Lately I have become obsessed with statistics that I can measure about progress. I think of it as goalitus or statitus. It began with looking at my web statistics for my personal site. I started checking daily and then more than once a day to see how many unique visitors had come to my site. I also check a couple times a week to see the geoloc tool on the site to see the map of visitors. I am apparently much more popular everywhere in the world but America and the only place in America where people read what I write are people living in and around Boston.

Now at Viapoint as the marketing guy I am obsessed with increasing the traffic and downloads for the product. Luckily the stats for Viapoint’s web server are only compiled once per day so if I look at them during different periods throughout the day I won’t learn anything new. I did manage to make one of the graphs spike by going on a 12 hour binge of posting PAD files to all of the shareware sites. A PAD file is an XML file you can put on your web server that describes everything about your company and software and you just tell the shareware sites to check it out and then you have a nicely formatted web page on the sites. One site suddenly boosted the download volume by about 75 overnight. Unfortunately I awoke today to find that the work only had a short-term effect on the stats since they were up for a day but they were starting to fall back down again already. My big hope with stats is to make them suddenly jump off the chart in a hockey stick. It’s a game to me.

Yesterday I went to check how much money I had made off of the advertisements that I put into this page. It is more than one buck but less than two. I’d buy a cup of coffee with it but they don’t give you any money until you make $100. I actually am not complying with their policy since I am not supposed to talk about the financial results of advertising through the adwords system.

I mainly put the adwords onto the site to see what types of products would be advertised in my little world. There are some weird ones that come-up. For example – today I am advertising for birdbarrier.com someone who has a solution to “pest starlings” and a lot of books and prints about Audubon. If I look at the post I made on satanic credit cards the page advertises for a bunch of credit card services. My post about Bush’s inauguration speech brings-up tools to find your old veteran buddies on military.com and militaryfriends.com. They are apparently competitors in the market for finding long lost military friends. Personally I would like to have a couple of military friends, just in case I picked a fight with a small sovereign nation. Ultimately the ads are somewhat useful to me. I could potentially recommend the bird barrier to Aaron to keep the starlings out of the building in Burlington.

All of this stat checking and PAD file posting had the side effect of running some internal drug in my system that has the rough equivalent effect of amphetamines. So I’ve been high as a kite on stats and PAD file checking for the past two days. The hypo-manic attitude may also be related to having a coffee maker running both at Viapoint and in Brookline causing my daily coffee intake to spike this week especially because after a long day of posting PAD files to shareware web sites you want to take a lot of little breaks to drink cups of coffee.

The irrational exuberance also might be related to having Improv practice on Tuesday night and having gotten really hyper during the class because we were testing out different pieces of opening music to get psyched-up to. So we were bouncing off each other for an hour listening to AC/DC, Blister in the sun, and all sorts of get psyched up songs. I finished the improv class with a sketch where we were all hunting in a field and we decided that we needed to kill all of the crazed bloodthirsty Easter bunnies. The solution to the get rid of the bunnies that we resolved was to go after their eggs. Eventually we found one egg that looked particularly dangerous and got into a disagreement regarding who needed to open it. I was out because I had sat on Santa’s lap a few months back during the elf hunt. The egg exploded and the scene ended.