Monthly Archives: January 2011

How To Kill Paper Wasps

Humour, Life

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had several encounters with paper wasps and had varying levels of success in attempting to kill paper wasps as well.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been four different sets of paper wasp nests forming around the house. Two of the four were in really inconvenient places, such as above the back sliding door near the laundry and in the joint of our clothes line.

On the weekend, it seems like as good a time as any to try my hand at killing the paper wasps again. Last time I attempted it, I was armed with a can of Mortein and I can assure you, when I sprayed their nests – they were very unhappy.

Wanting to see if I could one up the paper wasps this time, I was armed with a can of Baygon Surface Spray and WK-40. You’re probably wondering what WK-40 is; well it is your garden variety WD-40, the spray lubricant with a thousand uses with an awesome new label provided by Andrew for my 27th birthday. The WK-40 was the key in avoiding getting bitten this time, as with the thin nozzle connected you can spray a tight stream of WK-40 for over 2 metres – great for distancing yourself from angry as hell paper wasps!

With a can in either hand & feeling a little like Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, I walked up as close to their nests as I dared and coated them & promptly ran away as the wasps swarmed the area looking for something to string! As it turns out, WK-40 and Baygon Surface Spray is a lethal concoction with great knockdown power.

In each of the four paper wasp nests, I came out on top without getting bitten once. I’m sure WD-40 didn’t have killing paper wasps on their list of 1000+ things that their fantastic lubricant is good for!

Hugo Swinging

Family, Photos

Hugo Swinging With Red Bucket Hat, Sunglasses & A Big SmileSaturday afternoon Claire, Hugo, Evie and I popped down to the same park that we had Hugo’s 2nd birthday party at in Maudsland on Greenway Boulevard.

Nothing quite describes pure joy than babies or children smiling from ear to ear!

If you live in the area and haven’t been there before, you really need to take your kids – it is fantastic. There are a couple of different play areas which include swings, flying foxes and climbing equipment. In addition to the play equipment, there is also a rotunda and a couple of undercover picnic tables with electric barbeque’s to match. To make it that little bit more appealing, there is now a coffee shop directly beside the park – could it get much better?

Hugo, Boris, Sickness & Silver Linings

Family

Hugo has been off colour from the end of last week and over the weekend it turned into some sort of bug which has caused him to vomit a few times.

At dinner tonight, insisting on having his all time favourite cuddle toy Boris with him, Hugo threw up again and it went all over his toy. Vomiting or being sick doesn’t seem to bother Hugo, he was quite unfazed by the whole thing. Though he was telling me he was ‘wet’ and I didn’t join the dots with vomit, but rather water from his water bottle.

The upside, after a lot of tears because we had to take Boris away, Boris had a bath for the first time in about 2 years & his head didn’t fall off – yaa Boris!

Hopefully Hugo will be back to his normal awesome self tomorrow.

2010 Traffic Statistics

Blogging, Websites

Following on from my 2009 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. During 2010, the site generated 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews. That figure is down from my two biggest years of approximately 145,000 and 135,000 during 2007 and 2008 when I was posting less frequently but the posts were of a more technical nature and also pop culture related such as Australian Idol. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

During 2008 and 2009, I wrote a couple of posts each year that grabbed a moderate amount of traffic and were clear standouts with respect to the number of pageviews. During 2010, none of my posts really caught the attention of the internet; which per above can be attributed to the topics that I’m writing about.

The traffic breakdown by source shows a considerable decrease in the reliance of search engines, with their traffic percentage falling from around 85% in 2008-2009 down to only 74% in 2010. Within the search engine space, Google are completely dominating with 94% of the search engine traffic. During 2009, Yahoo! were the first non-Google search engine with about 2.5% & Microsoft Bing was the new kid on the block. Fast forward a year and the tides have turned with Bing now accounting for 2.6% and Yahoo! 2.4% of the search engine traffic.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to 2009, with four of five remaining and one newcomer:

  1. Disable Options In A Select Dropdown Element
  2. Select Option Disabled & The JavaScript Solution
  3. Oracle RETURNING Clause
  4. ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate <x> bytes
  5. Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate:

  1. ORA-06552: PL/SQL: Compilation Unit Analysis Terminated
  2. HP Laserjet & Windows Vista Driver Support
  3. Oracle Dynamic SQL Using The DECODE Function
  4. ASP Error ‘ASP 0104: 80004005?
  5. State of Origin 2006

It is probably worth noting that nine out of ten of the highest traffic web pages on my site are not about anything to do with myself or our family but are in fact to do with helping others. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you see the meteoric traffic growth question and answer sites Stack Overflow and Quora have seen in the last two years.

That being said, still nothing from 2010 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2010 and the landscape is vastly different:

  1. Doodle 4 Google Winner On Display
  2. 4 Car Motor Vehicle Accident
  3. Medibank International Sydney Winner
  4. Ford Falcon XR6
  5. Mantra Group Wins Circle on Cavill Trade Mark Court Case

Onward and upward for 2011!