Insanely Great
Statistics show that as of today, there are about 71 million web sites running WordPress. Those sites publish 500,000 new posts per day and are viewed by more than 320 million people every month. Mind boggling, isn’t it? Kind of like the national debt or the number of stars in the cosmos, it’s difficult to even wrap your mind around a figure of that magnitude. I’ve been a WordPress user for — what, probably seven or eight years by now. Before WP, it was Movable Type. Remember that one? Yeah, it still out there. Let’s see, prior to Movable Type my site was developed and maintained using nothing more than Windows’ built-in Notepad program and an ancient version of Photoshop. That goes all the way back to the site’s...
Read MoreSR22 Delivery Flight
The life of an aviator is indisputably rich in adventures, unique experiences, and, as Magee phrased it, “a hundred things you have not dreamed of”. Even in that life, however, there are a few days which stand above the rest. Who can forget their first solo, the successful checkride, or the name of their first passenger? As anyone who’s been there can attest, even the most diminutive among us stands ten feet tall at the end of those flights. Another big moment — one of the very sweetest in my experience — is the day you escape any niggling notions of common sense and purchase an aircraft of your very own. Today, that often means what a salesmen would refer to as a “pre-loved” aircraft. Pre-owned. You know, used. A...
Read MoreWhen I Ruled the World
The topic of computers in my last post reminded me that this month marks the 30 year anniversary of the object which made me a bona fide rock star throughout the world. That’s right, the whole freakin’ world! (Um, it may be worth noting that at nine years of age, my “world” consisted of a three block radius around our house in Studio City.) The year was 1981. I was in fifth grade and an unfortunate part of the desegregation busing experiment of the early 80′s. If you’re not familiar with this, the idea was to force students who lived in good school districts to attend an abysmal institution in the worst part of south-central Los Angeles while the kids from that area were bused each and every day to my neighborhood to attend a...
Read MoreAdSense
From one house to another… a quick shout-out to my college roommate, Rich, on the relaunch of his sports commentary site, House of Sports Blab. I don’t know about the name, but the content is first rate. We spent the afternoon putting some fine touches on the WordPress template design, tweaking the style sheet, and so on. The main thing he wanted was a location for Google AdSense advertising. The spot we dedicated to it is directly below the tagline on the right-hand sidebar. Speaking of AdSense, for a long time I’ve frowned on such advertisements and vowed that I’d never put such junk on this site. I’ve got nothing against Google, but we’re bombarded with ads from the time the radio wakes us up in the morning until we...
Read MoreShorten This, Pal
Grrrrrr. I really hate spammers. It’s not bad enough that they send me about 2,000 pieces of junk mail each and every day. No, they have to usurp my own web site for their nefarious purposes, too. From my ISP: We have received a rather large number of complaints of spam being sent in promotion of a URL under your account. Upon further investigation, it appears to be some sort of ‘URL shortening’ tool, used (in this case) to obfuscate the destination of the URL being promoted in the spam. I have disabled the script in question by moving it into your home directory. If you wish to continue using this tool, we must ask that changes be made to prevent 3rd parties from abusing it in this manner (this may mean modifications made to the script...
Read MoreFoo Fighters Good; Sony Bad
Some of the most relaxing moments of the San Carlos dive trip were had during surface intervals on the boat. A ‘surface interval’ is a period of time spent on the surface in between dives. This time allows the body to naturally rid itself of excess nitrogen accumulated while breathing compressed air at depth. Without an appropriate surface interval, a diver runs the risk of having this nitrogen come out of solution in the blood and form bubbles which can cause pain, vomiting, paralysis, and even death. Anyway, our surface intervals were typically in the 60-90 minute range. We’d use the time to eat lunch, fish, and just relax. Well one day, David put the new Foo Fighters CD, In Your Honor, in the boat’s CD player. It’s a two disc...
Read MoreDon’t Go Changin’
No, not that kind of change. I’m talking about coins. Loose change, the kind you find in your pocket. You know, the stuff that ends up under the sofa cushions? That mass of flat metal objects that clunks around in your pants as you walk down the street? The very same stuff that once short circuited a 9-volt battery in my pocket and nearly caused it to explode. It’s nearly useless in modern society. Inflation has ensured that you can’t buy anything with loose coins. And the stuff it is good for, like vending machines, require so many coins that you need a Brinks armored car full of quarters in order to buy a pack of gum. Coins are heavy, loud, and tends to fall out at the most inopportune time. The best thing I can say about coinage is...
Read MoreHarmonia Baroque
Harmonia Baroque Players is a professional early music ensemble based here in Orange County. While I’ve been running their web site on a volunteer basis for a number of years, the look & feel has always made me cringe, especially because their quality of their music (listen) is not represented accurately by the pathetic FrontPage design. So I took matters into my own hands the other day and brought it into the 21st century. Out with the old… … and in with the new: I’m pretty happy with the new site, especially considering I whipped it together in about six hours from start to finish. Goodbye FrontPage, hello CSS. Harmonia Baroque is far from the only organization out there with a lousy web presence. In fact, I’d say that most...
Read MorePoetic Justice
I’m not anti-Microsoft, but the folks at Apple and Sun must be smiling about this: Forget trying to flood Bill Gates’ e-mail inbox with junk. The Microsoft Corp. chairman receives 4 million e-mails a day, but practically an entire department at the company he founded is dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into his inbox, the company’s chief executive said Thursday. “There are two people who probably are the number one spam recipients in the world,” Steve Ballmer said. “Bill Gates (is first) because he is Bill Gates. Bill literally receives four million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam.” Spam or junk e-mails are unsolicited messages, generally advertising goods or services and usually sent to many...
Read MoreThe Winbook
The financial markets have been on a tear lately. Those who supported President Bush will tell you that it’s all due to his electoral victory last Tuesday. But my own feeling is that the markets were just happy to have a clear winner. They probably would have performed well even with a Kerry win as long as it was unchallenged, but that’s just speculation on my part. If conventional wisdom holds sway, we’re in the opening years of a secular bear market that, despite the recent gains, will see stocks headed downward over the long term. But for the moment, I’m doing pretty well, and to celebrate I took some of the money and bought myself a new laptop computer. I haven’t owned a laptop since the mid-90s. It was a Compaq Armada 1100T...
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