Tag Archives: Sweden

Seven years

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It is hard for me to believe that today marks our seventh wedding anniversary. Sometimes it seems like time has flown by, and at other times, it seems like we’ve been married for longer than seven years. We are really blessed. Some of the events of the past seven years include the following:

  • three more children (Keegan was eight years old when we married)
  • three household moves
  • the death of my father
  • my mother-in-law’s hospitalization and long recovery from dilated cardiomyopathy, as well as a later surgery to replace both of her knees
  • the death of both of Michele’s grandfathers
  • the death of one of Michele’s uncles as well as two uncles and an aunt of mine
  • the legal adoption of Keegan as my son
  • Michele’s extended neurological illness (which has since reoccurred)
  • my hospitalizations for meningitis and other weird ailments including a severe case of the shingles
  • purchase of two different minivans, and the sale of a car and one of those minivans
  • the adoption of three dogs, two parakeets, several kittens, and several freshwater fish
  • three job changes on my part
  • three graduate courses taught
  • more than 15 emergency room visits
  • thousands of miles traveled to/from relatives and one plane trip as a family (to Maine)
  • the purchase of two Mac computers
  • several business trips made by me, including a trip to Sweden, two trips to the UK, and trips to various parts of the U.S.
  • several other funerals and marriages of friends
  • the marriages of a niece and a nephew

I’m surely forgetting some other important milestones, but this list covers a lot as it is. Happy anniversary to us!

Memories in photographs

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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.

Blog visitors: some interesting facts and figures [Updated]

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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.]