Stan’s Obligatory Blog

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 */

This just in…

Mandonna played here in L.A. last weekend. They are an all-male Madonna tribute band. We just read the review in the L.A. Weekly, and we’ve decided that this is a must-see. So we got on their mailing list to find out when they are coming back. Be sure to check out their web site. It’s quite slick, and they have some songs you can download. Their version of “Material Girl” is priceless.

We went to see Julia Sweeney‘s monologue show, “Letting Go of God” this weekend. It was really good. Very entertaining. She tells the story of her Catholic upbringing and her later disillusionment with it. This led into her spiritual quest which involved Deepak Chopra, trips to Tibet, Bhutan and the Galapagos Islands. And how all this ultimately led to her abandoning her belief in God. Along the way, she tells a lot of funny stories and takes pokes at most of the major and minor religions. It was a hoot.

She said that the show has been extended through at least the end of January. If you’re in the L.A. area, it’s definitely worth seeing.

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.

Here are the Christmas ornaments made out of food that Lucinda’s class made today. Cathy is the volunteer art docent for the class, so she comes up with these projects for them to do.