My sGradlj.com reached 80.000 visits (after less than 5 years of counting), blog reached 10.000 (same counting) a few months ago and the Panoramio, at about 900 pictures now, should reach 700.000 in a few days.
The most frequented part of the site are the derogatory terms. Collecting them for a few years now, initially with a lot of help from the ppp, and now mostly on my own, whenever I hear or remember something.
Snow, not holding. It felt like early spring last few days. Been chopping some wood - last of the last season's dry.
Cats mating season. johana is visited by at least three toms regularly, plus a few optional guys who come and go. They've already overturned a stack of chopped wood in the basement, and a bunch of slats on the terrace. Heard a lot of noise last night.
Finished reading the "Edge of Foundation" and moving to "Foundation and Earth" now. One more to go after that. Rereading the whole series, came to some conclusions:
- Azimov (actually, Ozimov) is a better Agatha than the Christie girl. She had to maneuver only the who-when-where. He had to invent whole cultures as alibies.
- As a prophet, he failed badly. All his media are on microfilm and require readers. The speech-to-text goes straight to paper - with all the computing power that requires, he didn't think of storing the text on anything but paper.
- As a predictive programmer, he's a swell. Along with Clarke, he welded the domed cities into everybody's minds for decades to come. The idea has spread like wildfire and has polluted almost half of the SF of the time (cf "Logan's run", "THX", "Dark city"... as far as "Aeon flux"). Most of the people can, nowadays, imagine the future as either a post-apocalyptic desert, possibly populated by local warlords' tribes, or domed cities. The only reason they aren't more popular is the cost of putting them into movies, digital or set. Once the push to abandon the country and concentrate the cities comes (and it's maybe a forceful nudge already), the people will have expected that and have already got used to the idea. Which is exactly the idea behind predictive programming.
OTOH, he did even better with robots, he got his three laws (which he repeated just like a boring ad) to override almost any other robotic concept (except that the Frankenstein type of creation was too strong an idea to be crushed, but that's the only other one now). The only notable exceptions I can remember are the HAL 9000 and Addams's Marvin. HAL is confused by special orders, Marvin is a pissed off butler.
- His naming algorithm is rather interesting. He's chopping and reassembling pieces of existing names, and there he seems to pull a lot from the jewish and slavic pool. Not a single apostrophe in there - he obviously predates Star Trek :) (does that make him a ST predator? :).