July 2008 Archives

Being both a geek and an earth scientist, I am now beginning to wonder who in their right mind would choose a Luddite like McCain for president. He watches the Internet with his grandchildren and says that there is a common border between Iraq and Pakistan. Next will he be saying that evolution is a bunch of bunk or that Obama must be a Muslim?

Now I know that those high up in politics have aides and drones to read and respond in their name to email messages and to glean information from Internet sources, but come on. It is the 21st Century and at least a tiny bit of familiarization about technology by a candidate expected to lead what is purportedly the richest, smartest, most advanced country on Earth would be appropriate. No, he does not have to blog or tweet or plurk or text, but a basic understanding of all of the above would be nice.

And geography... don't get me started, but here we are not talking rocket science. We're talking elementary school! He can't blame lack of access to Google Earth either. He could use a paper map, atlas, or a globe. Granted, he was making a speech to a group of people who probably can't find their way to the next county, let alone state, but what if he was standing next to the leader of a country and makes a gaff like that? So many are saying he is just Bush continued and this is just another example of that. Oh, he was just confused say the conservative pundits. Well, geez, what if he is confused while deciding whether to say bomb Kazakhstan or not. He might think... hmmm, sounds like Kansas and say well... bomb Kansas! Dorothy and Toto would not like that, Mr. McCain. I know that is an outlandish example, but if he cannot do basic geography or understand new technology, who's to say?

All of this lack of knowledge by the presumptive candidate of the Republican Party or of any party for that matter should be of concern to all Americans. Does this mean if he does not understand something that he will just let his advisors take charge? If he gets confused, we should just ignore it? Does this mean that if he makes a mistake that we'll all just say oops, nevermind? I feel that being the chief executive of my country requires at least a general knowledge of the world and what makes it work. McCain flunks miserably. Being a POW does not make you a commander in chief. Being a senator does not make you a leader.

Now that you are done reading, take a moment, print a blank outline map of the world (PDF file), and see how many countries of the world you can name correctly. Here you will find larger blank maps of the world's regions to make those tiny countries easier to see. Also, look at these blank US and Canada maps and see if you can label the states and provinces. Share this with friends and family... amazing how much fun it will be when you here mention of Bahrain or Moldova or Nunavut on the news and actually can place where it it. The whole collection of blank (and labelled - no cheating!) maps can be found at Houghton-Mifflin's Education Place.

I hacked a bit of perl code yesterday to draw off the current Atom feed from the US Geological Survey to post to Plurk the latest earthquakes recorded worldwide greater than Magnitude 2.5. It uses the unofficial API to Plurk using Andy Armstrong's WWW::Plurk module.




You can view it at plurkquakes' public timeline - feel free to add it as a friend or just watch!

It is with great sadness to write about the passing of one of my dearest friends at the fire station. Special Fire Police Sergeant Albert P. Greenleaf, the last remaining charter member of the West Whiteland Fire Company, passed away this afternoon at the age of 88. Albie was a member of the company's active force as a Fire Police Officer for nearly 55 years.

He was recognized by West Whiteland Township for his service to the community on his 80th birthday by the establishment and recipient of the first Albert P. Greenleaf Outstanding Volunteer Award.

I still remember the first time that I met him. He walked up me, firmly shook my hand, saying welcome to the newest fire cop from the first one. During my time serving with him, I learned so much, especially about the history of the area of which he was a lifelong resident.

Our condolences and hearts go out to his wife Elsie and to his family. We at Station 6 have lost one of our dearest family members.

It was an honor and a privilege to learn from you, Albie... to talk with you, and to serve with you, Sergeant. You will always have a special place in this fire cop's life.

When viewing and funeral arrangements are finalized, I will post them as an update to this entry.

Crappy day to work in the yard, so I am confining my chores to inside ones. On occasion when I sit to rest the bones, I will start to move over some of my old content which I have been too busy to get to over the past months. First off will be my Chester County fire service-related links and information, followed by some of the academic-related things I have done (like weather widgets and map gizmos). It will get done... some day....

Also, a welcome to those of you who are visiting from Plurk and Facebook and the variety of other spots I have linked back to here. Enjoy!

Decided to get rid of that other blogging package off of my server. So, my former blog, my sediments exactly can now be found running Movable Type as well. No comments or pingbacks over there - 99-44/100% of them these days are spam anyway - leave a comment or question on my current blog.

Something I used to do was post some of my favorite home-brew and modified recipes. While I was concocting dinner tonight, I decided to renew that idea. Enter my first recipe blog entry for Gneiss, Tuff, and a Little Wacke.

The basis for this recipe is my tomato base. it originated as my basic pasta sauce, a quick and dirty dressing for whatever pasta I felt like eating. The nice part about it is that you can toss it together in under 30 minutes - only requires 15 minutes to simmer before serving - and it is much better tasting and better for you than the canned or bottled variety. The proportions serve two nicely with enough for leftover lunch for one.

The ingredients are as follows:

• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper
• a measure of the nationality spice
  
• a medium onion (yellow or white), chopped
• half a red pepper, chopped
• a heaping teaspoon of minced garlic
• big can of diced tomatoes (not puree, not sauce, not drained)
• small can of tomato paste
• 1/2 cup of red wine (merlot is nice and optional)

In a medium saucepan, start the olive oil and garlic over a medium heat. When the garlic starts to crackle, add the onions and peppers, stirring frequently. Cook for 3 - 4 minutes, getting the veggies a bit softer, but not limp or burnt.

Add the diced tomatoes and juice and mix well with the veggies. Stir in the tomato paste to complete the tomato base. Stir in the spices. Bring the mixture to a boil, then cover and reduce the heat to low, simmer for 15 - 20 minutes.

The difference in the base and its eventual use or in what I call the nationality spices. If I was just making basic pasta sauce with an Italian flair, those spices are 1 - 2 teaspoons of oregano and a bay leaf, which is what I did tonight. Spicy Italian? Add a shake of crushed red pepper. Want a south of the border taste, substitute chili powder for the oregano and bay leaf. More cajun? Add tobasco.

Note the measuring method shown - I have a perfect teaspoon palm. Also points out something I do obsessively when I cook: constantly wash my hands. No one wants to eat something made with dirty mitts.

Anyway, while the sauce simmers, I cooked up some fresh sweet Italian sausage (about a pound of links). The way I prepare them is by first browning them in a frying pan, then adding 1/3 - 1/2 cup of water and cooking them over a low heat for about 15 minutes.

When the sausage was done, I drain and blot them, then slice them into 1/2" slices and toss them into the sauce. I then let the whole concoction simmer for another 15 minutes to let them communicate with each other.

While they talk, I bring a pot of water to a vigorous boil and prepare the pasta. With a chunky sausage sauce, I prefer a big pasta like tonight's choice, rigatoni, a ribbed, tubular pasta. Boiled for about 13 minutes, it comes out al dente, firm, neither hard nor limp. Also toasted up some nice thick garlic bread to sop up the sauce - never ever leave a drop of sauce to waste!

The nice part of this tomato base is that it can expand or contract with what you have on hand. It goes just a well over rice or potatoes. My father always taught me (yes, my father taught me to cook) to be creative in the kitchen, constantly experiment with new ingredients and combinations, and listen to what your eating companions say. More importantly, see how clean their plates are when they go out to the kitchen or who kills for the leftovers!

Buon appetito!

This is a test of the Plurk broadcasting system. It is only a Plurk.

Checking to make sure that my Plurk is being notified of new blog entries via the MT-Plurk plugin.

Update: didn't work... will look at the code in the morning.

Since I have more or less gone from tweeting to plurking, I thought it was only appropriate that I find a way to plurk when I post. Enter the Chad Everett's MT-Plurk plugin for Movable Type. It is a nifty little piece of code that you can use not only to update Plurk when you post to your blog, but also can be used to cull bits of information from Plurk as well. Since I use the Plurk widget, I will postpone the exploration of that part of the plugin for now.

So, let's see if it plurks!

Editor's note... it appears in this post I have accidentally alliterated a number of words beginning with the letter p. Plurk-peculiar?

I was looking at Sears for an intercom (you know, Sears has everything!) and came across this splash ad for furnishing dorm rooms (month and a half 'til Fall Semester). They have several different layout options to fit your kid's particular style. So I browsed through them to see what ideas I could get for doing stuff around the house as we clean and paint and fix-up.

But take a close look at the picture (click it to see it full size). Do you see something missing from this picture? Something like... books... notebooks... educational materials.... Yes, the room has an el grande TV, game station, gaming chair, but it seems to lack anything vaguely related to school. With all the toys, who has time to go to class, study, socialize (not connected to the 'net).

Back in the day, there used to be one TV in a lounge in the dorm (dark ages, I know), but that way you got to mix and mingle (and yes, fight over what to watch). Go to the library (OMG!) and actually read a paper book. I know, reality bites. But, hell, the bite might just be worth it!

Stepping off my high horse...

I have to create a new category for this one. Let's call it the NIHSEOW20 (Now I Have Seen Everything on Web 2.0). I was looking at the specs on a Panasonic wireless camera and came across this link to a webcam at a canine swimming pool. No way, I thought. Yes, way.

Now mind you, I think that animals deserve recreation like humans, but this is just far too much. I wonder how much this pet-minding service charges?

Look for the NIHSEOW20 category to increase as days go by... there are so many to fit into this category. I might have to make a whole web site for this one.

I will be taking down the scanner stream to do some LAN wiring. It should not be down for more than 15-30 minutes at a time (hopefully only one time).

I really should add my blogroll back to the sidebar (some day), but until I do, I will share some of the items that I read somewhere on the sidebar some time soon. For now, here is the snippet of my most recent reads, courtesy of Google Reader.



I was also playing with reBlog from Eyebeam. While the UI is nice, the problem is that all the publishing code is in PHP (not my forte) and the plugin to integrate the output into MT was for 3.x (meaning I would need to hack it to 4.1). It does not appear to be in active development either - probably no reason to since it seems to work quite well as is. I had previously used Bloglines, but I never cared for it. Since I spend what seems like half my life in Google-land, I figured giving the Reader a good move. We'll see.

One blog I have started following in my quest for wrangling social networking is Social Web Tools. She covers a wide range of tools and, in particular, Twitter and its analogs. Even with this post, I suggest it as a good read.

A recent article, Promote Your Site The Smart Way With BookmarkingDemon, just plain rubbed me the wrong way. In a nutshell, the tool she is describing provides a means to send out links to your entries, web pages, whatever, automatically to a variety of social bookmarking web sites. Automatically. Daily. While it is termed as an SEO tool, it sounds in the same category as the blog / web site / comment / search engine spamming engines we all dread. I get 5000+ worthless spam pings a day. While they never see the light of day, it still degrades my web site response and chews up traffic.

Rather than rant on again, let me just clip the comment I left on the post, just in case it gets lost in moderation:

"It can be such a tedious pain though, to manually submit your URLs to all those social bookmarking sites on a daily basis." "...many features such as ... automated account creation."

Last time I looked, the definition of "social" has an intimate connection to the word "human" as in a person. Call me old fashioned, but I thought social networking was to be... um... socialable. I really enjoy reading your blog, but this post resembles promotion of a spam tool (I know... it is an "SEO tool"). You may not be promoting Viagra or whatever, but it is no different.

As far as automated postings, pings, and such, it is much easier (and free) to use one of any number of plug-ins that already do the same thing when you actually do make an update.

Just my $0.02, guess I am old-fashioned and already swamped going through all the repetitious links and spam out there.

To promote yourself, do it yourself. I have no problem with update pings when you make a change, either automated or manual. Using a tool that not only pings, but also creates additional accounts in social engines, is spamming. Sure, we all can have multiple personas on the Internet, but mechanical ones seems to defeat the purpose of social networking.