The experiment begins

You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I can be quite competitive at times. Take, for example, my 5 year obsession with my rank in the Folding @ Home project. It started out as a group effort, nearly everyone crapped out, but I kept finding computers to put to the task. Occasionally computers that I didn't actually own, and at great risk to my job. It appears that I'm only interested in competing when there is a very clear metric, like team rank.

Supposing, for the moment, that there is still anyone in the world reading this blog, you will have noticed that I haven't updated it in months. I'm going to blame that on my job, but you don't necessarily have to believe that story. Nevertheless, it has become moribund. Frequently, I come up with an idea for a post, but they never seem to rise to a level of clever or sentimental that they could stand up against the few previous posts that I am quite proud of. Well, I guess I'll have to learn to get over that. Or perhaps I could learn to write well.

Either way, I've decided to make this a competition. Technorati has a list of every dopey blog ever written and has come up with some calculation that ranks their popularity. I have noticed that the blogs of some people, like my friend Lisa, who are quite, shall we say, normal, are quite popular (80,724) according to technorati. The fact that technorati knows me at all is encouraging.

I've decided to start watching the stats and chart my progress in popularity. Who knows, maybe after 10 years, someone might think I'm clever, or (dare I say it?) cool.

Today, then, the starting line is 1,978,754. That is my rank. Which means that there are nearly 2 million blogs that are more popular than mine. Which is depressing until you take into account that they are tracking 71 MILLION blogs. So I prefer to think that my blog is more popular than 69 million other blogs.

Postscript.
I just looked at my rank page on Folding @ Home, to link it above. Wow. A bunch of people have joined my team in the last week and contributed 1 work unit. Weird.