2020 Hindsight

Not earthquake weather

Happy Hallowe'en!! Hallowe'en comes but once a year, and this one falls on a blue moon!!! (2nd full moon of the month)

earthquake weather It's getting chilly. Raining. This is not earthquake weather. But a coupla minutes before midnight last night, my monitor began to wiggle a bit. Hm. Was that me? Or is this an earthquake? We've had so many teeny ones lately, maybe it's another one of those. I'd just talked myself out of its being an earthquake (oh, I must've bumped the keyboard) when the monitor began wiggling some more. Okay, that was *not* me. It's an earthquake. Lasted longer than these little bump-the-bed jolts, so it's gotta be a bigger quake from farther away. Yep. A few minutes later, the USGS earthquake site had the data on it. A 5.1 down in Anza, between Palm Springs, the Salton Sea and Oceanside. The L.A. Times has a story on it, but so far Daypop hasn't picked up anything about earthquake and 5.1. Yahoo News has. Strange. Nor is the quake listed on the Did you feel it? page, either. Hey, seriously..... My monitor was wiggling a bit and I wasn't the one doing it!

Plutonium Scowcroft: From plutonium to plowshares. Enriched weapons-grade uranium is relatively easy to blend in with regular uranium. Plutonium—dangerous for millenia—is much harder.

A Jew in the Mosque Salon interviews Yossi Klein, author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.

Search update Okay, yesterday I added a search capability. It doesn't work on the static site, so I may have to take it down. Sigh. Plus, there's stuff in the search algorithm that is strange. I did a search for 'taliban' and the only page it turned up was yesterday's entry. What? Here are the Google results for Taliban on this site. Maybe I'll look at the Google macro for searching.

First Rain

Rain, rain The first pitter pat of the first rain of the fall-winter season is pitter pattering outside. Now where the heck did I put my umbrella? ...and..good thing I didn't get my car washed yesterday.

Is it an urban legend? Hey! There's a Patron Saint of Urban Legends! (email all your friends!)

I found that one while looking up who is the patron saint of impossible causes — Saint Jude. Turns out St. Jude's day was on Sunday, Oct 28th. Patron saint of desperate situations, forgotten causes, impossible causes, lost causes (and hospital workers, and hospitals, Al!)

Hit me! Hit me! Gee.... I'm getting lots of hits (these are to the dynamic site; I've also gotten just over 2000 hits to the static site) based on the search string "Taliban Singles Online" or "Taliban Singles". The destination, of course, is this image I posted a few days ago. (no, I did not create it. I received it in email and thoroughly envy the person who made it.) Yesterday, I was #1 on Google, but I've slipped down. I guess that the Washington Post's article about online humor resulted in tons of searching for it. Right now it's Daypop's top-requested search item.

Search me, search me I added a search form to this site. Ridiculously easy. All I had to do was use Weblogger's simple {searchMySite()} macro. Only thing is this... it won't have any results until tomorrow.

I Get It Now!

Day two of the two-day road trip (see day one) was one veritable feast after another.

My friend and I stayed over in Union City, a little south of Oakland, where there happens to be a certain famous donut establishment. We'd heard tell from a grrlfriend that hot donuts from this establishment were to! die! for! and the same grrlfriend once brought a sampling of cold donuts to a meeting we all attended (I ate and thought, "hmmmm, nice glazed donut, but it doesn't live up to the hype").

Well, so first thing in the morning we could see how these famous donuts were made...

Here the donuts do rise. Note the difference in size from the left to the right (they're travelling in a left-ward direction).

Here the raised donuts are fried to a golden brown

Then the donuts run under a solid waterfall of glaze.

The donuts are sold to customers hot hot hot off the assembly line. We stopped and ate a fresh, hot donut. My first words after the first bite were, "I get it now."

We even called our grrlfriend on the cellphone to exclaim, "I get it! We get it! We're here in Union City, we're eating them hot and we! get! it!.... We're at a Krispy Kreme donut shop" (there was much laughter on the other end of the fone, complete with first Krispy Kreme hot donut anecdotes that I simply cannot repeat here.)

...then we traipsed across the Dumbarton Bridge to Palo Alto, home of many things, but most especially home to a little eating establishment on Emerson Street called Jing Jing, home of the famous Spicy Noodles. My friend took off on her own in what was her old hometown while I got together with Dave Winer, Robert Scoble and Robert's son Patrick. Our rendezvous time was a little before Jing Jing's opening time, so we wandered to a coffee establishment around the corner (just as well, because tho my donuts immediately disappeared, I was still sipping my coffee).

Here's Dave at the coffeehouse.

In time we went to Jing Jing...

Here are the Scoble father and son duo.

Welcome to Saturday's Feast Two.... So what are these spicy noodles that everyone talks about?

They're yummy.... a spicy peanut sauce is being mixed into the noodles right at the table.

Did I mention the word "feast" already? Well, if I didn't, I beg your pardon.

Elsewhere, Robert Scoble mentions the tensions of getting his son Patrick to behave when Uncle Dave is playfully carrying on. I'll spare you descriptive details, and let this picture tell it all...

The expressions on father's and son's faces are telling... See how the son relishes Uncle Dave's antics! See how the father takes it all in stride!

Alas, all good feasts must come to and end, and travellers get on the road and head home. So it was for me.

Of course, there are great little places to stop on the way home, just outside of Garlicville (Gilroy) on Route 152 there is an establishment by the name of Casa de Fruta. In addition to the necessary facilities, there is a coffee shop, and a shop with culinary goodies, as well as a little zoo and a maze made of hay bales for the kiddies to run among.

We didn't try out the Casa de Coffee (coffee shop), but it's nice to know that it's DAA recommended (DAA stands for the Dominion —of Canada— Automobile Association).

But... there was one more feast (what, another one?) en route south.... once a person has discovered the delights of Harris Ranch Kitchen, a trip north or south in Interstate 5 is never complete without a stop there (assuming one is travelling during hours when the place is open, that is).

Back from the Road

I took a very quick road trip to the bay area. Left just after midnight Thurs night/Friday morning.

Here are some mundane photographic details from the road...

Buttonwillow, California. Approximately 2:30 am. This is a vision of a place or event that no one really stops and focuses on; it's just something to get past. Well, I stopped. I focused.

There are those who stay in one place while so many people pass by.

Someplace along Interstate 5. 5:00 am. Oh, the things you do to attract sleep-deprived motorists to your place of commerce. Neon.

Cool. Not only can you stop and take a leak, get coffee, buy a pack of gum or a burger or taco, but you can buy boots and maybe a TV, too!

Uh oh. It looks as though the bill has passed. Kiss your civil liberties goodbye.

Drove through Livermore (6:20 am) just as morning westbound early morning rush hour traffic started to get heavy. (note to self: getting into rush hour traffic when you're nearly falling asleep is not wise). "Yes, I know why the rush hour is on! They just passed the Anti-terrorism bill and took away Lord knows how many of our civil rights with it, and all the people who work at the Livermore Lab are rarin' to go now that they've got extra powers!"

(really, the whole thing is a ruse to try to stay awake. Job #1. Thou shalt not hit any other car with thine own car, neither shalt thou allow any other car to smite thee, especially if the car thou art driving is the car belonging to thy friend, a car of a famous German manufacturer.)

9:20 am, after a 2.5 hour nap in some grocery store parking lot, then driving in search of the nearest Starbuck's: When you stand next to the open door of your car in the parking lot where there's a Starbuck's Coffee and assorted bagel and smoothie establishments, digging out some essential item from the back seat (mind you, this is on two hours of sleep), and you're standing in what someone else thinks is a perfectly good parking space, and that someone else is driving a huge green SUV, and he honks at you to get out of the way, you know that the days of shocked kindness to one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen immediately following the terrorist attacks are now a thing of the past.

(And did I stand in the way of the person exiting the car so he had to say, "excuse me"? And did I reply by a way over the top ever-so-polite "Oh! I am *so* sorry!" You bet I did. c'mon, folks, we're working on 2 hours of sleep here! That's when passive-aggressive behavior works best!)

(the other passive-aggressive behavior would have been to get the guy's picture. I didn't. I was preoccupied.)

Ah, slumming it at the Friday morning rush Starbucks in a tony little mall in Castro Valley... surreptitiously bringing toothbrush, toothpaste and morning ablution items to ablute with before downing a bracing latte to help overcome the drag of a two-hour nap...

The rush to get to the bay area by Friday morning? My friend needed to get to the Alameda County Office of Records, among other places. Here's a little peek at what greeted us. It was quite efficient, in all.

Oakland, CA. Alameda County Records Office. 10:30 am or so.

....There's more to this story, of course... it ended up Saturday in Palo Alto with yummy Spicy Noodles with Dave Winer and Robert Scoble. I gotta find my camera, tho.

(see page two)

Variations on a...

Variations on a Theme Here's a Manila item to ponder. You can subscribe to themes... is there any way to find out which themes are among the more popular? or most used?

Ridiculous Non-Sequitors I think I'm the only person I know who routinely puts the apostrophe in Hallowe'en. There. You really needed to know that, didn't you?

Taliban Singles Online

I had to do it. Post this image. I was sent it in email. Don't know where it came from. Don't know who did this. If you did this, thanks for the laugh.

(did you see the occupation of the third one down on the left?)

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After a trip to Berlin, where streets are called straße, Megnut re-aßeßes her spelling. Resistance is futile; you will be aßimilated! What is this, some sort of new aßonance? It's filled with sibilance! I suppose that this list (or listleßneß?) had best include Mißißippi.

Wow! Hal and Audrey and Ian are in Daypop's Top 40 (#12 and climbing!) I took screen shots for posterity; not posted tho.

Newsflash The United States Government announced today that it has warned the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and his henchmen "or we will round up all your women and send them to college."

Rather than fighting so-called piracy problems, here's how Hollywood can help Bring on James Bond!

The terrorists' true goal, I suspect, is to tempt us into war. They may WANT us to bomb Afghanistan and elsewhere, unwittingly fulfilling our role in a crackpot scheme to unite their fractious Islamic brethren in a holy war against western nations. In this scenario, the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings are a trap, and our warlike response might force us into the snare. But in each Bond film, our hero goes undercover to root out the evil; huge armies play little or no role; the mess is cleaned up quietly and thoroughly. [read more]

10 to the 23rd

I just heard that 10 to the 23rd is some figure relating to the number of molecules in something or other. How's that for vague? later..... It's enough information for Katrina and Andrea to post far more meaningful information.
Andrea: "6.022 x 10²³ atoms or molecules are 1 mol, and a mol of atoms is similar to a dozen eggs - it's just a number of things." Thanks! (whether mol or mole....and here I thought a mole was something that looks cute and dark when you're young, but it tends to grow and lighten when you get older)

Manila Wish list New wish list item. A macro or something called {siteMap} What would this macro do? Well, you could create a page, plop that macro in it, and then it would take the contents of the site navigation and custom structure, and plunk it all together into an automatically generated site map.

In other words, take the contents of this prefs item:

/admin/sitePrefs/default$advanced#sitestructure

and put it all in a shortcutted linked form. Voila! Auto site map! And, perhaps, work with metadata plugin so that if there are page descriptions or some other thing, there's a brief description for each page that's part of the site map.

Wouldn't that be cool? It's still October, so it still must be love Manila month..... so I guess it's still up for the drawing board, eh? :D

Speakin' of wishes... Bryan Bell wishes to do UserLand's dishes! Bryan Bell offers to fly to your home and do your dishes for a week. What would make him do that? This!! (seems useful to me!) Now that's quite an offer!

Shortcuts and title tags For a bit there, I thought that I could make a shortcut entry that would also include a title tag, such as this:

<a href="http://frontier.userland.com/news/" title="hey ma! lookit me!">Love Manila Month</a>, which looks like this:

Love Manila Month

So, I guess I can't use the Shortcut feature to do this, because the form for the shortcut starts with http:// , that is, what's enclosed within the quotes after the href= in the hyperlink anchor tag. Hrmmm.... maybe there's a macro that'll do that. Very likely. Hafta check it out. Hmmm. neither glossSub nor relativeLink seem to cover the title tag as part of the anchor tag.

What are others wishing for? Loving Daypop more and more... a search for Manila wish list in daypop led me to two sets of wishlists. Paul Nakada's brief list had one particularly intriguing entry: let me track my outbound links. Oh yes!

And Phil Wolff's wish list has several items of interest. I like his request for making the prefs home page more useful better than my own. His error message item includes a great request: "Create a stats page listing error history so buggy links or other causes can be discovered by the weblogger and fixed."

Rager Boy

Heh. somewhere in these weblog parts, there's a person called RageBoy.

And now.... ta da! there is a Rager Boy! He's beeeeuuuutiful!

Congratulations to Hal and to Audrey and welcome to the world to their very young son!!!!

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Escapism... one of my favorite themes right now. Saw Tortilla Soup last night. Someone told me that it was a remake of Eat Drink Man Woman. The person was right. (I loved Eat Drink Man Woman when it came out several years ago) A visually stunning flow of images; mouthwatering; great story and acting; lots of really wonderful touches.

Saw a preview for A Waking Life [link is to wired news story about it]; intriguing film.

Laughter and tears

Oh I'm so glad there's stuff like this to laugh at, because these things make me cry.

Oh that scary white powder. Planned Parenthood has been getting sent powder, too. Is this a case of home-grown terrorists?

Another source of laughter. Saw Rush Hour 2 last night. What a romp. I love the outtakes during the final credits.

What the hell is a "fifth column"? I've seen more references to this (nudge nudge, wink wink, I know what this term means and you don't, nyeah) over the last 5 weeks than.... well.... off to Google I go. Daypop has more. Thank you, Google... this page has a definition that works, "the twentieth century political connotation, an organized body sympathizing with and working for the enemy in a country at war." Okay. So what were the first four columns as part of the fifth column reference?

Oh, I love this weblog medium! Thanks to Austin (quoting from the OED! way cool!) and Donald for replies!

Thoughts and prayers and best wishes to Hal and Audrey! (heh.. and as Hal helped take my niece out of the baby backpack I was wearing at the end of our mini-tour of the Las Vegas Reserve, I said, "go ahead, you'll be wrangling babies a lot very soon." Yes. very soon indeed!)

Earning the Right to Extend my Pinkie

I participated in a poetry reading last night. Yep. I got up and read three of my poems. This was my first "poetry reading."

I feel like I arrived at something, that I've earned my right to extend my pinkie when I hold a wine glass, or that I've earned my right to wear even more black, or blackier black (not that before yesterday I didn't wear black or extend my pinkie if I felt like it. But today, well, I just feel more justified in doing it).

Anyway, it was a good experience. I learned lots of things about delivery. A friend whose work I was familiar with also read. Since I know her, and I've heard her poems at least once already, it was easy to hear them again. But everyone else I was hearing for the first time... some were easier to take in than others. And what made the difference to me was delivery. If the reading was dramatic, if the poet made eye contact while reading, if the words were enunciated a little more slowly, then I could drink in the words, let them paint their pictures...

Of course, post-reading, I'm wondering, well, how'd I do? Cause all those were hearing me for the first time. Did they listen? Did they take it in? Did they like it? How did my delivery help or hinder that? The feedback from friends who were there: my delivery was okay, it helped, didn't hinder.

And today, well, I'm wearing black. ; )