? A message drop for spies? I don't know. They are all gone now.

Nipponjin with Scissors collected 21 lengthy "comments" from Pakistani scissors manufacturers soliciting my business. And the post I made about this blog spam received a spam itself. Pffft.

Here's the one that irks me most. i-mode penetration gets frequent notes complaining that the reader thinks the site is useless, he can't find what he's are looking for, etc. One included 43 exclamation points to back up his frustration!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Oh, I can't compete.)

Why does everyone hate that post? Because it mentions Japan's population and most of these commentators are misguided schoolchildren. One said I was wrong and she thought the population of Japan was 8 million. Maybe she confused Tokyo with Japan, but greater Tokyo has more than 12 million. Another even suggested that I update the population numbers for 2003. I guess she doesn't realise that Japan takes a census, but not annually.

Hey kids, get a clue--this is a weblog, not a valid source of information for your school reports. Check out the CIA World Factbook.

[Addendum, 9:39 am. As if on cue! To my July 6, 2001 post about resting in bed with my laptop, I just received this rather unusual comment: "I don't mean to be too forward, but hearing you talk about your fat rolls turns me on. Fat is so sexy. Tell me more please?" Should I delete this one or keep it? I'll let you decide...]

I have Moveable Type mail me new comments from my weblog. It's a very convenient feature, since I don't get too many comments (hint, hint).

Late last night, I received an e-mailed comment that linked to the Nipponjin with scissors entry froma few days ago. It is spam from a manufacturer.

"[...]we are willing seriously to establish our bilateral trade relations with you as well as with your esteemed company for a long time. And also want to cooperate with you at all steps."

First step towards bilateral cooperation: do not spam me!

Was this done by a clueless drone who is paid to paste form letters into anything vaguely scissors-related? Or is it a nefarious tool to seek out keywords on webpages and then fill in forms it finds attached to those pages? There was a spate of automated comments spam in late October; here's an interesting article on Dive Into Mark about solutions.

I guess I'll know if my spammer was human or automated if this post (also containing the word "scissors") gets spammed.

Watch this space...

After MJ & I discovered how to make SSI work, I had incentive to update design of mediatinker.com again. Now the most recent work and other blogs are listed on the index page and all of the subsections are more clearly tied into the site.

I like it but websites are never finished and no doubt there will be more improvements in the not-so-far future. Right after I get some of my paying work done!

I'm finally getting my act together and installing Moveable Type on my server. Now I can control all aspects of my weblog with finer control and no more worries about Blogger problems.

Of course, that means I have a lot to learn and things look a little wonky at the moment. So if you'll forgive my errors and fumblings, I should have everything back to normal (or better!) shortly.

Every morning, I spend between an hour and 2 hours checking in on friend's weblogs and reading news. Lately, I've been thinking that this activity takes up too much of my time.

NetNewsWire keeps track of new headlines on news sites and new posts in weblogs. This would be a huge time saver. But...

It uses a protocol called RSS which is an XML-like content syndication language. Since few of my friends' sites nor many of the major news sites (BBC, CNN, Yahoo) use RSS, I really don't get the biggest benefit from using NetNewsWire. For the sites that are using it, it's really fantastic.

Maybe I'll rework my site to use RSS. But can I persuade Dan, Jenn, & both of the MJs to do it, too?

I'm updating the site today to consolidate all of my pages (except for this weblog) at mediatinker.com

If you see a broken frame (above this page), please empty your browser cache and/or reset your bookmark to point to http://www.lm.com/~kristen/blog/blogger.html. Other problems with this page? Please comment below.

To celebrate the half-year, I've added comments to my weblog. Thanks to enetation, you can talk back to my posts. I'm not sure if this is wise or foolish. Why don't you tell me? Click down there...

I can't decide whether I'm thrilled or humiliated.

In the past 13 days, the Zous website has had 824 visits. Mine got only 166.That explains the possible humiliation.

On the other hand, I'm excited because zousan.com was mentioned on KininaruWeb, a Japanese site that shares links to interesting sites. The comment that accompanied the link was "No deep meaning, but very cute." That garnered about 250 hits.

I'm puzzled about where the other 550 visitors came from. I've got maybe 100 steady readers here, and I doubt you've visited the site five times each! The mystery may be solved over time because we're tracking the referring URL in our logs as of yesterday.

The Zous are very excited. Their domain, zousan.com, went live yesterday. They have photos, personal favorites, and even a song. They are already considering upgrades, like a weblog and a guest book.

They keep looking at the webstats to see if anyone has visited it, so if you have a minute, take a look and make them happy.