Achievements in 2006

This is your Xmas/annual newsletter to keep you up-to-date on my happenings throughout the year. Instead of adopting the more popular narrative style that seems to be landing in my inbox I have decided to put my achievements in list form:

• 3 rattlesnakes
• 7 coyotes
• 47 lost golf balls
• 8 birdies
• 32 rounds of golf
• 0 days at work
• 2 new sets of clubs
• 1 mini-road trip (Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona)
• 1 flat tire
• 1 moving traffic citation
• 1 day at traffic school
• 4 ski trips
• 1 grand canyon
• 9 mountains hiked

Have an amazing 2007 everyone!

Top searches for 2006

Just in case you're too lazy to go to the Google Zeitgeist for 2006 the top searches for 2006 were:

1. bebo 2. myspace 3. world cup 4. metacafe 5. radioblog 6. wikipedia 7. video 8. rebelde 9. mininova 10. wiki

and the top news searches were:

1. paris hilton 2. orlando bloom 3. cancer 4. podcasting 5. hurricane katrina 6. bankruptcy 7. martina hingis 8. autism 9. 2006 nfl draft10. celebrity big brother 2006

How does Paris Hilton end up at the top of the news search for an entire year? Is that really news? This requires some investigation so I googled Paris Hilton and discovered that there are 41.4 million pages in the Google index with Paris Hilton in them. That's a lot of reading...

Most Commented Blog Posting

I am posting a link to this blog posting for purely academic and research reasons. The reason is: Have you ever seen a blog with so many comments on it? This blog posting, as I type this, has 1,224 comments. By the time that you visit it, it will probably have more.

The Photos that stripped Ms. Nevada of her title!

How would I find out if any other blog posting has more comments?

I'm going to research that Ms Nevada post again. Perhaps the answer is there.

Los Angeles to San Diego via Las Vegas

I think that this is the one feature that I've been waiting for more than anything on Google's mapping software. If you go to http://maps.google.com/ and enter a start and end point it will map your route for you. But say you wanted to go via Las Vegas to get there. (Hey, who doesn't want to go via Vegas?) So you enter Los Angeles as your start point and then enter Las Vegas as your destination. Google maps it for you.

Then you might, if you look very carefully, see an "Add Destination (new)" link in the bottom left corner of the screen. Click this and add San Diego and hey presto, it will show you how to get from Los Angeles to San Diego using a short cut via Vegas. (If Vegas isn't a short cut then I don't know what is.)

French Milled Soap

We checked into a hotel this evening. I won't mention which one but the name sounds a lot like Double Tree Guest Suites.

In the bathroom I found some French Milled Soap in a box. This required further investigation. I now know that I will never use un-milled soap again and never use soap made in any other country/style than French.

(I can't believe that anybody falls for these marketing/naming gimmicks.)