Having gone through two weeks of orientation at school now, I’ve learned a lot more of what the next 21 months of life will be like and met many of the people with whom I’ll spend it. In meeting lots of my new classmates, I’ve been frequently asked the following question.

Do you go by Matt or Matthew?

Most people would have a definite answer to this question and respond one way or another. However, my response is almost always “either.” And I answer that for a few reasons.

First, in every academic setting (but no workplace setting) I’ve been in, there has always been at least one other Matt or Matthew. Since I’m relatively easygoing, I’ve typically deferred to either going by whichever the other Matt or Matthew didn’t go by or just given the interrogator the choice of convenience.

Second, and over time this has become a corollary to the preceding point, I’ve noticed that others will call me what they are used to calling people named Matthew. In the few situations where I provided a definite answer to the question, over time many people will switch to calling me by the other name. They’ll even spell my name differently if that’s what is familiar to them.

Finally, depending on the situation, context, and rhythm or cadence of what I’m saying, I will identify myself by either name. Typically, I introduce myself as Matthew, but a minority of the time, I will introduce myself as Matt. I’ve identified myself with both names, so others doing so is fine by me.

I use Google Apps for email on my domain, which is awesome and pretty much just like GMail save for the lack of themes. When setting it up, I had to choose a username. At the time, I reflected on how some people call me Matthew and others call me Matt, and how whichever I chose, some people could be confused. My solution? I picked one as the user name and set up the other to redirect to the first. So if you want to send email to my waymost.net email, you can use either matt or matthew in front. Either way, I’ll get your message.

And that’s just the way I like it.

I set up Google Analytics on my site yesterday for all the typical reasons. I want to see traffic quantities, patterns, and statistics as well as play around with the software. It can take up to 24 hours before it starts reporting data (it starts gathering data as soon as you add their script on your pages though). So I check it this morning, and, not surprisingly, there isn’t a whole lot of activity.

But as I played around with some of the reports, an interesting datum caught my eye. I had two visits that came from Google search results. “Who the hell is searching for me on Google?” I think out loud. So I take a look at the keywords. It turns out these visitors weren’t interested in me at all (surprise, surprise), but instead were searching for Los Angeles traffic on Google. What?!

Sometime during or soon after college, I played around with adding traffic data to a Google map of L.A. I was just testing out the Google Maps API and figured traffic data made sense to work with (at the time, Google apparently hadn’t heard of traffic since they didn’t add the feature until late 2007). I used a PHP script to pull data from Yahoo and overlaid (I hate the term “mash-up”) that data onto a Google map and put it up here. Then I promptly did nothing else with it. So you’ll understand my surprise when I saw that page randomly getting hits from Google queries.

What is even more impressive is that I’m the number three result for google traffic los angeles and the number one result for la traffic google! I haven’t played around with other queries much, but having my site come up as a top result for those two is very cool and rather amusing. Unfortunately, the same doesn’t occur on Yahoo or Bing (another surprise).

But now that I’ve discovered this, I feel I should go back and put some more effort into the page and make it a more useful resource. Maybe I can get repeat visitors! Then I could start pulling down ten cents per month by slapping on some Google ads! The possibilities are endless. But mostly, it would be fun to turn that page into something even a small number of people get use out of on a regular basis.

Feel free to check it out and let me know what useful stuff pertaining to L.A. traffic you’d like to see on there (not that there is much content there now); any and all input is appreciated.