I don't give money to people begging at freeway off-ramps, but I saw a guy I would have given a few bucks to today if I'd been on the right ramp. He was holding a big sign saying "Unemployed Geek" and was wearing a propeller beanie, with the propeller spinning proudly in the breeze.

I gotta switch cell phones. If I only had the right one (a Nokia 33XX model), I could make my ring tone be the theme from Good Eats!

Glenn writes about Blog into the Healing Light Dot Com?. Sounds like a non-profit foundation to me (and one that should, imo, hire Al in some capacity). When I had a health scare last year, it was great to be able to put all the news on a couple of web pages (here and here) to keep people up to date, so I didn't have to say the same things over and over. A way to bring this into hospitals would be wonderful for not just the patients, but their friends and families.

Dialup? Did I say something about dialup? Screw dialup. Oh, have I mentioned before exactly how much I love MacStumbler? Very, very cool.

Here's a puzzler for some of you: on a normal day, we get page hit counts somewhere in the middling three digits (if we counted images, it'd be a lot higher). Yeah, we know that this doesn't put us up on anyone's Top 10, or even Top 1000. But...

On Friday, we got approximately 3,000 page hits.
On Saturday, we got approximately 16,000 page hits.
On Sunday, things were back to normal.

According to my logs, all of those hits show that they came from host-148-244-88-130.block.alestra.net.mx with scripting.com as the referrer. It looks to me like someone dialed up to a Mexican ISP, but who knows?

My initial guess was that someone was scraping Dave's site in a way that followed every link. Dave says that he's not seeing any unusual amount of hits and that he's had no other reports of this, so he's as stumped as I am. So, what da hell do you think happened?

I'm in NYC and having a great time! The only downside: dialup (shudder).

OK, one last AB note, for our friends in Portland:

Thursday, October 17 6:30 PM
Cooking class @ Sur La Table
1102 NW Couch Street
Portland, OR 97209-4114

Note that the store is not yet open; it's still being built.

Speaking of Alton Brown, the Desktop Pictures page on his site has been updated with a new desktop wallpaper image. Tom sez check it out, if you like a particular painting on the wall of the current Good Eats set. You'll know what I mean.