If you want to stay up-to-date with WordPress, you can try running it from SVN. I’ll post a little guide on how I do it soon.

No, I’m not dead. My last post was published quite a while ago, but I’m still alive and well — for the most part.

Concerning the human swine flu, it’s important to note that hype and paranoia may not really be that far from the truth. It is a serious health risk, and the World Health Organization recently issued a level 4 alert.

At least the City of Toronto has no known swine flu cases thus far.

Stay safe and be careful!

That’s the slogan for Mercedes-Benz’s new midsized, premium sports utility vehicle, the Mercedes GLK. This is clearly a car for those who love style, comfort and elegance — concepts shared by Mercedes’ new mini-site promoting the GLK.

The promotional mini-site is actually rather artistic. A fully Flash-based site, it is amazing in usability and experience, as I might expect the GLK to be. The site has a few major sections, which include a place to ‘watch’ — that is, to look at high quality photographs and promotional videos for the car —, a place to learn — that is, to review information about the car —, and a place to ‘create’, which apparently means to answer a very short personality quiz to create a background image that remains consistent throughout the site. (There’s also a feature to download that background to use as a wallpaper image.)

Prospective buyers will get all the technical information and product insights that they need from this GLK mini-site. While being dazzled by the site’s amazing functionality, high-res pictures and persuasive commercials, buyers can still get what they need to know about this new model from one of the world’s most reputable high end automaker.

In times like these, you want a fuel-efficient vehicle that will reliably stay with you for years to come.

This is not going to be an extended hiatus. I will be back!

It’s nearly the end of 2008, and that means lists, lists, lists. All the magazines and newspapers, and some blogs, are coming out with lists of top ten books from 2008, best inventions, etc… you get the idea.

I thought that I would post something of the sort too, with lists about this blog, lists about people, maybe even a list about events in my life this year… and I thought that I would publish it.

(read more after the jump)

So, here goes nothing.

Most Trafficked Blog Posts

Below is a list of the top ten blog posts, in descending order of hits. Now, ordinarily I would be using Google Analytics, but after discovering that the WordPress.com Stats plugin could basically keep track of the same things, I’ll just take the data from there; keep in mind, though, that this blog hasn’t existed for more than a year.

(Also, I’m using the long titles for the posts whenever such titles exist.)

1. Pictures from a spectacular opening for the Beijing Olympics
2. I recommend H.264
3. A Thorough Treatise on the Nature of Friendship
4. A Social Experiment
5. Two online PowerPoint hosting services
6. Customizing 404 error pages on WordPress
7. Secret Journal 1
   (oddly enough, this post is password-protected… a lot of unauthorized visitors must have tried to view it)
8. A Thoughtful Examination of Why Friends Suck
9. The Anatomy of Trust as it applies to everyday secrets
10. Analyzing Shifts in Human Behaviour (part I and II)

There are a number of higher-traffic pages that I left out because they were not blog posts, or because they were meaningless; for instance, the Simpler iPaper page was deliberately left out because it is not a blog post, and Anti-Facebook Series was left out of the list above because it merely linked to a few articles on Geekie.org.

5 Least Successful Blog Posts

These are defined by: low or non-existent traffic and low or non-existent comments.

1. Space Alone
   (I attribute this post’s inactivity to its front-page visibility; no one visited the single post page because it was on the front page. Additionally, it might have been published before the WordPress.com Stats plugin was first enabled.)
2. I’m getting a quad core computer
3. 5 days to go until the 2008 Beijing Olympics
   (My blog’s traffic really picked up during and after the Olympics; before then, very few posts had visits on their single post pages.)
4. No More Lab With Leo
5. Videos about Tibet

I don’t know whether anything can be said here.

5 Worst Political Moments

I’m really only talking about countries with which I am associated; for instance: the U.S. and Canada because I live in North America, China because it is my homeland.

1. The U.S. and other Western nations condemn Russia for what they call “a disproportionate response” to the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia; Russia then unilaterally recognizes independence of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia
2. Robert Mugabe holds on to power in Zimbabwe; a power-sharing agreement is later signed
3. Western media exaggerates and spins the Tibetan uprising
4. Irish referendum rejects the Lisbon Treaty
5. Kosovo declares independence

Of course, you’re free to disagree.

Other Significant Political/World Issues

These are just the items that didn’t make it into the list above, because they weren’t bad enough.

• Raul Castro is elected the leader of Cuba by its National Assembly
• Stephen Harper wins another minority government
• Radovan Karadžić arrested for war crimes
• Iraq finally stabilizes
• The price of oil hits and exceeds $100 per barrel
• Rising food and fuel costs lead to riots and unrest in the Third World

5 Important Tech Industry Events/Releases

1. iPhone 3G
2. Bill Gates steps down
3. Yahoo!’s demise
4. Macbook Air
5. The Browser Wars are back on

5 Most Significant Events, Looking into the Future

In no particular order:

• The Phoenix lander discovers water on Mars!
• The Large Hadron Collider is started up for the first time
• China: hosts Olympics, conducts its first spacewalk
• The world plunges into recession
• Barack Obama is elected the President of the United States

5 Worst Natural Disasters

1. Over 133,000 die in Myanmar as a result of Cyclone Nargis
2. Chengdu earthquake in Sichuan province
3. China’s worst snowstorm since 1954
4. Hurricane Ike
5. Tornado outbreak in the Southern U.S.

I’ll be adding to this list in the near future. For now, enjoy what I have above, and send me feedback through the comments!

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Subscribe today! (If you can’t decide right now, you can do so at any time using the form in the sidebar.)

However, if you’d like to keep track of me in a stalker-ish way, follow me on Twitter (it’s even better if you have an account and you click “Follow”). I will use my cell phone to send text messages that will hopefully keep you appeased of what I’m doing and where I am (in a non-specific way).

At the same time, let’s welcome Brandon who is in Canada as part of an exchange program.

If you’re looking for something to read in the meantime, see “Why Kosovo Was And Always Will Be Serbian” or “Georgia-Russia Conflict” from two friends who are ethnically linked to the issues at hand, and who offer insightful perspectives.

Finally, I’d like to apologize for being part of “Western media” when it comes to my podcast’s coverage of the Georgia-Russia conflict. I did try to present both sides or multiple points of view, but I really didn’t know what to believe… thanks to the terribly influential and often deceptive Western media.

Recently, however, I realized that the focus of Geekie.org has widened to things beyond “geekie” interests. Lunar eclipses, for instance. Thus, I felt that a personal blog for myself, not following a clear-cut focus like technology, was suitable. Of course, technological developments will still be on Geekie.org.

This blog also gives me the opportunity to test out my innovations on PersonalLog without interfering with someone else’s work. I no longer need to experiment on the Demo Blog, or take a risk by applying changes to the home page.

Besides, I also have a Blogger blog, set up yesterday to allow me to compare. So far, I’m far too fond of WordPress to use Blogger!