Passion never dies

Some people say you never forget how to ride a bike. You may fall off once or twice, but after a couple of minutes, you feel ready to take on the longest road, reassured by your renewed skills and confidence. Well, I think it's probably the same with passion. The passion for creating things, for drawing, for letting words flow into an empty piece of paper, longing to be written upon.

Sometimes passion is lost for no apparent reason. The novelty simply wears off and you feel like you have been doing this over and over again. And then passion, rebel as it is, finds another new place to go into, and you forget that once upon a time you loved doing something. Time goes by, and the love you once felt seems now faded, part of a distant life.. but in reality, its never gone away, it has just been waiting patiently in an unexpected corner, waiting for the right time to come out and take you by surprise.

Today I took the wrong turn, and hey, there it was.. blood vessels rushed to expand and let my brain cells activate again. I rejoice at the realization of something new and exciting coming back my way.. yes, exciting and yet familiar, and making you wonder why you let it run away in first place :)

The side effects of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very useful tool that allows webmasters to find out what's really going on with their websites. For instance: How many people are visiting your blog? Where do they come from? Are they reading it or rather skipping it? How long do they stay in your webpage?

A couple of weeks ago I went to a job interview which required me to know a bit of web analytics, so I decided to test Google Analytics and see what the fuzz is about (or was, since it's no longer a new tool and I am not sure if there's something better out there). So.. I opened a Google Analytics account, copied a piece of tracking code to my blog.. and believe it or not, people actually visit my blog!

Well, it's definitely not the most visited page on the web (10 visits per day during the last week, and 90% of the visitors never click on a link), but... its much more visited than I thought :)

Thanks to Google Analytics I know, for instance, that 38% of my visitors come from the US (see map below), and that British are more likely to keep reading it, rather than jumping to another webpage.

This is, truth be told, amazing news. I haven't written here anything at all for almost a year, and yet people still visit it.. now imagine: what if I actually wrote something? Can I improve traffic? An interesting experiment...

Blogs are dead

Its official: blogs are dead. They are so 2003. No one read blogs, and the reason is, that you can read the same things in Facebook or twitter. Well, actually not the same stuff, cause you wouldn't write more than a couple of sentences in any of these pages, but people don't want to think more than a couple of catchy phrases per day. Who wants to read three paragraphs about the life changing experience that I had last week when I found a dog hunting a rabbit, when all the people who care about it, could read it from your status update in Facebook?

Moreover.. who wants to have to deal with these freaking chinese porn comments? Its been ca. 30 since April... I just dont feel like having to log-in once a day to erase these comments. Come on China, how come you censor everything, and you cannot keep these idiots out of my blog?

NO CHINESE PORN AFTER THIS POST, PLEASE!!!

Finding myself

So, you may think, everything has happened before. But there I am, lying inside this metallic cylinder, trying to figure out what's going on. The place is dark, but you can spot a small window to the outside world. I can barely move, the place is simply too small. I wonder if it's only a dream or a metaphor of my life. Or a bit of both. I am trapped in this box and things are about to get worse. Outside the window I see a woman. She hesitates, she is not sure what to do. She seems to be pushing buttons - first gently, then desperately. Then, suddenly, I hear a click. The machine is now sealed, I realize, and she looks at me for the first time. Her eyes seem familiar, but the glimpse is too short to tell. Ten seconds, perhaps twenty, and the device starts filling in with water. The cylinder trembles, and then, starts moving. I am inside a fucking washing machine, I see it clearly now. And the fun is about to start...

This is why I dont like Italy

Rigid codes of behavior govern everything from how to dress to the proper time of day to drink a cappuccino. Far from being a melting pot, Italy remains a three-course meal, with the pasta carefully segregated from the appetizer and main course and no place for a bowl of hummus or plate of egg rolls.

Source: Time.com

Fat Cells Are Forever

Swedish scientists have killed all my hopes to become thin one day. According to some studies conducted at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, it seems that "the number of fat cells we develop as kids and teenagers determines how many we'll have for the rest of our lives".

"Scientists already suspected that the overall number of fat cells remains constant throughout adulthood and that that number appears not to be influenced by how much you eat or exercise (when you lose weight, your fat cells shrink but don't go away; when you gain, they fill up with fat and expand). But until this research, they weren't sure how long fat cells live, or how often they die and are replaced. Understanding fat cell "turnover" could possibly lead to treatments for obesity that block fat-cell regeneration."

Source: The Washington Post