Last year, I visited a customer in Swindon. When I arrived at the office, I noticed some water dripping from the underside at the front of my car. I didn’t have time to investigate or get my hands dirty so I subconsciously hoped it was just condensation from the air conditioning unit and tried to forget all about it. After work, I managed to navigate Swindon’s world famous roundabout of roundabouts and finally locate my hotel. When I parked, I noticed the temperature gauge was reading high - very high. Sure enough, I got out of the car to see steam pouring out of the bonnet and was greeted by the familiar smell of anti-freeze. ...

That was the year that was. Statistics for 2009 with the comparative numbers for 2008 in brackets. Summary 29,901 visits (43,732) 39,545 page views (63,095) 1.32 pages per visit (1.44) Average time on site - 48 seconds (54 secs) 91.2% new visits (90.6%) Search Engines Google - 22,627 (32,830) Yahoo - 381 (704) Bing - 168 (N/A) AOL - 128 (229) Ask - 115 (195) Referrers identi.ca - 575 (229) avc.com - 222 (348) Disqus post linked by Fred Wilson google.com - 216 (primarily Reader) oracle-base.com - 169 (225) disqus.com - 101 Platform Windows - 81.4% (85.7%) Macintosh - 11.9% (10.3%) Linux - 5.1% (3.26%) iPhone - 0.6% (0.2%) iPod - 0.2% Symbian, Android, PS3 - < 1% Browsers IE - 42.5% (56.5%) Firefox - 41.4% (33.6%) Safari - 7.2% (6.2%) Chrome - 5.4% (N/A) Opera - 1.6% (1.3%) Content Blog - 3,990 Review of Virgin Media V+ box - 4,666 (June 2007) Virgin Media V+ upgrade - 1,871 (March 2007) High Definition TV on Virgin Media V+ - 1,378 (December 2007) intelligent automatic follow/block script for Twitter - 1,303 (April 2008) pictures of a Virgin Media V+ box - 1,273 (June 2007) 25 reasons you should use Disqus - 1,270 (April 2008) how I ditched iTunes and started living with Foobar 2000 - 810 (October 2009) Beware of Dixons Tax Free shopping - 791 (October 2005) Posterous leveraging Tumblr themes - 729 (September 2009) Posts 79 (94)

What a terrible holiday period for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. By the time, we had opened all our presents, stuffed ourselves with turkey, fallen out over charades and finally slumped in front of ‘Gavin & Stacey’, Umar should have been sitting at the right hand of Allah, surrounded by a variety of 57 vestal virgins, clad in white silk lingerie, feeding him grapes, tending to his every whim, straddling… [That’s enough vestal virgin fantasies - Ed]. Even worse, the young man does not have much to look forward to in the coming weeks of 2010. ...

People never ask me ‘Hey Norman - where has your glamorous globe trotting lifestyle as a IT consultant taken you this year ?’ January - Bergen February - Berne, Blackpool March - Madrid, Cairo April - Slough, Macclesfield May - Lisbon June - Warsaw July - Brisbane, Perth, Broome, Darwin (holiday) August - Brentford September - Sunderland October - Swindon November - Dusseldorf December - Kitchen Table

Cary Millsap posts a brilliant article about his approach to performance troubleshooting that resonated loudly with me. When I first started working at Siebel, a standard review was a production health check that consisted of meetings with key project staff (Siebel Administrator, DBA, systems and network admins, project manager, developers) coupled with some standard checks on key Web, Siebel and Oracle configuration parameters. At the tail end of one engagement where I had precious little to note or report on, I asked to meet with an end user for a brief chat. The response was surprising and not dissimilar to the standard retorts Cary describes. ...