I am reaching the end of my fourth year blogging on WordPress.com and I just realized, or actually discovered, that this off-the-beaten-track blog site just reached a major accomplishment: over 100,000 page views (visits?). However you slice that statistic, it’s far more visitors than I expected, ever.

Granted, the past year I have not posted as often I had in the previous years. Life has just gotten too busy and keeping a digital presence with friends and family is accomplished with posts to Facebook and Twitter. But, now that I am less active, I have more followers than ever. In fact, I average about 120 visits per day. As you can see by the stats, my best day ever was only 1,000 hits, but that’s not bad for a guy that is on a less-traveled (and hard to find) road. It amazes me that the less active I am, and the more time that passes, the greater the number of hits to this site. I can’t say why that is, exactly. As far as I know, my mom is not running up the stats by visiting throughout the day hoping that I will have posted some new and fresh content.

Not that the number of visitors or page views matters, but at the current rate this site will reach 200,000 page views in only two years (half the amount of time it took to reach the first 100,000 visits/page views). I guess I should put something useful up here so people won’t regret dropping by from time to time.

If you are a new visitor to this blog site, welcome! And, if you are one of the readers that browse this way from time to time, thank you for your attention and interest in what I have to say. I hope that I have both amused you and informed you over the past several years. And, I hope to continue do that for several more years.

Century Plaza Hotel in L.A.

During my recent visit to Los Angeles, I stayed at the Century Plaza Hotel. It was very nice. But, what I really liked was the view from the room that was randomly assigned to me for my visit. It was on the front side of the hotel facing, dead center, the uniquely architected (is that a word?) office building directly across the street. I couldn’t help but take some snap-shots of the view using my iPhone. The purpose of this blog post is to share those photos.

View from Century Plaza Hotel Balcony

The unique building across the street has a hole in it, literally. It’s hard to see if from the above image, but what you see through that hole is part of two other buildings. One of the things I really enjoyed about this room, in addition to the view, was the fountain seen in this photo. It helped to drown out (no pun intended) the city noises. The sound of the fountain was a little bit like the sounds you hear at the ocean. Or, it was as close as you might get to it in a metropolitan area like Century City.

View of buildings in L.A. at sunset

This wider-angle photo of the same view of the building across from my hotel room gives you a much better idea of how there are two separate buildings behind the building with the hole in it. To add to the strangeness, the two tall buildings behind are triangle shaped, not traditional buildings with four outside walls.

Yes, the hole is real. I’m not sure the thinking behind it, other than making it very unique, but there is no magic trick at play in these photos (no smoke or mirrors were used to produce these photos).

My stay was more pleasant because of the view and the sounds produced by the fountain. Oh, and the weather (65 F degrees at night), didn’t hurt, either.

Last week I attended the Midsize Enterprise Summit (MES) conference for CIO’s. This year it took place in Los Angeles, California. At that conference, which is made up of CIO’s from many different industries all across the United States, the organizers picked what they called the top 50 CIO’s. Well, today I found out the list was published on the Internet by Reuters news agency.

If you know me, you’ll see my name in the list. If you don’t know me, then you probably don’t care. I am really just posting this link so extended family, friends, and colleagues can know about it. I e-mailed a couple of people already but I don’t intend to e-mail anyone else about it. Obviously, this kind of thing would never happen if it were not for my staff. It is because of their hard work and dedication that we were included in the list. So, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank them for making this possible.

The title of this post? Yup, I took the inspiration from Steve Martin and his movie, The Jerk. Do you remember that funny scene when the new phone books arrive and he discovered his name is included? Well, that’s a little how I felt when I discovered the list was out and I was included.