This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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The world is continuing to get safer. Grenada and Cuba have both had their travel warnings lifted. Presumably because the hurricane damage has pretty much been taken care of. This brings us back to a level of 26 countries with State Department travel warnings… which in the little more than a year I’ve been doing this seems to be the “normal” level.
State Department Travel Warnings Over Time
A chart of how many countries world wide have US State Department Travel Warnings as that number varies over time. Serves as a proxy to chart roughly how dangerous the world is as the world situation changes over time. Perhaps not the best measure of that, but an interesting one perhaps.
So anyway, start planning those trips to Grenada and Cuba! They are OK now!
OK. So for the last year or so, when I’ve looked at stats or logs from my site, I’ve actually looked at filtered logs, with just the hits to actual PAGES. Yesterday I decided, for the first time in ages, to look at the FULL logs. I found some fun things.
Just like the picture of Sara was in the email going around, several other of my pictures are in use on other websites. For now, I’ll highlight the ones I found from looking at the full logs for my website for 11 Nov 2004 (UTC of course). These are fun! (Listed in order by the first time each appeared in the log during the day.)
#1) 00:10:55 UTC CrazyBrave: They use my picture of a sad panda to illustrate a point about “PandaGate”. PandaGate is apperantly some sort of scandal going on in Australia. The sad panda is very sad. I found it on the ground by the dumpster in the rain one day. I almost saved it from its fate, but in the end I just took pictures. And now it is immortal!
#2) 00:23:49 UTC The Condominium: Someone on this discussion group thing uses this picture of Spaghetti from my site, but the discussion board is members only, so I can’t see the context. My context was that I picked up the box of spaghetti not knowing that the bottom of the box was open, and it spilled all over the floor. I wish I could see what they were saying about it! (But not enough to try to join their little exclusive club or whatever it is.)
#3) 02:37:44 UTC Kelliee’s LiveJournal: A user named “heartsofarmor” posts a picture I once took of a daddy longlegs type spider thing with a caption “that’s what they look like here in Georgia”. Actually, I took the picture in New Jersey. South Brunswick, New Jersey to be specific. But to be fair, they probably do look pretty much the same in Georgia. They were trying to show someone on the West Coast what East Coast daddy long legs look like, because apperantly they are different. I did not know that.
#4) 02:37:48 UTC Quick Impulses’ Live Journal: Uses a picture I took of a Fuzzy Road in some sort of angst ridden passage about fear: “I’m experiencing a third level of fear – not that I desire to fit in and fear I can’t; not that I fear directly what other people think of me; not that I think the standards of appropriate behavior as observed by the rest of the world should necessarily be mine – but that one day by something I do not fear now, I will learn to fear all these things, that I will learn to hate myself when a stuffy establisment doesn’t accept me, and to change for it so that they do.” That is what he says right before my picture. OK.
All four of those got repeated hits all through the day. Very interesting. A little odd, but fun. (And no Rebecca, I don’t mind at all that they are using my pictures without permission, I think it is cool, although it would be cooler if they dropped me a note telling me!)
There are even more places like this that I’ve found by googling myself that just didn’t lead to any hits yesterday, but I’ll save those for another day. Some of them are pretty funny. I’ll post about those sometime before too long.
I’ll do one as well sometimes on just all searches that lead people here and similar things. But not today.
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Got this from our agent a few hours ago:
The listing realtor will have the extension signed by the sellers. She has told me that the roof is scheduled for the end of the month. Hopefully, it will get done on time so the other repairs can also get done. There is nothing we can do at this time but wait and see. I will keep you informed as progress is made.
For those of you following along, after the sellers had told us they would not be able to make repairs in time for the closing that had been scheduled, we agreed to give them more time after we got our mortgage rate lock extended. But they still had no actual date scheduled for the repairs to start. Now they do!
So soon all of the wreckage resulting from two direct hits by hurricanes will be gone and the place will be back to the state we originally saw it in!
At one point in this process, I put the odds of this thing working out at like 25%. That was when they still had no date for the repairs, they told us they would not be able to meet the deadline, and we didn’t yet know if we could get the rate lock extended. Now, with a rate lock going through late January, and them startiung repairs in a couple weeks… I’d say it looks pretty good again.
There are still a few things that have to fall into place to make this happen. So it isn’t 100% yet. But much higher. I dunno. Maybe 80%? So here’s crossing fingers that they do the repairs quickly, but with quality and that all the money stuff on my side falls into place in time, and everything else goes smoothly!
And then, if all goes well, we can enjoy being house poor for awhile… cause with the additional monthly cost, plus moving expenses, plus new things we’ll need for the house… we’ll be scraping by for at least some transitional time. So a bunch of those “optional expenses” like new gadgets and such will have to wait at least six months, maybe more. And we’ll have to cut back a little bit on our usual spending too. Hopefully not for VERY long, but for at least awhile while we transition and adjust…
Very exciting. But stressful too!
The view of the world right now, centered on me, as it should be.
Up on the image is oriented toward the current location of galactic north.
(OK, this is actually what it looked like about half an hour ago, it took me a little bit to get it online… since then galactic north has moved a little bit relative to the planet, and of course the sun has too, and the cloud patterns may be a few hours old… but basically this is what it looks like.)
It is pretty. I like it.
I’ve noticed over the past few days that I seem to have fake people registering here. Not that many yet. So far there are 8 registered users. 1 is me. 2 are people I know. 1 more is a person who might be real. Then four are from russian domains with random letters in their emails and names who appear never to have logged on, read any posts, or posted any comments. I am guessing these are not real. And some have website links in their profiles like people trying to increase google page count. Anyway… I’ve turned on the feature to require “activation” of new accounts, hopefully that will stop these fake people. (Of course, only 4 of them over the course of over a year isn’t THAT bad… but there are now as many of them as real people, so time for action!)
I’m still leaving comments wide open, but if I start getting any comment spamming (which is getting more prevelant) then I’ll start requireing registration for that too.
Anyway, I’m late for work. Gotta run!
Oh, and if you are one of those Russians, and you are actually real, let me know. :-)
So today at lunch I went with Brandy and exchanged my Treo 600 for a new one under warrentee. Right now it just finished resyncing with my laptop to restore all my contacts and programs and such. This is now my FOURTH Treo 600!!!
#1) Ordered right after the things first came out. Got it all set up. Loved it. Used it a lot. One day, the screen just was blank. Backlight on, nothing there. It was a decent flashlight, but no longer a phone. I paniced and was all upset, ready to buy a new one. Brandy made me go to the Sprint store though. They said “looks like you killed it” and then went into the back and got me a brand new one in the box. This was while we were still in PA.
#2) While I was going back and forth between FL and PA (March through June) I was doing conference calls a lot, so I bought a headset for the phone. I proceeded one day to wrap the headset around the phone, stick it in my pocket, and then sit on it. The headset had a remote control volume and microphone thingy that would normally hand down and you talk near it. Well, it is a kind of bulky thing, and when I sat on it, it pressed into the screen, because the way I had wrapped it, the bulky part was on the screen side this time, and not on the hard back of the Treo. The screen was smashed to smithereens. This time the Sprint store told me that this was NOT covered under warentee, cause, well, I had smashed it. I had to buy a brand new one full price. Bastards.
#3) When I get calls on my cell at work… or when I have to make a call, I go outside. Two reasons: One, reception in this building sucks because it is basically a metal box. Two, my office has tall walls and a door, but the walls do not go all the way to the ceiling, and are pretty thin anyway. There is no privacy. So I go talk on the phone in the parking lot. Well… in the summer in Florida when you go stand in a parking lot it is HOT. And when it is hot I, well, um, tend to sweat just a tad. After a 15 minute phone call, my face is soaking wet. And, since I am holding the phone next to my head, so is the phone. And I have discovered that Treos don’t like being soaking wet. The phone would start to flip out and do all sorts of random things. The keyboard would become unresponsive. The screen would sometimes work and sometimes not. After a few hours it would all dry out and work OK again. Well… the first few times anyway. Eventually some of the buttons stopped working completely. Namely the “Alt” button that lets you type symbols like @ when you are doing email. And the shift key, that lets you do capitals. And the space bar, which, well, does spaces. Finally the zero key started to be erratic. And while I used the touch screen to actually dial phone numbers, you have to use the zero on the keyboard when you go through those menus and stuff for customer service. I kind of needed the zero. Anyway, I’m not really sure if it was the sweat or not, but this time Sprint gave me a warentee replacement. (And even if they hadn’t, after #2 I signed up for the $4 per month phone insurance to replace the phone for a small deductible if I destroy it.)
#4) The one I picked up today. This time instead of a brand new one in the box with all the accessories I got a “factory refurbished” one. Oh well. I was hoping for a new one again, but given the situation I won’t complain too much. This one looks like new anyway. I also bought a new case for it that completely encases the Treo, with a clear plastic front that you can actually use the touch screen and all the buttons through. So I never have to take it out of the case. Ever. So I should be able to sweat on it if I have to. And I got a new headset, but one big enough and oddly shaped enough I will not be tempted to put it in my pocket. It stays in the car use for hands free driving only, not for normal use when I’m not driving. So hopefully this one will be OK. And if I do destroy it by mistake, I have that insurance now.
Of course, now there is a Treo 650. I of course want one. Next time I kill the 600, maybe I’ll be able to upgrade. But as usual, there are a BUNCH of things on the “to buy” list ahead of that…
So for now, I’ll see how long I can make Treo #4 last. They seem to be averaging about 3 to 4 months each.
OK, one feature that is provided by this blog software that for one reason or other I never had activated and functioning properly is comment notification. I had it visible on the blog when I first launched it, but it never worked, so I eventually removed it.
Well, tonight I got it all up and running and working.
So now, if you add a comment to a post, you will have an option to check a box to be notified if anybody else responds to that post. Woo!
(I also get an email when someone responds to any of my posts, so now I’ll catch comments being added to old posts, which I sometimes miss these days.)
For now I am continuing to leave commenting wide open to anybody, but at some point in the future I may start requiring registration for posting.
This thing has other mailing list features to let me send emails to registered members and such, but I haven’t explored them yet.
One thing I may look into next time I have is to provide automatic notification of new posts to people who register for the mailing list on here or something. Right now I email the monthly top ten list whenever I make a post, but that is manual. It would be nice to automate that for the top ten. And then I guess letting any non-top-ten people that want to sign up for such a list be notified as well would be fine too.
But that’s require some more research into the tool and probably a little bit of custom modification of the code. So that will wait awhile. Maybe days. Maybe months. Next time I get inspired.
For now, I should have gone to sleep about 3.5 hours ago, and have to be up in 5 hours, so even though I’d like to look into this more right now, I will not.
So for now, content yourself with the fun new feature of being told if other people respond to posts you respond to… if you want that. :-)
I know I’d basically decided to switch off commentary on elections and politics and such for now cause I kind of overdosed in the weeks leading up to the election, but this is about MAPS. And I love MAPS!
I’d seen most of these in other places in the last week, but this page nicely puts them all in one place:
Election result maps
(via Andrew Sullivan)
This starts with the tradtional red/blue state by state map and shows the county by county one too. But then also shows the cartograms for each (with the states distorted so their sizes represent population instead of land area). And then it ends up with the “purple maps” that show various color shades between red and blue to show the how the percentage vote really broke down rather than just straight red or blue depending on the winner.
The red and blue ones make one wonder if another civil war is something we should worry about since the differences seem so stark and to align so neatly with geographic divisions. But looking at the purple map you see that most places are indeed a healthy mix ideologically, with some places leaning a bit more one direction or another, but basically most places being basically “purple”.
Well, OK, if you look at the last map he gives, where anything over 70% in one direction is solid red or blue, it looks bleaker and more divided again, but lets concentrate on the purple map in the middle!
Also, I note he has left out both Alaska and Hawaii, as many people often do. Perhaps we should just shove both of them back out of the nest and let them go their own ways. :-)
But hey, funky cartograms!
Just saw a link on Fark to a cool little Tool from World 66 that lets you easily plot a map of where all you have been in your travels. So of course I did so… I used my memory and also looked through the Visa’s in all my old passports going back to childhood. Here is what I came up with:
Note: On the world level they count Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as countries, and on the Europe level they break the United Kingdom up into its parts… I wouldn’t have done either of those, but I’ll stick with how they set it up.
Countries of the World: Canada, United States, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, United Kingdom
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Countries of Europe: France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, England
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States of the USA: Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachussetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin [Edit: See my comment in the comments section for revised map based on new information.]
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Provinces of Canada: Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec
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And that’s it! I need to get back into the grove of the random trips so as to fill in some more! Like I’m not sure how I missed Kentucky and Michigan! I have a call in to my mom to see if I visited either of them as a child and don’t remember. Those are the only two east of the Mississippi that I haven’t been in. And the next random trip will fill out Mexico, whenever we are actually able to get to it…
Anybody else want to share those? After you do it, they give a chunk of HTML which I think (although I am not sure) will work if you just cut and paste it into the comments here. [Edit: Looks like the site might be farked now… if it doesn’t work, try again later…] [Edit again: Farking has subsided, and pasting the HTML it gives you works fine except for a little extra code that shows up, but that is fine, it works.]
Of the regular readers here, I bet Ivan can do best on contries worldwide. Not sure if he is also who would do the best on states.
And beat me by five months too! I’ll have to get that HDTivo sometime! But new house and computer and maybe car will call come first. Darn Marcus! Well, at least it is broken. :-)
HD Tivo becoming unusable over the last few days
(Marcus Alzona, TivoCommunity)
Over the past few days, my HD Tivo (unmodified, working fine for 5 months) has becoming unusable. Its the same occasional problem I used to have with an SD DirecTivo or an SA Tivo – sometimes, you’d press something on the remote, and it either wouldn’t respond, or respond in a few minutes to all your presses (not a remote issue – you’d see one of the Tivo’s LEDs flicker as it receives the command). The problem would go away on its own most of the time, and a reboot would always fix this problem.
Oh, and hi to Marcus and congratulations on the new baby. :-)
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