I’m back. I was going to write a whole story, but then I remembered what a waste of time that is. And yes, about half of the pictures are blurry - this camera I bought last year is a total piece of shit and simply will not focus correctly when you are in a situation any lower light than, say, the surface of the sun.

There’s not much more of an update than that, especially since we got in late last night and everything is still in a state of confusion and still-packededness. I also have a huge stack of books that arrived while I was gone, and I want to read all of them. I also have two seasons of Seinfeld on DVD that won’t even get their shrinkwrap cracked until mid-June. And dinner’s on the way. So I best get to it…

Here’s a quick halftime report of the Vegas trip, thanks to the wonder of in-room ethernet. We’re staying at the Bellagio, which is pretty damn awesome. (See also Ocean’s 11, the remake version with Clooney and Pitt, although we don’t have the ultra-suite shown in the film.) Our suite looks east aka toward the strip, and every time the fountains go off, we see them launch water in the air. Luckily, the room’s got the blackout drapes, and they’re even operated via remote control motors with buttons by the nightstand.

Things have been good and we’ve mostly ate too much and gambled only a touch. We have a car, so we went out to the Liberace museum, which was pretty interesting, especially the cars. Today we went to the Atomic Test museum, which is not a giant hole in the ground, but rather a big new museum a few miles off the strip, which houses a ton of memorabilia about the testing done out at NTS back in the day. Unfortunately, no photography at either, but I have a lot of other good snapshots to upload when I get back.

Food has included the Bouchon, Thomas Keller’s restaurant at the Venetian (pretty damn good, but I’m finding I don’t like French food as much as I probably should); the buffet at the new Wynn casino (pretty much the best you could imagine); the breakfast at Denny’s (I can’t really stomach it anymore); lunch at In-n-Out (one of the best burgers out there, but the fries aren’t a+ material, even if fresh); another lunch at Pink Taco (despite the name, one of my favorite Amerimexican places); a late-night dinner at the Bellagio cafe (excellent); and room service breakfast at the hotel (the best $17 breakfast burrito you can find).

And I finally rode the monorail! Somewhat useless, but very nice. Also drove south to a huge outlet mall in the middle of nowhere, and did a lot of other wandering. None of our other co-vacationers are here until tomorrow night, and then the fun begins. Me and Bill turn 35 on Friday, and there are no plans yet, but we’ll see what happens.

Everything is under construction here, BTW. Every crappy strip mall that sold phone cards and junk t-shirts is getting bulldozed for a new condo development. The look of Vegas will be very weird in a couple of years. For now, it’s all about the home-builder’s convention, and every masonry contractor in middle america is here with their wife and/or girlfriend for the weekend. Nifty.

Still jetlagged, so even though the watch says 11, the mind says 2 AM, and I must collapse.

It’s Monday, but it’s a bank holiday, and I have the day off, so life is good. And in about two hours, we will get in a car for LGA and fly west to Las Vegas for a week, and I will again celebrate my birthday (Friday, the 20th) in the land of gambling, no open container laws, and all-you-can eat buffets. I actually don’t know where we’re staying, and it is a complete surprise that will be revealed to me when we actually drive up to the hotel for check-in. So that should be interesting.

The second journal book has already lost steam and been but aside for now. I still want to do it eventually, but I’m just not in the mood to slog through it right now. I’m trying instead to get back on another project I’ve been messing with for a year or two, which is basically a heavy metal version of John Sheppard’s book Small Town Punk (which is getting re-released on IG this year.) Maybe that isn’t a good comparison, but I want to write something about growing up in the late-eighties in Elkhart, Indiana, which was such a beat area where people could never escape and everyone was at the mercy of these huge manufacturing plants that paid okay money for menial labor, but basically killed you in the long-term. And because the whole thing revolved around the economy, and the economy was shit back then, you had mass layoffs and strikes and mandatory overtime and cutting corners on safety and everything else.

And as a 17-year-old kid, I didn’t fully appreciate that situation, but what I did see were the side effects. Kids with one parent who worked 60 hours a week at a trailer factory ended up becoming burnouts, and the people who had a daddy that was an executive vice president of some RV place had the rich lifestyle and basically lived like those executives at Enron who fucked everyone over. And the whole city looked like shit, except for the gated communities, and everyone latched onto whatever fad or abusable substance or religion would promise them a moment of feeling appreciated.

Of course, the book is not about that, but mostly about a kid trying to get laid, and listening to every Metallica album constantly. And it’s not autobiographical. I think I always said that Summer Rain was 80% true, and I think this book will be closer to 30-40%. Many of the main characters are composites, and will have to have big parts of their lives altered to fit the timeline and story. Part of that is that the book has to contain a certain amount of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and none of my friends back then were getting much of any of those, and I wasn’t either. Plus I’m finding it impossible to write about real people anymore without pissing someone off because I’m not 100% glowing about them. The characters need to be real people who fuck up and do stupid things, or it won’t be a good book, so I’m diving more into the fictional realm to do this. But the setting of Elkhart will be there, in full hilbilly glory.

Not much else is going on here. I got one of those Newertech drive enclosures for the Mac Mini and it’s pretty awesome. It looks just like the mac case and sits under there, and has Firewire and USB hubs on the back, plus a 160 GB drive inside. I haven’t had time to start filling it, but what’s also neat is that it has some stuff on it already, like shareware and a bunch of Apple commercials and episodes of The ScreenSavers in QuickTime.

I didn’t leave the house all weekend, which was neat. In fact, I don’t even think I put on shoes once, except to go downstairs and pick up laundry one time. We watched a lot of movies and basically sat around, since we’re going to be running around all week and eating too much and spending lots of cash. We watched a lot of movies, mostly. Meet The Fockers was okay, and The Ali G Show was absolutely hilarious. I also got an Amazon gift certificate and plowed through that last night, mostly ordering house books on wind energy and underground houses and stuff like that. I’ll have a whole pile of stuff waiting for me when we get back.

Okay, wish me luck!

First things first: A hardcover version of Summer Rain is now available from lulu.com. It’s the same size and same text as the second edition book I published with Lulu, but instead of perfectbound paperback, it’s bound in navy blue linen with gold foil spine printing and a full color jacket. It costs more ($25.99) and it will cost more to ship because it weighs more, but it’s a real hardcover book, and I’m very excited about that. Go to lulu.com/jkonrath to purchase it or any of my other books on Lulu. I don’t expect anyone to actually buy this, but I had the option, and I wanted one for my bookcase.

Speaking of which, I have decided to publish a second book of journals. I know nobody bought the first one when it came out, and maybe nobody will buy this one either. But I don’t really write books to make money, and I really wanted a new book on the Konrath shelf of the home library. So I pulled together all of the HTML from the 2000-2005 journals, threw it into FrameMaker, and started down the hellish path of trying to edit things together.

Most of the initial problems involve stripping off HTML for scripts and tops and bottoms of pages, and turning headings in HTML into headings in Frame, and all of that garbage. FrameMaker doesn’t have a smooth way to import HTML, believe it or not, and that makes a lot of work. It also totally fucks things up, like making individual lines into paragraphs, which require monumental amounts of repetitive labor in stripping things down and applying the right styles.

Once I got the text into the book, I had about 1200 pages. That’s not really accurate, because I still had scripts and markup and junk, and pages weren’t flowing right, and paragraphs were all fucked up. While formatting, I dropped a few entries that were either short, or repeats, or pasted in stories that I didn’t want in the book, or whatever else. By 9

or so last night, I had it down to 676 pages. This is still with a third of it still jagged and fucked up, and without even a first pass on actually dropping or combining or editing down some of the entries.

The basic idea though is to keep the book about this long. I don’t intend to chop everything down into a 180-page “best of”. One of the things about my journal is that it’s been around a long time, and there’s a lot of old entries back there. I think there are about a half-million words from 1997 to present, and it’s not all a bunch of timely and now useless info, like memes and political garbage, which would now be completely outdated. One thing that digging through the old entries has made me realize is that a lot of it is still very readable, and very interesting. Well, maybe not everyone would enjoy it, but I still find it entertaining to go back to old entries. And that’s why I want to make the book.

So that’s the current project. It doesn’t have a name, and it needs a lot of editing work, but it’s keeping me busy.

I thought I’d start with some year-end statistics and bookkeeping, since I thought it would be a good time for answering the question “How many people read this thing, anyway?” So I downloaded all of my logs to my home machine, and used the handy grep, cut and wc commands to crunch away on the raw logs. But before we start, a few disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: I did not “wash” these logs to remove search engine crawling in any way. I’m sure there are nice tools to do this, but I’m doing this in the most rudimentary way. And just from looking at raw logs, there are a fuck of a lot of search engines out there hitting web sites. If someone told me that 50% of all web traffic was currently web crawlers, I would not be surprised. And even though Google and their huge image-crawling project are the cause for much of the traffic, everyone and their brother is running a web crawler. Jabronis in garages running searches to find email addresses for spam operations are all over my logs, with malformed headers and IDs to try to protect their get-rich-quick operations. Oh, and they’re doing it with the bandwidth I pay for, which is even more heartwarming.

Disclaimer #2: I’m not using a log analysis program. There are hundreds of programs out there, and 99% of the web is using Analog, one of the least interesting of the bunch. Why? Try to get any of the others to work and you’ll find out. If your ISP has some neato package to generate reports on how long people view your pages and stuff like that, great. I’d rather pay for an ISP that’s always working and won’t be shut down in a year when the owner goes to college. So anyway, my stats are based on just raw searches and counting of logs, and nothing fluffier.

Disclaimer #3: Of course, hits include both people who read every word of a page and enjoy it, and people who typed “butt sex” in google and somehow ended up at my page and didn’t read one damn thing when they saw there were no free videos.

Okay. In 2005, 34.216.9.77/ had 1,508,132 hits total. In comparison, there were 86,022 hits in 2004, and 53,972 in 2003. That’s about double from last year. There was a similar trend on just the people that came to any of the URLs south of 34.216.9.77/journal (I.e the page you’re currently reading.) 2005’s total hits were 153,586, while 2004 was 86,022 and 2003 was 53,972, which is close to the same trend.

What about unique users? Overall, the entire site had 55,044 in 2005, compared to 44,917 in 2004, and 40,592 in 2003. (I calculated a unique user as a unique IP number or hostname in the logs. I realize that the same person could read both at home and at work and be counted twice; but then many people reading behind a firewall or NAT appliance or whatever could all be considered one visitor, too.) That means that in 2005, the average person read just over 27 pages. Of course, when you factor in all of the people who googled over to my page hoping to download some free Metallica MP3s and only read one page, it balances out with those of you who read all of my entries.

As far as the unique visitors on the journal page, there were 7008 in 2005, which is down from 2004 at 8612 and up from 2003’s 6994. I don’t know why there was a drop, although it’s possible that all of the press I got about Adam Gadahn in 2004 bumped up the number, plus I didn’t write as much in 2005. (56 entries in 2005 versus 91 in 2004.)

So those are the numbers. 7008 readers (minus the search engines and people looking for free porn) is orders of magnitude higher than I would expect, based on the comments and the fact that I really don’t know that many people that read this thing. I don’t advertise; I am not in any weird web rings or communities or whatever; I don’t really socialize with bloggers (I don’t even consider this thing a blog to begin with) and I don’t really whore things out as far as links and whatnot. I did blogexplosion briefly, and go there when I’m eternally bored, but most of the blogs there are either mommy blogs or are so hopelessly useless because they’re nothing but political repostings of day-old news.

I’m happy with the numbers only in that this isn’t my life. It’s a side project, something I do when I can’t write and I don’t have other things to do, and the main reason I do this is so that in five years, I will be able to go back and read this and enjoy it. My guilty pleasure is to go back a few years and read my old entries, and I really love it when I hit stuff I’ve almost totally forgotten and I love the old writing. I put out a book of the first three years of the journals, and it sold about 6 copies, but I admit one of the reasons I did it was to have a paper copy I could read in bed. I still waver back and forth on whether or not I should do a second volume, and maybe throw in some pictures or scans of paper journals or something just to make it interesting. Maybe I will. Who knows.

In other news, I finished reading First Man, James Hansen’s authorized biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, and I really did enjoy it. Armstrong kept out of the public light for years, hoping he wouldn’t get mauled by the media like his hero and friend Charles Lindberg. For years, there’s been little information about his life, and various second-hand info from other NASA colleagues about the lunar mission. This is a huge book (almost 800 pages) but it was very rewarding as far as how Neil grew up in rural Ohio, went to school at Purdue, joined the Navy and flew jets from carriers in Korea, and became a test pilot before getting tapped for the astronaut job.

I think a lot of the reason I liked the book is that Armstrong was so different than other astronauts or test pilots. He was all about the science behind the mission, and he loved the engineering aspect. Strapping into an X-15 rocket plane and flying to the edge of the atmosphere wasn’t about the joyride, or the “extreme” aspect of the mission; it was totally about gathering the data to prove or disprove the theorems that the guys with the sliderules were throwing down in the labs. Armstrong probably could have been elected king of the world in 1969, but he was always shy about politics, and though it was best to not discuss one’s political views, as has become the national sport in the 21st century. He was greatly honored to meet both LBJ and Nixon, but not because they were the highest red or blue, but because they were in charge, and you honor the office over the person. He was from a very religious family, and certainly was religious, but he said so little about it, people accused him of being an atheist. Instead of becoming a token president of a fortune 500 company, like some of his other Apollo buddies, he taught undergrad physics at a small university. He could have just had his name put on the door of a big university, so he could do nothing or maybe dabble in research. Instead, he wanted to go somewhere that would let him teach, because he thought furthering kids’ educations was more important. It’s all of those little things that make him so much more interesting to me, and now that I got a full dose of the official story, I’m happy. (But, Neil’s crewmate Michael Collins’, autobiography still stands as the best I’ve read sofar.)

Quiet Saturday here. In a week and a couple of days, we go to Vegas for the annual birthday celebration, and I can’t wait to get out of town. Until then, I’m taking it easy…