About a month ago I set this web-site up to do some serious testing on who visits this site, how they get here, how long they stay, and from what page they exit. This was done for a specific reason - to try and figure out how to make this site pay it's own way. In the process I've made some startling discoveries.

A couple of weeks ago Bobby Clarke, a ferry operator at the Cree community of Norway House in Manitoba, took a 2 minute and 49 second video of a "bigfoot" or "sasquatch" as is the more common name here in Canada. I did a short follow up on the initial story that I found on the Internet and then followed that up with a couple of other stories linking to when and where the sasquatch video would be aired. To my utter astonishment the story has generated up to 500 hits per day on search engine referrals alone.

But by far the most interesting thing I noticed on close inspection of the web-server logs is that a sizable percentage of those hits are coming from business and government URLs. Those hits are also coming in during normal working hours when those URLs should be staffed by employees punched into the time clock. This leads me to believe that a lot of productivity is being wasted by employees punching, "norway house bigfoot video" into their favourite search engine and scanning the results that come up.

I was very surprised by this revelation as a year ago I was fired from a job after I exposed the surreptitious use of a keystroke logger on my workstation. I know exactly why the keystroke logger was installed and it had absolutely nothing to do with performance monitoring and everything to do with a supervisor trying to impress a woman he had a crush on. In any case, the keystroke logger had been installed for a month before I discovered it and it failed to find any evidence of productivity issues. In fact, I was fired in an effort to suppress a potentially embarrassing situation for a publicly funded organization from getting out into the open. This cover-up even included perjury during an inquiry held by the Privacy Commissioner for the Province of Alberta.

Call me naive but I just didn't think there was that many people that surfed the Internet for personal reasons at the employers expense. By the same token, I didn't think an employer would go to such extremes to try and prove it. The last year has been an eye-opener.

Anyhow..., the Privacy Commissioner will be making a ruling within a week or two and you will read it here first. That's a guarantee!

Check back regularly, no telling what little nugget of gnarled knowledge or whimsical wisdom you're going to unearth here but it could be a 'highly embarrassing nugget' propelled by naturally generated methane.

Hasta La L8r Señor Time Waster