Waylaid visitors

I use a site meter program thingy to track the number of visits to this site. The results are confusing and not very helpful (and probably wrong) but it's still interesting to see who turns up here and (sometimes) why.

One day in a fit of whimsy I wrote this post about Sesame Street birthday cakes using a photo yoinked from a birthday cakes site. That's probably not legal but I'll take it down if they ask me to, and anyway, their URL is plastered across the photo.

Ever since I posted that picture, the hit count on this page has gone up to about 20 hits a day, which is about 19 more hits than I used to get on average. Almost all the IP addresses are from places in the US like Tacoma, Washington and West Bloomfield, Michigan. According to my site meter results, very few of them stick around for more than 3 seconds. I guess this is because the picture is coming up on a google images search or something like that, and once they get here they realise I am not going to tell them how to immortalise Bert and Ernie using flour and sugar, and they leave.

So, hello to all you thwarted birthday cake makers and good luck in your quests. Sorry to disappoint you.

Meanwhile, I have 19 working days left before we start our dawdle home to Brisbane via Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar. My desk is a tornado of hotel bookings, flight confirmations, newspaper articles and visa applications. I sometimes wonder how it will feel to be back in Brisbane, settled into home and back at work. Scarily permanent perhaps? But then I think of walking down the river's edge in the sun in bare feet, and the 10-minute bus trip to work, and I feel a bit better.

I've posted some photo sets from Italy and Scotland up on flickr too, here.