Day: May 18, 2006

Just Let The Alligators Attack

Rather than shark attacks this time around, apparently the new sensational media story of the summer is going to be alligator attacks (they’re apparently sexier than deer, which apparently actually kill more human beings every year than alligators — of course the deer aren’t trying to eat the people).

Anyway, should you find yourself the victim of an alligator attack, make sure you don’t fight back or you could face legal consequences. From the Associated Press,

A woman has shot an alligator that came into her home and attacked her dog.

The alligator was only 3 feet long, but Candy Frey wasn’t taking any chances. When the reptile came into the lanai of her home east of Bradenton Saturday and attacked her golden retriever, Frey went and got her gun.

After Frey and her daughter managed to push the gator out of the lanai through the dog door, she blasted away at it four times.

. . .

The alligator barely bled from gunshots to the neck and shoulder, Frey said, and wildlife officer put it back in the lake.

The deputy gave Frey a warning citation for hunting without a license.

WTF?

Source:

. Associated Press, May 17, 2006.

Holy Optimization, Batman

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I used to do a lot of newspaper writing but got burned out by that and figured I could reach just as many, if not more, people on the web. So 10 years ago I registered a domain (and then a dozen or so more) and figured I’d be happy if I could ever reach 1 million page views/month which would be a much larger audience than I’m sure my newspaper writing ever had.

Unfortunately, I reached that in 2004 and then became very bored with the writing thing (World of Warcraft didn’t help).

The weird thing is the traffic just keeps increasing. Last Fall, the server was serving up about 1.2 million pages/month. Lately that’s climbed to about 2.5 million pages/month and is still rising. Not bad for something I do in my spare time.

Anyway, what’s also amazing to me is that the server that’s now 2-3 years old is able to keep up, especially given all of the dynamic elements that are part of pretty much every page. Macrobyte has done an excellent job of optimizing Conversant to get the most bang for the buck from hardware.