After my Cross Platform Development post, I wound up with with Firefox and Mac OSX ads on my site. A little ironic for the Microsoft IE guy... I think those Google guys are out to get me.

(Of course, this post won't help...)

OK, I was wrong yesterday. I wasn't ready to go back to work. I woke up this am with the sore-throat-of-death -- the same thing the kids went through.

I finally went to the doctor this morning. She gasped in surprise when she saw my tonsils. (I'll take "Top sounds you don't want to hear from your doctor" for $100, please...) I guess they were a little red and swollen...

Now I have the best antibiotics American medicine can provide (thank you, Microsoft, for our unparalleled health benefits). At the advice from doctor, I topped the drugs off with a little organic yogurt from Trader Joe's; this is to restore the fauna in my gut that the antibiotics are killing off, thereby preventing some <ahem> unpleasant side effects of antibiotics. I also picked up some San Pellegrino Aranciata; this yummy "sparkling orange beverage" doesn't have any known medicinal qualities, but it does wonders for my mental health. I never buy the stuff normally, only having it when I'm out. It seems a little decadent to have a whole six pack at home, but heck, I'm sick.

OK, since I'm trolling through my logs this morning, I figured I'd write about the browser and OS stats.

Since January 1, 2007:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0: 34%
2. Internet Explorer 7.0: 23%
3. Opera 9: 10%
4. Firefox 1.5: 8.9%
5. Mozilla 5: 7.2%
6. Firefox 2.0: 3.6%
7. Netscape: 1.4%
8. Internet Explorer 5.0: 1.3%
9. Safari: 1.3%
10. Firefox 1.0: .7%

I admit the high Opera numbers are really surprising. All told, IE versions account for 65% of my traffic. Mozilla variants including Firefox are 21% and Opera is 11%. These non-IE numbers are higher than the market as a whole, leading me to believe that my readers are more on the tech enthusiast side (a segment that use a broader range of browsers than the population at large.)

These stats don't include the search robots who hit the site. Yahoo visits the site a ton, accounting for 13% of my web traffic. Robots in general are about 20% of my traffic - a surprisingly high cost.

On a separate note, who is out there running all these old browsers? WTF? It's not like they're expensive. Everyone should be running the latest version of their preferred browser, if only for the modern security protections! Come on people!

With respect to operating systems

1. Windows XP: 65%
2. Windows Vista: 9%
3. Linux: 5.8%
4. Windows 98: 5.7%
5. Windows 2000: 5%
6. Windows NT: 4.3%
7. MacOS: 2%
8. Windows Server 2003: 1.3%
9. FreeBSD: .8%
10. Windows 95: .8%

All Windows versions account for 91% of my viewers. I'm surprised how many more people use Linux than Macs, but that may again reflect my geeky readership. Whoever is out there running Windows 98 or Windows 95 - please, for the love of God, move to something more modern and secure. We don't even provide security updates for Windows 98 or 95 anymore, so you're running naked.

On the ISP front, Comcast is the single biggest provider at 15% with GTE at 10% and MSN at 5%. This skew may be due to the popularity of those providers in the Redmond area.

Unfortunately, I think the other stats are too heavily warped by the robots and comment spammers to be useful (stuff like unique visitors and pages viewed per visit.)

Welcome to the Year of the Pig! Here are a few comments about Pig years from ChineseAstrology.com (it's on the web, so it must be true...)

Finishing touches, tying up loose ends, last stands, curtain calls and closures will be the urging of the year. So, prepare to finish projects, complete goals and even say some goodbyes. Put your ducks in a row, cross your T's and dot your I's in 2007 and the proper Pig will be gracious to you.

Pig years are known for their respite from strife, patience and passivity, but also for indulgence, sensuality and fleshly delights. As the last sign of the zodiac, the Pig represents "resignation" accepting human nature as it is - content to live and let live. The greatest risk will be naivete, so by all means avoid confidence schemes and being fooled or duped throughout 2007.

It's also supposed to be a difficult year for monkeys like me. Guess I'll have to watch myself.

That said, I'm ready for some "fleshly delights", especially ones having to do with pigs. Bacon anyone?

Having Google ads on my site has been a source of some amusement for me (in addition to the nice checks). As you know, they pick the ads based on the content of my site, so as my posts change around, the ads change.

The "I Hate Michelle" post (really a provocative title for a post about the TV show 24) generated the "cheating wife" ads here. Hm, not quite contextually relevant, but funny.

As for the other ads, I understand why the running one is the there, but the "union with God" ad? Must be because of the bacon posts, for bacon is truly a sign that there is a loving God. Maybe Google Adsense is smarter that I realized.

We in the software industry are not known for our fashion sense, but there are a few little tips that even the biggest geek can use.

The easiest is to not wear your card key publicly. Your card key only gets you into your office and will impress no one outside your building.

This tip is especially true in a bar and even more true if you're on stage...

According to the Seattle Times: "Americans say they reached - or will reach - their peak physical attractiveness at age 38."

I'm 2.5 months from 39. Crap. This is as good as it gets.

The Stanford's men's basketball cracked the Top 25 coming in at #23 after this week's amazing upset of (formerly) #3 UCLA and (formerly) #25 USC. The team was expected to have a mediocre season this year, so their relative success has been a pleasant surprise.

Of course, making this even more sweet for me is how the UW Huskies are tanking this year. Not that I need to gloat at work, but it shuts up a lot of Dawgs at the office...

The Seattle area completely falls apart when the first snowflake hits the ground, as evidenced by yesterday's storm. Having grown up in Minnesota, land of 10,000 blizzards, I'm continually stunned by this.

In December 1990, a few months after I moved here, I had my first encounter with this. It started snowing in the morning, but we all stayed at work and didn't think anything of it. By 4:00pm, there was eight inches of snow on the ground and reports were coming in that people couldn't get out of Microsoft. Traffic around the area was at a standstill with people abandoning their cars on roads and bridges (sounds familiar). A bunch of my friends stayed the night at work. We walked down to the local Safeway and rented videos, which we watched in a big tele-conference room used for our collaboration with IBM on OS/2. About halfway through Caddyshack or whatever it was we were watching, we realized we were beaming the movie to IBM office in Boca Raton. Fortunately, it was probably 2:00am there... We walked down to the Fred Meyer (local chain store like Target), bought tire chains, and crawled home the next day.

Anyway, things haven't gotten better in the last sixteen years in this regard. I think the region has something like six plows with rubber-edged plow blades (so they don't knock the reflector turtle things off the road), and they don't use salt on the roads because of the cost and increased corrosion. On top of that, Seattle drivers lose their minds in the snow.

In Minnesota, an armada of plows with sharpened steel fangs and spewing great jets of metal-eating salt beats back the snow and ice relentlessly, rendering all but the worst blizzards a minor inconvenience. (On the other hand, virtually every car in Minnesota more than a few years old has rust holes on the bottom.) And, of course, Minnesotans are mentally prepared for snow and experienced since their first driver's ed class in handling snow (we used to do doughnuts with our cars in the snowy high school parking lot - fun stuff). The snow tires we all had didn't hurt either.

In the Seattle area's defense, however, I will say that there are a few important differences that makes snow in Seattle tougher. First, it's almost never very cold for long, so the snow thaws during the day and re-freezes at night. Bad. Second, I think the roads are more crowned than most, sloping off to handle the rain that we get. This makes it easy to slide off the road and hard for plows to really scrape the ground clean. Finally and perhaps most important, it's hilly here. Icy roads in flat Minnesota simply don't have the same impact as the hilly ice rinks we get here. It's amazing to watch a big four-wheel drive SUVs sliding backwards down hills.

Still, I think most the region's snow pain is avoidable. More plows, a little salt, and a few more IQ points among the drivers would go a long way.

Wow, what a winter it's been so far. Yesterday, we had another arctic blast come through Seattle, the second of the season on top of our big windstorm. Of course, this storm had the good manners to hit during the evening rush hour, snarling traffic for hours.

Michelle and I had the added concern of having to pick the kids up from school. Normally, this is not challenging since they both go to school reasonably close to work, but when it took Michelle twenty minutes just to get out of the garage of her building because traffic leaving Microsoft was so bad, I knew we were in for it.

I decided to head off on foot instead, leaving my car safely in the Microsoft garage. It was amazing to see the cars slipping and sliding. Even though there was only about two inches of snow, the temperature outside was just right to turn everything into ice on the roadway. Even on relatively shallow grades, two-wheel-drive cars were struggling.

I walked to Andrew's school and picked him up - on time I might add, although there were plenty of other kids who were still stuck there. He and I walked home together and had a nice chat. It was actually a pleasant evening for a walk, although I may have ruined my leather shoes. I walked about four miles total.

After 2.5 hours trying to get the few blocks to Michael's school, Michelle had to ditch her car at the bottom of a big hill that she couldn't get up and walked home the last half mile in her three inch heels. We all arrived home at exactly the same time coincidently. She wasn't very happy...

Once the three of us were home, I got into our 4WD truck and went back to get Michael. There were still about a dozen kids at school, even though it was an hour past the after-school care normally closed. I really appreciate the professionalism of the after-school care teachers in both schools. They were calm and matter-of-fact about the whole thing, ready to spend the night if needed.

However, I was disappointed that the cellphone network melted down. Everyone was stuck in their cars calling the network was simply overrun. It was almost impossible to get a call through; text messages seemed to fare a little better.

So, today, school was closed, and most of us at Microsoft worked from home. School is closed again tomorrow too. I can't remember a year when the kids had so many days off of school. I hope this winter isn't a sign of things to come. An inconvenient truth indeed.