Tuesday, April 20, 2004

The joy of driving..... and google

I'll give you an idea of how interesting my typical Sundays are.

Yesterday I drove to New York with a friend of mine to pick up his girlfriend from the airport. It takes about 4 and half hours to drive from sleepy State College to the mighty Manhattan. Once we got to New York we had lunch in a nice sushi restaurant in a very gay (as in the boys there like other boys as opposed to everyone's happy .... although everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves) region of town. Before walking around for quite a while, I guess mainly in the village and soho... but I don't really have much of a clue about what the different areas are called. And then there was some looking at the nice shiny things in the apple store (I want an ipod!! And I'll stamp my feet and moan until I get one. Or at least wait until my tax return comes through and then um and ah trying to decide whether I want a big 40G one or a littler 20G one or a very little mini- one.) After achieving my original aim of finding the shiny things store we set off to look at the Flat Iron building, which is my favourite building in New York. On the way there we saw magic tricks and anti-Einstein theorists and a multicultural food market place, all sorts of fun things that you don't really see hear in lovely State College.

Then it was back to the car, off to JFK, hang around for an hour or so before the immigration people finally let go of our friend. By which time it was around 9pm, and we set off homeward. Once we had negotiated the twin tunnels and crossed Manhattan we started thinking about getting a bite to eat.... which was the start of our downfall. You see, it turns out that 10 o'clock on a Sunday evening is some sort of a watershed time for restaurants in New Jersey. It took us nearly two hours to find somewhere to eat, well find somewhere and eat there, and it was at an all night truck stop. As you can imagine the food was less than ideal. Is ten o'clock really so late to eat food?

Anyway, I've been rambling. The moral of the story is that I went for a 12 hour round trip just to spend three hours wandering around a city. And this was a good Sunday for me.

And now for something completely different. For the last month or so I've been using retro stats to keep track of how few people actually glance at this website. I'm not quite sure why. It feels somewhat narcissisticanarcissisticl. Well it would at least if lots of people looked at the site. But anyhow, it keeps all sort of interesting factlets such as language, operating systems, referrers, etc. My favourite page though is the one which keeps track of what search terms were used to find my musings. On this list are a couple of people who were looking for the country which are strangely named guy from a rap band comes from (trying not to further encourage this linkage). But there are also one or two more interesting search times. My personal favourite is the guy (I guess) who was looking for "dirty bitches in guildford". But I also liked "ryan's syndrome" (which it turns out exists.. sort of) and "ryans bus times" (I just have no idea what it could possibly be about). Needless to say I find it all very amusing.

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