This webpage includes a brief note by an 82-year-old friend, who in his retirement turned his attention to hybridizing some really amazing flowers. In his younger years, Oscie Whatley was one of the engineers who worked on the St. Louis Arch. His son, David, is CEO of Simutronics.

Oscie has been in seriously poor health lately, and many of us are worried about him. I wanted to blog something about him for my memestream though, and decided that pictures of his flowers would be most appropriate. :)

Daylilies

This week my elonka.com site tracker reached an interesting metric: Over 1 million page views, since I started with the sitemeter tracking service in September 2002.

Site Summary

VISITS

Total 441,488
Average Per Day 1,142
Average Visit Length 4:39
Last Hour 43
Today 318
This Week 7,996

PAGE VIEWS

Total 1,003,077
Average Per Day 2,955
Average Per Visit 2.6
Last Hour 108
Today 682
This Week 20,687

My observations on the source of the traffic:

The vast majority of visitors are researching the link between Kryptos and "The Da Vinci Code", so they're coming in on searches such as "King Tut and the CIA", "only WW knows", and other terms which I know are coming straight from the trivia quiz on Dan Brown's site.

The second-most common reason for visiting, seems to be my "Unsolved Codes" page. It's an erratic draw, with "surges" of traffic that come in as it gets picked up by different sections of the blogosphere every couple months, gets a flurry of links from people in that section of the net, and then the traffic dies down again after a few days.

Third-most common: General kryptos curiosity coming in from the search engines. Lots and lots of visits with a single search term: "kryptos"

I'm also getting some interesting side traffic coming in from the Brazilian search engines, since I posted a Portuguese translation page of my Saint Raphael information (for the benefit of some of my relatives in Brazil). So I'll get regular visits on that page from people searching on all kinds of bizarre combinations of search terms which happen to match unrelated words on the page: Top draws seem to be things that involve the words "Pope," "Poland", "tuberculosis", "exhumed", and "cemetery". Heh. Lots of morbid curiosity out there....

] Efforts at finding a solution have grown increasingly
] elaborate. Elonka Dunin, an executive at St. Louis
] computer-game company Simutronics, has hunted down other
] encoded sculptures by Mr. Sanborn in search of recurring
] themes.

Wall Street Journal: CIA sculpture 'kryptos' draws mystery lovers

] Baranowska Agnieszka
] (1819 - 1890), autorka dramatyczna, poetka

I *really* wish I could find a good Polish/English online translator. This page seems to have a biography (written in 1998) of my great-great-great-grandmother, who appears to have been a relatively famous Polish poet and playwright of her time.

Agnieszka Lipska Baranowska, Author (1819-1890)

] Op de CIA-site is de informatie over Kryptos nogal
] summier, maar op de amateursite Elonka's Krypton page
] vind je alle denkbare informatie over dit mysterieuze
] kunstwerk.

Traffic to my Kryptos site spiked today, evidently because of this article that showed up on a Dutch website. International interest has been increasing lately. Tons of hits from Japan, some from Indonesia, some from Latin America... It's like a game, trying to figure out which language is on the current site that's linking to me!

Hmm, as part of my genealogy research, I've been trying to track down a Dutch branch of the family, by which I'm related to the famous botanist Eduard Adolf Strasburger. I wonder if I can use this to get back in touch....

Elonka :)

Kryptos and the Da Vinci Code, in Dutch

] Hero's Journey is a sleeper hit. Simutronics gave us a
] closed-door showing, and it blew my pants off. First and
] foremost, the character designer owned me. Remember how
] everyone was warm in the pants over CoH's character
] designer? This totally blows that away.

Here's a page which reviews many of the multiplayer games shown at E-3 (including mine).

Caution, not to be read by anyone who's offended by profanity. ;)

E3 Brain Dump, from 'The Corporation'

] karena katanya terdiri dari 3 huruf,.. maka jawaban yang
] tepat mungkin a kryptos sculpture..
]
] hehehe.. pantesan mata lu pusing nin,.. gue aja begitu
] ngeliat jawaban loe kryptos sculpture.. gue jadi males
] sendiri..
]
] pokoknya kalo ada yang mau tahu kryptos sculpture itu
] kayak gimana buka aja contohnya di
] http://elonka.com/kryptos/transcript.html
]
] parah dah.. pokoknya kalo emang gak ada waktu luang
] jangan coba2 dahg..

Heh. I was reading my weblogs, and followed a link to this site. I could tell they were linking to me, but couldn't understand the language! For a minute I wondered if it was a Star Wars fansite and they were all speaking in Ewok or something, but I finally figured out that it's a message board in Indonesian, that got hooked on the puzzles in The Da Vinci Code.

Wild. :)

Kryptos and Indonesia

] Hero's Journey takes the crown
]
] This game came out of left field to impress. In a year
] full of big budget, big company titles, Hero's
] Journey offered graphics on par with all the major
] players and an extremely exciting look at their game
] play. E3 2005 marked a show where several high profile
] games were touting very similar features (state based
] combat), and in swept Hero's Journey with their
] innovative group combat, highly cinematic missions,
] interactive environments and hands down the best
] character creation ever put into an MMORPG.

:)

MMORPG.com: E-3 Best of Show award given to Simutronics' 'Hero's Journey'

One question I often get asked in interviews, is, "*Why* are people so interested in solving codes?". I can of course talk for awhile about the importance of codes in times of war, but there's also another more philosophical reason.

In one of the posts on a Kryptos brainstorming list, I saw this comment by one of the longtime Kryptos researchers, David Allen Wilson, and it struck a chord with me, so I am re-printing it here:

***
Something that I've learned since I've started working on Kryptos is not to believe that we have to always be on the right track, or to believe that there -must- be a solution to part IV. Yes, I am working on part IV; not because there -has- to be a solution, but to learn. If we find the solution, great. If we don't, oh well.
***

Well put!

Elonka :)

Alas, this site is all in Polish, but it definitely seems to be about my family.

The top painting on this page is Maksymilian Taczanowski, my great-great-great-grandfather, who died in 1852.

The second painting is Alfons Taczanowski (1815-1867), Maksymilian's son. Alfons received an additional title of Count from another country, and thereby became a member of the Prussian House of Lords.

The third painting is Antoni Taczanowski (1849-1917), Maksymilian's grandson, nephew of Alfons, and brother of my great-grandmother Lucia Taczanowska.

The fourth painting is of a man, Jan Taczanowski, who I don't recognize, but I think it's a safe bet that we're related!

Elonka :)

(Polish) Palace in Taczanow