Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda’s first day of school is Thursday. This evening we went to her Back-to-School picnic at Don Benito to see her classroom and meet her teachers. We got her a school shirt and met some of the other incoming kindergartners. There are pictures in her photo album.

Today’s ride was the ‘Toluca Lake Inverse’. This went through South Pasadena and Highland Park to Griffith Park. Then we rode past the L.A. Zoo, Travel Town, and Forest Lawn to our snack stop at Priscilla’s in Burbank. Then we came back through Glendale and La Canada, including riding up the infamous ‘Hospital Hill’ on Verdugo Blvd. I got a flat on the way out. I put on the spare tube, which turned out to have a slow leak, but I was able to make it the rest of the way and only had to stop to pump once. 42 miles.

Today we went to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. In the American history hall, they had a small exhibit about transportation, including a license badge for cars produced under the Selden automobile patent. This patent was taken out in 1895 by George Selden, and it covered the automobile. He never built a working model, and he had no intention of going into the automobile manufacturing business, but he knew other people would be in years to come. So he got this patent and then proceeded to shake down the car makers for license fees. For some years, they paid, until Henry Ford challenged it in court. In the end, the patent was ruled invalid, since it was basically just a form of legal extortion. But it’s a lot like the current SCO case against Linux.

Later on, we were in a different part of the museum, and I saw a display of a stuffed hawk that, sadly, didn’t look very lifelike. The cobwebs sort of gave it away.




Still, it was a fun day, and Lucinda had fun. Pictures in her photo album.

I see that there is a link to my “I hate Texas” page on a blog called News to Hughes. Seems that the author spent a month in Texas and pretty much came to the same conclusions I did.

Funny thing is, there were a bunch of comments to his post, and almost all of the pro-Texas comments consisted of people calling him names and threatening him. Not exactly substantive argument. Of course, this is the sort of behavior that we always see from people who, deep down, know they’re wrong…

After work today, I went for a little bike ride. Up to Chantry Flat and back, complete with the four-mile uphill part. This time, I saw three (count ’em, three) cars and one other bicyclist on the road. For once, I saw the other cyclist when I was coming down and he was going up, so I got to see what the “I’m riding up a four-mile hill” face looks like on someone else. It was fun.

I saw from the statistics the the hotlinkers found my new site. They were eating bandwidth with images. So I set up a .htaccess file to put a stop to that. It’s not that the bandwidth is all that big of a deal now that I’m not self-hosted on a DSL connection, but it’s just plain bad manners to hotlink images from someone else’s site.

We got our first comment spam today. It was terribly annoying. So annoying, in fact, that I went and implemented a simple CAPTCHA.

I just finished reading What’s the Matter With Kansas?. It’s an entertaining read, all about how conservatives and the Republican Party have managed to convince blue-collar people to support them and vote against their own best interests. It’s an entertaining book, well-written and funny, and he makes a serious point. Highly recommended.

For more on the idea of voting and self-interest, see “Self-interest & Voting” at Slacktivist.

Went riding with Foothill again today. This time we did a kind of strange ride. Made a big loop through Arcadia, Temple City and South Pasadena to Highland Park. Then we went by the Rose Bowl and rode up and down the hills near there. That was fun, even if I did get a flat on the way back down. The snack stop was at Il Fornaio in Old Town. At the end, the ride was only 35 miles, so I rode out to Arcadia and back just to get a little more distance. 44 miles total.

I got us a web hosting account with PHP Webhosting for our web site. Currently, the site is getting something like 500 visitors a day, and serving about 1.7GB a month. This is getting to be a bit of a strain on our little DSL connection. So I got us a new domain name and hosting account. We will now be living at http://www.1134.org. I’ve gotten most of the site transferred over and working. When it’s all set up, I’ll set the old web server to issue redirects to the new URL.

Sadly, we can’t take our ‘cosmo’ domain with us, since it appears that Cogent Networks has disappeared, so I can’t find who to contact about changing the domain pointers. The ‘delegated domains’ list at http://www.nic.us/register/delegated_subdomains.txt gives an address of ‘domains@cogent.net’ for pasadena.ca.us, but cogent.net now points to pcnalert.com. I sent an email on the off chance someone there is still minding the store…