Over at http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/.
After 6.5 years and over 1300 posts, a new chapter begins.
My sincerest thanks to everyone who's read, commented and supported this blog over the years for your time and attention. And I'll be seeing you over at the new digs!
We should probably all do this every once in a while, just as a way of expanding our connections a bit.
Here are the social networks that I'm reasonably active on:
Warning! Navel gazing ahead!
At the beginning of January, I did a longish post about the hit stats for the blog over 2008. It had been a good year as well as about 18 months since I'd last posted stats, so I thought it was a good time. I also favour transparency in such things; I appreciate it when others post their stats as I think it demystifies the whole "popularity" business.
Little did I know what the beginning of 2009 would bring.
Not that the rush has been that impressive -- I've gotten 19,113 pageviews so far this year compared to 73,212 for all of last year (26% of last year's total in 21% of the year so far, so a slight increase). It's how it's come.
So far this year, I've had my most popular post ever as well as my 6th most popular. That's since June 2006 when I started using Google Analytics. Before then, however, my traffic was only about 5-10% of what it is now so the data from then probably won't affect "all time" totals much.
So, what are those two posts?
I've been using Google Analytics to track my blog stats since July 2006. I first posted a year's worth of stats in July 2007, giving me a good year's worth of stats to report on. Of course, it seems to make some kind of more sense to report based on a calendar year rather than the anniversary of installing a kind of software.
Therefore, this post.
Last time, I was inspired by a couple of other people reporting their stats, and this time is no different. It was Richard Akerman's recent post on the stats for his Science Library Pad blog that really gave me the kick in the pants to get this done. I'm not going to get as detailed as Richard, but I do hope to give a flavour of the last year.
Some basics (visits / pageviews):
From the Toronto Star's Vit Wagner.
I couldn't have said it better myself:
No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I don't want to live in a world without bookstores. Bookstores like Book City, Ben McNally Books, Type and Pages (my personal favourites) are not only convenient places to browse unhurriedly for literature of almost every sort, but they are also among the few retail establishments where you can go to get out of the rain and snow, or arrange to meet a friend, without being made to feel like a loitering indigent. No one is saying you have to buy all of your books in a store. Just some. Consider it part of your resolution to get out more.
Another meme, this one first encountered at Uncertain Principles. Oddly, because I was actually in one of the cities at the same time as that blog's author.
So, the cities (besides Toronto) I spent the night in during 2008:
I did this last year and it seemed like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year.
Trends in my reading this year? Lots and lots on science and technology, especially on the impacts of those on intellectual culture. A great year, in that respect, with Shirky's Here Comes Everybody leading the way. Not so much fiction, and especially sf, this year. This'll be corrected by the Sunburst reading I do this year and next (not recorded here, see below), but I think I just needed a break.
Overall, the total number of books I'm reading this year is the highest it's been in quite a long time. Why? Well, honestly, I think it's because of the variety. I used to read mostly fiction, mostly fantastic fiction, and I think I was just getting bogged down by the sameness of it all. Lately, since my sabbatical especially, I'm just reading much wider. And that's made my reading wider and more interesting to me. And this results in me reading more.
So, without further ado, here's a list of all the books I've read this year with links to my reviews:
Some of you may have noticed a bit of a blog silence around here since last Friday. Well, last Saturday night we got the very sad news that my mother had passed away very suddenly earlier that day. I spent the last week in Montreal with my family, cleaning my mother's apartment with my sister, attending the funeral, buying a new suit and other assorted activities. And mostly being offline.
Needless to say, it's been a difficult time.
And the last day or so, as things have approached normalcy, I've struggled a bit with whether or not to mention my Mom's passing here. After all, I've tended to post very little of such a personal nature here and that's been on purpose. On the other hand, I've been very happy to be part of both the library and science online communities and have "met" (and/or met) many people here who I consider true friends. As such, I do feel that I can occasionally talk a little about what's going on in my personal life.
Besides, I asked my wife what she thought about me posting here and she said, "Sure! Your Mother would have gotten a kick out of being on the Internet!"
In any case, I'm including a great picture of my mother with my two sons below. It was taken about 18 months ago and really captures both her spirit and her love for her grandkids and, by extension, her whole family.
Some links: newspaper notice, online memorial, Kane & Fetterly funeral home, who were a great help to my sister and I through this whole process.
Please feel free to leave a note here, on Friendfeed or the online memorial site.
As usual, late to the meme party...
I'm not a huge fan of taking part in memes, but this one seems to be sweeping the science blogosphere. It's generated a lot of very interesting responses so far, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's also been quite a while since I did a navel-gazing post, so I'm probably due.
The meme was started by Richard Grant Martin Fenner on Nature Network. The only other science librarian one I've seen so far is by Frank Norman.
The winners have just been announced for the 2008 edition of the Sunburst Award, Canada's juried award for literature of the fantastic:
As I noted a while back, my older son Sam has his very own science blog, initially called Space Exploration and Us, which was a blog he created for school. He's now relaunched and renamed it Physics on my Mind. He tends to post intermittently, but it's well worth checking out his latest thoughts on the LHC.
Another chip, you say? That must mean that the other kid has a blog too?
That's right. My 13 year old son Daniel has started his own music review blog called Killer Tunes. Of course, I think it's great -- no way would I think it was a the work of a 13 year old. He's fairly good so far about adding content regularly although with various summer activities it's been pretty light recently. It's also interesting to note that we have an example of a teen that actually thinks in terms of CDs. Hmmm.
In any case, visit the blogs, leave a comment, encourage the next generation of bloggers!
Yesterday I got back to work after four weeks of vacation. We spent three fairly soggy weeks at a cottage just north of Ste-Agathe, Quebec, about 1.5 hours north of Montreal. Although the lake we're on is perfectly beautiful, we didn't take as much advantage as we normally do because of the weather. BBQing was also highly curtailed. We've rented this particular cottage a number of times over the years.
We also spent a few soggy days in Montreal visiting with family and friends; we were back in Toronto last Wednesday to get the boys ready for two weeks of summer camp. They left on Friday. The last few Toronto days of vacation were also fairly soggy (and explosive, too)
Movie-wise, we saw the The Dark Knight in Montreal and Hellboy 2 in Kingston. My wife and I finally got around to seeing Get Smart this past kid-free Saturday.
Rain means more reading, course, and I certainly did a fair bit of it. Here's the tally of books that I've read in the last four weeks. I've noted the ones that are in progress. Three out of the four of us read Heart-Shaped Box and we all enjoyed it. The Ruins and Triptych were both read by two of us (with me still in progress on Triptych).
Well, it's that time again. I'll see you all back here around the second or third week in August.
One thing that will be a bit different about the blogging break this year is that I've scheduled some Friday Fun posts for while I'm away. It's just recently that Blogger has allowed us to write posts and schedule them for later publication, something most other platforms have had for a while.
Blogging breaks are for reading books, of course. So, here's some of the books I'm planning to read over the next little while. It's a nice mix of novels (mostly horror this year, for some reason) and popular science. The popular science, at least, I'll end up reviewing here. Those reviews will probably be the first few posts when I return.
Sincere apologies for so many inwardly focused posts lately, but this is one more.
Last Monday's appearance as the Blogger Blog of Note fortuitously lead to a rather nice little item about the blog and me in today's Y-File, York's internal email newsletter. Thanks to Sandra McLean for such a nice profile!
(FWIW, the blog got got over 12,000 hits in the week following the Blog of Noting -- compared to the 600-700 hits per week I've been getting lately that's quite a jump. Even today, a week later, I'll end up over 1000 hits.)
Update 2008.07.07: the Y-File story was reposted in ylife, the student email newsletter. As well, my sister Michele pointed out to me that the Y-File story was also highlighed on Academica a few weeks ago.
Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript was in Toronto this week for a job interview.
Eva Amsen, Philip Johnson and I all met Alex for drinks and dinner this past Wednesday. Eva has some rather somber and depressing looking pictures up at her site, but really, it was a great time with much laughter and discussion about the trials and tribulations of blogging, life in Toronto and, of course, science and academia.
Checking my referrer logs this morning I see that I've been named today's Blogger of Note by the Blogger team. It's quite an honour and I'd like to thank them for giving this humble blog that very kind recognition.
Please stick around and check out some of the other stuff you can find here. Probably my most famous and well know series of posts are:
The family and I all finally went down to the Royal Ontario Museum yesterday to take in their Darwin: The Evolution Revolution exhibit.
Overall, the exhibit was fantastic. We all enjoyed it tremendously, especially the two science fans among us. Even the no-so-enthusiastic science fans thought it was great. It's odd, because I've seen quite a few fairly harsh criticisms of the show online in various places -- mostly saying that it was too long and wordy and boring. Yes, it is a bit heavy on the reading rather than the "experiencing" we would expect from a grade-school oriented science centre exhibit, but that's completely natural. It is an exhibit aimed at adults rather than kids and we would expect adults to be able to deal with a more intellectually demanding experience that 8 year olds. In fact, if you have younger kids, do not take them to this exhibit. I would say about 11 or 12 is the minimum age to be able to really appreciate the experience, preferably even 14 or 15. My 12 year old enjoyed it but found it a bit long. My 15 year old just loved it.
Like I said, it is a bit long -- you need to give yourself 90 to 120 minutes to really absorb the contents and it would definitely repay a second visit. You could manage in 60 minutes but would have to skim a bit. We did it in about 90-100 minutes and it worked out pretty well. We also dropped by the tremendously improved dinosaur galleries afterwards before leaving.
Did I find anything disappointing? Yes. The gift shop. Now I'm not a big fan of shoving gift shops down the throats of visitors as they leave an exhibit but if there was any case where I was positively disposed to picking something up, this was it. The Darwin shop was fairly small and mostly concentrated on trinkets and little doodads, most too cute and/or overpriced. What few books they did have seemed rather randomly selected. For example, they had volume II of the Janet Browne set but not volume I. And that in hardcover rather than paperback. Considering how directly the exhibit is aimed at countering creationism, I was surprised that they didn't have more instructional books on evolution or any of the recent spate of anti-creationism books. The only one they did have was Shermer's Why Darwin Matters. Also I was quite disappointed in their lack of tshirts or other clothing. And not one DVD of any of the recent Darwin/evolution series.
The Chess & Math Association is moving their Toronto store from about a 15 minute walk from my house to, literally, right around the corner.
The Chess'n Math Association established in Toronto in 1993. After 15 years on Bayview, and a recent change in landlords, we were forced to look for a new location for our retail outlet - Strategy Games - as our rent was about to double...
We have now signed a 5-year lease nearby at 701 Mt. Pleasant Rd. (South of Eglinton and opposite Sobeys). Cutomers will find parking to be better than on Bayview and this new location is also within easy walking distance of the subway. Lessons and school administration will continue at 1650 Bayview for the next few months.
Our lease at 1683 Bayview expires June 30th but if all goes well we expect to start operating out of Mt. Pleasant on or around June 20th.
We would like to thank everyone for their support over the years and we hope you will visit us at our new location.
Sincerely,
Larry Bevand
Executive Director
Chess'n Math Association
Ok, trying this on a blog with a fraction of the traffic or Uncertain Principles might be a bit risky (ie. what if nobody asks any questions?). But, I think it's an interesting idea and worth trying at least once. I'm really enjoying Orzel's responses as they give insight into the inner workings of one of my favourite bloggers.
So, the rules. Ask me any uncomfortable question about any topic: life, books, work, libraries, science, web 2.0 culture, free stuff, whatever, and I'll answer it here on the blog. Only restrictions: I reserve the right not to answer any question that might be too personal concerning me or my family. I also won't answer any question that basically asks me to trash somebody.
You can leave your questions in the comments. Ask away!
So which one am I?
Late to the party as usual, this post is a response to the recent kerfuffle over at ScienceBlogs about a post at the BayBlab blog that was highly critical of the effect the Seed sponsored ScienceBlogs platform is having on science blogging in general.
The original post brought up a lot of issues, like being traffic whores, insularity, cliquishness, lack of focus on science and the influence being paid has on the ScienceBloggers.
If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays. Seed Magazine and the bloggers themselves profit from the traffic. That's right, Seed actually pays these bloggers for their posts. And the whole ScienceBlogs thing is a little incestuous, they really like linking to each other, but not so much to the little blogs. I'm afraid gone is the amateur blogger, and in is the professional gonzo science journalist. Might as well read Seed magazine.
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