2012 in numbers

Just a tote of various personal numbers and statistics from last year. Could really do with being an infographic, maybe later.


Weight change
+6 Kg

Distance walked or run (exercise)
385 miles
(164 miles in 2011)

Distance travelled by car
8197 miles (5803 miles approx in 2011)

Petrol Spend
£1014.85 - 758 litres
(£724.00 in 2011)

Foot/car ratio
1:21
(1:35 in 2011)

Distance flown
2876 miles

CO2 emissions from travel
1587 Kg
(Air - @0.21 Kg/mile; Road - @0.115 Kg/mile; Foot - @0.105 Kg/mile)

Change in wealth
+£6393.93
(+£5389.49 in 2011)

Stocks & Shares change
+9.58%

Gigs attended
20
(15 in 2011)

Gigs played
1
(nil in 2011)

Songs recorded
3

Programming, markup and scripting languages used
8 (Java, Javascript, Python, html, php, SQL, R, CSS)

Xbox games completed
7

Websites created
4

Website unique visitors
13600

Items knitted or crocheted
5

Gender inequality at Indietracks: There I fixed it

Following on from yesterday's internet entertainment and also today's discussions on the Anorak forum, I thought I'd use the spreadsheet I made up of the past few Indietrackses as a force for good.

I have compiled a fantasy Indietracks lineup featuring all bands that have played there before, but carefully selected so as to be completely balanced by gender.

First a brief note as to what I mean by 'balanced by gender'. Rather than all acts being 50% male and 50% female, I've tried to figure what the make up would be if males and females were randomly distributed. So there are some all male bands and some all female bands. Considering we want about 55 acts to play in total, the mix would be as follows:-

All male	9 bands
Mixed mostly male	14 bands
50:50 bands	10 bands
Mixed mostly female	14 bands
All female	9 bands

With this in mind the lineup would be as follows:-

Disasteradio, Emmy The Great, Foxes!, Frances McKee, Helene, Kevin McGrother, King of Cats, Labrador, Loyal Trooper, MJ Hibbett (solo), Oxo Foxo, Roy Moller, Ste McCabe, Allo Darlin (2008 lineup of Elizabeth and Virginia), Berlin Brides, Burning Hearts, Everybody Was In The French Resistance.. Now, Lets Whisper (2008 lineup including Elizabeth Morris), Marshmallow, Kisses, Modular, Paisley and Charlie, Poppy & Friends, The Cannanes, The Lovely Eggs, The Middles Ones, Zipper, Gordon McIntyre (2012 lineup), Haiku Salut, The Just Joans (2008 platform lineup Dave, Katie, Rowan), Betty and the Werewolves, Teenage Fanclub, The Specific Heats, Art Brut, Butcher Boy, Cola Jet Set, Friends, La Casa Azul, Rose Elinor Dougall, Stereo Total, Tender Trap, The History of Apple Pie, The Red Shoe Diaries, The Smittens, Hong Kong in the 60s, Very Yours Truly, Stars of Aviation, The School, A fine Day for Sailing, A Little Orchestra, Withered Hand, The Loves, Little My.

This gives the following gender stats:-

Total female performers	90
Total male performers	90
%female performers	50.00%
%male performers	50.00%
All male	9 bands
Mixed mostly male	13 bands
50:50 bands	11 bands
Mixed mostly female	10 bands
All female	9 bands

Which is close enough to ideal.

You're welcome.

**UPDATE**
The list of bands was a little half-arsed, so here's the lineup by stage

FRIDAY
MJ Hibbett (solo)
Allo Darlin (2008 lineup of Elizabeth and Virginia)
Tender Trap

SATURDAY
Main Stage
Butcher Boy
Betty and the Werewolves
Everybody Was In The French Resistance.. Now
The Loves (2011 festival lineup with dancing girls)
A Little Orchestra
A fine Day for Sailing
The School

Indoor Stage
Emmy The Great
The Lovely Eggs
Hong Kong in the 60s
Gordon McIntyre (2012 lineup)
Little My
The Red Shoe Diaries
Berlin Brides
Haiku Salut

Church Stage
Helene
Roy Moller
The Just Joans (2008 platform lineup Dave, Katie, Rowan)
Labrador
Ste McCabe
Friends
Very Yours Truly

Train
Oxo Foxo
Paisley and Charlie
Loyal Trooper

SUNDAY
Main Stage
The Smittens
Rose Elinor Dougall
Teenage Fanclub
La Casa Azul
The Specific Heats
Stars of Aviation
Cola Jet Set

Indoor Stage
Art Brut
Stereo Total
Poppy & Friends
Withered Hand
The Middles Ones
Zipper
The History of Apple Pie

Church Stage
Lets Whisper (2008 lineup including Elizabeth Morris)
Disasteradio
Marshmallow Kisses
Burning Hearts
Modular
The Cannanes
Foxes!

Train
King of Cats
Frances McKee
Kevin McGrother

Sexism in indiepop band selection and Indietracks

Earlier today Daniel Novakovic and Jennifer Reiter posted an awesome blogpost on the So Tough So Cute blog about gender inequality of performers at Indietracks 2012.

Twitter erupted, Facebook erupted as band members and promoters denied their sexism. And cos Daniel and Jennifer had used statistics to make their argument it was all a great heap of awesome.

They had analysed the male/female/x make up of all the bands listed as performing at Indietracks 2012, then categorised the bands into being male, female or 50:50

This is how we counted performers at Indietracks. The process is based on the Ladyfest Malmö method.

• A female act is an act where the majority of band members are female
• A male act is an act where the majority of band members are male
• A 50/50 act is comprised of half females and half males or equal members of males, females and trans people

and with the help of lovely polkadot pie charts summarised the findings as

Summary:

• 56 acts were booked in total.
• 38 were male acts
• 7 were female acts
• 11 were 50/50-acts

Clearly since 51% of the population is female there must be sexism at work.


Similarly for individual performers at Indietracks 2012

• 159 were male
• 64 were female
• 3 trans or genderqueer.

It doesn't really represent the population.

But how badly should indiepop promoters feel about this? Is indiepop particularly sexist compared to other musical genres? I've always felt that indiepop is a broad musical church, inculsive of all genders and sexes. Compared to pop, punk, rock and metal, there are far more people in skirts in indiepop bands.

Anyhoo, So Tough! So Cute! only looked at the data for Indietracks 2012. Which could just be a blip, so I've poured over the old festival guides for Indietracks 2009, 2010 and 2011.


For performers, without investigating the privacies of trans and genderqueeriness

	2009	2010	2011	2012
Total female performers	75	58	59	64
Total male performers	138	143	120	159
%female performers	35.2%	28.9%	33.0%	28.7%
%male performers	64.8%	71.1%	67.0%	71.3%

Its roughly 70:30 male to female, how much variation were you expecting? About that much?

	2009	2010	2011	2012
Female bands	7	5	7	7
Male bands	40	43	35	38
50:50 bands	13	11	11	11

That is remarkably consistent, considering all the thousands of indiepop bands who could possibly play, more often than not there's always 7 female bands and 11 50:50 bands

Personally I think there's something a bit off about calling Allo Darlin' a male band, since without Elizabeth Morris, they wouldn't be half as successful.

So, as I have access to the raw data, we can categorised them differently, thus:-

	2009	2010	2011	2012
All male	19	17	17	15
Mixed mostly male	21	26	18	23
50:50 bands	13	11	11	11
Mixed mostly female	3	3	2	4
All female	4	2	5	3

Thrilling stuff that doesn't really change the argument much, except that if promoters were being sexist in their selections, there would perhaps be more 'All male' bands.

There are, of course, flaws in the methodology here. Flaws such as Dan and Jonny from Pocketbooks who as a mobile rhythm section play bass and drums in a couple of different bands, most of them featuring female members, when considering Indietracks, do Dan and Jonny only count once or multiple times or as fractions adding up to whole people. Likewise Remi from Electrophonvitage/Sunny Street and as a solo artist, the Colin Clary/Lets Whisper/Smittens, and Simon Love, cos he's worth ten normal men.

On the female side there's Emma from Knickers, Owl and Mouse and Darren Hayman's band who's trying to make up gender inequality single-handedly.

What's to do?

I can only propose that all women in general are forced to form bands and get on stage even if they don't want to.


Any musically talented women must join at least five bands.


I don't know.


UPDATE #1
As mentioned earlier the original piece didn't cover other music genres outwith indiepop, so I thought I'd venture into other worlds...
These are the details for The Didmarton Bluegrass Festival 2012

Total female performers	28
Total male performers	118
%female performers	19.18%
%male performers	80.82%

All male	19
Mixed mostly male	14
50:50 bands	5
Mixed mostly female	1
All female	3

So thats most imbalanced than Indietracks, with overwealmingly male bands.

A sickly nation, unable to provide for their children

Channel4 have a neat websitey thing called ChoPORNot, where viewers are give a series of choices between two cards representing things that could be cut to reduce the £152,000,000,000 deficit.

Choices like Reduce disability benefit or not to renovate social housing.

A lot of the options are a bit, well, crap. Like axing GPs when actually giving thema pay cut might be less destructive (considering their pay tripled in the last ten years)

Anyhoo, a neat thing is that you can see the charts of which items most people have chosen to slash and which items most people have chosen not to cut, to 'cherish'. After 500 or so people have had a go on the website the list of things to cut is like this:

1. Military - Don't upgrade Trident. Stop subbing the subs...
2. Military - Withdraw from Iraq. Time to watch our own backs...
3. Religious and other community services - Stop supporting churches. What about their collections?
4. Economic affairs - Plan a bank raid. Reclaim bankers' money.
5. Broadcasting and Publishing services - Cancel all government advertising. Stop ads...
6. Military - Pull out of Afghanistan. Stop digging that hole...
7. Military - Cut navy spending. Waive the rules...
8. Education not definable by level - Learning and Life Skills Council? Who's heard of that?
9. Military - Clip the wings of the RAF
10. Executive and legislative organs, finacial affairs, external affairs - Cut back on government. No such thing as society...

The overiding message seems to be that we hate the military, we hate bankers and the government.

Contrast this we the items most cherished:-

1. Primary and Preprimary education - Shut primary schools. Increased illiteracy? So waht?
2. Social Exclusion - Stop all home help visits. Leave unwell alone...
3. Medical Services - Axe, slash, chop or cut 50% of A&Es...
4. Medical Services - Close 20 hospitals. Keep 'em waiting...
5. Primary and Preprimary education - Sack 2000 teachers. More friends for each classmate!
6. Old Age - Shiver their timbers! Cut winter fuel payments.
7. Secondary Education - We don't need no education... Cut 2000 teachers.
8. Transport - Close branch railways. Everyone's got a car...
9. Old Age - Cut state pensions. No more golden oldies...
10. Secondary Education - Shut 40 secondary schools. Don't teach 'em a lesson...

We love the NHS, schools and old people! Wooh.

Personally I'm divided, I thank we should pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, but other than that the UK should have a strong and well-funded military. But on the other hand, the more right-wing libertarian in me reckons that the government should have little to do with education, health and social care, we she keep our taxes and invest in our own private health insurance, and we should fund our kid's education first hand from our own pockets.

Maybe its just Chop or Not's jaundiced view, that only the state can provide teachers and schools and hospitals and if not the state then these things would cease to exist. In real life, rather than closing 40 colleges or sacking 2,000 teachers, they'd just transfer to the private sector. The jobs would still be there, the potential for educating is still there, its just the state have abandoned that as one of their competencies.

Regardless, the state has demonstrated that it is unable to run its finances adequately enough to fund health, education and social care. It could almost be like the government is to the UK, what Greece is to the EU.

**UPDATE**
Just to clarify and ruminate, this one time at my last job in the soup room, I was asked how old I was, thirtyish, and if I had any kids "nope" and why not, at the time I didn't answer, but the answer would be that culturally I'm unwilling to have kids if I can't provide for them, that is I can't afford kids, I'm thousands of pounds in debt, and either on minimum wage or unemployed. To have kids I'd want to be able to pay for them, to pay for their toys and trinkets and to some degree pay for their education, since I can barely afford these things for myself, I refrain from spawning.

Its part of my self-sufficiency thing, like growing my own potatos or not drawing housing benefit.

Although somewhere out there its an enshrined right to have a family, to have kids, this isn't a free right, its a right that the state has to provide for, so I refrain from taking advantage of that right.

A little bit of me thinks that to have kids and expect the state to provide for them is as bad as living an unhealthy lifestyle and expecting the state to keep you alive. My health is, for the most part within my own hands, however the defence of the nation and upholding law and order, that's for the government.

Blog Stat Pron - March

Good evening and welcome to my irregular start of the month look at the previous month's blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for March, this blog got:-

1,503 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,413 Pageviews

Compared to February's

1,336 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,229 Pageviews

Well, Absolutes are up a massive 170, total Pageviews up by almost 200, I think I've set myself a new record for days when the blog's had more than 100 views in a day, sure it mostly due to one rather popular post I did in February which google seems to love, but its all fair game.


Statcounter reckons I had 2,305 Unique Visitors, and an average of 92 pageloads per day, down 6 from last month. Still not quite breaching the 100 ppd barrier, but getting better man. Maybe next month.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

26 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
8 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

Boring, same as last month, why do I even bother?

These are my top referrers for March (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 138 visitors (216 friends)
2. Twitter - 52 visitors (174 followers)
3. UK Bubble - 42 visitors
4. Mark Wadsworth - 26 visitors
5. Wikio - 12 visitors
6. Hootsuit - 11 visitors
7. Another Form Of Relief - 6 visitors
8. Liberal-Vision - 6 visitors
9. Quick as Rainbows - 6 visitors
10. Club Baby Honey - 5 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during March.

1. The Holly Greig Story - 589 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 91 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 69 views
4. Death Disco - 64 views
5. Project Streetview Racing - 36 views
6. Bookcase Dreams - 30 views
7. Impending Doom of 6Music - 30 views
8. Brent Central PPCs - 26 views
9. Some Videos to Watch - 25 views
10. Does Shisha Kill - 24 views

The top five most popular posts that I wrote in March were:-

1. Death Disco - 64 views
2. Brent Central PPCs - 26 views
3. Some Videos to Watch - 25 views
4. Latest Dirt on Brent Central PPCs - 24 views
5. Dancing in the Street - 15 views

That's it belatedly for March's stat pron, until next time, take care space cadets.

Blog Stat Pron - February

Good evening and welcome to my irregular start of the month look at the previous month's blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for February, this blog got:-

1,336 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,229 Pageviews

Compared to January's

1,309 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,405 Pageviews

Well, Absolutes are up a wee bit, total Pageviews down a wee bit, kind of satisfying considering the month has a few days fewer than other months. Its all thanks to one post which cornered the market on google traffic, but more about that later.

Statcounter reckons I had 2,151 Unique Visitors, and an average of 98 pageloads per day, up 3 from last month. Still not quite breaching the 100 ppd barrier, but getting better man. Maybe next month.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

26 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
8 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

Boring.

These are my top referrers for February (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 76 visitors (213 friends)
2. Twitter - 36 visitors (169 followers)
3. Stumbling and Mumbling - 22 visitors
4. Mark Wadsworth - 17 visitors
5. UK Bubble - 11 visitors
6. Baby Honey - 8 visitors
7. Liberal-Vision - 8 visitors
8. ClimateQuotes - 3 visitors
9. Last.Fm - 3 visitors
10. Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes - 3 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during February.

1. The Holly Greig Story - 573 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 142 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 57 views
4. North Vs Pachauri - 48 views
5. Back to Academies International - 43 views
6. Give me my internet 7 - 37 views
7. Benefits Anxiety - 29 views
8. Names of the dead in Gaza - 24 views
9. London Indiepop EyeSpy - 24 views
10. Bookcase dreams - 23 views

The top five most popular posts that I wrote in February were:-

1. The Holly Greig Story - 573 views
2. Give me my internet 7 - 37 views
3. Benefits Anxiety - 29 views
4. I Give Up - 10 views
5. London Bloggers Meetup - 8 views

That's it belatedly for February's stat pron, until next time, take care space cadets.

Climate Change report errors and Tiger Woods

You'll be aware the EU Referendum site has been somewhat neglecting its coverage of EU issues, such as US President's Obama's snubbing of the annual EU meeting cos no one was sure which European Union President has primacy and the whole Greek bailout thing. Instead EU Referendum's Richard North has been concentrating on mercilessly tearing climate change to shreds.

You'll also be aware of EU Referendum's Tiger Woods index, its a gauge of public interest in a news story, and calculated as the number of google web results divided by the number of google news results.

Here's a wee table of the various errors and issues in the current Climate Change debate with their Tiger Woods index today.

Issue	Google web results	Google news results	Tiger Woods Index
Glaciergate	242,000	221	1,095
Droughtgate	3,770	3	1,257
Netherlands sea level	258,000	173	1,491
Africagate	36,400	15	2,427
Chinese Urban Heat Island	169,000	33	5,121
Losses from disasters	445,000	65	6,846
Climategate	14,600,000	1,801	8,107
1.3 billion agriculture employees	176,000	0	n/a
Antarctic boot cleaning manual	84100	2	42,050

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Blog Stat Pron - January

Good evening and welcome to my irregular start of the month look at the previous month's blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for January, this blog got:-

1,309 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,405 Pageviews

Compared to December's

1,004 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,853 Pageviews

Well, I think thats spectacular, a 30% increase. If I wasn't frantically tightening my belt and trying to spend as little money as possible, I'd be spraying champaign everywhere in celebration, instead you'll have to make do with spittle. The secret is to come up with goods time and time again.

Statcounter reckons I had 2,282 Unique Visitors, and an average of 95 pageloads per day, up around 50% from the sort of figures I was getting last year. On the back of that phenomenal success, for February I'm aiming to beat 100 ppd.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

26 subscribers - GoogleReader (up 4 from last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
8 followers - Blogger (up 2 from last month)

These are my top referrers for January (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 124 visitors
2. Twitter - 90 visitors
3. UK Bubble - 36 visitors
4. Mark Wadsworth - 26 visitors
5. Baby Honey - 25 visitors
6. EUReferendum - 19 visitors
7. Quick as Rainbows - 6 visitors
8. Newport City - 5 visitors
9. Nick X Spencer - 5 visitors
10. Luciana Berger - 3 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during January.

1. London Indiepop EyeSpy - 243 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 194 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 58 views
4. Pensioners burning books - 49 views
5. Bookcase dreams - 47 views
6. Back to Academies International - 45 views
7. Facebook IQ test gubbins - 39 views
8. Names of the dead in Gaza - 37 views
9. North Vs Pachauri - 33 views
10. Facebook Scramble graphs - 31 views

That's it belatedly for January's stat pron, until next time, take care space cadets.

Top Posts this month #1

Top ten most viewed posts on my blog that I wrote this month

1. London Indiepop Eyespy
2. This Pensioners Burning Books thing
3. Back to Academies International
4. North versus Pachauri
5. Excess Winter Deaths then and now
6. The dramatic return of Glasgow Indie Eyespy
7. Body Scanner Porn the legend continues
8. Pay Cuts Pay Rises
9. Brent Council FOI Fail
10. New Years Resolutions

Frankly I'm surprised I came up with that many posts with over ten hits each, but that London Indiepop one got over 200, by Jove.

Referral spikes

This one time in 1998 when I was a fresher at Strathclyde University, going to King Tuts to see bands a few times a week, I once went on a mission to pull Kenickie. They were on tour, passing through that venue, and we a fine looking bunch of girls. I'd rounded up a couple of fresher chums, we acquired our tickets and headed along.

The gig wasn't the most crowded I'd been to, but the girls were on top form, their acappella version of Come Out 2Nite was a particular highlight of the set. The band had two new members for this, their final tour, some bloke and a hot keyboard player called Dot, who'd later go on to play with Blur.

My attempt at pulling Kenickie got as far as saying "Hey, how's it going?" to Dot. She smiled.

So, thirteen years later when my website charmed former Kenickie lead singer Lauren Laverne on her radio show, it was like completing a ancient quest.

As a result of getting talked up on the 6Music show, the website got a wee blip of traffic.

Lets compare it to other spot traffic blips I've received on several of my blogs:-

• Boing Boing mention - 24,000 hits
• YouPorn blog feeder - 500-1000 hits
• Lauren Laverne on 6Music - 450 hits
• Ian Dale new blogs mention - 200 hits
• Half-arsed Devil's Kitchen mention - 150 hits
• EU Referendum - 60 hits
• WardmanWire - 40 hits
• Britblog round-up - 30 hits

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Paying for costs

Back to my theme of questioning why the government wants to extract as much money as possible from the population. Via Mark Wadsworth I stumbled on this blogpost where this bit jumped out.

Over 30 years, alcohol consumption has increased by just 19%. But the cost of treating alcohol-related conditions has increased by 100% in just 5 years. It sounds to me rather as if the problem is not increasing levels of drinking, but astonishingly rapid increases in the cost of related healthcare.

The report also mentions "the focus of the 2004 national alcohol reduction strategy". So that strategy has covered the last five years - the period over which the NHS Confederation is saying the cost has doubled.

So clearly the national alcohol reduction strategy has failed miserably. Three possibilities present themselves:-

• the strategy requires more funding to be effective
• the strategy requires less funding because its a bottomless pit, but nice to have ongoing
• cancel the whole damn exercise

One stat that's missing from the blogpost is whether alcohol deaths have increased, cos what I'm thinking is we can compare alcohol deaths to road traffic deaths, cos like road deaths are at their lowest level for almost a hundred years, whatever the powers that be are doing is working, whatever draconian laws, speedlimits, punishments and technological advances have been applied have reduced road deaths, whatever money has been poured into the issue has been effectively spent, but still the various lobbying groups are calling for more money and tighter rules.

Let me briefly summon the National Statistics Office website for alcohol-related deaths:-

Figures on alcohol-related deaths in 2007 indicate a levelling-off of the trend, following rapid increases since the early 1990s. There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991.

So what is it with alcohol deaths? Why isn't it working? Why aren't the numbers coming down. If its all bullshit, why do the numbers go up.

Has the doubling of the cost of treating alcohol-related conditions doubled the effectiveness?

For road deaths you could pull up the figures for car ownership over the last thirty years (28% increase from '79 to 2000) and then the death rates:-

The total number of deaths in road accidents fell by 7 per cent to 2,946 in 2007 from 3,172 in 2006. However, the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant over the last ten years.

The decline in the casualty rate, which takes into account the volume of traffic on the roads, has been much steeper. In 1967 there were 199 casualties per 100 million vehicle kilometres. By 2007 this had declined to 48 per 100 million vehicle kilometres.

So for driving, whatever has been spent has worked. For drinking, it hasn't, and there's no evidence that spending more or doing more will reduce deaths.

All this reasoning is of course a red herring, the cost to the NHS of alcohol related treatment has doubled or increased by whatever factor not because of people's behaviour, its barely a correlation, not causation. The NHS could easily reprioritise and half the spending regardless of how much you and I drink.

But no, any excuse for the state to justify trying to extract as much money as possible from the population.

Blog stat pron - 2009

Good afternoon, and welcome to my summary of this blogs web traffic for the year. I know that its still a few hours to 2010 but I'm bored and have other things to do, like homework and cake making, so I'm wasting time on the internet. Without further ado here are the overall traffic figures for 2009:-

10,451 Absolute Unique Visitors
23,212 Pageviews

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree, but I don't have the complete 2008 figures to compare it to, and as Climategate has taught us, you really need continuous data to make any comparisons. Luckily I do have complete data for 2008 and 2009 from Statcounter:-

	Unique Visitors	Pageloads
2009	17,858	22,482
2008	7,614	10,126

I've more than doubled my traffic, coolio. Lets look at statcounter's graph showing monthly traffic:-

Crazy stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. We can clearly see that returning visitor traffic has been dying off for months and months since the peak in the middle of 2008 when the kindly folks from a certain indie messageboard used to visit here often. On the other hand, pageloads have been increasing in steady chunks over the two year period, but have pretty much levelled out now. I'm going to have to start doing something different and new if I want to keep growing.

Moving on, the latest metrics for feed readers are as follows:-

23 subscribers - GoogleReader (up two from October)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
7 followers - Blogger (up one from October)

These are my top referers for the year (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 726 visitors
2. Twitter - 657 visitors
3. EUReferendum - 249 visitors
4. UK Bubble - 198 visitors
5. Mark Wadsworth - 180 visitors
6. Iain Dale - 110 visitors
7. Matt Wardman - 85 visitors
8. Counting Cats - 69 visitors
9. Longrider - 66 visitors
10. Devil's Kitchen - 43 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during 2009.

1. Facebook IQ test gubbins - 1,031 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 855 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 579 views
4. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints - 516 views
5. Facebook Scramble graphs - 355 views
6. Animation with Windows Movie Maker - 351 views
7. Names of the dead in Gaza - 219 views
8. Sea level rises - 195 views
9. Band Nationalities - 160 views
10. Names of the dead in Iran - 152 views

Its a bit overwhelming, I know, but that's it for this years blog stat pron update. Thanks to all the folk who've linked here in 2009, I hope to return the favour a bit more in 2010.

Gilmour out

Blog stat pron - October

Good evening and welcome to my regular first day of the month blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for October, this blog got:-

1,132 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,924 Pageviews

Compared to September's

1,054 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,769 Pageviews

Whilst not quite at the heady heights of traffic that this blog was getting when I was a full time blogger unemployed, but up a healthy bit from last month when I resumed full time employment. To be honest though, its mostly old posts that are getting interest, rather than the newer tranche of cookery-orientated posts. Statcounter reckons I have 1,667 Unique Visitors, and an average of 66 pageloads per day, completely whupping the ass of my target of 65 pageviews. On the back of that phenomenal success, for November I'm aiming to beat 67 ppd.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

21 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
6 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

These are my top referers for October (not including google wanderers)

1. Twitter - 70 visitors
2. Facebook - 48 visitors
3. UK Bubble - 21 visitors
4. EUReferendum - 17 visitors
5. Mark Wadsworth - 16 visitors
6. Boy Trouble - 10 visitors
7. Daniel1979 - 5 visitors
8. Fitlads - 5 visitors
9. Zath - 4 visitors
10. Anorak Forum - 3 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during November.

1. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 239 views
2. Origami flapping bird animation - 77 views
3. No idea about pornography - 52 views
4. London Bloggers - Havana - 51 views
5. Facebook Scramble graphs - 42 views
6. Facebook IQ test gubbins - 36 views
7. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints - 32 views
8. Does Shisha kill - 32 views
9. Job Vacancies update 17-Aug-2009 - 32 views
10. Names of the dead in Gaza - 27 views

That top post there, "What Have I gotten myself into", about the training academy scam thing has been steadily growing in traffic since I posted it in July, clearly the organisation is still going and still roping people in. Using the wonders of Google's graph API, here's a bar chart showing how the hits on that blogpost have increased to date:-

Actually, due to the overwealming nature of old blogposts in that list, here are the top ten blogposts that I actually wrote in October:-

1. No idea about pornography - 52 views
2. London Bloggers - Havana - 51 views
3. SongKick Meetup - 26 views
4. Just like Delia - 22 views
5. BNP on Question Time - 19 views
6. Probably been to more gigs than you - 16 views
7. Blog Stat Pron - September - 13 views
8. Job Vacancies Update - 12 views
9. On the Minimum Wage - 12 views
10. I hate gigs that run late - 10 views

I have Aref-Adib to thank for retweeting the pornography post on Twitter and Facebook, cheers.

Another thing which has occurred to me that I ought to add in these regular stat pron updatey posts is a pie chart showing what I've been blogging about most.


Thats it for November's blog stat pron. If there's any other metrics you want to know about this blog, let me know in the comments.

Ooh, and before I depart for other topics to blog about, I ought to mention that I've started a SongKick-specific blog just here, called SongKick Dreams, so I shalln't be boring my regular blog readers with that sort of thing round here. If you're on SongKick, or like both statistics and going to gigs, then check it out. I think its awesome.

Exhaustion

Oh god, I'm so tired.

I'm sat in the staff canteen at 5:45am, nursing a cup of watery tea, about to start my shift at my minimum wage job sweeping floors in a factory.

Last night had me running like a crazy person, after I barely had time for a shower before I was out and running across town, to meetups and gigs, leaving gigs early to get home for some semblance of sleep before getting up at stupid o'clock.

I'm so tired but there's no escape. Working six days a week here doesn't quite cover costs. I keep a wee callendar in my notebook, marking off each day, how much I've nominally earned, and what that pays for.

• 15 days pays rent
• 4.5 days pays debt interest
• 1 day pays Blackberry bill
• 2 days pays car insurance
• 1.5 days pays bus fares
• 1 day pays petrol
• 2 days pays for socialising
• 2 days pays for food

By this time I've run out of days to work. There's no time to pay off debts.

We can clearly see that my rent is far too much, I need to move to somewhere cheaper. I could sell the car. That would save me three days's work and the lump some would pay off something. But I spent years paying off that car and without it, the whole concept of travelling and freedom is limited. Hours waiting at bus stops, planning journeys, missing trains.

Am I being snobbish? Precious? Maybe. This is all difficult, painful, draining, desperate.

I'm so tired.

Blog stat pron - September

Good afternoon and welcome to my regular first day of the month blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for September, this blog got:-

1054 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,769 Pageviews

Compared to August's

908 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,944 Pageviews

A biot of a mixed picture there, more uniques, less overall. I'm spreading myself wider I guess. Statcounter reckons I have 1,488 Unique Visitors, and an average of 60 pageloads per day, down 2 from last month, sadness prevails once more, the target for October will be a somewhat unfounded and optimistic 65 ppd.

Here, here's a graph of traffic over the month, its a bit erratic, with highs and lows. I haven't been posting much, its my job you see, early starts and tiring hours. Also doing posts from my Blackberry is so unsatisfying, I have to go back later and adjust any paragraphs and spellings and add images, links and stuff

Compared to the past few months, figures are still on the same plateau, I still need to crank it up a gear or two, but it's going to be hard with so little time, and with me being so boring. Pie charts about snogging indeed.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

21 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
6 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

These are my top referers for September (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 59 visitors
2. Twitter - 54 visitors
3. WardmanWire - 45 visitors
4. UK Bubble - 16 visitors
5. EUReferendum - 15 visitors
6. Anorak Forum - 7 visitors
7. Total Politics - 7 visitors
8. Mark Wadsworth - 6 visitors
9. Longrider - 4 visitors
10. Hayley Dunlop - 3 visitors

Thems hits from the Wardman Wire were courtesy of the Britblog Round-up, my submission was one fo my job vacancy posts. Not the most interesting, but for a first'un I thought sticking to the facts would be wise.

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during September.

1. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam (160 views)
2. Origami flapping bird animation (94 views)
3. Job Vacancies update 17-Aug-2009 (76 views)
4. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints (45 views)
5. I fucking hate GAME shops (45 views)
6. Does Shisha kill (44 views)
7. London Bloggers Meetup - Ebay (44 views)
8. Facebook IQ test gubbins (36 views)
9. Facebook Scramble graphs (32 views)
10. Animation with windows movie maker (24 views)

Thats it for Septmber's blog stat pron. If there's any other metrics you want to know about this blog, let me know in the comments.

For October expect more posts about Songkick, and I'm going to go batshit crazy and try networking with even more people at the London Blogger's Meetup.

London will be mine.

Blog stat pron - August

Good afternoon and welcome to my regular first day of the month blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for August, this blog got:-

908 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,944 Pageviews

Compared to July's

1,136 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,344 Pageviews

Statcounter reckons I have 1,499 Unique Visitors, and an average of 62 pageloads per day, down 10 from last month, sadness prevails once more, the target for September will be a somewhat unfounded and optimistic 80 ppd.
Looking at how traffic has increased of the past eighteen months or so, we can see that I've kind of reached a plateau, which I find reassuring, but not very useful.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

21 subscribers - GoogleReader (up 6 from last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
6 followers - Blogger (up 3 from last month)

These are my top referers for June (not including google wanderers)

1. Twitter - 121 visitors
2. EUReferendum - 71 visitors
3. Facebook - 60 visitors
4. UK Bubble - 38 visitors
5. Mark Wadsworth - 22 visitors
6. Counting Cats - 12 visitors
7. Longrider - 7 visitors
8. Charlotte Gore - 6 visitors
9. YouPorn - 6 visitors
10. Daniel 1979 - 5 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during July.

1. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam (71 views)
2. Indietracks videos (63 views)
3. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints (61 views)
4. Origami flapping bird animation (38 views)
5. Facebook IQ test gubbins (37 views)
6. London Bloggers Meetup sponsored by Starbucks VIA (36 views)
7. Morning Blogulation 11-Aug-2009 (26 views)
8. Veolia flytipping in Camden (26 views)
9. Animation with windows movie maker (25 views)
10. Facebook Scramble graphs (23 views)

Thats it for August's blog stat pron. If there's any other metrics you want to know about this blog, let me know in the comments.

Flat tax and the Chevy Volt

Over on Liberal Conspiracy Tim Worstall is duking it out with the progressives in the comments, pimping the idea of a Flat Tax system.

Rather than having several tax rates depending on income, there's just one flat tax rate, and a sizable untaxed allowance.

Some of the lefties are saying its not a progressive tax, and Tim's defending that it is. I guess the problem is that its not progressive enough to satisfy. Its that untaxed allowance that makes it so great and progressive - the poor pay less.

Here's a graph showing the rate of tax for various income levels under three different tax regimes (the current tax system, a flat tax of 30% with an allowance £12,000 and my own flat tax plan 45% tax rate with an allowance equal to the median income of £25,000)

I reckon there are merits to having a really high allowance and a really steep rate, it kind of encourages the folk who decide pay levels to pay the underlings more, rather than raising their own salaries, that thought at the back of the mind that if the underlings get the money, then the government will get less money through tax than if the more highly paid people got the money. But that's just my philosophy. The underlings will undoubtly spend the money rather than save it and eventually it ends up in the treasury's coffures.

For future governments, if they find they need more or less money, they have the two options of changing the tax rate, which will lead to rich people leaving the country or coming here depending on the change, or they can change the allowance which will lead to more or less middle class people voting for them depending on the new allowance.

There's a problem in conveying the merits of each tax scheme in a single number, if you say the latter flat tax rate is 45% then the middle classes shudder, but if you say its 20% then the lefties moan that it doesn't tax the rich enough. And if you have a system with lots of different different tax bands and tax reliefs and all that then its horrendously expensive to implement, this is what we have at the moment.

Elsewhere on the internet the Chevy Volt is trending because the American EPA are giving it a 230 miles per gallon rating, the first vehicle to achieve a triple digit mpg.

My first thought was "hang on, the Chevy Volt is an electric vehicle, it doesn't use gallons of any fluid fuel". My mistake, its a hybrid, it's electric batteries give it a range of 40 miles before the gasoline engine kicks in. The gasoline engine gives it efficiency of about 50mpg.

This is the same graph as the flat tax, the initial all-electric range is the tax free allowance, and after that the gasoline engine mpg is the taxable income, and its nothing special. I get 60mpg in my Smart car, sometimes 70mpg if I'm on the motorway.

This 230mpg figure comes from including the electric only range, if you drive 55 miles, only the last 15 miles uses gas, and thats where 230mpg comes from. If the drives does 300 miles fuel efficiency is only 62mpg.

So aye, I reckon claiming 230 miles per gallon is misleading, and pretty dishonest.

That sort of thing is just going to lead to car companies developing greater battery capacity to increase the electric-only range, when in the great scheme of things, improving fuel efficiency would mean making the electric motor more efficient. They ought to be pimping some measure of miles per watt hour for the electric drive chain and also the miles per gallon for the gasoline engine, rather than pimping just the single misleading number.

Another thing to consider is when the future finally arrives and we're all driving electric cars, how will the state charge fuel duty on electricity?

Blog stat pron - July

Good afternoon and welcome to my regular first day of the month blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for July, this blog got:-

1,136 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,344 Pageviews

Compared to June's

938 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,969 Pageviews

Uniques are up by 200 from last month, and pageviews are up by almost 400. Statcounter reckons I have 1,708 Unique Visitors. Statcounter has me getting an average of 73 pageloads per day, 10 up from last month, cartwheels and stiffies all round in celebration chaps, the target for August will be 75 ppd.

The peaks towards the end of the month is from Indietracks videos, those indiepop kids love the internet, and I love them, and the peak near the start of the month was my Songkick top gig-goers list, if you do a web page about enthusiastic internety music people, then they will come.

Feed metrics:

15 subscribers - GoogleReader (up 3 from last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (up 1 from last month)
4 followers - Blogger (up 1 from last month)

These are my top referers for June (not including google wanderers)

1. Twitter - 115 visitors
2. Facebook - 107 visitors
3. UK Bubble - 68 visitors
4. EUReferendum - 21 visitors
5. Mark Wadsworth - 13 visitors
6. Anorak Forum - 7 visitors
7. Daniel 1979 - 7 visitors
8. Longrider - 7 visitors
9. Matt Wardman - 7 visitors
10. Songkick - 5 visitors

The rise of traffic from Twitter and Facebook as been stratospheric, here's a graph what I drew of how those traffic streams have been growing this year.

Look, the lines go upwards.

Its almost like magic, apart all from me just whoring my posts, and once or twice they get re-tweeted.

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during July.

1. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints (175 views)
2. Songkick top twenty (103 views)
3. Facebook IQ test gubbins (83 views)
4. Videos of Indietracks bands (75 views)
5. Indietracks lineup table (62 views)
6. Job vacancies update 25-Jun (53 views)
7. UK sea level rises (43 views)
8. Facebook Scramble graphs (42 views)
9. Norwich North (33 views)
10. Indietracks videos (31 views)

Thats it for July's blog stat pron. If there's any other metrics you want to know about this blog, let me know in the comments.

Blog stat pron - June

Good afternoon and welcome to my regular first day of the month blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for June, this blog got:-

938 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,969 Pageviews

Compared to May's

921 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,027 Pageviews

Uniques are up from last month, but pageviews are down. Statcounter reckons I have 1,547 Unique Visitors, about an eighth of what Constantly Furious gets. Statcounter has me getting an average of 61 pageloads per day, down on last month so the target for July will be a more realistic 65 ppd.

I think its the dips in posting at weekends that have let me down a wee bit. you're going to have to put up with that, cos I ain't giving up the missus.

Feed metrics:

12 subscribers - GoogleReader (up 1 from last month)
3 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
3 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

These are my top referers for June (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 109 visitors (up 20)
2. Twitter - 63 visitors (up 3)
3. Longrider - 24 visitors (up 2)
4. EUReferendum - 23 visitors (up 9)
5. Mark Wadsworth - 16 visitors (down 33)
6. UK Bubble - 11 visitors
7. Daniel 1979 - 10 visitors
8. Bloglines - 7 visitors
9. YouPorn - 7 visitors
10. Rob Fisher - 6 visitors

So referrals are down last month, Facebook and Twitter are both up a wee bit, shameless whoring to blame there. Over there I've turned into one of these marketing bores.

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during April.

1. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints (152 views)
2. Names of the dead in Iran (117 views)
3. Facebook IQ test gubbins (71 views)
4. MPs self-published expenses (41 views)
5. Facebook Scramble graphs (38 views)
6. Guide to doing animations on Windows Movie Maker (33 views)
7. Origami instructions (29 views)
8. Updated ranking libertarian blogs (26 views)
9. Songkick ranking (24 views)
10. Names of the dead in Gaza (21 views)

Somewhat frustrating that folk don't give a damn about my opinions, well, they're crap anyway, its just the factual and informative posts that get the most hits, graphs and stuff.

Thats it for June's blog stat pron. If there's any other metrics you want to know about this blog, let me know in the comments.

I'm going to have to try my own kind of gear change if I want to really jack up my stats, I'm going to have to try something different again, post different things. God knows what.

Job vacancies update - 25-Jun-2009

Your regular amateur analysis of the UK's job vacancies scene from ground-breaking attack blog illandancient.

Total vacancies in the UK 411,023
Up 0.46% from last week
Up 4.19% from last month
Down -2.33% from last quarter

Here's your regular graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk, The Guardian's Jobs pages and the Job Centre Plus. A wee caveat about the JCP and The Guardian is that the total jobs listed on their sites are updated in real time, so it varies depending on the time of day, contrast this with Reed who update their total daily.

Based on Gordon Brown saying there was 500,000 job vacancies in PMQs back in February, we can look at how the number of vacancies on the job sites have varied and we extrapolate it up to a total figure for vacancies in the UK.

Graph a little too messy for you? Try this one of monthly averages.


Its a little better than a last month.

Well, its debateable.

Is having lots of job vacancies a good thing or does it mean that our labour pool isn't skilled enough for the jobs available? Maybe a little bit. Me, I'm unemployed so what I'd like in the world is as many possibilities for employment as possible. The number of unemployed folk in the UK is growing, and I guess they too want lots of job vacancies to apply for too.

I reckon too that lots of job vacancies is also a symptom of companies looking to expand, which is a broadly good thing for the economy in most circumstances. I'll come back to this later, cos in some circumstances, I'm not so sure.

Anyhoo, looking now at the breakdown of sectors on reed.co.uk, which ones have grown and shrunk compared to last month:-

Motoring and Automotive 21%
Retail 12%
Manufacturing 10%
Legal 9%
Public Sector 6%
Hospitality 5%
Banking 4%
Financial Services 4%
Actuarial 3%
FMCG 3%
Health 3%
Sales 1%
Management 1%
Social Care 1%
Strategy and consultancy 0%
Recruitment Consultancy 0%
Construction and Property -1%
Graduate -2%
Marketing and PR -2%
General Insurance -3%
Temporary Work -3%
Admin -4%
Transport and logistics -4%
Purchasing -5%
Customer Service -5%
Education -5%
Multilingual -6%
Scientific -6%
Charity and Voluntary -7%
Accountancy Qualified -8%
Engineering -8%
Human Resources -10%
Media, Digital and Creative -12%
IT and Telecoms -13%
Accountancy -13%
IT Contractor -18%
Leisure and tourism -27%
Training -32%

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Lets take a look at some individual sectors.

Me, I'm a manufacturing engineer by training, I get a warm fuzzy feeling in my tummy when I spend all day slaving in a factory to make a pallet full of things that can be sold for more money that they cost to build, that's wealth creation in action, you can see it before your very eyes, in manufacturing.

The line on the graph is at its highest point since I started looking. That is the sign of a sector that wants to grow, and has enough confidence in the future, to employ more people rather than increasing working hours. Sure, its only a few hundred jobs, but its a productive sector, it creates wealth.

A similar story for the automotive sector.

That is a sector that is growing. Aye, some of the car manufacturers are having month long shutdowns and three day weeks, but in other quarters of the sector, I guess, car showrooms and service and pokey wee garages, they're taking on more staff, that's what the graph is telling us.

If you know about cars and find yourself unemployed, there's more opportunities now than there has been in months.

Now, where I'm worried is another growing sector.

The political blogs and Westminster centric types will know about Gordon Brown's dividing line between Labour and the Tories where he's portraying the Conservatives as a party of public spending cuts, calling David Cameron Mr 10% after some think-tank crunched Tory spending statements and figured that in order to protect some chunks, like the NHS, then other chunks will face a 10% cut in their budgets.

The media and most politicios seems to accept that there'll have to be cuts in public spending to make up for the huge debts racked up by the government. One way or another there will have to be cuts in state expenditure spending. Budgets will be cut, departments will receive less money next year than last year.

So, here's the graph of job vacancies in the public sector:-

Its growing. There are more vacancies now than at any point since I started looking three months ago. It doesn't look like the graph of a sector that realises there's going to be less money to pay people with in the future.

Anyhoo, what do I know.

That's it for this week. Good luck with the job hunting.