I am scanning photos endlessly. I’ve got a lot of 93 and 94 done, and a good deal of my Trip East in 99. I’m mostly scanning with no regard to how I’ll get shit in iPhoto or ordered up yet, but I’ll eventually be adding stuff to my photos page. For now, you can go and look at these pics from my 1994 trip to Knoxville with Larry. I also got a shitload of slides from my mom from 1970-1973, so lots of pictures of me naked in a bathtub. Scanning slides is a major pain in the ass; at least with film, I can load in a strip of 4 and go away for 20 minutes. With slides, I have to constantly reload. I wish this thing would let me load up one of those Kodak carousels and leave it for a day or two.

Not much else to report. Gotta go change slides.

Damn, my Loompanics order got here fast. I thought the whole going out of business thing meant they would take forever to fill the order, and 87% of the books would be gone already, but everything I ordered showed up in about four days. I was home sick on Friday, and spent the day going in and out of nap-state on the couch while reading a book about a guy who homesteads in the desert in a little house he built for about $300. Pretty crazy, but interesting. (And no, I can’t do this on my land – we actually have zoning that explicitly prohibits this sort of thing.)

Another book I got that I was flipping through last night talks about the ins and outs of buying houses and then moving them. It’s a pretty interesting book, because I’ve always had some fascination with that process. When I was a teenager, the US-20 bypass got built, just a short distance north of our subdivision. Where it crossed, there lay a different, slightly older division of homes, and they were all bought by the government at fair market value and the owners given the boot. Most of these were fairly new ranch-style homes, maybe ten years old or so, and after The Man got the land, they auctioned off the structures for a pittance. In the year or two following, I saw a lot of homes being hoisted onto steel frames and pulled by huge trucks to their new locations. I remember one time, riding my bike to the Concord Mall, I started down a hill on Sunnyside Drive, and as I gained speed and popped over the crest, I saw a giant house blocking the whole road! That’s a pretty unusual sight to behold. They put in the house on that land, and from what I remember, they either added a smaller house to make it an L-shape and grafted the two together, or maybe they just built the new wing from scratch. Anyway, the fact that they bought these houses for hundreds of dollars (if that) and then installed them to make a house costing maybe $50K more is pretty enticing.

The author of this book talks about people bidding on houses that are being struck out to expand airports and ending up with $100K homes for something like $25. Of course, you have to pay to move it, but depending on how far you go, that could cost you only five or ten thousand dollars. You hire a mover, and they pop the house off the foundation with jacks and mount it to steel girder framing to keep it from twisting or buckling. They’re also going to do the other dirty work, like sever that electrical and wiring junk, and deal with any outcroppings, porches, decks, garages, verandas, or other pieces that are going to worm lose during the whole trip. They talk to the local PO about traffic, and maybe work around any power lines or other problems on the route. Then the whole thing goes mobile, and they prop the house up on the new site with a shitload of huge oak timbers.

Depending on if your movers are just taking you point-to-point or if they are a turnkey place, the movers will either take their money and run, or they’ll do the next step for you. The next step involves basically building a foundation under the house that’s now hanging in the air. Maybe you were able to dig a basement and pour footers and walls, in which case you’ve got a nice sill on which to drop the bitch and start wiring and picking paint for the living room. Or maybe not, in which case you do your digging and concrete work while the house sits above you. You then have to go through every system of the house (wiring, HVAC, plumbing) and get it all up to code, which might take some work if you’ve just moved a 200-year-old plantation house or something.

And despite what people thing, moved houses are not fundamentally weaker than new houses. I know that misconception sounds like it would have to be true, but for whatever reason (probably the fact that they have to jack all of the house to the right level and build a new foundation around it), the new houses are often stronger. And they don’t buckle or bend as much as you think, because of that steel below it.

I wish the Alamosa airport got some huge grant to expand and put the nix on a bunch of houses so I could buy one. I’m guessing with all of the crazy homesteaders out there though, it would cost a lot more than it would if I lived in Elkhart. (Not that I’d want to live in Elkhart…)

In unrelated news, I got a Nikon Coolscan V ED film scanner, and I’ve been pulling in a bunch of my 35mm negatives. It works well, although it’s slower than fuck. Also, I cannot find some of my negatives, which I thought were all in one place. I don’t feel like digging around for them though – I have enough to keep me busy until summer. Also, my mom has a warchest of old slides, containing a lot of my baby pictures and other early stuff. She’s going to ship those off so I can restore them and get them onto CD, hopefully.

Still writing. Still not talking about what I’m writing. It’s getting near the 50K word mark though.

As I’ve said before, if I’m not updating here, it means I’m busy writing on a real project. And I have been picking at something for a little while, and making okay progress. I’m still at the beginning though, and too scared to jinx it to mention anything about it. The best explanation to this phase of the writing would have to do with the metaphor about swimming across a mile-wide lake. If you swim out a hundred feet, it’s pretty easy to turn back and swim another hundred feet and then go home. If you swim out a thousand feet, it takes some work to quit and go home. If you’re out three or four thousand feet, you might as well just finish. I need to get down a solid layer of wordcount on this before I even make any decisions on what stays and what goes and how the plot will unfold. I have become the king of false starts in the last few years, and I really need to stick with this one and keep it going, until it’s to a length where I figure I can’t put it down and quit anymore. When Summer Rain was a bad first draft and I gave it up to work on my second book, I eventually had to come back to it and start the next draft, because I invested 80,000 words into it.

(That’s probably not a great metaphor, because I can’t swim.)

Speaking of Summer Rain, I got the hardcover, and it is pretty amazing. I love that it’s done with a color jacket and the actual book has gold lettering on a cloth binding. Very classy. I know nobody else will give a shit to buy one, but I’m glad to have it on the shelf, with the others.

And speaking of buying books, Loompanics is going out of business! For those not in the know, they are (were) the big one-stop catalog for all of your paranormal, fake ID, lockpicking, drug, sex, and spying book needs, many of which you can’t find in stores. They used to put out a great zine-like catalog, and I could just read the catalog itself for hours, poring over all of the strange books they sold. They were located in the Pacific Northwest (Port Townsend, WA – a bit north of Seattle) and I first got their catalog from a zine show or the book fair or something about ten years ago. They’re the kind of store where I would put in a mega-order for a half-dozen book every once in a while when a bonus or tax check came in. Anyway, they are closing shop, and are running a 50% off all stock sale. I placed my order, and I hope I get at least some of it before everything runs out.

I’m still reading as much as I can, as I work on this new book. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk is currently going – the original version, not the new-and-(un)improved IG Press version which will come out in the future.

Okay, back to work…

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 9:00 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, Rumored.com 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 rumored.com/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…