Claire's Random Thoughts

I will start with material goods on a personal level, because these are the easiest.
Tangible goods on a personal level:
1. A nice pea coat that can match fancier outfits, since I have a scary obsession in matching in fanciness over matching in anything else
2. Discovery of a new fragrance that I can smell and enjoy myself (since I have an unusually dull sense of smell)

Slightly more difficult…
On a personal level, cannot assign a monetary value to:
1. Subscribers who will subscribe to my blog and read it regularly
2. Know what I’m looking for in a potential relationship, maybe I can’t find one because I don’t know what I want

Pretty much impossible now
On a global level:
1. To see US companies that deserve to fail actually fail. This can only happen if the government stops interfering and pumping money into the free market, which is not going to happen the way we’re going.
2. The end of partial communism in practice until humans become like robots and lose all sense of self-interest

It’s been a long time since my updated, hasn’t it? Over one week.
Maybe I took a short break, since I was busy with the end of the semester and packing to come back home, but I’m home now with my winter break and not too much planned yet besides my buying/reselling small business, so I will be returning to blogging.

Wow, I even discontinued my previous series on my winter survival gear. I will be trying a new series that may be more interesting next week on things that are both eco-friendly and economical. Due to personal interest, the economical part is both more important and practical for me, but I recently have begun to learn that being eco-friendly does not necessarily have to cost more money or inconveniences. Since it was typical for me to start my series on Monday and end on Sunday with one post per day, I will hold off on publishing the series.

Meanwhile, make sure you check out Ideal Bite. They provide a newsletter that suggest “green” living tips every weekday.

Instead of studying for my last final, which should be okay in terms of difficult as far as I’m concerned, I’m taking the idiot tests to try to prove to myself that I’m not an idiot.

Idiot Test

Idiot Test 2

Idiot Test 3

Idiot Test 4

The first one actually took me a couple times to get through to the end (lol). The main problem was, I wasn’t sure if I actually clicked all the way or not at certain points in the game, so I accidentally clicked again and failed. After that, all subsequent tests were very similar, and I was able to get them on the first try, except for the 4th one which is the most challenging in my opinion.

Oh, and you have to like cookies or pretend you do to pass the 4th one.

I would also like to point out that in the first test, someone too smart might actually fail from overanalysis. It’s sometimes interesting to see the fine line between idiot and genius. When it asks you to click on a “rectangle” on a screen with a whole bunch of rectangles and squares, you technically could also click on a square, and your answer should qualify is right, because a square is also a rectangle.

This is post 3/7 in my weekly series of my Winter Survival 2008-2009

Earmuffs are like hats in that they are usually optional, so I don’t typically wear them. In fact, I more often use my headphones as a substitute for earmuffs instead of actual earmuffs (see the picture to the left). The picture to the left of this paragraph is one of the soft inside of my Bose QuietComfort 3 Noise Cancelling headphones. I never used to walk around with headphones on until one day when I didn’t feel like turning off my music after leaving the library. It also happened to be a windy and moderately cold day, and I couldn’t help but notice that my ears were significantly warmer than the rest of my head was.
Or, of course, a less expensive and more practical alternative could be my regular Target earmuffs, compliments of Athena. By the way, I don’t really use my headphones as earmuffs that often, since I rarely use earmuffs of any kind unless it’s under 25 degrees (farenheit of course). I thought I would just throw the idea out there, because I seem to use both at about the same level of frequency, and I thought the headphones were pretty effective for doing the job, even though that wasn’t what they were made for.

I discovered how to almost guarantee that visitors will look at more than one post, making the bounce rate in the single digits almost every day. Thanks to google analytics and my new weekly series idea

For those of you who don’t know, let me define what a site’s bounce rate is. It is the percentage of visitors that only look at one page and then “bounce” or leave the site right away. A high bounce rate is typically undesirable, because it means visitors see less content than the webmaster would typically desire.

I’m fascinated by statistics of all types, so naturally I obsessively look at my google analytics statistics for my blog stats. I couldn’t help but notice a significant difference in my my bounce rate during one “mysterious” week:
Typically, I had a history of a fairly high bounce rate, because this was a blog, and most visitors had no need to look at more than just the post of their interest. A high bounce rate is typical for blogs. Mine was 100% for a few days too, because that was before I started updating again.

Before November 17, I had a very high bounce rate every day. It went down from November 17 to 23, but after November 23, it “mysteriously” skyrocketed again. So, why was my bounce rate so low from November 17 to November 23? I noticed that it also happened to be the week of my first weekly series. Apparently, if I have a series index post followed by seven other posts (one per day for the series), visitors tend to look at more than one post in the series. I make sure that each posts links back to the series index, and most of my visitors will not only read the post that they searched for but also take a look at the entire series index and possibly click on another post.

For you bloggers out there, this is a great way to get visitors to read more than one post! Have one index of several posts which links to all of them, and make sure each of the individual posts also links back to the series index. This way, readers will not only read the post that then first landed on but also refer to the series index and have a high rate of reading other similar posts in the same “index” post.

So, I will make sure to continue my weekly series posts. I write my content so it will be read, and I was very happy to see that most people saw more than one post that week.