April 2010 | write/geek

Impressed, perplexed by Howard Johnson

I’m presently at a hotel, and I’ve found myself impressed with the Wi-Fi here. The signal strength is okay and the speed is adequate, but that’s not what’s standing out. It’s the branding.

I’ve seen all manners of SSIDs since Wi-Fi became commonplace in hotels, from “Free Wifi” to “[hotel name here],” but in my experience, this Howard Johnson location is truly singular… and perplexing to me.

The hotel offers multiple wireless access points. I’m guessing this is for better coverage, but they decided to give each one a different name. The names aren’t anything predictable, like hojo1, hojo2, either.

I’m impressed that the management actually took the time to integrate feel-good corporate messages into each access point’s SSID. Using tech to communicate thoughts in nontraditional ways is certainly relevant to my interests. However, picking a different slogan for each AP not only seems technically sloppy, but makes for an awkward mish-mash of old and new company taglines. Also, how am I supposed to know the AP I’m connecting to isn’t an evil twin? It’d be pretty trivial for someone to throw together something like hojolovesyou and have its potential for malice be imperceptible next to the other goofy networks.

My concerns over the wireless amenities are mostly theoretical, since my tethered Android phone has me adequately covered when it comes to Internet access. My use of the free Wi-Fi is limited to consuming to high-bandwidth content that would make my currently-EDGE connection choke. (What’s more, as a Linux user — varoom! —much of what a theoretical attacker could do, outside of MITM, isn’t really a concern to me.)

The plugins behind the blog

I appreciate the slick publishing platform that WordPress provides for my writing. Perhaps even better is its plugin system, which lets me make it do just about anything I like.

Since you wont find me churning out PHP code of my own anytime soon (I’ve actually been meaning to take another stab at to wrapping my brain around Python now that version 3 is out), I rely on the WordPress community to do so for me. Fortunately, with nearly 10,000 plugins available, they seem up to the task!

When I set up my WordPress installation earlier this year, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go overboard the way I usually end up customizing and extending most of the other tech tools/toys in my life. Even while showing restraint, I’ve managed to accumulate just over 20 plugins at this point… whoops! ¹ That said, every plugin I’m using has helped make this blog what it is today… from one that mirrors comments that people post on Google Buzz, to one that gives me a per-post space to brainstorm as I compose.

Thus, I’ve created an ‘About Plugins‘ page that properly recognizes each one.

The plugins actually seem to be impacting the blog’s performance; I need to take a closer look into just where the inefficiencies lie.[↩]

Why I don’t worry about blog stats, not even a little bit

I don’t obsess over this blog’s traffic stats. Doing so would be an example of kicking my own ass.

So while I use both Google Analytics and the WordPress Stats plugin, I don’t care a whit about the numbers. I don’t even have to check them to know that they are meaningless; they’re close enough to zero that they might as well be. (Words I’ve never spoken: “I had 12 pageviews today, up from 10. High and to the right, baby!”)

I can’t separate bot traffic from human traffic, and for all I know, I’m probably responsible for some incidental pageviews… at least if I happen to load pages when not signed in to WordPress. And why should I care about pageviews, anyway? It’s not like I’m looking to sell ads.

So why do I continue to use not one, but two solutions to not give me numbers? For the qualitative data. I can’t get enough of those.

My two favorites are as follows: referrers and search terms (which are, themselves, referrers, anyway). Both of these give me information that is actually useful, right now. Search terms tell me about a case where someone was looking for something and found my post’s title and/or summary promising enough to actually click through. And referrers, clearly, show me who (if anyone) is driving people my way.

(Even in my past life on Multiply, I hooked my account up with Site Meter‘s free service to see if they could show me any insightful stats. I took a look through what they offered and found that all I really cared about were the referrers… which were, more often than not, hilarious. Web browser, OS and screen resolution can be interesting for seeing how my visitors stack up against Web users as a whole, but what am I going to do with that sort of insight? Fix IE6 CSS issues? Ha.)

The qualitative data that these services collect from my blog have shown me that people have found my post about the crappy Vivitar Clipshot, some even wondering if it’s OS X-compatible. (Hint: it isn’t.) A bunch of different search terms brought people to my logo/visual puns post. And one search that didn’t even logically match up with content I’ve posted, recently learned words reappearing, gives me a great idea for a future post!

Should I be worrying more about appealing to the masses, or about creating the sort of content that people who actually do visit are interested in? That’s easy. The searches and referrers have shown me that (please cue the schmaltzy music) I’ve touched people’s lives… even if I didn’t necessarily give them anything of value, and perhaps even wasted their time with content that wasn’t relevant to their interests. I made a difference!

Pocket paper perplexity

I don’t like shopping for clothing very much, and it shows: my wardrobe overwhelmingly consists of solid-color shirts, jeans and the same kind of sneakers in a few different colors. Sticking to basics keeps things simple. Hmm, does this plain t-shirt come in black? I’ll take it!

So yesterday, while at a local outlet mall, I did something I didn’t really enjoy: I bought a new pair of jeans. I had to dig through a few clearance racks before coming across a pair I didn’t dislike that much, one that actually fit me without suffering from the intentional distressing that the cool kids seem to favor these days. I would have initially liked my chosen pair even more if they didn’t suffer from this funky (that means “bad”) color pattern sewn into the back pockets. The pants are made by Mecca, and according to an attached tag, feature a “rocker fit.” (Oblig: \m/) I suppose this is to differentiate from most of their clothes, which feature a hip-hop fit.

I decided to try them on for size (a phrase nobody uses literally these days!) regardless, and perhaps having caught a look at them in the fitting room mirror, found myself… actually liking them, even sort of appreciating the funky (that means “good”) color pattern!

So I bought them. Arriving home, I put them on and noticed the familiar rustle of paper in the pockets… except I couldn’t imagine why that would happen, unless the receipt had somehow slipped in. I reached into the rear pocket to remove the paper and found that it didn’t easily slide out on its own. I pulled harder, heard a soft ‘tear’ sound and found myself holding something that looked like newsprint.

I kept pulling and, as you can see, produced a good amount of paper scraps from the pockets. Perhaps not surprising is that many of them include clothing-related information, but what of the “forklift pockets,” which seem to differ from pants pockets? Or the seemingly random phone number scrap?

I could still feel a little bit of paper in the pockets; I changed into another pair of pants so I could have a closer look at these. I turned the pockets inside-out, and this is what I found:

To state the obvious, it looks like the process used to create those colorful patterns on the pockets involves sewing newsprint onto the reverse side of the pants. Not being a big textile enthusiast, I can’t imagine what purpose that the paper serves, but I’m guessing it should have been removed before leaving the factory in Pakistan.

With English being the official language of Pakistan, and widely used in commerce, I suppose it’s not much of a surprise to find paper from there with English writing on it.

I just wasn’t expecting to find anything of the sort, you know, in my pants.