This is a picture of a man pretending to be spanish moss.
I'm having a bit of a crisis right now.. not the painful writhing kind, but more the calm hopeful kind, if that makes any sense. I've realized that I've always wanted some kind of liberal arts degree. Not that I'm upset at being close to having a fine arts degree - I'm proud of being here and think this is important - but I want to have a degree in literature, history, or philosophy as well. It's an issue of having something that you are very close to and educated about to create art of... it's possible to create art about art or art about things you are interested in, but I feel like I'd just be able to find my voice if I really immersed myself in more learning.
It's addictive, I admit. I'm in danger of being lost in academia forever, possibly. I was already planning on going to grad school and want to teach eventually. I'm not uncomfortable with the thought, although school is, by nature, nerve wracking and time sucking. I don't particularly look forward to having to take slow moving intro classes with bored freshmen. But really I just wonder how I'll ever be able to pay for any of it. Maybe a school will let me pursue a degree in philosophy while teaching entry level photo classes to freshmen? Maybe I'll be able to get a full ride somewhere? Does anyone have any recommendations?
Actually, I think philosophy in specific is a good start, for looking. My copy of The Gay Science is quickly becoming the most dog eared and manhandled book in my collection, with only the complete Kafka and The Brothers Karamazov coming anywhere close. Anyone know a good place to study?
1. Scan - It's impossible to look to the future with a large amount of past work unfinished. I have to get these negatives out of the way as soon as possible.
2. Organize - I have to put together two books before the end of this quarter, apparently both photo classes I took require them. It's going to be interesting, and as a side effect of the publication process, they will actually be available to purchase (if I decide I'm satisfied.)
3. Tutor - I know the college is in need of tutors, and I should get a job teaching either photography or art history. It's not the best pay, but I only have a small amount of teaching experience on my resume (even though I often help peers in the darkroom or outside of class, apparently I'm a go to guy for photo knowledge and brutally honest critique, which I only give in person) and if I'm hoping to teach my way through another degree, anything I can get will help.
That's enough list for now.
I'm taking a moment to do some calculations here, figure out how my site is doing. I don't know a huge amount about this stuff, but I'm learning.
Successful requests: 7,945,505 (182,093)
Average successful requests per day: 7,326 (26,013)
Successful requests for pages: 427,866 (54,803)
Average successful requests for pages per day: 394 (7,828)
Data transferred: 772.49 gigabytes (31.25 gigabytes)
Average data transferred per day: 729.35 megabytes (4.46 gigabytes)
Those numbers seem a bit huge, but they don't represent people, so to try and figure out how many people are actually looking at my shit, I'll have to do a little more digging.
Ok, so each page hit is when a user loads a page. The main page has two frames, so that counts as three, and there are twelve more pages. So I'll just assume the average person hits 15 pages when they visit, since doubtless some people only look at one or two pages, and others look all around or come back multiple times. I can't really be sure of it, so it's really a total guess, but it's worth thinking in that direction.
So... divide by 15.. I'll round em to full numbers.
Successful requests for pages/15: 28,524 (3,654)
Average successful requests for pages per day/15: 26 (522)
So on average about 26 people visit my site per day? That doesn't seem impossibly large, and this last weeks figures are totally off from the average, since I linked it everywhere when launching the new version. 28 thousand visitors seems to be pretty damn large though, maybe there's a hole in my logic. I mean, I'm sure at least 1,000 of those have been myself and immediate family hahaha.
What is odd, is that in my failure report, /favicon.ico was requested 24,616 times. I don't have a fav icon and keep it that way, because this way I can tell if someone saved my site to their favorites, or at least that's the theory. I though that must be some kind of bug (There is no way that many people were interested) but it's pretty close to the above figure... I mean, that is over 3 years, so it's not impossible. It's hard to see that many people being interested in a personal website though.
Lets see if any of these other stats are useful... Most of my overall requests are from the folder I post images for my journal to, that makes sense, since it's reproduced on people's friend pages automatically. That still doesn't explain the page views though. Livejournal basically accounts for 50% of my overall traffic, which is allright, I have plenty of bandwidth. So I don't have to stop posting images to lj or worry about it overloading my server and costing me a bundle. Good.
Most people visit the site at around 9pm, with the hours between 5pm and 1am being the most active... again logical, you guys are all checking your internets.
Wow, this last year has seen a huge increase in my average traffic. The first year, 2005, it was around 80-1000 requests for pages a week, this year has been around 2000-6000 on average with spikes around 10000 every few weeks. It served 197,094 pages in 2007... so about 13,140 visits? That's almost half of the total. Not bad. At least it's showing an upward trend, right?
Oh man, the really funny shit is in the Search Query Report, apparently some people find my site by searching for some really weird stuff.
"shitting girl" "tampax index" "naked snow girls" "gender bender (this one sort of makes sense since I shot an event called that)"
That's just from the couple random daily reports I glanced at. Anyway, that was interesting. Not worth thinking too hard about though, right now, as long as I'm not in danger of being over bandwidth.
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