Ever get tired of plastic-tasting water while you’re biking? Soma Fabrications has just the thing for you: A polypropylene water bottle!
These are available online from Soma, or you may be able to find a local retail outlet. The dealer locater could be a lot easier to use, e.g. enter a ZIP code and find the nearest store(s). Also, just because a dealer is listed doesn’t mean that they carry every Soma product — make sure to call and check availability before you cruise to the store.
Over on cruftbox.com, Michael wrote about spoiler rules after a lunchtime discussion on the etiquette of spoilers. A variety of opinions were expressed in person as well as on blog commentary. I don’t think it’s reasonable to attempt a general spoiler rule, because there are so many variables to the situation — Books versus films, conversation (f2f or on-line) versus posting, genre (Michael’s “action vs whodunit” is a perfect example), familiarity with your friends’ reading/viewing habits, etc. I guess this places me in the “No blanket policy” camp.
The thing that really interests me about this topic is how the spoiler attitude breaks down viz a viz people with/without kids. I’ve got two children, and I’m not going to take them to every movie I want to watch. A current film featuring cannibalism comes to mind. I’ll probably see this on the big screen, but it’ll take me a while to get around to it. (I’m a parent, and parents are either very busy raising their kids, or they’re not very good parents imo.) In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if people would give me a “heads up” if they’re going to discuss current/recent movies so I have a chance to avoid hearing any spoilers.
If you have a comment on spoiler etiquette, feel free to post it here (especially if you have a parent/non-parent viewpoint) or on the original cruftbox post.
I used to think that Gee Dubya’s “Terror Alert Level” was completely worthless, but now I’ve discovered that it does indeed have its uses — parody and satire!
Current Terror Alert Level:
I think this neatly skewers the fearmongering basis of the pile-of-crap Terror Alert Level. Honestly, if all you are told is that Terror Level is “orange” what in God’s name are you supposed to do? Stay home with your children and panic? Go to work and panic? Wake up, people!
A few months ago I wrote about using Statcounter on a WordPress blog. I had originally hoped to find a plugin to help with this, but in the end I had to roll my own “plugin” to get the job done.
I’ve been using Statcounter to collect data on the usage of my blog/website for a little over a month now. It’s an awesome tool! The graph at the top of this article shows the number of pageloads (green), unique visitors (blue) and returning visitors (orange) over the last month or so. I had no idea this many folks were reading this crap. Get a life, people! 
Seriously, though… The traffic image above is just a nice graphic. The real value of Statcounter is the analysis tools they provide for your visitor log. My favorites are the “Popular Pages” and “Keyword Analysis” tools. Popular Pages shows your most-frequently accessed pages, duh. Keyword Analysis shows the search engine keywords that people are using to find your site and most importantly what pages they’re choosing to view.
In fact, the reason for this post is an analysis I ran this morning. A fair number of people are searching for “statcounter wordpress” and landing on one or the other of the two pages I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. Further analysis of the Visitor Paths (another handy tool) shows that many of those people aren’t finding both of those articles. I’m hoping that this article will get a slightly higher page rank than the other two, and search engine users will more easily find the information they’re looking for.
I’m in the process of re-working my wife’s quilting website. (It’s so pathetic right now that I’m ashamed to link to it.) I originally hand-rolled some PHP and CSS for her. It got the job done, sort of, but I’ve never been very happy with it. After using WordPress here, I got the idea that it would do a much better job than my own pitiful code. So here’s how I set up WP as a content management system (rather than a blog server) for my wife’s site. This is my third WP install, and I’ve learned a few things from the first two iterations. I even managed to document my second installation which has been helpful this time, so I’m documenting even more thoroughly this time around. Continue reading ‘New website for my wife’s business’
My wife and I had lunch today at Gönül’s on ‘J’ Street in midtown Sacramento. In a word: Awesome!
We ordered (and split) the artichoke ravioli and margarita (the pizza, not the drink), both for $8.95 on the lunch menu. I’m glad we arranged to split these, because they were both delicious although I’m not sure I could have finished either of them on their own. (Too much of a good thing, you know?) There were a bunch of entrees that sounded good on the menu, definitely some difficult choices ahead the next time we eat here.
The interior of this place was pretty striking. Very high ceilings (~15 feet), interesting curves, angles, lighting, upholstry and paint colors. Lots of art on the walls, much of it very attractive. The whole south side of the room made up of tall windows looking onto the patio tables and ‘J’ Street. (Perhaps not the most beautiful view at lunch time, but the natural light is very pleasant.)
We’ll definitely be back to sample more of this excellent food!
Gönül’s J Street Café 3839 ‘J’ Street Sacramento, CA 95816 (916) 457-1155
Update 2006-03-31: I received an email alerting me that the blog software returns “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria” when searching for Gonul’s (without the umlauts). So I’ll try to be sure and include the ASCII spelling in all posts about this restaurant. I’ll also tag all posts with the keyword gonuls.
Sometime Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, DiskWarrior finally completed “Step 5: Locating directory data…” which gives an elapsed time of 200-216 hours or almost 9 days! It’s currently working on “Step 6: Overlapped files detected: 146″ which translates to quite a bit of manual effort for me. 
Step 6 has been running for somewhere between 26-41 hours as of this post.
Lessons learned:
I’ll update this post as steps are finished.
Update 2005-10-06 23:58:27 UTC: It’s been on step 6 all day, now up to 186 overlapped files detected, sigh. I’m about to leave for the night. Hopefully tomorrow will be the day I get my data back…
Update 2005-10-10 15:48:55 UTC: It spent all weekend on step 6, now up to 675 overlapped files after more than 5 days. Ugh!
Update 2005-10-11 15:40:36 UTC: Step 6 has been running 6 days. Overlaped files detected: 807. And counting…
Update 2005-10-12 14:34:20 UTC: 7 days, 935 overlapped files. I am so screwed…
Update 2005-10-14 00:37:53 UTC: It’s now been almost 9 days since step 5 completed.
Step 6: Overlapped files detected: 1124
Update 2005-10-17 15:26:00 UTC: 12 days on step 6 now, 1605 overlapped files. I’ve got a lot of time invested in this, but I’m starting to wonder if it’ll be worth it. (Of course, my co-workers have been telling me to bail on this process for quite a while now. Considering that I’ve been running DW for three weeks, they have some reason.)
Update 2005-10-24 17:23:46 UTC: Step 6 is on its 19th day, 2512 overlapped files. I’ve been running DiskWarrior for 4 weeks straight. I’m really missing my laptop (whimper). I’ll be crossing the 1-month boundary this week, and if it’s not done by then I’m giving up.
Update 2005-11-09 18:09:25 UTC: After more than five weeks (and 4586 overlapped files) on “Step 6,” I’m giving up.
My wife and I usually wake up to Air America Radio, broadcast in Sacramento by KSAC, Talk City 1240 AM. But on Monday, Oct 3, the clock-radio woke us up with music instead of Morning Sedition with Mark and Marc (Mark Riley and Marc Maron). I thought maybe the kids had been messing with radio, or maybe there were “technical difficulties” at the station. But today the same thing happened, so I started scouring the ‘net looking for answers.
First stop was Talk City 1240’s web site, which wasn’t encouraging. Their “On-Air Schedule” has all the previous Air America time slots listed as “To Be Announced.” They still have an Air America Radio logo on their banner, but none of the programming.
Next stop was Air America Radio’s web site. I searched for “Sacramento” on their station locator page, but the only station listed is KSAC 1240 AM.
I found a post by bonniesac which talks about Air America changing frequencies and moving to 1320 AM on 1 Nov 2005, but this doesn’t explain the absence of programming today. bonniesac is blogging on the Sacramento for Democracy site, which unfortunately doesn’t allow unregistered users to post comments. (Perhaps a pingback from this post will get through, but I’m not hopeful.)
There is another post, this time on the Morning Sedition blog, which also discusses the frequency change. It also has some theories on the lack of official information from both Talk City 1240 and Air America. (And again, this blog doesn’t allow unregistered users to comment. Closed blogs suck, but that’s a subject for another post.)
I haven’t found anything else yet, but this seems to explain what’s going on. I guess all us progressive/liberal types will have to get Air America programming via the Internet for the rest of October, before switching to the new station next month.
Andy let me know that the Sacramento Bee ran an article about this recently.
