In the real world, a mere five-minute walk from my cubicle, a fellow middle manager also loses his focus on his business priorities and seeks temporary escape from the rigors of the corporate grind via non-work-related internet surfing on his laptop. In the virtual word, we both end up at the same place - this site, although we come at it from slightly different angles...
Bookmarks are for old people. I have some regular readers. I can sorta guess their ages. The younger ones revisit my page by using Google to search on "benmiller" or "ben miller" or believe it or not "benmiller.com." Even with incipient Alzheimer's I can remember the www and save a few of my rapidly dwindling (probabilistic) store of seconds of (borderline) lucidity. Youth, so truly wasted on the young. For the young'uns, my referrer log shows variants of:
The oldies use bookmarks, so when they revisit my log shows no referrer:
followup:
* more common across all age groups than I thought according to AOL search data leaked earlier this year discussed in the context of the self-serving nature of the end-of-year lists of popular search terms offered by the rival search engines. [ref]
First an American #; now a German. I wonder if there is a micropayments system I could implement. Clearly without a clue, at this fevered point, these guys would probably cough-up $1.00 for access to a special page of links offering information they appear to value.
Today's most intriguing visitor is searching for "Tokyo prostitution" from his -- her?...yeah, right; she's a delegate to a U.N. Conference on the exploitation of women and children needing to get some last-minute information for her paper "Mme Butterfly Meets Jet-Trash" -- room at the ultra-exclusive Hotel Okura.
If only I knew his room #. The hotel is about five minutes walk from here, and I suspect I could pull off smart-ass, potentially bribeable undercover vice cop for a few minutes for the benefit of this first-time visitor yokel.
Letting the unprepared loose in the sexual pay-for-all actually has a serious side. Whenever I read of some poor foreign schmuck reporting stolen credit cards, the story almost invariably involves some American middle-level manager from the somewhat-less-worldly heartland of the continent. He leaves his room for his big night-out, with only a couple of hundred dollars worth of local currency. He is not particularly well prepared for places with mind-bendingly beautiful staff, and where a couple bottles of champagne and a few lap dances later, his cash reserves are insufficient and accordingly his credit card gets whacked for several thousand dollars.
Yikes! What to do? If it's the personal credit card, the wife is gonna kill him. If it's the corporate card, unless he works for boo.com he's screwed. The next morning, I too would concoct an imaginary pickpocket, and back it up with a visit to the constabulary and U.S. Embassy. Either that or lose some combination of wife, house and assets, career.
Today's referral log shows a visit from someone in Nigeria searching for "private individual email address in japan 2006 find." The only private email address I can find here is my own. Perhaps this will lead to an opportunity to contribute to the hysterically funny body of work of shivermetimbers at 419eater. I'll have to learn photoshop (or woodwork and taxidermy) in order to do things like this and this (images from 419eater, but copied to here because of bandwidth constraints there) to the hand-carved indigenous art for which I hope to soon be in earnest negotiation. If not that, perhaps I can get someone to tattoo themselves on my behalf.
update:
problems with images both here and at 419eater; in lieu of, this flickr image is priceless
