Every now and then I get teased about the barren waste that is my Facebook account. No avatar, no personal info, a handful of University friends I haven't talked to in years, and a bunch of game messages & invitations. I often claim lack of time, but sometimes I give the honest answer that I value my privacy, which almost always gets people giggling or rolling their eyes as if I had delusions of grandeur. There is a widespread and simply misplaced belief that privacy is only a concern for Hollywood actors and politicians. I can live with that, it doesn't bother me. There is a vicious version of the belief that really gets on my nerves, though - the "nothing to hide" voyeur's argument.

It goes like this: "You don't hide anything if you have nothing to hide." This seems to be the recent trend, and it's getting worrisome for me. Facebook has been casting privacy to the winds lately, with their terms of use changing almost daily to reflect the new policies. If you have a FB account, then more and more aspects of it are going to be public, you won't have a choice and you will be poorly informed at best. Friend lists already are public. So will profiles. In the words of the FB founder, "the world is going public". I love the English language, I really do (or I wouldn't be here ). Its power to express strong concepts with a minimum of sounds is unmatched. Unfortunately, it can be used for cheesy slogans like this, as well. Have you asked the world if he's going public lately? I've left a message on his answering machine, hope he'll hit me back shortly.

The Google CEO said: "if you do something you don't want anyone to know, then you probably shouldn't be doing it." This is officially scary (and definitely not the first time Google provides morality as a PDF download for the masses; turns out their motto "don't be evil" is not just a...

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Seriously. The title sums it up. Crazy huh? Sure, it won't last, but for right now I'm savoring it. See... I've been confined at my house for roughly the last two and a half weeks almost going on three while I recovered from carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand. It was great having a break from work, but when your on a 'break' you want to be able to do stuff. When your hand is wrapped in gauze and causing you serious pain, you really can't do ANYTHING. I could wiggle my fingers, but that was about it.

Now though... I happy. I just went back to work today. I missed work. I really love my job. It can be crazy busy or dead boring slow, but its always an interesting and challenging part of my day. I like to think I'm a great hostler. Maybe I'm not the best one that ever lived, but I love to smile all day long and do the best job I personally can do. That means, to me, cleaning and straightening up the yard (it can get trashed fast with 300+ trailers). That means giving the best customer service to the DC I work for that is possible. It means having a 'can do' attitude thats heavily infused with friendliness and helpfulness. Sometimes I have a bad day, but even when I'm having a bad day, I still have to put a smile on my face and get my job done.

I guess when you take time off work, you always wonder if you'll be missed. Will people even notice? It goes along with the whole thinking process about disappearing or dying today who would care or notice? Turns out... everyone cares and noticed. I got so many smiles, thumbs up, "LET ME SEE THE SCAR", people poking at my wrist, gossping with me, complaining about all the frigid weather I conveniently missed... it was bliss.

Granted my palm hurts where they cut through it after an 8 hr shift, but thats to be expected. I haven't done much with it for three weeks. I only had the stitches out Wednesday, but baring that, emotionally I'm in bliss. The substitute did a good job, but my relief...

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Pics of my Mom's cousin's Place in Carrol, Iowa. These are my... second cousins (?) Jean and Wayne. Great people. Don't egg their house. You gotta love it. I'm really glad I'm not there.

Many of you should know by now that I'm really big on numbers, and while 20,000 posts isn't as ominous a milestone as 1729, it's still worth bragging about. 20,000 is a respectable post count for a still young community with great no-spamming etiquette and a chat replacing the need for trivial posts (though we miss out on such useful reads as "Let's count to 1000!" threads). Several big old pioneers of the PbP format have post counts around 200,000. It'd be good for Miza to be there in 2012, cause you know, it's 2012 so we shouldn't be planning too far ahead.

Over the last 30 days we've served 280,000 pages not including bots, spiders and users with javascript turned off. Our site received 14,000 visits (up 22% from last month) of which about 1,750 were new to the site for a total of about 2,100 unique visitors. We consumed nearly 50 GB of bandwidth, up 40% from last month. The average visitor spends 27 minutes on the site.

Now, this is all sweet and stuff, but it is certainly not why most people read my stat entries. What they really want to know is - what are web surfers looking for when they stumble upon Mizahar? And so, we look at the google searches that brought people here over the last month. Thankfully, we've made some progress since the times when we owned the word Maseltoff. Changes made to the forums made it so people are usually looking for fantasy roleplaying stuff when they find us. Er, usually. Ahem.

Some people use google as a replacement for the search function, to see the places where their PCs are mentioned. I'm not counting those, or the queries from people who already knew Miza and were looking for a specific page. I won't bore you with the obvious "fantasy rp", "roleplaying plots", lore, etc, either....

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