This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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November 2004
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Safer Once Again

The world is continuing to get safer. Grenada and Cuba have both had their travel warnings lifted. Presumably because the hurricane damage has pretty much been taken care of. This brings us back to a level of 26 countries with State Department travel warnings… which in the little more than a year I’ve been doing this seems to be the “normal” level.

State Department Travel Warnings Over Time

A chart of how many countries world wide have US State Department Travel Warnings as that number varies over time.  Serves as a proxy to chart roughly how dangerous the world is as the world situation changes over time.  Perhaps not the best measure of that, but an interesting one perhaps.

So anyway, start planning those trips to Grenada and Cuba! They are OK now!

Sam’s Pictures in Odd Places

OK. So for the last year or so, when I’ve looked at stats or logs from my site, I’ve actually looked at filtered logs, with just the hits to actual PAGES. Yesterday I decided, for the first time in ages, to look at the FULL logs. I found some fun things.

Just like the picture of Sara was in the email going around, several other of my pictures are in use on other websites. For now, I’ll highlight the ones I found from looking at the full logs for my website for 11 Nov 2004 (UTC of course). These are fun! (Listed in order by the first time each appeared in the log during the day.)

#1) 00:10:55 UTC CrazyBrave: They use my picture of a sad panda to illustrate a point about “PandaGate”.  PandaGate is apperantly some sort of scandal going on in Australia. The sad panda is very sad. I found it on the ground by the dumpster in the rain one day. I almost saved it from its fate, but in the end I just took pictures. And now it is immortal!

#2) 00:23:49 UTC The Condominium: Someone on this discussion group thing uses this picture of Spaghetti from my site, but the discussion board is members only, so I can’t see the context. My context was that I picked up the box of spaghetti not knowing that the bottom of the box was open, and it spilled all over the floor. I wish I could see what they were saying about it! (But not enough to try to join their little exclusive club or whatever it is.)

#3) 02:37:44 UTC Kelliee’s LiveJournal: A user named “heartsofarmor” posts a picture I once took of a daddy longlegs type spider thing with a caption “that’s what they look like here in Georgia”.  Actually, I took the picture in New Jersey. South Brunswick, New Jersey to be specific. But to be fair, they probably do look pretty much the same in Georgia. They were trying to show someone on the West Coast what East Coast daddy long legs look like, because apperantly they are different. I did not know that.

#4) 02:37:48 UTC Quick Impulses’ Live Journal: Uses a picture I took of a Fuzzy Road in some sort of angst ridden passage about fear:  “I’m experiencing a third level of fear – not that I desire to fit in and fear I can’t; not that I fear directly what other people think of me; not that I think the standards of appropriate behavior as observed by the rest of the world should necessarily be mine – but that one day by something I do not fear now, I will learn to fear all these things, that I will learn to hate myself when a stuffy establisment doesn’t accept me, and to change for it so that they do.” That is what he says right before my picture.  OK.

All four of those got repeated hits all through the day. Very interesting. A little odd, but fun. (And no Rebecca, I don’t mind at all that they are using my pictures without permission, I think it is cool, although it would be cooler if they dropped me a note telling me!)

There are even more places like this that I’ve found by googling myself that just didn’t lead to any hits yesterday, but I’ll save those for another day. Some of them are pretty funny. I’ll post about those sometime before too long.

I’ll do one as well sometimes on just all searches that lead people here and similar things. But not today.
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