To my valued readers, avid commenters, lurkers, passive RSS feed subscribers, and occasional stumblers who wander in from places like Tomorrow or the Intelligent Singaporean:

Thank you for reading this blog. Readership has hit an all-time high of 172 subscribers1 to the primary Feedburner feed. Coincidentally, several statistics also recently rolled over to large round figures. Last week, I filed my 500th post and the 1,000th comment was rescued from the purgatory of my spam filter moderation pool. As I trudged home in the snow drifts earlier this week, the 500,000th page view was served and the 30,000th unique visitor arrived since I last reset the counter exactly six months ago, and the installed spam filters had just deleted its 34,000th spam comments since the new year. I hope these numbers show that someone, somewhere, ideas are being shared and discussed, in the optimistic possibility that by some mechanism of thought, someone is being edged ever so much closer to the Enlightenment ideals of our times.

Your continued patronage means a lot to me. May the Year of the Golden Pig bring you to new heights. 万事如意、步步高升、心想事成、红包拿来, and all that nice stuff. Especially the last part.2

I’ll see you on the other side of the New Year.

P.S. I’ve updated by blog header picture to show off how beautiful campus looks after being doused by a grand total of 17″ of snow.

Footnotes
  1. It appears that the sudden jump in readership is due, at least in part, to Google Reader finally reporting readership statistics to Feedburner.↩
  2. Depending on the presence of overwhelming response, or anticipation thereof, your contributions may be tax-deductible. :) ↩