collisionbend.com

…just can’t wait to get on the road again… (and that’s a cool, unintended effect with a WordPress plugin! I think I’ll leave it…)

NEWTOWN, CT — We arrived in Connecticut yesterday after driving half of Saturday to Cooperstown, NY. We only had a little rain early on, then it cleared up and allowed us to drive without hassle.

Getting to Cooperstown isn’t 100% easy. Sure: I-90 east to Route 28 and go south. But Route 28 can get stacked up at times, and it twists and turns all over the place.

The Hall of Fame itself was a sight every baseball fan should see at least once in a lifetime. The other exhibits bored me after a while, truth be told. And the Museum Shop was a disappointment as far as those things go. The staff was almost entirely kids, 16 to 18-ish, and they were nice enough, but three words I never heard uttered from their lips: “excuse me, please” when they cut you off in a crowded hall or bumped into you. That irritated me.

The rest of Cooperstown is a quaint little place — and just about the largest souvenir stand in existence. Every store for three blocks in any direction sells nothing but souvenirs of Cooperstown, or baseball, or Major League Baseball — which is really nice if you’re a Red Sox fan, or a Yankee fan, or a Phillies fan, or a Mets fan.

The rest of MLB? Fagettabouddit!

We ate in the Shortstop Restaurant just down the street from the museum (and down the stairs) and had a pretty good meal. I tried an Old Slugger Pale Ale, a local brew from the next town over, and enjoyed it. It’s not Great Lakes, but it can hold it’s own — no one’s going to steal home on this brew…

Google Maps leaves a little to be desired in these situations, sometimes, let me tell you!

We arrived in Connecticut yesterday afternoon, and the restaurant photo over there in the Moblog was the building — a century home, actually, converted into a restaurant — and now it’s a sushi place. The sushi was very good.

And now to relax: a little golf, play with the nieces a bit, do some photography, catch up on my redesign when it rains… time to decompress.

Tags: Connecticut, cooperstown, Google Maps, MLB Hall of Fame, Old Slugger Pale Ale, souvenir, sushi

And I’m dead tired. This is the fourth site launch in as many weeks for me, and each one has been a challenge in one way or another. This site was going great last night in my development partition on my live server, so it was time to push — and a few things are now a little wonky.

The Pages listing in the Rail (far right column) isn’t listing Pages. The navigation menu just below the masthead isn’t giving up its dropline with the subpages on hover; in fact, WordPress isn’t generating the subpage menu at the moment, so I’m not surprised the Pages listing in the Rail aren’t working — the two are somewhat related. The weather plugin in the right column has died as well.

The rest is going as it should. The Moblog column works as designed, although I wish I could res up the photos a touch; that would be nice. Archives, etc., are functioning better than I thought: no glitches from the nickel seats — so far.

Yes, I know the new design is a reverse, and I know there are some who despise the style… but there will be a style switcher coming soon, and the other choice will be this same layout, same color palette, same everything, except a white page with dark text and a different masthead image (and different RSS and “made on a Mac” footer image).

All in all, however, things being as they are, and as tired as I am, I’m content enough to call it a night — I just can’t do any more tonight, that’s for sure.

Anyway, come on back, especially over the next 10 days or so, as I get the issues worked out and some content added to both the Photography subpages and the Moblog (I think I’ll have some interesting stuff to show in the Moblog over the next few days).

I’ll let the tech specs wait until later. Sweet dreams!

Tags: design, Moblog, WordPress

I understand that East 21st Street next to the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University is snarled with snow and satellite trucks. The weather is nasty, and the city is pretty quiet save for the debate.

The newsroom here at WKYC is busy, but quiet, with an interesting tension as they go live with an 8:00 p.m. debate special; WKYC staffers that met with us all looked slightly edgy as the clock rolled around to air time. I guess this was a really big deal here.

They’re proud, and they should be: they’ve done a heck of a job setting this up.

Rita Andolsen, WKYC’s News Director, had this debate plopped on her lap virtually at the last moment, and the level of organization here is impressive. The relative quiet of our meeting room, right off the main news room, is vibrant with conversation as Paul Thomas prepares for broadcast from this very room.

Right now.

Look alive.

Post.

Now.

If you know me, you know that I’m a weather buff. I love studying weather, looking at the radar, and trying to figure out what’s going to happen before it does.

If you’ve been reading my site, too, you’d also surmise that I’m either too busy to write, or that I’m too bored. Both assessments would apply: I’m excruciatingly busy, and I’m terrifically bored with the Internet — it’s the same-old, same-old…

Today at lunch, however, I was reading last month’s copy of MacWorld, and I found the coolest Web application yet developed: the Weather Channel has a new AJAX-based radar map.

Lookee here:

This is über cool: it’s actually something that you can use to determine the weather as it applies to your local region. You can zoom in, zoom out; you can change the transparency of the clouds; you can put the map in motion; you can move from frame to frame in the animation; you can glean valuable, up-to-the-minute information from this map at a moment’s notice.

Severe weather heading your way? Go no farther than here: you can find out what’s happening at your home, office, or your company’s far-off headquarters with the flick of a mouse. It’s based on Google Maps, with the interactive satellite and radar images superimposed. It’s quite cool.

In saying this, I also think that the service is still somewhat limited: there are a few things they haven’t included, and the time loop is limited to only 10 minutes currently.

A few things I would add:

1. A longer loop, say, about 3 or 6 hours;
2. A larger image size to accommodate wide-screen monitors;
3. An RSS feed, complete with warning sounds for impending severe weather alerts;
4. An interactive surface analysis map, showing the isobars and the fronts, perhaps the temperatures as well, moving in real time with the images;
5. A radar summary to lay on top of it all, for weather geeks like me.

Other than that, it’s still a pretty informative device, one that I will bookmark and view again and again.

Tell me this isn’t the slickest thing to hit the Internet in the last 10 years….

Back in August, I wrote two posts about my MacBook having problems with narcolepsy.

The actual problem was the Random Shutdown Bug, which affected about 15% of white 1.83Ghz MacBooks, 12% of black 2Ghz MacBooks, and 8-10% of white 2Ghz MacBooks.

So this morning I received a comment from someone in Milton, Queensland, Australia about narcolepsy, linking back to AskTheSleepExperts.com, an apparent site dedicated to sleep disorders.

To explain, my use of the terms “narcolepsy” and “narcoleptic” were a literary device, a simile, similar to the old Winston cigarette ads on television, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” More correctly, grammatically, in Winston’s case, “like” should have been “as”; in my use of “narcolepsy,” I was actually referring to my MacBook acting as if it had narcolepsy, or as if it were narcoleptic.

Suddenly, I feel like I’m in a GEICO “Caveman” commercial, in a way: no matter what you write, there’s always someone there to remind you…

And I’m not complaining. Many among us have serious sleep disorders, narcolepsy being one of them, and they are not trivial: according to the University of Maryland Medical Center, sleep disorders cost close to $16 billion in terms of lost productivity annually, as well as an additional “$50-$100 billion in indirect costs (accidents, litigation, property destruction, hospitalization, and death),” for a combined total of $116 - $166 billion annually. Add unemployment, therapy, other medical treatments, and more, to take the costs well over $200 billion annually.

Compare this with the cost of drug use in the US, which hovers around $134 billion annually, give or take a few bucks. Granted, drug use takes a huge chunk out of our GNP on a daily basis — but sleep problems actually take more. At the Maryland site listed above, search on “drug addiction” and take a look at any of the pages in the result; then check out what they cite as the root causes: depression and sleep loss.

I would submit to you that employers should test for sleep disorders as well as drug use, for it actually costs us more in the long run — and is far more prevalent in our society.

Myself, I had sleep apnea.

I say “had,” because it’s exactly that — past tense: I had sleep apnea. It’s now gone, thanks to my losing close to 80 pounds: I no longer sleep with distorted portions of my body shoving themselves into my stomach and forcing stomach acid to climb up my esophagus, making me choke on my own fluids; I no longer sleep with distorted portions of my body forcing other portions of my body to relax into unnatural positions, shutting off my airflow, making me snore — and threatening my life.

Today, I have no issue with falling asleep or getting drowsy mid-day, and my head is clearer now than it has been for 17 years (to be precise), because I no longer wake up for split second every 10-20 minutes or so because I (physically) can’t breathe.

That same sleep apnea probably led to my separation from Optiem, truth be told, for I spent many a day there, sitting in my chair in front of my computer, fighting sleep: I simply wasn’t sleeping at night. I couldn’t dream, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t function. Hell, I couldn’t even see.

Well, the past is the past: today, I work elsewhere — as well as for myself, I own a MacBook Pro in place of the “narcoleptic” MacBook, and I’m no longer referred to as “Goodyear” (as in the blimp).

And I have more energy and more stamina — every day, all day — unless you look at me late in the day that Mother Nature decided to dump 2 feet of snow on us…

OK, having lived in Cleveland for almost 50 years, I think I’ve just about seen it all when it comes to winter stupidity.

I took the long way home from my weekly small business networking meeting this morning, as the weather last night whomped Mentor with about a foot of snow in places, making the roads a bit of a mess.

My usual route home from the Panera Bread on Mentor Avenue east of Heisley Road is up through the back streets past Mentor City Hall and Mentor High, then straight down Lakeshore Boulevard deep into Euclid, iPod on all the way. It gives me time to think creatively without the distraction of my Inner Editor.

My route this morning, instead, was straight down Mentor Avenue through Willoughby (where it becomes Vine Street) to Lakeshore. And, on my way home, I saw this:

I must add here that this was not the first car I saw like this. Neither was it the second, nor even the third: it was the fourth in a 12-mile stretch. Each one of them was driving like a bat out of hell, too.

Now, this should be illegal.

In fact, I think it is, but you never see a policeman detain someone like this and write a ticket.

They should: people who don’t take the time to clean their windows and license plates shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel, as they are a hazard to the rest of us: they can’t see, their hearing is impaired (the snow actually muffles outside noise), and if they dodge between lanes enough, people will get hurt.

And worse yet: they don’t care, either.

What if an emergency vehicle were to come up behind them? They wouldn’t see it to get out of their way. Just imagine the guy in the back of the ambulance having a heart attack, on his way to the hospital, dying in the truck because the ambulance driver couldn’t get around this stupid fool.

Does a vehicular homicide charge make sense?

But, then again, I remember one event quite clearly: about 20 years ago, I lived in Berea and worked in Lakewood. Traveling down the Berea Freeway one snowy morning, I watched in horror as some chick (sorry, but this one is warranted) in the car behind me was busy donning her makeup in her rearview mirror — at close to 60 miles an hour on a slippery roadway, in the high-speed lane — with only a 15-inch round opening in her windshield directly in front of her, the rest of her car under at least 8 inches of snow.

A real brainiac, no?

She never saw the truck that cut her off, sending her to the left, spinning into the barrier in the median, then over to the guardrail on the right, and eventually rolling her over two or three times. Fortunately, she missed every other car on the highway — no small feat during rush hour.

Her car ended up as flat as a pancake; I’m sure she was, too.

And it served her right.

I was fiddling around last night, looking for a couple of new twists for the site, and I couldn’t get over how hot it was — 94 degrees at the time — so I decided to find a weather plugin for WordPress.

I found WeatherIcon, a nifty, little doo-dad that takes up about 3 lines of code, is modifyable both through the WordPress Dash and your CSS file, and it displays weather information from whatever site you select.

In this case, it’s getting its information through METAR data from Burke Lakefront Airport in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

It slows the page just a tad, though, which is something I’m not totally happy about; it’ll do for now, however.

So, as I write this, WeatherIcon is telling me that the current tempurature is 94 degrees, with a heat index of 105; the humidity is only listed at about 53%, which I know is incorrect: it’s actually more like 72%, according to the National Weather Service’s Cleveland reporting bureau — which is what all of the local media outlets use.

Otherwise, however, I like this new thingy; the only thing I might change is the icon style. We’ll see.

(71.8 — 65.4 — 6.4 — adjusted by WW)

Change is in the air. Lots of changes — lots of ‘em.

First off, I have three web sites under construction, two of which are on hold, and the third will go live some time next week. That third one, by the way, is a members-only site.

Then there is good ole’ CB itself, which will be sporting a few changes with my coming anniversary next month. I can’t address those changes here — yet — but I will in due time. Let’s just leave it that I’m sprucing up the site, as well as making it faster. No, I’m not upgrading to WordPress 2.0, either — but I might at some point. I just don’t see the need for a WYSIWYG interface.

I am also waiting on approval to create another site, which hopefully will come some time this week. This is the one that’s making me anxious.

I hate waiting. Absolutely hate it.

Not that I’m not patient — if I’m anything, I’m patient. What gets to me is that this approval for the one site is the gateway to bigger and better things for me and my career, an opportunity that I can’t miss. It’s the difference between comfort and dreams on the one side, and another lean year at the Bend on the other. Your prayers are deeply appreciated, however you pray, and to whomever you pray to (as long as it isn’t evil).

Patience is an ally of mine, truth be told. I got married at the tender age of 44; I waited, and it turned out that it was the proper choice, as I’m far better off with my bride than I would be if I had married one of my prior relationships.

My career passion, web design and development, didn’t exist when I attended Ohio State. That didn’t come for almost 15 years after I left that fine institution. Again, I waited, and I’m glad I did: I really love the work.

The one place where I’m not as patient as I should be (and I usually don’t “should” myself) is in my attempt to lose weight: I want to reach my long-term goal now, not next week, next month, or 20 weeks from now (which is the healthy term, and the plan I’m on). I want it now.

Quite frankly, it’s harder work than I anticipated, and it’s not the easiest thing I have ever done, regardless of the excellent results I have achieved in the last 11 weeks (32.6 pounds lost).

So, what am I doing at the moment?

I’m sitting in the Wickliffe Arabica on Euclid Avenue and E. 293rd, avoiding the cold, sucking down some decaf, web surfing, blogging, listening to my iPod, thinking about the delicious, ice-cold Samuel Adams Black Lager I plan to quaff this Saturday night, and avoiding creating the slide show I need for a presentation I have to do next week.

I guess it’s in its own holding pattern.

*Sigh*

Back to work…

(73.8 — 32.6 — 41.2)

Finally. WordPress 1.5.2 installed on the Bend.

I haven’t upgraded for a while for a number of reasons: the new job (which now isn’t) took a lot of my time; school took a bunch of time as well; general life gets in the way (I don’t necessarily want to sit in front of a computer monitor for 16 hours a day); and the last upgrade (from 1.0.1 to 1.2.2) borked my entire site.

Not this time. Smooth as silk.

And I like this new version of WordPress. It handles plugins better. It’s faster. It’s more secure. It’s better at blocking SPAM (which I know will piss off a couple of folks who love to SPAM this site. AWWWWW!).

It has more gadgets and gizmos, and I like gadgets and gizmos. And yet it’s all familiar. Nice.

I upgraded another thing today: I refenestrated my house. It’s a little warmer in here now, also a little quieter. I hope it helps lower my heating bills. I’ve already lowered them some 45%, but that wasn’t too hard considering the bonehead that owned the place before us…

Another upgrade on the horizon: CB v3.0 is on the way, hopefully to be released before the New Year. Jello City. Won’t look too much different, but will be a little better for those of you on large screens (1600 pixels and larger).

And yet another upgrade in the works: I’m planning my office makeover. Woo-hoo!

We had to cancel a highly-anticipated trip to Niagara Falls this weekend because of the weather.

What ticks me off about it is that the weather wasn’t that bad; the fear-mongerers at the local TV stations that pose as weather authorities kept us in town. And they were able to do it all in the name of ratings and advertising revenues. I should’ve known better. (”Bad weather’s a-comin’! Be afraid! Be very afraid!”)

So today we went to the outlet mall at Grove City, PA for a little Christmas shopping. My other half is Super Shopper, able to find extreme deals at rock-bottom prices in almost any store in the US. But not today. This is not to say that she didn’t find any bargains; just not as many — or as good — as she usually can. (In other words, she got skunked.)

I am not Super Shopper — by any means. But I did end up buying two pairs of Rockport shoes for less than $80, one of which is Gore-Tex lined with a lug sole for winter weather. Not bad at all.

But my real bargain came at the end of the day: I found an Oxo corkscrew, retail price $24.95 (which the outlet store sells for $22), clearance priced at $9.98. When I got to the register, it was half off, bringing the price down to a cool $4.98 plus tax.

Which just goes to show that every once in a while, even a blind squirrel can find a nut.