What are they building?

Not that many, if any, humans noticed but I pulled my blog offline for a couple of weeks.  This is why I pulled it down. 

I started creating the material published in this blog a long time ago when things were changing in my life, my eyes were wide open, and I was learning. Writing for this blog has really helped me navigate some tough times and establish some clarity for myself.  I don't write nearly as  much now, but my eyes are still wide open and I am still learning. 

There was a time when I wrote daily and posted entries often. I only publish posts few times a year now. When I write now, it's more of a self indulgent brain exercise to let the world know that I am still here and learning. I like to believe that there's a handful of anonymous people out there who check in on me via my blog and few more who blog surf and land on "The Stuff That Makes a Firefly Glow." I can only hope that they read something in one of my posts that makes them feel something and/or maybe even smile.  I'll never really know. I am OK with this. 

I am a musician. When I perform music, I thrive on the validation I get from the folks I am playing for.  When it comes to my writing, I equate it more to the falling tree in the forest that is beyond earshotof humans. That said, I am curious about the who and where of the eyes that find this blog.  I check my blog often to see if anybody is reading it. On  most days, this blog is the falling tree in the forest.

A few months ago I noticed in my blog stats that it was getting A LOT more traffic I had more views in one month than I've had in the past 15 years. I was confused to see that nearly all the views where coming from Hong Kong....Why? 

When it comes to social media, I tend to be pretty private. I publish this blog under my nom de plume and and I am very careful about maintaining privacy  (and others) in my posts. The Hong phenomena peaked my curiosity so I did some research.  I learned a little about Hong Kong, intellectual property protections for digital content creators and data mining efforts underway for building Artificial Intelligence. Apparently, Hong Kong is a hotbed for the latter.

I will concede that I may be climbing the ladder of inference here but the thought of of a computer mining my blog for A.I. pisses me off to the point of wanting to take a shower. 

I took the blog off line for a while, changed the search engine settings and checked the my stats.  It seems to have worked for now.  If you know how to find my blog, kudos to you and thank you for stopping by.

I will be back to writing about life soon.

Cheeks