Tag Archives: ocd

Fun with Olympic Names

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For the past two weeks we’ve been glued to our television set all night long watching the Olympic Games. Of course our favourite sport was swimming and we didn’t miss any of it.

It’s always fun to see the different athletes from around the world and how many different names the announcers end up struggling with. While watching the final of the woman’s 50 free Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gains were all excited commenting and they kept having to say “Kromowidjojo” over and over again. Ranomi Kromowidjojo is a sprinter for the Netherlands and besides giving us a good laugh that they had to keep saying it I thought, wow, what a cool name.

I’ve always liked the names of the Scandinavian athletes. A couple of years ago there was a skier from Norway called Lasse Kjus that I cheered for because I liked his name. I think it has something to do with all the consonants in row that just seem to make the name almost completely impossible to pronounce.

I found a list of all athletes from the London 2012 games and I figured I would go through the list and see what other tidbits I could find.

There were a total of 10902 Olympic Athletes from 205 different countries listed in the roster. To be honest that kind of surprised me sinceI didn’t expect there to be that many competitors.

Fun Facts:

  • Length – Both first and last name.
    • The shortest names came in at just 4 characters. It’s probably cheating but “Deni”, a weight lifter from Indonesia, had only one name listed. There were a total of 12 people who were listed at having just 4 characters in there name but I have to believe that some of them were incorrect. “Joel” a footballer from Spain was probably “Joel Robles Blazquez” the keeper.
    • The longest name goes to “Aleksandra J Klejnowska-Krzywanska” coming in at a whopping 32 characters long. Aleksandra was a weight lifter from Poland. (What is it with these weight lifters.)
  • Length – Just last name.
    • There was a tie for shortest last name between “Lamusi A” a judo competitor from China and to “Diju V’ a Badminton playing from India.
    • The longest last name goes to “Elena Danilyuk-Nevmerzhytskaya” from Belarus at 25 characters. You can really stack it up with those hyphenated names.
  • Frequencies
    • By far and away “Kim” was the most popular surname with 82 different competitors. 61 were from South Korea, 19 from North Korea, 1 from Russia, and 1 from Uzbekistan.
    • The next closest last name wasn’t even a last name but the suffix “van”, as in “Elco van der Geest” at 61 followed by the suffix “de” at 50.
    • There was a tie for next most frequent proper last name of Li and Wang with 39 people.
  • Family Competition – Andrew won the family competition and I didn’t even make it into double digits. Athletes with the first name:
    • Andrew – 30
    • Alex – 20 (I’ve excluded all the Alexander, Alexandre, Alexey, etc.)
    • Jennifer – 18
    • Caroline – 13
    • Derek – 7

Alas, there were no McEachern’s in this years Games.

2011 Year In Numbers

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I never did do a 2010 year in numbers feature but it’s back this year. All kinds of great stuff for last year.

Website

It didn’t feel like I did very many updates to the website last year but looking over it I added 20 new pages. Last year it was 23 and in 2009 there was 21 so I wasn’t that far off from previous years.

I used to really keep track of how many different people were visiting the website but I have to be honest, this site has a really narrow focus,  namely, people who want to find out what is going on with the McEachern family so I’ve really stopped caring how many people are visiting the site, though I still like looking at some of the other statistics.

The top visited pages specifically for 2011 were

  1. Andrew’s birthday party.
  2. Trip to Sea World San Antonio.
  3. Andrew Baseball
  4. Alex’s birthday party
  5. Florida Trip

However, these pages were not the most visited pages on the website. The top two were

  1. Newfie Jokes – “newfie jokes” also happens to be top search term used to find the site.
  2. Statue of Liberty – “statue of liberty” is the 3rd most popular search term that brings people to the site.

One of the reasons these are the two most popular is that I prevent search engines like Google and Yahoo from indexing any pages outside of the blog so random people who find the site will be directed there.

The other stat I like looking at is where people are visiting the site from. Last year people visited from a total of 76 unique counties. The United States and Canada were obviously the two most popular followed by the UK, Brazil (hey Jesse and Otto), Australia, and Germany. The green shaded countries below are where people visited from, the darker the green the greater number of visitors.

2011 Website Global Map

There were also visitors from 950+ unique cities and this graphic shows where the top 250 of those cities are located. The larger and darker the circle the more people.

Website City Map

Swimming

I kept up swimming this year and like I’ve been doing since I was a teenager I’ve been keeping track of everything I do in the pool. Over the past five years this year I swam farthest.

I set myself of goal of going 300 miles which was pretty aggressive since in the past five years the most I had gone was around 250. I managed to just squeak over the goal with 305 miles.

2011 Swimming Summary

September was the longest month and I was just short of 40 miles. I have masters swimming logs from 2006 and since that time I’ve gone 1,260 miles/ 2,027 km, a total of 2,217,448 yards.

On a map that brings me from my door step to about 30 miles short of London, Ontario somewhere on highway 402.

2011 Swimming Map

Reading

I made an effort to try and read more books this year. I’m really jealous of Jen who can speed though piles of books while I plod though at a snails pace,heck even Alex is a faster reader then I am.

Despite my slow reading ability I got through 12 books last year. I read the first two books in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. These were originally published in the early 90’s but I had never heard of them until I read a review for the latest book in the series that was published last year and they compared it to Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” books. They were similar in that they are by a Swedish author, take place in Sweden, and they are novels about violent crimes. Overall I was very pleased and will probably read more in the series when I have time.

Next up I read two books by Jo Nesbo from the Harry Hole series. These were also part of my Scandinavian author kick though these are set in Oslo Norway and not Sweden. For Christmas I received the latest book in the series so I’ll have that to read this year.

During the summer Alex checked out “The Mortal Engines” by Philip Reeve from the library and it sounded interesting so I decided to read it. It was the first book in the “Mortal Engines Quartet” about a time in the future where the world has been totally devastated after the sixty minute war and technology that we have has been totally been lost. Nations as we know them no longer exist and they have been replaced with the “Tractionist” and “Anti-Tractionist” movements. Traction cities are mounted on huge moveable platforms and the cites move around the continent eating up smaller cities. It all sounds very strange but it was a really good series and according to what I have seen on the internet Peter Jackson will be directing and producing a 3D version of story.

For the new year I already have 5 books on the pile so it looks like I’m set until June.

Movies

We are Netflix subscribers and this year the company took a lot of heat for raising their prices fairly substantially and then in an attempt to try and smooth things over they announced they were going to split the company in two. One for users who get DVD’s by mail and another to serve users streaming content. We have both the one DVD out at a time and the unlimited streaming service. I wasn’t so upset about the price hike, that’s the cost of doing business, but splitting the company in two was going to be a pain since I would have to manage my movie lists in two different places.

After much pressure Netflix scrapped the idea of forming two different companies and kept everything under the Netflix name. This is great because for Christmas we got an internet enabled TV with Netflix and we can stream movies right to television without having to hook it up to a separate system.

Looking back through my DVD history we went through 31 movies, mostly stuff for the kids. I only streamed 16 films to my computer during the year but since we got the new TV with build in Netflix we have already gone through 10 movies.

I would say my favorites for the year would be the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, the Swedish versions. I thought they stuck very close to the book and the actors did a great job. I have it on my todo list to see the Hollywood version but haven’t yet had the chance to do that.

2009 Year in Numbers – Part 2 – Everything Else

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Continuing along with my ocd 2009 year in numbers moving on to the year in swimming.

In 2008 I went 290,000 yards, 162 miles, and this year I set myself a goal of going at least 200 miles. I didn’t want to set the goal too much higher then 2008 since I knew that at the end of February we would be having Caroline and I wouldn’t be in the pool to much after that.

Things went much better then anticipated and I managed to go 387,000 yards, 240 miles.

Swim Yards

January and February were really strong months and as expected after Caroline was born I didn’t get in the pool for over a month. Then things picked up again and in July I managed to post an all time high of 32.9 miles. October through December were pretty slow months starting with a week off for Amanda and Ben’s wedding, then I got sick in November, and finally the holidays in December.

In addition to keeping track of yards swam I also kept track of hours in the pool. I swam for a total of 112.5 hours or 4.69 days. Holy cow that’s a lot of hours in the pool. If your doing that math that works out my average swimming speed of 2.14 miles per hour.

The other thing I kept track of was the break out of swim vs kick, vs pull.

Swim, Kick, Pull, Breakout

Obviously the swim is going make up the majority of the yards but I was surprised by the 46,000 yards kick. You can see that I’m not a real big fan of drill since it barely registers on the graph.

Other numbers for the year.

  • Netflix movies – We rented 52 movies this year. Certainly no record based on how many I hear other folks go through but that works out to one a week which isn’t too shabby.
  • Jen drives about 1,400 miles a month, and since I’m now working much closer to the house I only drive about 650 miles a month.

2009 Year in Numbers – Part 1 – mfdc statistics

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I’ve always loved keeping track of totally useless numbers and statistics so here is installment one of the 2009 year in numbers, mfdc statistics.

Last year was a record year for web site traffic with 117,263 hits. Compare that to 2008 were it was only 79,870 hits.

By month it broke out like:

It was on a steadily increase right from January through July when then things just fell off a cliff. I’m not exactly sure what happened there but it picked up again in October and then went right back into the toilet to end the year. I can understand the December numbers since there were really no web page updates or blog entries to speak of so the site got a little stale.

If remember last years summary I was giving my Canadian friends a hard time since I had more people from France, Poland, and Mexico visiting the site then from Canada and I’m glad to say that this year you didn’t let any other countries beat you. Unfortunately it wasn’t a matter of you beating anyone else but rather a rather large drop in the amount of traffic from every other international country.

Last year Canada accounted for 744 hits but this year it was only 364. I’m not sure what caused the huge drop in international visitors other then it’s possible that they are not being correctly accounted for. Last year there were 5,466 hits that couldn’t be attributed to a specific country or domain and this year that number was 11,098 so I have to believe that somewhere in this number here were countries not being accounted for correctly.

This year I added Google Analytics to the site which helped me track how people actually find there way to mfdc. Like I would expect the vast majority of visitors are coming directly to the site either by bookmark or just typing in the web address and most of those people or repeat viewers. This really isn’t surprising since the audience is really family and friends and since I don’t allow search engines to index any of the main site it limits what your going to find using a search engine.

None the less there are still what I would consider a large number of people who get to the site by coming from other locations like:

  1. blogger.com
  2. facebook.com
  3. google.com
  4. images.google.com
  5. twitter.com
  6. images.google.ca
  7. notebooks-brazil.blogspot.com. (Beats me. When I saw this a couple of months back I tried to hunt it down but couldn’t find anything.)
  8. images.google.co-uk

The other interesting thing is look at the search terms that people typed into a search engine that lead them to the site. As you would expect “mceachern family” and variations of peoples names with “mceachern” show up frequently but here’s a couple others exactly as they were typed into search engines that sent people to the blog

  1. alex matisse
  2. don’t forget your lunch box
  3. antique bobsleds
  4. sesame place secrets
  5. sesame princeton
  6. abe’s log cabin
  7. canada trip family pictures
  8. rhyming words with hiatus
  9. pictures: “hello. anyone home?”
  10. pictures of you, pictures of me.
  11. picasso baseball pictures
  12. zee zed canada

Some of these I can tell exactly where they ended up but others make absolutely no sense. I mean really, picasso baseball pictures, rhyming words with hiatus?

And now for the mfdc Top 5 most popular pages of the year, drum roll please…

  1. Caroline’s first pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caragrace/index.html) Was anyone surprise by this?
  2. Alex’s 7th Birthday Party (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/alexparty/index.html)
  3. Caroline’s 2nd set of pictures (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/caroline/index.html)
  4. Amanda and Ben’s Wedding (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/amandawedding/index.html)
  5. Andrew’s 4th Birthday (http://www.mceachernfamily.com/2009/andrewparty/index.html)

2008 Year in Numbers

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Some useless numbers and statistics to sum up 2008.

mfdc in numbers
It was a record year for web site traffic this year with 79,870 hits from 1,803 unique visitors. In the overall scheme of web site volume 79,000 visitors isn’t all that many but the target audience for this site is meant to be small and this still works out to 218 hits a day which is fine. When I include all the auto crawlers from seach engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, we had a total of 108,858 hits.

By month the trend looks like this:

I would have assumed that the huge tickup in traffic in November would have come around the time I posted the Disney vacation pictures but after looking at the traffic that wasn’t the case. Someone from France (see below) pretty much went through the entire site in about 10 minutes so it was probably some type of automated collector even though the browser type doesn’t indicate that’s what it was.

Top visitors to the site came from addresses ending in .net, followed by a chunk of unknown, then .com. The next three largest groups came from France (1,961 – 857 being the suspected automated web site crawler from above), Poland (827), and Mexico (772). You Canadian visitors came in 7th with 744 hits.

Excluding the home page, blog home page and rss feeds the most popular page was the January trip to Great Wolf Lodge, Christmas pictures from 2007, and Alex’s Matisse.

The top browsers used to visit the site were Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (mainly mac users), and Opera. There were 23 hits from a Lynx user which surprises me since Lynx is a text based and out site is pretty much graphics driven. (Then again it was only 23 hits, only for the home page, but it spanned from January to September so whoever it was kept coming back.)

Blog Posts
Compared to previous years I managed to get out a couple more blog posts then years past with 70 items. That accounts for 24% of all posts and I’ve been posting on or off since July of 2004. It’s hard to beleive that it’s been that it’s been that long which got me thinking how long I’ve had this site up. Looking at the WHOIS record I’ve owned mfdc since October of 2001. Holy cow, 2001. I remember I got the site while Jen was pregant with Alex as a good way to share pictures with the family. (And now she’s pregant again….cue twilight zone music.)

Swim Numbers
Ever since I was in high school I’ve more or less kept track of all my workouts. It’s a habit one of my old coaches got me into and it’s been impossible to break. It doesn’t feel like a complete workout until I’ve written it down and recorded the yardage.

This year I swam 290,600 yards which works out to about 165 miles (265 km). February and March were really down months since I took them off due to surgery so I’m relatively pleased with how far I went. The thing that’s aways a little surprising to me is that it was only 165 miles for the whole year since it sure feels like way longer while I’m in the pool. On a map 165 miles doesn’t look all that impressive and depending on which way I go from our house it doesn’t even get me out of the state.

So instead of ploting how far I’ve gone horizontally how about looking at it vertically. According to Google Earth this is what the view of our house would look like from 165 miles up. More impressive if you ask me.

Netflix
According to Netflix we rented 61 movies last year and I wactched 1 online using the “Watch Now” feature. That works out to more movies then remember watching in previous years and now that I know how many it is I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth even if I’m not one of those 260+ movies a year type person.

There you go, the 2008 ocd numbers summary.