My Twelve Most Popular Posts

As of today, I have published 175 posts to my blog. That’s an average of 2.33 posts per month for the last 6 or so years. Not bad at all. Over that time, some posts were complete flops, receiving only a handful of views. Others made it to the front page of Reddit or Hackernews and almost crashed my site. Here are the twelve most popular posts on arunhasablog.com in descending order. The percentages represent each post’s share of total site traffic.

 

18.7% [updated] Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

The most popular post on my blog is my complaint about Uber. Back in Fall 2013, I was overcharged quite a bit after an Uber ride and had a hard time getting a refund. I resorted to writing a scathing post about Uber and posted it on Hackernews. The post stayed on the front page for a night and my customer service issue was quickly resolved.

 

10.9% Omegle Bot Hilarity

One tenth of all traffic to my blog was generated by this post from 2010. I let a robot speak with strangers on Omegle, an anonymous chat website similar to Chatroulette. Surprisingly, one girl from Scotland had an hour long conversation with the bot without realizing that she was chatting with my computer. I put it up on Reddit and it stayed on the front page for a day.

Here is short excerpt from the chat conversation:

You: Do you want to hear a joke?
Stranger: why not
You: Ambiguous: Sure or Because that is what told me to say.
Stranger: thats not a very good joke

There are quite a few hilarious dialogues and nuggets in the transcript. I had to hold myself back from reprinting them all here.

 

4.9% Why Is It so Hard to Exit Skype?

If you know me, you know that I don’t like it when services and products that I pay for have poor usability or customer service. When I’m paying, I expect a great user experience. Skype didn’t make it easy for me to shutdown their application on Windows. Naturally, I complained. Somehow, this post has brought in nearly 5% of traffic.

 

1.9% 40 Year Old Lens On My DSLR

This post is from college when I was getting interested in putting older manual focus lenses on modern cameras. I bought a fisheye lens from from the late 1960s and mounted it on my 30D via an adapter. I posted about how I found the lens and a few technical details about mounting M42 lenses on EOS DSLRs.

Since then, I have sold the lens and mounting old lenses on new cameras has become commonplace. In fact, my only digital camera right now is a modern mirrorless camera with a manual focus lens mounted on it.

 

1.8% New Camera: Canon Canonet 28

This one is yet another post about camera gear. I bought an old Canon rangefinder film camera at a thrift store in New York and wrote about rangefinders. I even included a video shot through the viewfinder of the camera that shows how rangefinders operate. A lot of people land on this page after searching for information about the Canonet series of cameras.

 

1.8% Week in NY 10/4-10/10/2010

This was one of quite a few weekly posts that I was doing in my senior year of college. I wrote about my watches (which I still wear daily almost 5 years later), an information session at Microsoft, my first hackathon, and a few other school activities.

 

1.6% E-Waste Hunting

This is one of my favorite posts from my junior year in college. Caroline and I used to regularly visit a “computer graveyard” deep in the bowels of Columbia. We would remove and take home small components like CPUs and RAM from the computers that were being discarded. I amassed a sizable collection of CPUs spanning a few decades, an almost complete history of Intel chips. In this post, I wrote a bunch of geeky details about some of the stuff we found.

 

1.3% Movies I discovered this summer

This post is a very short review of three movies I watched in the summer after my sophomore year of college. Coincidentally, all three were foreign films. One is French, another Chinese and the last is Korean.

 

1.1% Headphone Mod

The first high end headphones that I ever purchased are the Audio Technica ATH-ES7 . I bought them much before Beats by Dre and other high end headphones became mainstream like they are now. I loved them, but they had one problem. The cords kept tearing or getting frayed. I sent them in once for warranty repair, but they tore again. I was fed up. I took matters into my own hands and replaced the original cord with the cord from a pair of Apple earbuds.

 

1.0% Week in NY 10/25-10/31/2010

This is yet another weekly post from senior year. It covers halloween, our halloween potluck, shopping for and assembling costumes, dressing up in our costumes and attending the Village Halloween Parade. I think this post gets a lot of traffic because of my Nerd Herd costume from the show “Chuck”.

 

0.9% Wonder Girls!

As you may know, I used to be a huge K-pop fan from the end of high school to the end of college. One year, Caroline surprised me with tickets to the Wonder Girls JYP concert. This concert still is one of my favorite concert experiences. Rereading this post brought back so many memories. It also makes me sad that the Wonder Girls ended the way they did. They had so much potential.

 

0.8% I’m a Burner: My Experience at Burning Man 2013

This last post is by far my favorite. It might not be my best writing or photography, but it took the most thought and effort to produce. Burning Man continues to be one of the most transformative experiences in my life. I find that the things I learned there have seeped into every part of my life. I’m a burner and always will be.