Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Following in the footsteps of the 2009 and 2010 year in reviews I wanted to continue the year end ritual. I am surprised by how much has stayed consistent (top artists, quietest online search month) but there were a few new trends I didn’t expect.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. northlands park, edmonton
2. alberta downs race track, lacombe, ab
3. evergreen park, grande prairie
4. Rocky Mountain Turf Club, Lethbridge, Alberta
5. peggy’s footwerks
6. google analytics
7. peggysfootwerks
8. made in frame
9. peggys footwerks
10. peggy’sfootwerks

The top four results are work related for the Horse Racing Alberta website I managed. I have no idea why they were ranked so high amongst everything else. I also can’t explain why I needed to search for “northlands park, edmonton” as frequently as I did.

The rest of the search results were all related to a side business and seeing how high Peggy’s Footwerks was ranking on Google. In the end I was able to add the site to Google and have it hit on keywords so I no longer receive phone calls asking “why they can’t find the site in Google”.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in August with 1,667 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 864. These numbers are up from last year but June returned as my least active search month, which is a bizarre trend.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.google.com
3. www.imdb.com
4. answers.yahoo.com
5. www.amazon.com
6. www.ehow.com
7. androidforums.com
8. forum.xda-developers.com
9. market.android.com
10. twitter.com

Wikipedia dominates my top sites again. I honestly don’t think I go there that often but I guess every article about someone or something leads me to Wikipedia so I imagine that adds up over time. I like that Android sites appeared in this list, even though before September the notion of leaving iOS seemed crazy to me.

Top 10 Artists
1. The White Stripes (695 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard (631 plays)
3. The Beatles (542 plays)
4. Tegan and Sara (541 plays)
5. Michael Giacchino 482 plays)
6. U2 (411 plays)
7. Coldplay (357 plays)
8. Daft Punk (338 plays)
9. Rob Costlow (335 plays)
10. Ludovico Einaudi (329 plays)

Standard affair with this list: White Stripes, soundtrack or orchestral…plus a few other bands thrown in for good measure. Rob Costlow was a newcomer this year, but Daft Punk is stuck in there solely for the Tron Legacy soundtrack. I listened to the soundtrack for months before I saw the movie, and when I saw the movie all I focused on was the music.

What I don’t understand is how I listen to The Beatles that much. I like their music but I rarely say “Yes, I want to listen to all of The White Album”, but somehow they claimed the third most listened to artist this year. Sadly, there was no Bear McCreary. Battlestar Galactica is getting a lot of play time, especially the Solo Piano albums, but McCreary didn’t perform those songs so any plays for that were credited to Joohyun Park.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Dark Knight (29 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Bank Robbery (Prologue) (27 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Buyer Beware (26 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Halfway to Hong Kong (26 plays)
5. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Decent Men In An Indecent Time (25 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (24 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You’re Gonna Love Me (23 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Chance (22 plays)
9. The White Stripes – Astro (21 plays)
9. Rob Costlow – Bliss (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You Complete Me (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – We Are Tonight’s Entertainment (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – The Ferries (21 plays)

There are 13 songs listed here because of the five way tie for ninth spot. Last year “Inception” lead the way in music, and this year it was “The Dark Knight”. Odds are good that next year Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard will lead the way with “The Dark Knight Rises”.

With regards to air travel 2011 was the lowest in recent years with a pretty painless extended weekend trip to San Diego amassing 3200 miles covered. I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 13,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times (the same number last year). I have gone two calendar years in a row without completing a police report, and I received no speeding tickets or anything incriminating like that against me.

My decline in blogging continued this year. Including this post there have been 23 entries made in 2011. The majority of those were reviewing my experience with Telus TV and my switch to Android. There hasn’t been much to report on, or anything worth updating about, which is apparent because I made a third less tweets this year with 188. I also made 41 posts on Tumblr. As expected there were no Facebook status updates either.

I like social networking but I also don’t want to bother people with hourly updates or useless tweets containing song lyrics or writing about how much food I ate. I think my decrease in Tweets was related to not posting every time I updated my Project 365. If people want to see the photos they know how to find them, and spamming them doesn’t do anything more than get a few more image views.

I sent roughly 407 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 52 from my @hotmail.com address. My @gmail.com and @seangursky.com usage increased a bit compared to last year but @hotmail.com dropped a bit. What I did write from @hotmail.com was mostly Kijiji related, so maybe the shift is related to using Gmail for more communication.

I made one order with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one with monoprice.com and none with Deal Extreme or amazon.co.uk.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 5,200 photos with my Canon 5D this year. There was a few week period where the camera was in for repair but any photos I took with the iPhone or backup Pentax Optio were inconsequential. 5,200 is fewer photos than I took last year (7,850) but there was no two week long vacation to soak up a thousand odd photos.

All in all 2011 seems pretty quiet. Even when we tell people what we were up to the usual answer is “house stuff”. You add in a few months of Ice Dragons summer hockey, a couple trips to the cabin at Lac la Biche and you have the year in review.

2011 is in the books, I have a few things I’m looking forward to in 2012 and I’m sure the numbers will reflect that (I predict exceeding 9,000 photos taken) but we’ll see how it all shakes down in 366 days.

Between climbing a mountain and floating down a river last weekend Gord and I were talking about the Gallery software we use on our respective sites. He mentioned there was a new version of the software that featured some fancy upgrades. I thought the Gallery project was abandoned, but I guess development stopped on Gallery2 to make way for Gallery3.

On Monday I began the process of installing Gallery3 and configuring it to my server and preferences. There were several hurdles in the installation. Some were documented but I only accidentally stumbled across them while searching for another issue. I ran the migration module and slowly my Gallery3 library was filling up with photos from Gallery2 (). This was a several hour job but it had over 4000 items to move so I forgave the wait and was happy that it completed without issue.

I had Gallery3 running for a day and a half before deciding to downgrade back to Gallery2, and here are some reasons why.

Gallery3 worked well enough but I think I had been using Gallery2 for so long that if I couldn’t get it to look just like Gallery2 I got frustrated. I spent hours installing the available themes, customizing the options and then digging into the CSS to modify items I wasn’t satisfied with. There was a developer who was working on a “Classic” theme, but their demo site produced a server error and they hadn’t posted in months. That may have been all I needed to stay with Gallery3 but visuals aren’t enough to ignore missing features.

I appreciated the effort to have SEO friendly slugs but it didn’t work with my folder/file naming convention. Folders had an address of http://gallery.seangursky.com/index.php/Project-365-Year-5 and clicking on an individual file had an address of http://gallery.seangursky.com/index.php/Project-365-Year-5/20110910. This wasn’t so bad except some file names were long (look no further than something like http://gallery.seangursky.com/index.php/2011-Ice-Dragons/2011-08-12-Shredders_Castledowns_6430) and my compulsion to have things look good would have forced me to rename several thousand files so the URL’s look better.

For reasons unexplained it bothered me that “index.php” was present in all of the addresses. Gallery2 has a constant “main.php” but at least the album and photo are pulled through a query string, but the combination of “index.php” and long addresses pushed me over the edge.

I was able to look the other way for a few nuisances but then I found some potential deal breakers.

The two Gallery3 WordPress plugins I installed couldn’t recreate the current Project 365 Grid of photos I currently use (). I even used the WPG3 plugin (which was the predecessor to the one I was using in WPG2) and had no success. I was able to have the plugins communicate with Gallery3 using the REST API module but I couldn’t see a way to get what I wanted without making it myself.

The “Summary” title on my photos was merged into the “Description” text when the Gallery2 to Gallery3 migration was performed. This made my updated descriptions look something like “Fluid Hair Vandalism An ad campaign by an Old Strathcona company got people all riled up and some reacted by vandalizing their storefront.”, where “Fluid Hair Vandalism” was the original “Summary”. I could run some PHP/SQL to look for the upper case letters and remove the offending string but that would have been tedious and probably made a few errors along the way.

I had no problems with installing modules to open up functionality of themes but when I was recreating my workflow in Gallery2 there were problems starting to appear. I was no longer able to “Edit Captions” for all photos within an album (). Instead I had to click on the “Edit” (gearbox icon) () on each photo I wanted to edit, which added unnecessary clicks into my day.

The gearbox was a nice feature but it slowed me down when I wanted to rename multiple items or when I would accidentaly click on it. I am fine using the “Album/Item Actions” drop down () and it would have been nice if there was an option to change how the “Actions” menu was accessed.

I wanted to customize the metadata information that displayed on an album. Instead of showing the number of views on the thumbnail overlay I wanted to show the item count. This information was visible once you clicked into the album but I find album size more important than number of views. This should be possible to change in the template but it was just one more thing I’d have to manipulate myself.

I was no longer able to customize the thumbnail either, I had the “Square Thumbnails” module installed but I couldn’t focus in on a small part of the photo to generate the thumbnail. It was nice to have all of my images have a square thumbnail but I would prefer to customize the thumbnail over having uniformity in my older albums.

I like having my EXIF details visible for all photos but this required a click to open up a “Photo Details” modal which felt tedious and bothered me more than I thought.

It was around this time I debated if I could live with these problems. There were some incredible features of Gallery3 that I will miss, but they were more flash and not function so I decided to undo the steps I did only a day before by reverting the .htaccess file, 301 redirects and GoDaddy subdomain forwarding.

Some of the pros of Gallery3 were the ease of use and installation. The administration panel was well laid out and I didn’t have to go hunting to find a setting that I needed to update.

The ability to have a mobile theme was incredible (even if I would be the only one to view my gallery on a mobile device) and I like the implementation of some JavaScript libraries that brought new life to the photo gallery…but these were all aesthetics and weren’t enough to keep me around.

If you want to poke around the installation you can still find it here: http://seangursky.com/gallery3. I will leave the /gallery3 folder around for now so when the software has matured a bit it will make my transition a little easier.

At no time did I encounter a bug or error while using the software, modules or themes. Everything seemed rock solid and was nice to use, but I couldn’t switch until all of my Gallery2 needs are met. There is active development on Gallery3, coders are always checking in updates to templates and modules but it’s just wasn’t the ideal solution for me right now.

It has been a month with Optik TV, High Speed and Telephone service from Telus and I’m still as happy as I was when everything was hooked up. The honeymoon phase is over now and so to begins my first month of paying for the services.

Television
We are becoming accustomed to having TV again. I went from banishing cable all together to having all the channels and I like it. There are some shows that aren’t worth the effort of finding online and that’s where the benefit of having the full program grid of channels comes in. When our trial of all the channels ends we will likely purchase the Lifestyle package, because HGTV and Food Network are just too enjoyable to live without.

I am still waiting for the HD receiver to be upgraded to have the ability to pause live TV, a feature that is currently limited to the HD PVR. At the time of installation in February I was told that this would be enabled with a firmware upgrade shortly but for now I wait.

There were some feature updates to the HD PVR where the previous channels are displayed in the lower right corner of the screen. The firmware update is seamless, and if it wasn’t for any visual improvements I wouldn’t have known there was a change.

One thing I would like to see added is the way to mark a show as watched on the PVR. We are in the habit of stock piling shows for a lazy weekend and if we aren’t diligent on deleting them after watching it can be hard to know what we’ve seen and haven’t.

If you watched a recorded show, stop before the end and go back to your list of Recorded TV you have the option to resume from where you left off. This tells me there is the capability of knowing what you watched and it would be great if that could be transitioned into a visual indicator. Even if it was something as simple as having a green dot beside a recording you haven’t seen yet would be a huge benefit.

Because we delete shows as we watch them it’s not an immediate concern, but it would be nice to have a way to see how much space is left on the PVR.

Telephone
Nothing worth mentioning for telephone service. It works. It makes calls. It sends calls. We always look for the caller ID to appear in the top left corner of the television if the phone rings, and as Murphy’s Law would have it, we rarely get calls to experience this little feature.

Internet
I have had no problems with the Optik High Speed connection over the last month. It has remained reliable with consistent download speeds. The Internet is the most crucial service from Telus and, thankfully, it hasn’t given me any issues or doubts on my switch from Shaw.

The problem I’ve been working on since the network upgrade was the signal strength of the Actiontec V1000H from the basement to the living room. I upgraded my home server to a Gigabit ethernet card and that helped the speed of wired connections to transmit data but it didn’t resolve the buffering when I was streaming content wirelessly to the upstairs Playstation 3.

Looking on the Playstation Media Server forums there are several suggestions to improve performance but I felt it was the Actiontec V1000H that was at fault for not delivering a strong signal strength in the house. To remedy this I repurposed my DD-WRT powered Linksys to a room above the Actiontec router and used it as a Repeater Bridge.

The last time I tried to create a Repeater Bridge I was unsuccessful, but perseverance has paid off as it worked this time and my network has benefited because of it. The Playstation 3 went from 45-50% signal strength to 75-80%. Playstation Media Server still detected an estimated transfer speed of 5MB/s, but at least now I was able to stream SD and HD content without the need for buffering.

As an added bonus, I now have Galactica and Pegasus as SSID’s at home.

So say we all.

As far as Shaw and I are concerned, we’re done. I returned my phone modem, received my final invoice and will have a cheque coming to me for the extra amount I paid.

However, before all of my access was taken away I had a chance to log into the new MyShaw portal and take a look at the fancy bandwidth usage meter. I love data, especially historical data of anything I do, from Google Reader to the music I listen to. If there is a graph about my usage on anything I love it. It was a given that the new Shaw bandwidth meter would appeal to me but I found the results interesting.

The bandwidth meter on DD-WRT was useful but the one on Shaw is just so pretty. I also found that there were some days the DD-WRT wouldn’t track data, and after a few resets I lost historical data so the Shaw bandwidth meter was my first time seeing my Internet usage for the last few months.

Prior to Shaw reducing the download limits on their High Speed package I would have been fine on most months, but when it was dropped to 60GB my usage was consistently above that. In January I increased my package to High Speed Extreme (100GB usage limit), signed up for Netflix and Usenet and my overall consumption actually decreased. If I stayed with Shaw I would have been fine with a buffer of 40GB but I stand by my choice to switch.

What stands out to me is how heavy my bandwidth usage was in the summer months. We were busy painting, doing house work and being outside, I wouldn’t have thought we were online that much but those months were higher than ones in the tv season. It’s no surprise that my upload was on par with download. When it came to torrents I preferred a 1:1 ratio, but I never considered how much that would be on a month to month basis.

Maybe it’s because I’m only a few weeks into my Telus usage and they haven’t processed my first month yet, or that they never intend to meter customers usage, but the Telus bandwidth meter is showing zeroes. For my personal benefit I will keep an eye on my Telus usage and see how it compares to Shaw’s and see what long term affects Netflix, Usenet and having a PVR have on my consumption.

February 9th was my first day with Telus and here is a recap of my experience with Optik TV, Optik TV High Speed and Home Phone so far.

Installation
Two technicians arrived for the install within the scheduled window and spent 90 minutes running cables and setting everything up. The two TV’s I had hooked up were in rooms with a pre-existing coaxial and telephone drop but they still replaced a few lines. They were able to pull a phone line to my entertainment unit downstairs so the modem would sit where the previous one did. The technicians were friendly and helpful for any questions I had.

After everything was up and running I was given a quick run through the PVR functions, the Actiontec router interface and a few other tips on the service. They left me feeling confident in the tools and I didn’t feel that they rushed anything.

Television
I am sure this is a feature with Shaw, but having never used their PVR services (I used digital cable for several years) having the name and telephone number of an incoming call appear on your TV is incredible. I called the house several times just to see “SEAN GURSKY” appear in the top left corner (). We have to cover the length of the house to reach the nearest phone and if we were able to see who was calling we could determine if it was worth getting up or not.

The second biggest wow is being able to pause live TV. By no means is this feature exclusive to Telus, but I never really had the chance to play with this ability and it’s incredible. I never thought I would benefit from having a PVR but now I wonder how I lived so long without one. We will still continue to download shows but now we can fill up the PVR with shows that aren’t widely available or things we don’t follow episode to episode and enjoying watching when we have the time.

Telus has an iPhone app to browse the program grid, view your recordings and schedule a recording. The app is convenient and I could see myself using it frequently.

I did have two problems with the HD PVR but they were both solved by doing a system reboot.

The first was being unable to create a new account for Remote Recording. I was given an “Error 500: Service Unavailable” and every time I tried I got the same message. The next issue was not having any audio on HD channels over my HDMI connection. The video would come in fine, and audio on SD channels worked but just not on HD. I restarted the system and both went away and my question list for Telus support went from two to zero.

Telephone
With the move from Shaw to Telus we downgraded phone features. With Shaw we had caller ID, voice mail, call waiting and probably a few other ones that added to our monthly bill. A part of why the Telus bundle is so cheap is that the telephone is bare bones with one feature. We opted to have caller ID, as our phones have a built in answering machine and call waiting is not something we used that often.

Although, there is a semi-solution for call waiting with Optik TV. If our land line is occupied and someone is calling us they would receive a busy signal but on the television we would see who attempted to call us (the same way we do now in the top left corner of the screen). It’s not an exact solution for call waiting but it’s a nice alternative for the rare times we have two people wanting to speak to us at once.

Internet
I have similar download and upload speeds to when I was on Shaw High Speed Extreme. According to speedtest.net my download speed is nearly 15MB and upload is 0.8MB. If anything my upload speed is lower than with Shaw, but as I am no longer relying on torrents this is not a concern.

I have been using DD-WRT custom firmware on my Linksys router for over a year and I got accustomed to the features it gave me. Now with the modem/router combination of the Actiontec V1000H I’m finding myself a little restricted. There are plenty of administration features on the Actiontec, but it’s not what I was used to or I don’t fully understand how to recreate what I had on the Actiontec.

I had a hurdle trying to figure out how I could administer my SABnzbd install remotely. This wasn’t a problem before so it was a frustrating issue. Previously I set the proper “Port from” and “Port to” for port forwarding on the Linksys DD-WRT and it worked fine. With the Actiontec I wasn’t sure if I have the port forwarding information correct, if Telus was restricting a web server from running or something else. As simple as the Actiontec interface is I wasn’t sure what the optional part of the port forwarding information I had to set up. Ultimately I changed my SAbnzbd install https:// listening port to match the one I would connect to from http://my.ip:port and it worked.

The current issue I am having is signal strength from the downstairs Actiontec to the upstairs Playstation 3. With the Linksys I increased the strength of the wireless signal (TX power) and added Windsurfer parabolas on the antennas. This allowed me to stream SD content without an issue and even 720p across the house.

Currently the Playstation 3 has a 50% signal but it occasionally buffers on SD content. I transferred the Windsurfer parabolas on to the Actiontec but I’m not able to increase the wireless rate to anything above 100% () so I’m at a loss for what to do. I have a few things in mind to resolve the problem but they involve time and money. Currently I’m thinking of:

• Putting the DD-WRT powered Linksys in between the Actiontec and my home server ethernet connection and use the Linksys to boost the signal to upstairs
• Upgrade the network card in my server from the current D-Link 530TX to Gigabit Ethernet card
• Piggy back on the coax cable running upstairs to either transfer the signal from coax to Cat5 or use the coax cable as a lead to run Cat5 up to the living room

With that said, this is my problem and not one that was caused by the Telus service or installation. I need to upgrade my network and I just have to determine the best way to do that. My PS3 Media Server will send 93MB/s to the wired PS3 and 8MB/s to the wireless one (), thus filling a 100MB connection and could account for why it sometimes has issues and sometimes doesn’t.

At the end of the day the Internet connection is reliable, I have solid speeds and while watching Optik TV I never noticed my Internet speed to decrease.

So far my experience with the Telus package has been great. With Usage Based Billing taking a back seat my move may have been premature but I am enjoying life where grass is greener. I may still be in the honeymoon phase of everything so I will write another post in a few weeks to see how I am finding the services then and if there are any issues that have appeared.

If you looked at my contact history with Shaw over the last week they would think I was suffering from memory loss. I called to ask about cancellation policies, removed basic cable from my package, upgraded to Shaw High Speed Extreme and then called to schedule a service cancellation for my remaining products…all in the span of 72 hours.

When our cable was terminated on Monday I was surprised by what was left. I thought there would be a few channels like CBC or CTV that would come in, but they were fuzzy. Some channels I thought to be static came in clear like E! or MTV. I wasn’t able to pick up anything using Over The Air and I wondered if I made a huge mistake. We don’t need cable but it’s nice to have something to turn on for news or some other programming, which I thought would be the case with farmer’s vision.

I didn’t expect there to be nothing on the other side of a silent coax cable so I began researching. I went from looking at big and unnatractive OTA antenna’s, wondering if this would be too extreme for me and then wound up looking at Telus’ Optik TV option.

I was still confident on switching from Shaw to Telus but when I discovered the $15-$15-$15 for the first year deal for Internet, Phone and TV from Telus I contemplated signing up for TV…something I disconnected and thought I could live without only a few days before. I wrote down a lot of numbers and different scenarios and when the $15-$15-$15 promo ended after 12 months I would still be saving over $20 for all the services I had with Shaw. Those savings still covers Netflix and a Usenet subscription so I end up with more for less.

Optik TV is a relatively new service offered by Telus so I had a lot of questions about how it works, how it affects bandwidth, limitations of it and everything a Customer Service Rep told me (which was backed up by my online research) made me more sure of my switch to Telus than ever before.

I contacted Shaw and told them all the reasons why I was leaving and scheduled the Telus install for the second week in February. There is no guarantee that Telus won’t change their bandwidth policy and when that time comes I will be where I am now but at least I was able to tell Shaw how I felt with my wallet.

I have been with Shaw since 2006 and never had a problem with their services and was sad to go, but I hope I made the right decision and that I have a good run with Telus. After I have been using Telus’ services for a week I will write again and see if the move was worth it and if the future really is friendlier on the other side.

The recent news of Shaw enforcing their bandwidth caps have a lot of people upset, including me. I have been contemplating a life without cable television and relying solely on Netflix, streaming from the websites of the network and downloading shows for a few months now.

This all meant that I would be consuming more bandwidth, and with Shaw’s decreased bandwidth caps and charges for exceeding those caps I had very few options.

For the last half of December and all of January I have been struggling with the question of what to do. On January 16 I decided to take my scraps of paper with costs, caps and act on it by calling Telus and Shaw. There were no surprises with the call to Telus. The numbers they provided me matched my calculations and my call to Shaw was of little help.

I was told that other companies will charge, regardless of what they say. This video says that Telus won’t enforce bandwidth caps and I really want to believe them, but there is some underlying emotion that makes me dread returning to Telus.

It’s a numbers game, and be it bandwidth or cost, the future is friendlier and cheaper with Telus. I will save $9 a month if I bundle my Internet and home phone services with Telus, but with Shaw’s 30 day notice to cancel services I can’t make the switch overnight and will continue to hum and haw over this while I figure out if it’s best for me.

If I stay I am subject to bandwidth caps and paying more per month, but with Telus their situation could change and they could decrease limits and start enforcing, leaving me with no where to go and being inconvenienced for nothing.

In the mean time, I cancelled television to pay for the cost of Netflix and Usenet memberships. We will still have OTA channels and whatever else is on farmer’s vision but soon the coax will be cold and then I will really see how much bandwidth I consume when it’s my sole provider of entertainment.

Following in the footsteps of the 2009 year in review I thought it would be interesting to gather the same information and post them here. Some of the results are to be expected, others are a surprise. It’s interesting to see the trend in this information as a lot of what appeared wasn’t available or accessible to me until the last half of the year.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. lost season 6 soundtrack
2. *
3. from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347
4. corkhole poster
5. ups 1ZY511176793770653
6. london luton
7. google translate
8. 1Z8F73V8D900199952
9. usps CP684389748US
10. apple trailers

I really, really wanted to know when the sixth season of Lost soundtrack was going to be released. And when I found out there was a second release for “The Last Episodes” I used the same search query later in the year.

I don’t understand what * and from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347 are doing there, perhaps * is a blank query but I can’t see it happening that much to claim the second result on my query.

The third entry are longitude and latitude coordinates for near the Timms Centre for Arts on University Campus, which makes no sense to me. In July the World Wide Photo Walk was held there but I can’t understand how I searched directions to and from the same location for a one day event enough times to make it the third result.

I searched for the arrival of three packages enough to make them in my top ten, I guess it’s hard not to be compulsive when you track something travel across the country.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in December with 1,320 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 628.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. answers.yahoo.com
3. wwwapps.ups.com
4. www.google.com
5. epguides.com
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.imdb.com
8. www.ehow.com
9. mbradyclark.bigcartel.com
10. maps.google.com

Wikipedia was my top site in 2009 and it holds strong this year, and there were three other results that stayed in the top ten from last year. The combination of answers.yahoo.com and ehow.com appeared because they were a resource when it came to home improvement questions that came up in the condo and house. The rest are my compulsive nature to rename TV show episode titles and checking IMDB to answer the question “Where do I know that guy from?”.

Top 10 Artists
1. Michael Giacchino (1,827 plays)
2. The White Stripes (882 plays)
3. Philip Glass (698 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (637 plays)
5. Bear McCreary (571 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer (530 plays)
7. Ludovico Einaudi (501 plays)
8. U2 (374 plays)
9. Matthew Good (296 plays)
10. Florence + the Machine (290 plays)

Bear McCreary is knocked off the top spot in place of Lost composer Giacchino. Like my search queries above indicated, I really wanted to listen to the season six soundtrack of Lost and listen to it I did. The first season six album was released in August and the second was released in October so there wasn’t much time to shoot it up to the top of the charts.

Overall the number of plays in my “Top 10 Artists” are down from 2009 but I think those plays were distributed to other artists outside of the top 10. I found it difficult to see how many tracks I listened to within the calendar year so I wasn’t easily able to verify this but my listening habits at home, work and on the iPhone all stayed consistent so I would suspect the tracks played stayed similar too.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Michael Giacchino – Life And Death (47 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer – Time (46 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer – Waiting For A Train (44 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Half Remembered Dream (43 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Paradox (43 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer – Radical Notion (39 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer – Dream is Collapsing (38 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – We Built Our Own World (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – 528491 (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Mombasa (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Dream Within A Dream (34 plays)

There are 12 songs listed here but with a five way tie for eighth I had to include the extras. Guess which soundtrack I listened to a lot this year? The non-Inception Zimmer song was from the second disc of The Dark Knight soundtrack, which got a lot of plays when I discovered its existence in February.

There weren’t as many flights in 2010 as there were in 2009, but there were passport stamps in England, Paris and Iceland.

I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 14,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times. I didn’t file a single police report this year but I did have someone threaten civil action against me.

Including this entry I wrote 42 blog posts in 2010, I made 610 tweets and one Facebook status update. In July 2008 I talked about my fears of using Twitter and the decline in blogging, and I think you can be active on both…if you make the effort to do so. Unfortunately, I rarely tweet and I rarely blog.

I don’t think my lack of tweets and blog updates are related, I think it’s just that I have been busy and don’t have enough time to fill a 140 character space with my thoughts let alone write a several hundred word update. I wrote a few posts in December to catch up on what I had been meaning to write in November so if I can write a few posts a month in 2011 I’ll consider myself active.

I sent roughly 420 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 70 from my @hotmail.com address. I made two orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com none from amazon.co.uk and two with monoprice.com. I thought I ordered more online this year but I guess they were through other methods besides Amazon.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 7,850 photos with two different cameras this year. 7.65% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,350 actuations and the Canon 5D had 2,500 actuations.

2010 is in the books, 365 days until I count it down all over again.

The My Year in Status Facebook application has appeared in my News Feed quite a bit over the last few weeks. I am a sucker for “year in review” things, and was surprised by how many status updates some people did throughout 2010. I know I don’t post status updates on Facebook frequently so I was curious what my year in Facebook updates looked like.

I wanted to do this covertly so I had my Privacy Settings for Applications, Games and Websites in one tab and my Facebook Profile open in another tab, ready to remove the application and any posts it made after it had generated my numerous updates into a single image.

The result was a little surprising…

One update is all I made in 2010. I thought I was going to have a big blank page but it looks like I had something I wanted to tell the world about.

Maybe in 2011 I’ll have no updates?

As a 2010 gift to myself I purchased a one month subscription at last.fm. My original intent was to see the historical information presented in their “Playground” and get a sense of my listening habit over the last seven years I have been with last.fm.

I paid my $3USD one-time fee for a months access and immediately downloaded my “Tag Tube”.

It looked neat on the surface, but I was a little disappointed to see what it only went back as far as April 2008. Still, there are ebbs and flows with my listening habits and this map does a good job of representing that. See the last twenty months of my last.fm tags in Underground Tube format here.

There is not much to glean from this, but it looks like the tagging system is a little off because Matthew Good appears under “Alternative Rock” and “Canadian”. Both are accurate tags but I feel that if they had went with one over the other then MG would have had a more consistent presence in my Tubes.

Otherwise the information is pretty accurate. The White Stripes usually dominated my listening in any given month, but there were occasional binges with soundtrack scores (as “My Aught Nine Numerical Review” showed). I will investigate the other features of being a Last.fm subscriber, and since listening to their radio does not interest me, I will see if this was a worth while purchase. If not, then I may consider buying again in another 12 months to see how my Tube Tags look.