It’s downloadable from the above link in excel (60Mb) or flat txt form and it has the full 1m sites, in order.

And I’m in the list…

As you’d probably guess, google.com is #1 and Facebook, Adobe, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. all feature highly. Apple, interestingly doesn’t make the top 10, but only just.

I’m not sure If I should adopt an Alan Freeman voice and announce the following as, “This year’s smash new entry, pop pickers”. But the great news is that my puzzle site made it to 286,244th spot. That’s 286,224th place, in the entire WORLD.

In case you missed that, bimbogami.co.uk is the 286,224th most popular site on the freakin’ planet.

OK, maybe that’s going a bit far. I guess those guys aren’t the ultimate arbitrator, but given I don’t really put much effort into the whole SEO thing much, I can live with that.

I should really do a 3rd season of puzzles and attract some more traffic. Gotta break into that top 1/4m.

Thanks to my good friend for the heads-up.

So, today we’re learning about spurious screen-dimming, screen savers and an emergency exit…

Auto-Dim Screen

If you move about a bit with your MacBook, like me you may have been annoyed by the screen randomly dimming and brightening.

Turns out this is because your MacBook buddy is trying to be clever by sensing the ambient light and automatically adjusting the screen brightness. Moving around and variable lighting can confuse the wee soul.

Easily fixed through by switching off the cleverness:  Go to System Preferences > Displays > uncheck “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes”

Screen Savers

Next up, screensavers. I downloaded one, unzipped it and then went looking for the ‘install my screensaver’ option in the ‘Desktop and Screensaver’ section of System Preferences. But there is none! I spent longer than I really should have looking for one.

Then I realised I had reverted to Windows expectation mode. Installer? Pah! I tried the obvious – just double-clicking the file, et viola, installed and working. D’oh.

Force Force-Quit

Finally, for now, we have an escape route. In the couple of years I’ve since moving to Mac I’ve had occasion where an app (often MS Word) will stall or go into a tailspin.

Symptom: Spinning CD cursor and you can’t get anything to react, not even get the Apple Menu to open to get to Force Quit, which you know holds the key to your frustration.

Previously, I’d have resorted to a force-shutdown (hold down the power button for 5 seconds), but not anymore.

Keyboard shortcut Option(Alt)-Command-esc – brings up the Force Quit menu.

Air is a ‘flying’ coaster, which is the term for a coaster where the rider has a near horizontal seating position whilst riding, giving the impression of flying, like Superman.

I’ve only ridden this a couple of times before this visit, because for some strange coincidence it always seemed to be ‘off’ on my last couple of visits.

Rita Coaster Vital Statistics

• Type of ride: Steel coaster
• Top speed: 46 mph
• Track length: 2,756 feet
• Ride time: 90 seconds
• Inversions: 2
• Height requirement: 1.4m
• Opened: 2002
• Manufacturer: Bolliger & Mabillard
• Cost £12m

This ride gives the impression of being longer than the 1m30s or so it lasts, probably because of the variety of movement and the unusual riding style.

It’s a doozy though.

You get yourself into the seat, which initially feels not unlike Nemesis or other coasters that invert, in that you are securely held with an over-the-shoulder harness. The bit you don’t immediately notice are the ankle-clamps, a bit like you’d imagine the electric chair to have.

The reason for this becomes apparent when the ride prep starts and the chair rotates through 90 degrees, leaving the rider in a seated position but facing the ground – strange to say the least.

As is the norm, we find ourselves heading out of the station, almost under ground,  and up a chain lift to get some height. At the peak of the climb we head off with a short dip to the right and swoop down towards the ground.

As we come out of the dip we’re inverted by and now we’re flying on our back round a big sweeping curve. Then a twist out of there and a big outside swoop and into a barrel-roll to disorient us before a couple of dips towards the ground again.

Finally we go into another outside swoop, with a good view of the car-park, before heading back into the station with some brakes.

Verdict: Out of the ordinary and fab.

First up – Rita, formerly “Rita: Queen of Speed” (see below*), is a LSM launched coaster, much like the Aerosmith Rock n Roller Coaster in Hollywood Studios Florida, technology-wise. It uses a Linear Synchronous Motor to accelerate the cars from 0-62mph in 2.2 seconds. It does take your breath away a bit.

Rita Coaster Vital Statistics

• Type of ride: Steel coaster (Launched)
• Top speed: 62 mph (in 2.2s)
• Track length: 2,122 feet
• Ride time: 49 seconds
• Inversions: 0
• Height requirement: 1.4m
• Opened: 2005
• Manufacturer: Intamin
• Cost £8m

As for the ride itself, it’s not the longest, but with the accelleration, it’s pretty intense. The build-up includes a creepy babbling voiceover, ultimately urging, “you must escape!”

You can only just feel the brakes coming off and a slight roll-forward, just as the voice says “Go! Go! Go!” and you are launched, with cheeks pulled back, to that top speed in the two or so seconds it takes to get to the end of the straight coming out of the station.

Then we bank heavily to the right in a big curve and climb to the highest point of the track before switching to banking left round another tight curve, with the cars almost on their sides on the downhill stretch. We straighten out from that curve with a mini-climb and hard-bank-right into another tight right-hand curve, parallel with and just below the first curve. We again straighten into a slight lift and easy bank left then it’s over a final crest before we’re onto the brakes and back into the station.

* Rita was originally themed as a drag-racing coaster but was re-themed in 2010 to fit in with the new ‘Dark Forest’ look and feel for that section of the park and the introduction of the coaster Th13teen that year. As a result, it lost it’s “Queen of Speed” tag along with the bright colours and flames, and received the gloomy, dark treatment we see now.

Another significant milestone was passed yesterday. Over 500,000 low-life, would-be spammers have joined the bimbogami forum in an attempt to post links to their often offensive, sometimes vile, but always pointless rubbish.

Now I’m sure those folks keen on procuring an authentic Swiss watch at a knockdown price, a no-need-to-study degrees from a reputable university or enough pharmacuticals to make your hair (and perhaps other things) curl are sorely disappointed. I’m sure there are more appropriate places they can find them than a puzzle site.

So, half-a-million eh? That’s a big number by anyone’s measure. And 300k of those in the last seven months. That’s nearly 1500 a day! Fortunately I can console myself somewhat with the fact that I had the presence of mind to create a little bit of code to stop them posting at the point I only had a small number each day to deal with.

Now, if I had a penny for each one of them…
Well, I’d be five grand better off I suppose.

It’s now at the stage, my forum is creaking and some of the queries crash because of the number of users logged. I’m going to have to clear-down some of that space. Better dig out the SQL book…

I’ve often sung the praises of WordPress as a blogging platform. Particularly its functionality, flexibility and ease of use.

My blog’s been running for a couple of years without as much as a hitch. Adding themes and plugins, and upgrading to new versions were always a 1-click breeze.

But complacency sets in, and perhaps you don’t back up for a while. And, as everyone knows, that’s generally when disaster strikes.

The upgrade to 3.1.4 reminder popped up and, as usual, I clicked ‘upgrade automatically’. Yes, it reminded me to backup my database. Yes, I knew I hadn’t done that for quite a while. But hey, it’s never gone wrong before. So I clicked ‘proceed’. #fail

I did get the ‘upgraded successfully’ message but on returning to the dashboard, I got nothing but a white screen. “Strange”, I thought and tried a few things but nothing; completely blank, no errors, no spinning icon, nada. I tried the site itself, equally blank. “Now, that’s most definitely not good”, I reckoned.

Google had nothing. So I left it for a couple of days to see if it would heal itself, but surprisingly not. It was well and truly gubbed.

So I had a dig about behind the scenes and backed up the bust instance of the WordPress install. Then I deleted and reinstalled WordPress and went for a trial and error approach to getting it all back up and running.

I seem to have managed to get most of it back, the only missing bit being the categories, tags and view-counts on the individual posts.

I’d always thought my ‘Shame of Shamu‘ and ‘Is Disney Eco-Friendly?‘ posts were doing pretty well, beaten only by older posts. But they’ve been overtaken by one particular, more recent, post…

Well, it looks like it’s the whole branding thing that’s getting the hits and that Pepsi, beats Disney (or SeaWorld) in the search engine stakes.

Out of 76 posts in total, my top 20 (below) make up 50% of my total hits to date.

So, here’s my top 20 posts, by number of hits.

This is the end product (the photo, not the food) of my first venture into ‘proper’ pictures, ie. for a purpose other than my own pleasure.

It was done as a part of a small photo-shoot I did back in Frbruary, for Blue Chip Marketing, of a few dishes made by Tony Singh at Oloroso in Edinburgh.

The shots feature in a Visit Scotland-sponsored foodie booklet, along with the recipes to make the dishes and a competition to win foodie-goodies. The booklet is included as an insert in this month’s Sainsbury’s Magazine, out now, and The Observer Food Magazine, which came out at the weekend.

Together, these two publications have a joint circulation in excess of 700,000. So I’m quite chuffed with the ‘reach’ of my shots.

I suppose it means it’s 700k people that will likely curse when it falls out of the magazine onto the floor. But hopefully they will pick it up and have a browse, and see my pictures and perhaps even have a go at making the dishes!

The pictures are apparently going to feature on a few food related websites too. I’ll update this post with the links or screenshots when I get them.

For the unfamiliar, Oloroso is a lovely rooftop restaurant in Edinburgh, with beautiful views of Edinburgh city and the Castle. It’s run by top Scottish chef Tony Singh.

You may have seen him on the telly on the Great British Menu. When I was in his restaurant, he was sporting a bright red turban and was absolutely charming.

There were three dishes to capture and pictured at the top is the starter; Tom Yum Soup with Orkney Crab Pate Wontons.

Next up was Irvine’s of Perthshire Sirloin Steak with Glengoyne Whisky Pepper Sauce (above) and finally a Glengoyne Whisky and Marmalade Pudding with Custard, below.

The whole experience was a bit more rushed than ideally I would have liked as the restaurant had a couple of other things on while I was shooting.

This meant I got moved about a bit and had to re-set up. Then I had various not-so-subtle inquiries as to when I would be finished. But it all added to the fun and excitement; there were no second chances.

I can certainly say I learned a lot and look forward to the next one!

At that time, I had passed what I thought was a significant milestone. I had blocked just over 25,000 potential spammers from posting on the forum. Automatically.

I thought 25k in a single year was a lot. That’s about 68 attempted registrations a day.

Now, while I’d love to think bimbogami is quite popular, the reality of the situation is it’s very niche and therefore not that busy. Even when I’m running with a new season, there’s maybe 50-100 players a day on the main site on a busy day.

Well, I’ve realised recently that wasn’t even a teeny little milestone. Today, I passed a proper milestone – 200,000 thwarted spammers. Yes, 200k of these objectionable people have tried and failed to post their little morsels of crap promoting their wares on my site.

That’s an average of 685 attempted registrations a day. And that’s when the site itself  is quiet. Where are these people coming from? Are there really rooms full of people, paid buttons to search all day for phpbb sites and post spam on them?

This really annoys me, as I can’t see the point in it. Are people actually making money out of it and I just don’t understand? It’s a bit like virus-writers – what do they get out of it?

Maybe it’s just me. Get a life freaks!

Like a number of rides at Alton Towers, it’s a ‘first’ in a genre; in this case a ‘free-fall’ track coaster.

The coaster was built on the site of the original “Corkscrew” coaster, the initial main attraction when the park opened, which was in itself a world’s first; a  double helix coaster. A piece of Corkscrew’s track is now displayed in the entrance area to the theme park.

‘TH13TEEN’  Coaster Vital Statistics

Type of ride: Steel coaster with free-fall element

• Height: 60 feet
• First drop: 56 feet
• Top speed: 67 mph
• Inversions: 0
• Height requirement: 1.2 meters
• Opened: 20/03/2010
• Manufacturer: Intamin AG

TH13TEEN, to give the coaster it’s branding, is a horror themed coaster. The approach to it is surrounded by faceless wraiths (more of that later) wearing brown sack-cloth and accompanied by eerie music and sounds, the strapline of the ride being, “You’d better not go alone.”

The picture above is the banner above the entrance to the ride, with the neighbouring coaster Rita in motion across the top. The blurb mentions it cost £15m to build. These coasters don’t come cheap.

First thing I noticed was that the height restriction was only 1.2m and we’re only restrained by a lap-bar, so we’re not going to be inverting, what’s this one got to excite us then? The height restriction meant the boy could get on, so he was delighted.

We navigate the queue quite quickly, and hope for the back row in the little trains (as you know the position de choice for coaster fans). But purely by chance we end up right at the front, which turns out to be the best seat in the house for this particular coaster.

So we exit the station, turn right and get hauled swiftly up the chain-pull to the top of the 60 foot climb, and we’re off. A fairly tasty drop to start with and we reckon we’re in for something good, then a few swoops and turns and a little drop through the ‘spooky’ woods and I was beginning to think, “is this it?”

Then, in the middle distance I can see we’re heading towards enclosed scaffolding, covered in white tarpaulin and, as we head in to the dark, things take a turn for the worse (or better really). Under the dark tarp, it’s done up like an archeological dig, with dim lighting. The train grinds to a halt. We hear some creaking and a sudden CRACK! (accompanied with some air-blasts from the side, for effect) and everything goes completely dark and the whole train drops down suddenly, it feels about six inches, into the ground. The passengers all scream and just as the sound escapes, the train drops vertically again, this time some considerable distance (about 15 feet according to some reports). Now we’re talking!

We’re now in a lower ‘tomb’ with wraiths, green lighting and general spookiness. Then we start to go again, this time backwards, and fast, in the dark. We’re only going round in wide circles, on a slightly undulating (side to side) track, but in the dark the effect is pretty cool. After what feels like a couple of circuits, we come back out into the light and slow to a halt again. The points on the track change and we are accelerated into the terminus.

So, not only a first in terms of vertical drop track-coaster, but the use of both chain pull and magnetic induction for propulsion too.

One of the funniest things we saw was when we were heading back on again, along the empty ‘single rider’ lane. We saw a man dressed as a wraith position himself just before the merchandising outlet, but out of site of riders coming off the coaster. As they came round the corner, gabbing to each other about the experience, the motionless wraith, looking like a prop for the shop, suddenly reached out to one of them. We watched a few going past, and if the ride didn’t scare the living daylights out of them, this guy certainly did.

Verdict?

A great novelty coaster, something out of the ordinary.