They're Watching Me

You might know that Make:Blog linked to my Toxic Waste Dessert posting last week. A few other sites did as well (unhappymeal is my favourite of them.) My traffic counter went through the ceiling. Look at the graph. From between 5 and 33 visitors a day to 1,265 visitors in one day! I'm famous! I thought. But the excitement faded and by the weekend back to the old numbers. Yesterday I was looking at the Statcounter information on what sites are linking to me. I noticed I had 18 hits from http://bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=xxxxxxx&site=xxxxxxx (The letter x is replacing digits.) Bloglines is a service that lets people consolidate their blog reading. One of its features is that it lets a person search for specific topics. I clicked the little button that would let me learn more about these hits. They turned out to be coming from 4 different IP addresses with consecutive numbers. xxx.xxx.245.197, xxx.xxx.245.198, xxx.xxx.245.199, and xxx.xxx.245.200 (Again, the x replaces digits. You'll see why I'm replacing the digits soon.) So I clicked the little magnifying glass next to the first IP address to see who the ISP is and which of my pages they're looking at. ISP: Defence Research Establishment-ottawa Page visited: David Scrimshaw's Blog: Tasty Dessert: Toxic Waste (4 times) The other three IP addresses had the same profile. All from DRE-Ottawa, all looking at the Toxic Waste post. There you have it. A top secret government agency is checking regularly on my jello-pudding-gummy-worm-chocolate-cookie-etc dessert. Do you suppose they're planning a party?