10. Wii

According to some, the only console that brought some innovation to gaming overall. According to me, the biggest crap Nintendo has ever released. Wii is generally like communism - good in theory, sucks in practice. It could have revolutionised video gaming, it could have been the best console, it could have easily defeat its rivals. But it didn’t. I mean, it actually is the best-selling console on the market, and it reached the kind of customers no one has ever managed to reach before - casual gamers, but Nintendo have completely forgotten about the more important consumer base, the hard(er?)core gamers. Because nobody wants to play Mario all the fucking time.

9. Public transportation

I actually have to use public transport to get to and from school almost everyday. And of course, it has many advantages - it’s cheap, relatively ecological and environment-friendly, and often there are the bus lanes which are really in case of a huge traffic jam. But the list of drawbacks is much longer, unfortunately.

First of all, public transportation in Kraków (where I live) is free for people over 70. One could think “heh, how many 70-year-olds would actually use public transport?”. Surprisingly, the answer is: all of them. The buses and trams, quite crowded without the billion grannies using them, often are filled with people almost standing on each other’s head because of the lack of room to breathe.

Another group of annoying people travelling by the same buses as I do that are the stinking homeless garbage collectors. Oh man, if you happen to be on a crowded bus with a bum standing next to you, preventing yourself from throwing up will be a very tough job.

The last annoying thing in public transportation I’d like to point out are the screaming children. When one of them starts crying, and by chance there’s another one riding the same bus, he will probably start crying as well, and then the third one, and the fourth one… This can drive you mad. Even though I do always wear earphones when travelling by bus, to clarify that.
I’m gonna have to get a driving license as soon as I can.

8. Pi (π)

Not that I hate it, I just hate the ambiguity it brings to mathematics. While you can give the exact area of a rectangle, (in most cases) triangle or even most of polygons, while working on circle- or sphere-related calculations, the exact value of pi is never known. Whether you will substitute it with 3.14, 22/7 or 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510, you will never get the accurate result.

While the value of pi has been computed to more than a trillion (10¹²) digits, elementary applications, such as calculating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, a value truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to compute the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe to a precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.

Wikipedia

And even though the information I’ve found on Wikipedia (above) cheers me up, I never feel fully satisfied with my circumferences, because I know that pi’s expansion is infinite. That’s why I don’t use rounded corners on regua.biz.

(more…)

I’ve recently realised that 14th March, the day regua.biz was created, can’t actually be called “birthday” of the site, as it wasn’t born in the strict sense of this word. I’ve decided to call it “anniversary”. And so, let’s celebrate the 2nd anniversary of regua.biz’s creation! The only reason the site is still going is you, the readers. I’d like to thank all of you for your support and/or criticism, I hope you’ll still be enjoying regua.biz during the 3rd year it’s been online.

Many (seriously, many) things have changed over the last year. And I don’t mean the look or functionality of the site; I’m talking about the user preferences (note: yeah, this will be another statistic-based entry. If you don’t enjoy reading these, just skip it. Actual articles for regua.biz are on the way!).

Less than 30% of the site visitors were located in Poland. That’s quite a huge change, considering that last year it was over 95 per cent… Other countries that regua.biz has been viewed from include the United States (21%), United Kingdom (5%) and Germany (4%). The smallest number of visitors (strictly speaking, one guest) came from countries like Sudan, Mozambique, Kyrgyzstan, Antigua and Barbuda, Qatar and Barbados. Cheers to all Qatar readers!

The percentage of users browsing the Web with Firefox has slightly increased compared to the 2007 results. 65% of visitors use Mozilla’s browser, 23% have Internet Explorer, 6% use Opera and 4% are browsing with Safari. Surprisingly, I’ve got some views with the PlayStation 3’s browser - 0.06% to be exact - as well as iPhone (0.03%) and Wii (0.01%).

82% of the visitors use Microsoft Windows (84% of them is XP, 11% Vista), 11% have Mac OS and only 8% of the viewers use Linux. This is not surprising - Windows is still the most popular operating system, and as long as software developers don’t realise that there actually are other OS to develop applications for, this won’t change.

As to screen resolutions, 32% are 1024×768, 24% - 1280×1024. 1280×800 got over 17%, and 1680×1050 - less than 10%. I’m really glad to see 800×600 at 1.26%, that means that I can actually make new layouts a little bit wider without users complaining.

The top traffic source for regua.biz this year is… WordPress.org (thanks to ACP)! Far behind the leader there’s Google with 17% (and, strangely, Google.com with 5% - I’m wondering why Google Analytics doesn’t add them up).

The most popular keywords that brought people to the site were: regua (4.74%), taking the top place just as last year, “Cyanide and Happiness” with 3.49%, and many variations of phrases like “Ajax comments”, “Ajax WordPress” and “comment posting”, etc. I am really curious whether the people who google “regua” are actually trying to find me or they are people trying to plan their holidays in Portugal.

Now, continuing the tradition I’ve started a year ago, let’s get to the 14 March facts! (I’m pretty sure I’ll run out of these in a year or two, so if you know something interesting that happened exactly on 14/03, please let me know).

• On March 14th, Second Equirria were held in the ancient Rome.
• On 14 March 1804, Johann Strauß, Sr., the composer, was born.
• On 14 March 1889, Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented his Zeppelin (“navigable balloon”).
• By 14 March 1939 German troops had fully occupied the Czechoslovak provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.
• 14/03/1994 is the release date of Linux kernel version 1.0.0.
• 14 March 2005 is the date of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon.
• On 14 March 2008 (yeah, that’s today) Xbox 360’s price was officially lowered by €50 in all European countries. Theoretically, at least.

Again, thanks to all of you for letting me keep the site running. May the Force be with you, As-Salāmu `Alaykum, and happy Easter everyone.