My HoneyMonkey eating with chopsticks
A helpful waitress encouraged her to try using chopsticks. Mostly it was a clumsy affair, but once in a while she was able to get food in her mouth.
I can't wait until she tries sushi.
A helpful waitress encouraged her to try using chopsticks. Mostly it was a clumsy affair, but once in a while she was able to get food in her mouth.
I can't wait until she tries sushi.
| I forgot where I found this sticker. It came on some product I bought in Ukraine, possibly an item of clothing, or a bottle of potent vodka. So I put it on my wife and took this picture. Given that I don't remember where the sticker came from, it was mostly likely from a bottle. |
Over two years ago, when I was a new blogger, I wrote a post wondering why visitor stats on Posterous were so much higher than on Analytics. My Posterous stats were 6 - 10 times higher than Analytics. I figured that it was because Posterous was counting spider visits, and Analytics wasn't.
Others have noticed the same thing, and a few people have posted on it. Some other possibilities raised:
Out of curiousity, I decided to check out some of my more outrageous statistics. I have a few posts from late 2010 which Posterous says garnered over 20,000 visits, a figure have trouble believing. I chose a post called Gymnastics in Ukraine: boot camp for little girls, written on November 5, 2010. Posterous says it has 20,106 views, making it one of the most visited.
Then I went to Analytics and had a look at the data from the same date. It says the post has 129 views. This is much bigger discrepency, now we're talking about a factor of over 100. Then I remembered that Posterous counts all the posts on a blog's home page. So I checked that too. The post has been on the home page since it was written, so we can add in 521 additional views, totaling 650. But that's still a much smaller number than 20,000.
In fact, the total number of page views since November 5 for my entire site, including all my 180 posts, is just under 5,000. Even that number is well below 20,000. I would expect different methods of calculating page views to come out with different results, but this is just too much.
So what's going on? Maybe Posterous should tell us how Mixpanel, the company that does its analytics, comes up with such outrageous numbers. Of course, maybe Analytics is the one that's way off target, but if it were, it would be big news.
So maybe I should add another bullet to my list above:
Read other articles on this here:
| Not long ago I read, somewhere, that young Americans today have an inflated sense of entitlement. I already knew this was a whiny generation, but I had no idea how deep the problem was until I read Mathew Klein's op-ed piece in the New York Times. Mr. Klein argues that his generation is trapped in desperate circumstances, living in a dark world where hours of SAT preparation don't lead to high-paying jobs. He tells a tragic story about his friend, a Chinese major, who was forced to work as a lifeguard and move back in with his parents. He moans about his generation "losing faith in the future" and weeps for the "years of career-building experience lost." He even compares the travails of his generation with the struggles of young Arabs fighting against their despotic regimes. "The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa are a warning for the developed world," he says. Then he complains that we can't blame Obama completely. "He's not the only one responsible for the weakness of the recovery," he declares. The Obama administration had better take heed: the Nintendo generation has spoken. Frustrated lifeguards around the country might rise up and throw bottles of suntan lotion at their leaders. Nobody is saying that economic conditions are good for young people today. But guess what? They weren't so hot a few decades ago either, before the boom in the late1980s. When I was a college graduate, I took a poorly-paid, tedious job in a law firm. It paid the bills, barely, but gave me some good experience and more importantly, helped me find a few grown-ups who were willing to write me recommendation letters. If Mr. Klein opens a history book he might find less to complain about. Nobody sent him to fight in Vietnam, or Korea, or in the Pacific. My grandfather, who was separated from his wife and son for four years during World War II, would have loved to work as a lifeguard and live rent-free with his parents instead of getting shot at.The only real tragedy in Mr. Klein's story is one he doesn't explore: the parents of his buddy, the Chinese major. Think of the darkness in their lives: after years of raising a kid and paying through the nose for his education, he grows up and finally moves out. An adult, at last. And then, just as they think they're free, he moves back in, bringing his attitude of entitlement with him. They're the ones who should be writing op-ed pieces in the Times. |
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The United Nations seems to have a day for everything, from poetry (March 20) to families (May 15) to statistics (October 20). They even have a day for mountains (December 11). Some of these days are reasonable enough but mostly they're just ridiculous.
But World Water Day is different. Anyone who has gone without a drink or a shower for a few days learns to appreciate it quickly. And when you don't have clean water for real, the consquences can be a lot more serious than stinking up your cubicle. Millions of people die every year from water-related diseases, and millions more have to spend a big chunk of their income to buy it.
I saw this first-hand in Mongolia, where nearly half the population in the capital lives in heavily-polluted ger districts without running water or basic infrastructure. People there have to buy water and haul it in carts to their homes, often in sub-zero temperatures. They pay much more for it than people living in houses or apartments.
So I was pleased when IFC (where I now work part-time) chose World Water Day to launch its new quarterly journal, which is about private sector involvement in health, education and infrastructure in developing countries. The first issue, Tapped Out, focuses on water issues.
I think it would be great if the United Nations would support this effort by designating a "Public-Private Partnership" day. It could come in November, right after World Television Day. You might have to wait a whle, but at least you'll have something fun to read in the meantime.
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If someone offers you an apple, and you accept, you expect to get something that, well, looks like an apple. Not in my house. When my daughter offers you an apple, you get something that looks like it was magnified a billion times by an electron microscope. Something related to viruses or spores, or part of a micro-parasite. It still tastes like an apple, though.Except for the toothpicks. |
Gymnastics class for kids in Ukraine is tough. They don't just have the 2016 Olymics in mind. They're preparing for war. Or maybe they're training up a corps of future babe assasins to carry out deadly missions across the globe. Hollywood will love it.
My girl's teacher is a thin, blonde pixie-like student, almost a waif to the untrained eye. But when she's in command of a classroom of small girls, she transforms into another kind of being, one with an iron fist and a steely eye. She barks out commands and doesn't hesitate to criticize her pupils.
It's not exactly the style we're used to in the West. But it works. She's the only person in the world my daughter obeys without question.
Maybe I'll ask her to babysit.
Wife: Nobody in this house loves me.
[Wrong response. Very, very wrong.]
This is my first personal blog, which I started nearly two years ago in Ulaanbaatar. I had read an online article, in Yahoo, I think, about a platform that works by sending an email to post@posterous.com. Simple. So I tried it. I wrote some text about my BabyGirl and attached a picture and sent it off. Minutes later, I got a fabulous Web page that I loved at first sight. I have not stopped since. My blog, Out of Mongolia, has been a lot of fun to write and ended up getting well over a thousand visits a month. Not bad for a personal blog.
But after my recent move to Ukraine, I thought I should try something new. I wanted to experiment with other platforms, and I was curious about how Google's Adsense works. So I decided to switch to Wordpress, which was hailed as the most advanced blogging platform there is. It had a tool to import my Posterous blog. So I did it.
BIG mistake. I noticed right away that my fabulous Posterous photo galleries were transformed into an endless, clunky stack of pictures, forcing the reader to scroll and scroll and scroll before getting to the text. Then I noticed that my YouTube links, so perfectly reflected in Posterous as an image with a play button, were reduced to mere links in Wordpress. Then I checked out its e-mail posting capability. It works, but instead of just posting to an easy-to-remember email address, you have to send your post to some cryptic email address that you would never remember if your life depended on it. It works but I did not like it.
Then I tried to edit photos, and embed them alongside the text, something which Posterous can't do yet. I spent two hours messing with it. The photo kept popping up where it shouldn't have, and the caption I tried to add appeared in strange sizes and formats. In Posterous, I just add text right after the photo and it forms a perfect caption.
I also noticed that Wordpress forces a large, clunky font on you. You can't change it. You can't even change the size. After an hour of experiments, I found out that there is some third-party program you have to register with and somehow link to in order to modify the fonts. No thanks.
The final insult happened when I tried to put Adsense in. This is a major weakness in Posterous and was the main driver for me to look elsewhere. But there are no instructions in Wordpress on how to input Adsense, contradicting information I had read about monetizing Worldpress blogs. After hours and hours of research, testing, experiments and torture, I found out that Wordpress has two forms: a .com version and a .org version. The .com version will not allow Adsense. Instead, they put their own ads in. You can use Adsense in the .org version but you need much more technical skill than I have.
I realized that to use Wordpress the way I wanted would take a huge investment in my time. And at best, it wouldn't handle photos and videos and fonts nearly as well as Posterous does. So I re-imported my Ukrainian-themed posts from Wordpress and returned to Posterous, like a humbled, prodical son.
I will continue my blog on Posterous, but will experiment with a new blog on Google's Blogger. In the meantime, I hope that Posterous makes it possible to monetize blogs on their platform. I have noticed that a few Posterous bloggers have managed to do this, but I don't know how they did it.
What a relief to be back. I don't know how Wordpress manages to stay in business. They give you a lot of options, but they also make everything compicated, and don't give you what you really need.
