Many countries have academies in Rome, the most famous of them probably being the American Academy in Rome. Artists of various stripes enjoy a stipend and a variably good life, generally working on something to do with the city, and the various academies open their artists' studios to visitors from time to time. These are usually great fun, for art and for socialising. Last night was my first time at the Spanish Academy in Rome.

Wow!

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A few days ago, I shared some tribulations related to looking at the most popular requests to my websites, starting with all requests to Eat This Podcast in 2022.

Of the top 50 resources requested, only 14 were actual episodes or articles. The rest were technical, behind the scenes things, like various flavours of feed and some of the (locked) doors that give access to the engine. I know why people keep rattling those doorknobs, but I wish they wouldn’t.

I had hoped to see whether any meaning could be gleaned from them, but that will have to wait, because at the start I was staring at a mystery.

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Barely a day goes by now that my podcasting email doesn’t receive two or three not very enticing emails. One today offered “Lucrative Ventures”. Another wants to convert YouTube content into podcasts in a “network of health and wellness programs”. The third tells me, to paraphrase, that my restaurant menu sucks, which is odd as I don’t have a restaurant.

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In a spirit of exploration, and because he mentioned it again in a recent 20-year roundup I decided to see what I could do with Tim Bray’s Topfew. Not the actual Topfew, because that’s beyond me, but the original incantation:

awk '{print $1}' access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -12

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Over the past month or so I have been drawn inexorably into the world of unracer cycling, all of which has prompted both a forehead smacking but-I’ve-always-done-that and a guilty why-is-my-best-bike-languishing-unloved. With the purchase of a bike repair stand to help with the other bike, I was seized with the idea of fixing up the road bike. I mean, how hard can it be?

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