Christchurch earthquake

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Steve

I was really concerned when I heard of the big earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand, shortly after it happened yesterday local time. This is where my sister, Becky, lives with her family. Fortunately I was able to reach her by phone and although quite shaken (no pun intended), they were all ok. Their house was one of the few in the area that didn’t lose power — an important fact given that it is winter there right now and some snow had fallen the night before.

She told me that they’d never felt anything like this; that it was difficult just to walk to get out of the house while the initial quake hit because it was so violent. Aftershocks were sometimes pretty violent, too. They feel kind of queasy because of all of the motion but otherwise they are doing well.

My mother is flying out to stay with her tomorrow (a trip that was planned months in advance) and I hope that there will be no disruption in service because of this.

Skype for Mobile

Posted on May 8, 2007 by Steve

IM+ for Skype Software: Cost-Effective Phone Calls Around the Globe

Already using this very nice new software tool (beta version is free)! It costs me pennies to call my sister in New Zealand this way, and best of all, this service is all on the mobile (cell) phone, meaning that unlike an earlier version, this new service does not require you to have Skype running on your PC’s desktop at the same time.

1970

Posted on February 25, 2007 by Steve

The year 1970 is permanently engraved in my memory. Lots of things happened that year that irrevocably changed my family and those things still have an impact on me today.

In July 1970 I had my third birthday.

That same year, my paternal grandfather, Grandpa Oberg, died. I don’t remember him unfortunately, but I have particular memories of his death, such as seeing him in a casket in the dining room of the house belonging to my Uncle Laverne and Aunt Harriett Oberg, my father’s older brother and his wife. People, mostly relatives, were standing around in groups, many of them crying. Then there was the graveyard and the gravesite where he was buried. If my memory is correct, it was a sunny day and my brother, Dan, and I ran around a bit, and I particularly remember looking down into the big black hole into which my grandpa’s casket was to be laid. In my memory, my mother had made us black suits with matching jackets and shorts with a white shirt underneath. (Interestingly, a few years ago when my Uncle Laverne died, I drove out to Nebraska to attend his funeral along with some other family members. My uncle was buried in the same graveyard as my grandpa. The graveyard was definitely familiar to me even after more than 30 years had passed since my Grandpa Oberg’s funeral. My brothers and I decided to look for his grave and I was the first one to find it. That whole, short visit to Gothenburg, Nebraska, was like a series of flashbacks to memories long suppressed.)

In 1970 the church group my family belonged to suffered a huge split over revelations of immorality, or at least, ‘inappropriate conduct,’ of what they then termed the ‘universal leader,’ a man from New York named James Taylor, Jr. (a.k.a. JT Jr.). My maternal grandfather, Stanley McCallum, was involved in uncovering the ‘inappropriate conduct’ and was therefore near the center of the whole controversy. People in this church group (generically known as Exclusive Brethren) split over who believed which side of the story. This affected people all over the world, splitting families, pitting children against parents, husbands against wives, friends against each other. Two of my grandpa’s own sons refused to believe him and actively worked to discredit him and support JT Jr. (and still do to this day). I have no memory of Uncle David and Uncle Garth and I know next to nothing about their children or grandchildren, my cousins, except for one who left that group about eight years ago. I know of situations beyond count where separations were forced by JT Jr. supporters, e.g. children were taken away from their parents by relatives, in some cases, never to be seen again. I know of husbands whose wives and kids stayed with the JT Jr. camp and spent the rest of their lives living alone and never recovering from the pain of separation. My grandpa and grandma never recovered from this, either.

Partly due to this split, my parents decided in 1970 to sell their farm in Nebraska and move in with my maternal grandparents in Detroit. I well remember living in the basement of my grandparents’ home for several months, then moving into a nearby house, where we lived for the next year and a half or so before moving to east central Illinois where I spent most of my growing up years. Lots of dramatic and difficult experiences punctuated that 18 month stay in Detroit but I won’t go into them here. My grandma died in 1982 and my grandpa in 1987. After their death when going through some of their papers I remember coming across my grandma’s diaries in which she documented some of the anguish, loss, and depression they felt as a result of the 1970 split.

For me the events of 1970 became almost legendary, serving as a backdrop to just about everything and everybody I knew. And there were many more splits after that. I no longer think that one side was entirely evil and one was entirely good. I do know, however, that the legacy of this JT Jr. guy is still very prevalent today, especially in Australia and New Zealand where the latest ‘universal leader’ is a Sydney business man named Bruce Hales. These people have received a lot of media scrutiny over their political machinations in that part of the world and elsewhere. It was pretty freaky for me to read about and then see a few videos on Google Video documenting what’s been going on. Fortunately I haven’t had much interaction with these people, although my sister Becky and her husband, Martin, have. Martin has many siblings who are in that group and they have been involved in legal proceedings about custody battles and such between parents and children who are part of this sect and those who aren’t. Both times I traveled to New Zealand, I saw members of this sect (a.k.a. Peebs, Exclusives, The Brethren, PBs, etc.) everywhere, and all of the people I knew there were tragically affected in some way or another. I well remember going to a small town in the north of the South Island called Motueka where there is a meeting of about 200 members, a big population of Peebs in such a small town. As soon as we arrived in town, our arrival was noted by these people and we were watched during our stay. My brother-in-law’s father and I would walk down one side of the main street, and notice some of these people coming toward us on the same side of the street. As soon as they noticed us, they crossed over to the other side of the street so as not to come in contact.

I am very thankful to have not been raised in that group, that my parents raised me and my siblings in a better environment, even though that environment was heavily influenced by, and contained a lot of legacies from, the JT Jr. era such as alcoholism. I’ve glossed over most of the darker elements to the story because I don’t think they need to be gone over yet again and also because I still don’t have a complete understanding of it all. And I don’t really want to anymore.

So…There you have it. 1970 was quite a year.

Landing a 747 on grass

Posted on November 19, 2006 by Steve

Last weekend I continued my quest to scan more old photos, especially slides, so that more people, especially family and friends, could see them. I was particularly excited to unearth slides from my very first trip to New Zealand, in 1986. Viewing them brought back so many memories. At that point in time, my sister, Becky, was nearing the end of her first pregnancy. My niece, Lucy, would be born a month or so after I flew back to the States. She and her husband, Martin, had been married in May and I was the first one in my family to have the opportunity to visit them.

One of the funny memories I had relates to the flight from Los Angeles to Christchurch on Air New Zealand. (There was direct service then between the two cities; nowadays, you can’t get a direct flight to Christchurch and instead have to go through Auckland on the North Island.) I remember Becky telling me before I left home that I wasn’t to expect much of Christchurch, that the airport was really small and was out in the country. The flight I took was called at that time the Coral Route on Air New Zealand, which meant that I had stopovers in Hawaii and my choice of at least one other South Pacific Island, in this case, Fiji. I had never travelled overseas before and the flight was very long and I felt cramped and restless in the Boeing 747. You can imagine the excitement I felt when at long last, I spotted New Zealand out my window!

The photos below were taken from the plane as we came in for a landing in Christchurch. As we flew lower and lower on approach, I was amazed at the plains stretching out below me (what I later learned was the Canterbury Plains) and the endless number of sheep grazing in the various fields. I began to panic a little bit because we were literally only about 100 feet from the ground, almost at the point of landing, and nowhere could I see a runway or an airport! I remembered what Becky told me about the airport being small and the thought crossed my mind, and I half-believed it to be true, that maybe the runway was made of grass! I thought, wow, the pilots will be landing a 747 on grass!

Of course that turned out not to be the case. The plane landed safely on a regular ol’ runway after all, one that seemed to appear at the very last possible second before we hit the ground. But the memory of that approach to Christchurch will always be in my mind when I think of that trip!

Memories in photographs

Posted on October 30, 2006 by Steve

This weekend I was able to spend some time scanning old photographs, negatives, and slides using a borrowed scanner with the needed features, such as an automatic photograph feeder and slide/negative attachment. It’s funny how many memories are contained in photographs, and how enjoyable it is to relive them when looking at them after a long time has passed! I was especially pleased to be able to dig out all of the photographs from our honeymoon in Kauai’i. They were in pretty good shape in spite of sitting in a box in the garage for five years! A set of these photos is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_oberg/sets/72157594351079029/

Some other photographs I was able to scan include ones from our wedding, as well as photos from a trip to Sweden in 2001, a trip to England in 1999, a few photos from one of my trips to the Boundary Waters, a few from a trip to New Mexico in 1998, and a few from my first trip to New Zealand in 1986.

During this process I thought about the fact that my kids mostly think of photographs as digital. We bought our first digital camera in 2002 and ever since then we have taken digital photos almost exclusively. They rarely see print photographs, and probably have never seen a slide!

I can’t wait to find the rest of my photos in storage, especially the slides, so that I can scan them all.

Finally getting to investigate some much-hyped services

Posted on June 24, 2006 by Steve

I’ve finally dipped my toes into a couple of much-hyped social web services: MySpace, and Skype. Actually I’ve had a MySpace account for several months but haven’t really used it because, frankly, I have little use for what seems like a service that recreates the high school cliques experience in an online format. Now that I have managed to configure my account in a way that’s more to my liking, plus now that I’ve found that not everyone using this service is a party-animal-obsessed teenager or college student, I may make more use of it. We’ll see.

I’m much more impressed with Skype. I know, I know, that’s been around for forever. I just hadn’t investigated it before. Even I can get techno-overload, you know Anyway, after a student in my class mentioned that he uses it, I decided to give it a try. As I already stated, it is impressive. I’ve managed to call land line phones with little problem and have also used it to talk with my brother, Dan. It’s far from perfect in terms of sound quality and clarity but hey, it’s free! I am particularly thinking of using it to talk with my sister and her family in New Zealand. Using Skype, that phone conversation would only cost $.02 per minute, which is incredible. When we move to our new house (hopefully next week some time — we were supposed to have moved already by now but that’s a long story for another time…) we may not request land line phone service. Instead we may rely on our cell phones plus Skype.

If you read this blog and use either or both of these services, contact me and I’d be happy to add you into my list of contacts!

EndUser 2006 notes on opening session [Updated]

Posted on May 3, 2006 by Steve

[Through a series of missteps that I won't go into here, I discovered that I had accidentally deleted this post, first published a few weeks ago. I feel pretty dumb. When I figured out what happened, I sat here, stunned, wondering what to do. Then I remembered Google's good 'ol caching capability, did a quick search to call up the cached version of this post, did a quick copy and paste, and voila, problem solved. Well, almost. My error wiped out the original post entirely, meaning that it automatically broke the link to that post, as well. There's nothing I can do about that. In the process of reconstituting the content, I decided on some editorial tweaks throughout.]

(Warning, this is a pretty lengthy post.)

Yesterday was the start of EndUser 2006, Endeavor’s customer conference. Somewhere around 1,000 customers have shown up for this event, some coming from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, several European countries, as well as Canada, Latin America, and of course, the U.S. As I’ve noted before, there are several conference sessions dealing with topics of interest, but yesterday’s highlight was the opening general session featuring a representative from Google who spoke in depth about Google’s Book Search project. Tom Turvey, Head, Google Book Search Partnerships, gave a brief over of Google and how it makes money, defined the elements of Google Book Search, described the Google Book Search Partner Program (which he oversees), and finally discussed the Library Program portion of Google Book Search. Tom has a long history of working with online content, serving in numerous roles in the publishing industry relating to online delivery, including launching Barnes & Noble’s ebook offerings and most recently holding a senior post at HarperCollins.

Tom began by describing Google’s business. He mentioned that Google now provides 59% of all Internet search referrals. Google’s oft-repeated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Their Its core business, i.e. how they the company makes money, is from advertising revenue generated via paid search ads using Google AdSense. Tom also mentioned that Google is the leader, by far, in referrals to book sites (currently it processes about 60% of all such referrals). In describing Google’s business, Tom pointed out some interesting statistics about book purchasing. He provided statistics showing that 13% Thirteen percent of all book purchases are now done online; schools/libraries make up about 24% of the book buying market, direct to consumer purchasing (direct from publishers) is about 2%; and the biggest growth area recently has been in non bookstore retail (books being purchased in Costco, Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, etc.).

The next portion of the presentation focused on an explanation of Google Book Search. Tom pointed out that in his experience, never has there been so much misinformation about a product as there has been with Google Book Search (GBS). He made some comment that 90% of what has been published in the news media is false, thus the importance of explaining exactly what it’s about. GBS, at its heart, is an attempt to associate book content with what searchers are looking for in search engines. There are two main parts to GBS: the Partner Program, and the Library Program. The Partner Program involves relationships and agreements between Google and publishers. GBS launched in October 2004 at the Frankfort Book Fair. As of now there are literally thousands of publisher partners spanning seven languages. One of the most frequent questions publishers ask Google is, what books are good choices for discovery via GBS? One of Tom’s funnier statements was “we don’t need to help Harry Potter find an audience.” What Google is mostly interested in is the arcane, the obscure, and bringing this material to light via searching GBS. Every page is searchable; users are searching books from cover to cover. There are two ways of providing search on book content: a dedicated search (books.google.com), and integrating book content within the general Google search. The main intent of working with publishers is to drive book sales. Content is protected in a variety of ways (Tom mentioned that as you can imagine, this element of agreements with publishers often gets “into the weeds”). Only 20% of a book is viewable by one user during the course of a month. Print, copy, and save are disabled. Scanned images are purposely low resolution. Publishers can add/remote remove their material at any time. There is page level security as well. A percentage of pages is never visible at one time. Google’s process for receiving publisher content is pretty straightforward: the publisher usually sends either a PDF or a print copy. If the latter, Google digitizes it. As an interesting aside to closing out this portion of the talk, Tom mentioned “Oh by the way, the five publishers who are suing Google over the Library Project are actually members of the Partner Program.”

In turning to the third and last portion of the presentation, Tom outlined the elements of the Library Project. Partner libraries, as most people are aware by now, include Stanford, NYPL, Oxford, Michigan, and Harvard. In researching and comparing collections from each partner library, Google discovered that 60% of books are held in only one of the partner libraries. For legal and other issues, Google began the project by focusing on public domain books. However, public domain books make up only about 20% of a typical library collection. Ten percent of a typical collection is made up of books that are still in print (i.e. the stuff that is handled via the Partner Program). Most books, 90%, are in print but in a fuzzy area in which they may be out of print but still in copyright, or perhaps out of copyright. Seventy percent of collections were published after 1923 and fall into three categories: in copyright, in public domain, or the rights may have reverted. Obviously Google needed to figure out how to solve or address these complexities. Their solution was to offer to scan everything but provide three views: sample pages (partner view), snippet view (book under copyright w/out agreement with a publisher partner), and full book view (book is in public domain). The snippet view means that the full text of each book is indexed; users can only view three snippets from the book; there are links to “buy this book” as well as “find in a library”; different categories of books are handled in different ways; and copyright holders may opt out of display and/or scanning.

Obviously a critical factor for Google is optimizing and streamlining the workflow. For example, a key consideration was figuring out how long it takes to scan a typical book. Tom mentioned that in the early days of the project, founder Larry Brin and another staff member would use a metronome to time each other over and over again as they tried to figure out how best to scan a book. (Why a metronome? I have no idea and neither did Tom.) Books are scanned as is, including scribbles, marginalia, notes, whatever. Google is aiming to build a comprehensive collection of indexed books but has a long way to go yet on achieving that goal. Some of the challenges they face on a daily basis are 100% OCR accuracy, 100% image quality, search and integration with web search, the accuracy of any affiliated metadata, the existence of lots of “edge cases” in terms of how to process and display the scanned results, how to address books that contain multiple languages and/or scripts; and how best to achieve a good level of speed/automation of the entire process. As with their much vaunted (and top secret) search algorithms, Google is constantly tweaking the process to try to improve the quality. How do they handle math formulas, spelling correction (Tom used the example of vernacular language that is meant to be spelled a certain way but which looks wrong to a typical spell checker), etc.? What is the best way to deal with automated metadata extraction? Can they figure out an automated way to detect (and appropriately handle) different languages and/or scripts?

Tom made a big point of the fact that Google is actively engaging the library community. Librarians tell Google the good and the bad about GBS (e.g. of bad: too overwhelming for users, hard to know which stuff is authoritative and what is junk, desire to know exactly how the process for scanning and indexing works). Google wants to ensure that GBS works for libraries by making information more discoverable, driving more library usage, and supporting a worldwide community, which is especially relevant for remote and distributed library users. Google has no desire whatsoever to put libraries out of business; in fact, Tom claims that the opposite is true.

[One of the things that I thought was particularly striking was that at one point during the session, Mr. Turvey asked for a show of hands from the audience of those people who were aware of the facts and details he had provided about Google Book Search. To my astonishment, I was one of the few people to raise their hands. Maybe this was just due to some people not fully understanding the question or to some people's innate shyness, who knows. But if it was an indicator of professional ignorance of these matters, then we're in big trouble.]

After concluding his prepared remarks, Tom invited the audience to pose questions. This was perhaps the most interesting portion of the session and Tom handled the questions with aplomb and a dose of wit. Below are my notes of the substance of some of the questions posed, followed by the substance of what I could jot down of Tom’s answers.

Question: When a user sees a link to “find in a library” which leads to Open WorldCat, what librarians want is to have that user come to us rather than use Google and/or buy the book from the publisher. What is your view on this?
Answer: It appears that this is in fact what is happening. Logs show that adding the “find in a library” link, directed to Open WorldCat, has driven a tremendous growth in traffic to WorldCat. Presumably this leads to higher library use.

Question: I’d like to see much more powerful search options, including things like truncation, proximity searching, and boolean capabilities. Is this something Google is considering?
Answer: That’s a very good question, what I’d expect from a librarian <laughter from the audience>. Some of these capabilities are things we are indeed working on, while some of them are already available via the Advanced Search option.

Question: I believe that in search results from publisher content, there is no link to “find in a library” when there is such a link provided in the library search. Why is that?
Answer: Good question. Remember that the goal of GBS is to have a relevant search. The vast majority of books available in GBS at this time are from publishers. Over the next few years, that proportion will flip to emphasize library-owned material. Honestly there is a constant tug and pull between publishers and Google over this issue of how to direct users. Publishers, obviously, participate in GBS to sell more books.

Question: Is there any plan to include Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as part of the GBS search?
Answer: LCSH and other taxonomies are already used to some extent behind the scenes to assist with determining relevance as well as identifying relationships between books (linking from one book to a related book).

Question: Can you speak about why you are being sued by some of your publisher partners?
Answer: Attorneys love it when you talk publicly about their litigation <much laughter from audience>. Seriously, though, no, I can’t answer that.

Question: Are you indexing each book cover to cover (i.e. full text)? How do you determine relevancy? [Editorial aside: Was this person paying attention? This question was clearly answered in the context of the presentation.]
Answer: Yes, we are doing full text. The ranking/relevancy algorithms used in GBS are pretty much the same as those used in the regular Google search. Some tweaking is of course necessary to make the algorithms relevant for book search. We do user interface testing every month and as a result, we constantly tweak/change the algorithms.

Question: Do you have a formal digital preservation strategy?
Answer: We have agreements with our library partners that cover preservation to whatever degree they have specified in their legal agreements. It really depends on what partner libraries want. Other than that, no, we do not have a formal preservation strategy and do not feel that that is a role we should assume.

Question: Elaborate on how relevant metadata is in GBS.
Answer: Well, first of all, metadata does play a role in GBS but our bias is always toward full text, with metadata/abstracts thought of as secondary. This is probably the opposite of how most libraries would prioritize things.

Question: I have a question on the issue of fair use. Are you working to expand the concept of fair use in terms of scholarly material in particular?
Answer: We feel that our stance on fair use and GBS is very, very significant. We do not have any formal focus on scholarly material in GBS, though.

Question: What is Google’s stance toward the Open Content Alliance? Does Google view them as partners, or competitors?
Answer: We have an open door, a desire to partner and share in digitizing material. We believe that initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance are worthy of our support. However, as you can imagine, there are certain complexities and a lot of politics involved in this kind of interaction. We want to participate in initiatives like this in as open a way as possible.

Question: “Find in a library” links only to WorldCat at present. Does Google have any plans for directing traffic to other bibliographic (i.e. library) databases (this is particularly important for those libraries who aren’t linked from WorldCat)?
Answer: We’d be interested in any other worthwhile bibliographic databases, but WorldCat is it for now.

Question: A single search box is very attractive, but when you expand your data sources (as Google is doing), the simplicity and relevance of this one search become more difficult to maintain. How do you handle this?
Answer: We constantly reevaluate the one box concept and it is an ongoing problem to solve. There is no ready answer.

Question: How do you handle materials from publishers once those materials have gone out of print?
Answer: Good question. Once a publisher’s book goes out of print, they request that it be removed from the index and then it no longer appears in the search. The exception to this would be if there happens to be a copy of that same book that has been scanned and indexed as part of the Library Project. In that case, the book would remain in the index.

Question: Do you have plans for providing regional Google book searches (e.g. one for New Zealand imprints)? This is important for those outside of the U.S. because currently there is such a predominance of U.S. imprints in GBS.
Answer: We already do this, e.g. currently we have 65 regional book searches.

Question: The exposure from GBS for libraries is great, but it needs to be more two way, e.g. to direct users looking for material in a local library catalog to GBS and/or elsewhere. Are there any plans to extend the Google API to be used by libraries for integration into their online catalogs?
Answer: Something like this functionality is present in Google Scholar. We are very happy with this integration with library services and we want to figure out ways to extend this further.

Question: What’s your view on library’s development of customized Greasemonkey scripts to integrate library results in with GBS?
Answer: Anything that doesn’t violate copyright, we’re all for.

Question: GBS is very exciting. What about developing Google Journals?
Answer: <tongue in cheek> …So we have this thing called Google Scholar…Actually we are working ways to better integrate or link between GBS and Google Scholar.

Question: There is clearly a balance of power issue relating to the premise that allowing Google to do all this scanning and digitizing of book content puts the burden of proof on the content creator rather than the user. What are your thoughts about this?
Answer: We believe that this is a very important issue and our stance on this hinges on the belief that we are simply being consistent between the indexing of website content and indexing the content of books.

Question: What about working to include government documents, because they do no present a copyright problem?
Answer: Yes, we have a team devoted to this very issue. It is a bigger challenge to do this than it may at first appear because in order to do it we need to work out who is responsible (i.e. the publisher) of the multitude of gov docs. Expect progress on this front.

Look who’s 40

Posted on March 15, 2006 by Steve

Today my brother, Dan, and sister, Debbie, who are twins, turn 40 years old. Amazing. I am the youngest of seven children (five boys and two girls; an eighth child, Donny, died when he was 18 months old). Dan and Debbie are the next youngest siblings. When we were kids, we tended to play games together and were perhaps closer to one another than we were to older brothers and my older sister. Individually and together, we have gone through a lot over the years.

Partly in celebration of their birthday, Dan and Debbie are going on special trips soon. I’m a bit jealous because Debbie is going to Florida for a week, and Dan is going to New Zealand for two weeks to visit with my sister, Becky, and her family.

Now tomorrow is another family birthday, this time, for my brother, Jeff. I wish Debbie, Dan, and Jeff well on their special days.

Blog visitors: some interesting facts and figures [Updated]

Posted on January 14, 2006 by Steve

I’ve been using Google Analytics since mid-November 2005 to gain some knowledge about who visits this blog, how much traffic it generates, and from where. It’s not a perfect tool but hey, it’s free and it’s easy to use. I’ve read that others question the results given to them by Google Analytics and I think it is a good policy to try to track usage in more than one way (e.g. by adding in analysis of server logs, depending on whether your ISP provides access to that kind of information).

It’s now been about two months since I put in place the necessary tracking code. Here are some interesting facts and figures that I’ve come up with so far:

the site averages about 21 visitors each day (interestingly, that corresponds exactly to the number of subscribers it has on Bloglines)
about 37% of visitors are recurring and 63% of them are new during that two month timeframe
visitors come from all over the world, including (as far as I can tell) the following countries: the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Spain, France, Israel, Hungary, and Poland.
visitors find their way here mainly via Google, Technorati, or by entering the URL to this site (what Google Analytics terms ‘direct’)

I have seen steady growth in access these last few months. The traffic this site gets (and therefore its ‘impact’) is quite low, but that’s fine with me. It’s just kind of fun to know a bit about visitors, especially where they come from.

[Update: For reasons I don't quite understand yet, I discovered this a.m. that if I look at Google Analytics results for this site on a weekly basis, I get different results than if I choose to view the results for the complete length of time I have had Google Analytics running (approximately since mid-November 2005). The above statistics are derived from a two month summary rather than from analyzing results week by week. One major difference is the fact that a much larger number of countries are sources for visitors to this site than I had previously believed. These include China, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Romania, Italy, Netherlands, India, Vietnam, Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Thailand, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and Czech Republic. I think this is pretty incredible geographic coverage for a very low traffic, English language site, and it gives real meaning to WORLD Wide Web.]

Shark attacks NZ racing boat

Posted on December 22, 2005 by Steve

Those who know me well know that I have this “thing” about sharks and shark attacks. I also love New Zealand, where my sister and her family lives. So it should be no surprise that I read about a shark attack on a NZ racing team’s boat with great interest. The name of the racing team is Team Sun Latte and the story is available on their website.

Family Man Librarian

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