So I’m on the phone in my home office and the window starts to rattle. Normally this means one of the neighbors is running to the laundry room to put in the fabric softener. But then the rooms starts to rattle. And the walls shake. The guy I’m talking to asks what’s going on. Another earthquake. The second 5.2 quake in less than a week for Los Angeles.

Well I think this is a sign that it’s time for me to move. Not that earthquakes scare me so much. I grew up in Boston during the years when the region was hit by monster blizzards and vicious hurricanes at a pretty regular clip.

But when I moved back from San Francisco to Boston in ’89, it was the week of the Loma Prieta quake. I mean, I was unpacking and watching the World Series back in Massachussetts when the thing hit. When I moved to Texas in ’97, there was…

Well hell. I guess I’m not as bothered about Jacko getting off. So to speak. Given that this is Los Angeles, and he is (kind of) black, and that this is 2005, the verdict itself wasn’t too surprising. I can’t say for sure if this is a case of justice rebalancing itself after all the years of racism in the US, or if its something just plain stupid.

Actually. I can say. It is stupid.

One has to wonder if the verdict wasn’t somehow slanted by the fears of a riot if a white jury convicted a black celebrity. I know it’s not likely because, well, Michael Jackson ain’t no OJ. Jackson is an obvious freak. Everyone can see that, regardless of their color.

Some pretty weird doings up in Silicon Valley this week.

First, Sun buys StorageTek for $4B … yes, Billion. Sun, who once dominated the workstation space – crushing Apollo and DEC in the process – went and bought a tape storage company. In 2005. For four billion dollars. Say what!? For that kind of money they could have bought half a dozen very profitable software companies and had a multitude of options in terms of strategies. Instead they are going down the path that DEC went down twenty years prior. Clinging to institutional and Big Business support contracts. Didn’t work then. Won’t work now. What a waste.

That news probably didn’t wake many people up, though. But the news that Apple was going to switch to Intel microprocessors was right out of science fiction. The Apple/Motorola vs. Microsoft/Intel war is finally, more or less, over. Why didn’t they do this sooner is the only question. Switching to a lower cost…

There’s been a lot of really interesting stuff on TV this week about D-Day. They’ve been unearthing aerial recon photos and other documents that really highlight what an insane thing it was pulling off that invasion. America suffered over 8000 casualties on that day … fighting to free France. Isn’t it reassuring to see that the current French administration remembers this. Ho ho. Right.

World War II saw incredible advances in many areas. Technology especially. In 1939 many countries were still flying biplanes or were fielding their first monoplanes. Rifle calibre machine guns were the primary armament for most combat aircraft. The German Army’s tanks were also mostly machine-gun armed in 1939, yet they defeated Poland in a matter of days, and 6 months later over-ran France in a matter of weeks.

(Note: As of April, 2006 I have started using Performancing Metrics for my blog site(s). It’s a service, but it’s free, and pretty powerful. It doesn’t have quite the flexibility that TraceWatch does, but it’s also one less system I need to maintain.)

I run quite a number of sites and, up to now, I really wasn’t too concerned with the usage statistics. Partly because I didn’t like any of the scripts for tracking such information. They were either too much bother, didn’t give enough information, or weren’t flexible enough to cope with CMS-based sites like I have. This week I found TraceWatch. A really nice script written by a guy who, I guess, is in Iran or from Iran – based on where he has his demo running, anyway.

This script is nice and fast, does path analysis, integrates by JavaScript or PHP, looks great, and provides a wonderful dashboard…