Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Who says it never rains in California? Today was pouring down rain for most of the day. So I had to take my car to work instead of riding my bike. Trying to make the most of this, I stopped off on the way home so my car could get its every-other-year smog test. Like in an alien abduction, it got a probe up its butt and got measured. But all is well, and it passed.

And thus ended the dreary day.

A long time ago, I wrote a little PHP routine for our main home page to automatically add holiday decoration at the top of the page. I adapted it for WordPress today. I made a file ‘wp-holidaydecor.php’ which queries the database to get the next holiday and its lead time. If there is a holiday coming up, it calls a function to insert an appropriate image from the ‘holidayimages’ directory. I had to hack the main WordPress ‘index.php’ file and add one line:

< ?php include (ABSPATH . 'wp-holidaydecor.php'); ?>

I added this right after the ‘<div id=”content”>’ line.

The other part of this is the ‘holidays’ table I added to the database. I wrote a little Perl script that calculates the dates of the holidays and populates this table a year at a time. Right now, it’s filled through 2005.

Today’s ride was Gene’s “Horizontal Bomp” ride again. Good for a chilly day. We went east into Monrovia, then south to Temple City and back through San Gabriel and San Marino. We stopped for a snack at Il Fornaio in Old Town. Then we went down past the Rose Bowl for the trip home. The bleachers are set up for the Rose Parade next weekend. Down by the Rose Bowl we saw some sort of old-car meet going on, as well as the big tents where they are building the floats for the parade. Then we went up the hill to Altadena Drive for the trip home.

40 miles.

Today we went down to Leisure World to see the family for Christmas dinner. We brought the tamales that we made, as well as Lucinda, who was quite excited at the prospect of getting lots of presents from her relatives. We ate ourselves into oblivion. It was fun.

You can see all the pictures from the day at http://www.1134.org/gallery/xmas2004

Yesterday I heard that an article I wrote was published in Seismological Research Letters. It’s a novel thing to see something I wrote printed up and looking official. So today I borrowed a copy to have a look. It’s a fairly light article, the gist being that every time people in L.A. feel an earthquake, they all come to our web site and sign up for the mailing list. This surge lasts for about two weeks after each major earthquake, and it represents a ‘teachable moment’ which we in the earthquake business can use for public education and outreach.

…and sometimes it doesn’t. My experiment with Cochinita Pibil was a mixed bag. The flavor was quite nice, but I used the wrong cut of pork. So it was dry. So next time, I need to use a different cut.

Tomorrow is our office holiday party, and I’m the organizer. So I decided to try out a new recipe. It’s Cochinita Pibil. I’ve had this at Border Grill and it’s good. So I decided to try it myself. I found the annatto seeds and I ground them up to make the achiote paste. So here is the pork marinating, just waiting to be cooked tomorrow. When I write programs I usually start with a single comment at the top that says something like “I hope this works”, so here it is:

/* I hope this works */

Today’s ride was Gene’s “Just One Hill” ride. And there was just one hill. But it was big and steep. It wasn’t nine miles uphill like last week, but it was still a good climb. It was another picture-postcard day, so when we got to the top, we were able to see all the way out to the ocean. On the way down, I had to stop to do a brake adjustment on my bike. While I was doing that, Newton’s front tire just decided to go flat. So we had a little break sitting there on the side of the hill.

When we got to the bottom, we stopped at the Starbuck’s in La Cañada. I had a bagel and orange juice. Easy to digest for glycogen and all that. Then we headed back into Pasadena. We took the side trip up to Loma Alta and came back through the foothills of Altadena. The view from the top of Lake Avenue was impressive. The ride was kind of short by our standards, so we just sort of noodled around Pasadena and Sierra Madre to pad the ride out a bit.

40 miles.

Today we went to Lucinda’s school for their Holiday program. Parking near the school is always a problem. But I am the Master of Parallel Parking. I got the car into this space, and it wasn’t too bad. I had three fingers clearance at the back and five at the front. So the space was actually a good six inches longer than the car. Not a record by any means. Still, it was amusing, since Cathy didn’t think it was going to fit.

Also, when we got there, I was kind of amazed to see the towers of downtown L.A. off in the distance. They’re about 15 miles away, but usually we can’t see them through the smog.

One more sign of the impending holidays here in Pasadena. The bleachers are going up all along Colorado Blvd. in preparation for the 24 hours or so of madness that is the Rose Parade. I really can’t understand the people who camp out overnight to see it, and it makes our neighborhood a zoo for three days afterwards. But it’s part of our local kitsch and culture. So it’s all right, and it’s even kind of funny.

On the day of the parade, they park all the trailers in our neighborhood to collect the horses. This means that every little girl is out running around with a bag of carrots to feed them. It’s really quite cute.