danbruno.net/blog

How to win at Monopoly.

I have Mint installed on here as a novelty more than anything, but as I’ve been getting steady traffic (read: more than ten visitors a day) for months now there’s enough data to pick out a couple of interesting trends.

Referrers

Most of my referral hits come from three places:

• Google searches for “cool mac stuff,” which land here. Cool Mac Stuff is the most popular page on the site, and it’s easy to see why.
• Google searches for “naked quad run,” which land here (and will now doubtless land at this entry as well). Naked Quad Run is a tradition at Tufts in which people run naked laps around the quad to blow off steam before finals. Naturally it attracts a good amount of outside attention.
• StumbleUpon, which lands here. Someone added my roundup of the xkcd meetup to the database — under “Unknown,” for some reason — and every few days I get a big surge of Stumble-y traffic.

Of the other miscellaneous referrers, “expired salad dressing” recurs with notable regularity.

Browsers

59% of my visitors use Firefox!

Okay, that’s somewhat ridiculous, given Firefox’s ~15% market share. I blame the hordes of StumbleUpon fans for skewing the results.

After that, it’s 23% IE, 14% Safari, 2% Camino, 2% everything else.

Operating systems

65% Windows, 31% OS X, 3% Linux, 1% other.

No surprises here. The Mac percentage is likely bolstered by my incessant blathering about Apple. I do wonder about that “other” percent point, though.

Wired has a new article called “Why You Can’t Get Your Hands on a Wii.” The improbably successful game-console-that-could has been selling out consistently for over a year now:

[Nintendo has] bumped up production from about 1 million to 1.8 million a month, says Nintendo Senior Vice President George Harrison, with roughly a third of them earmarked for North America. Last week was Nintendo’s best since the Wii’s launch, with 350,000 sold in the United States alone. In comparison, Microsoft sold about that many Xbox 360s last month.

So how do you get one of these things, if you’re not willing to pay double the MSRP to an eBay scalper? Wii Alerts.

Give these guys your email address and they’ll notify you when there are Wiis in stock at one of their listed online retailers. Even better, give them your cell phone number and they’ll text you the moment they’re available. If you can get to a computer within a few minutes, you’ll have no trouble at all. I had one ordered within a week of signing up.

Good luck.

Best mistranslation ever: Stir-fried wikipedia.

The Freakonomics blog interviews Jonathan Coulton.

Today was one of the busiest shopping days of the year, and I spent it at one of the biggest malls in the country.

Yeah.

I think this picture encapsulates my experience:

(via Wet Riffs [NSFW])

If you’re a new Leopard user and you use Stacks, you might be interested in this clever little hack. It involves keeping translucent “drawer” icons at the top of your Stacks folders to keep the jumble of icons legible. Or, put another way, it makes your Dock not look like ass.

Here’s my Dock, which shows the drawers on the side.

“This unique ‘regular’ version of the classic board game will feature faithful reproductions of the Monopoly game board, paper money, and game pieces such as a thimble, top hat, and Scottie dog,” read a Hasbro press release on the new game, which also replaces the iconic, high-valued properties of Mariowalk and Luigi Place with its own fancifully named “Boardwalk” and “Park Place.”

(link)

On the 10-yard line, with time left for one more play and the score 27-24, Mohammed Ali Hammadi lines up to take the kick and send the game into overtime. As you dive to block the kick, you realize quarterback Ibrahim Salih Mohammed al-Yacoub has snatched up the ball and is running toward the end zone unchallenged. During his victory dance, al-Yacoub releases a deadly airborne virus.

(link)

(link)

Photo via presta. Some rights reserved.

The Tufts Daily:

Director of Student Activities Jodie Nealley was fired on Friday under suspicion that she embezzled approximately $300,000 from the university.

Nealley has admitted to Tufts officials that she took at least a portion of this money, according to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman.

“We are shocked, disappointed and angered by Ms. Nealley’s actions. She breached the trust that all of us at Tufts had placed in her,” he said in a statement.

See tomorrow’s issue of the Daily for further coverage.

Ruh roh.

UPDATE: Here’s the promised “further coverage.” Not much additional information, though.

201 stories by Anton Chekhov, translated into English by Constance Garnett. (via)

There has been a slew of interesting gaming posts this week on MetaFilter.