As if taxes and gas prices weren’t high enough already, The Wall Street Journal reports in Fuel-Efficient Cars Dent States’ Road Budgets that your friendly highway department is now looking for a way to get their hands on the money you thought you saved by buying a more fuel efficient car. They also have a nice graph (right), that shows why we’re still so dependent on foreign oil.
Since a coworker showed me Google My Maps a few weeks ago, I’ve been meaning to do something cool with it. Today I was finally inspired: I created a map of the places I’ve traveled, with links to photos and travel logs (click to check it out):
The interface is very slick AJAX, and being able to put HTML, images, and video in your own pop-ups is pretty cool. It’d be nice if you could also use your own icons; I had to repurpose a few, such as using the “man | woman” restroom icon for weddings 
I also had a moment of panic when I went to get the link and Google only displayed the first 10 markers, but happily discovered changing the num parameter in the URL lets you increase how many are shown at once. Still, it’s very fun to see where I’ve been and how much is still left to explore!
We’ve been enjoying a perfect week for biking here in the Philadephia area with sunny days hitting about 70 degrees. Thursday I joined a group from work for a ride at Valley Forge, and got some “hardcore” cred for showing up on my singlespeed. Saturday morning found me enjoying a beautiful ride at Wissahickon, my first there this season and only my second time on my full-suspension bike.
It’s always amazing how nice Wissahickon is for being a city park, particularly with the leaves filling in and the creek still healthy from the spring rains. Being by myself, I was free to ride at a mellow pace and stop to enjoy some of the scenic points we sometimes huff past on group rides. It was also refreshing to see the city putting some money into the park by shoring up parts of the trail along Lincoln drive that were about to fall into the creek.
Afterwards, I lounged a bit at the Valley Green Inn and enjoyed the people watching. They were setting up for an outdoor wedding which I’m sure was absolutely perfect; it’s a great spot I’ll have to keep in mind when I retire from dating.
Even judging from my web logs, it must be wedding season: “bridal party” was the top search leading for April. Since I haven’t been to any weddings recently, people must be hitting some old photos. In fact, 98% of the bandwidth is photos; only 55,000 of 120,000 requests were for pages. Image searches are the top referrers, and I was surprised to see images.snap.com surpass images.google.com last month.
I was also finally motivated to automate this log crunching; a bit of date, wget, and cron scripting will save me from trying to remember what to run every month. In addition to parsing out the statistics for just my part of the botos.com doman, I also run custom statistics on popular photos and feed subscribers - currently 46 subscribers mostly using Firefox as a feed reader.
Verizon’s been digging around the neighborhood installing their new fiber optic service the last couple of weeks. They call it FIOS, which actually isn’t an acronym for anything, but an Irish word for “knowledge”, according to Wikipedia. The process is a mix of the mechanical and manual. They’ve pulled most of the conduit using a Ditch Witch JT921 Directional Drill (Yes, I had to over and checked it out over the weekend while it was in the parking lot.), but have spent just as much time hand-digging the connection boxes and tying it all together.
The conduit some tough stuff; it’s hard plastic about a quarter-inch thick. There’s no way you’re going to “accidentially” cut through it with anything less than a backhoe or jackhammer. The inside is very slick for pulling the actual fiber, which it looks like they’re just starting. Instead of pickup trucks with big orange spools, we now have truck with big black spools. The real question, of course, is whether Verizon will actually offer a better deal than Comcast on TV, Internet, and phone service.
Grey’s Anatomy’s two-hour “special episode” last night actually turned out to be a hidden pilot for a new spinoff. I had heard Kate Walsh (Dr. Addison Montgomery, the redhead) was getting her own show, but this was a surprise tactic to grab some existing TV producers are being forced to get clever at marketing and drawing enough of an audience to keep a show alive.
As for the spinoff, it’s Grey’s Anatomy in a hipper, sunnier setting (LA instead of Seattle). Other than that, it’s about the same: a bunch of horny doctors who inject a bit of extra drama by sleeping with as many colleagues, friends, and other people’s spouses as possible within the limits of the mathematically unique character pairings. Indexed has diagrammed it some point, I’m sure. Add to that one introspective, slightly self-occupied female lead, and you’ve got yourself a show 
It does have a number of big names in the cast, though, so maybe it’ll last more than the token few episodes and “complete series on one disc” DVD release.
Two Firefox extensions, Stylish and Greasemonkey, let you take back the web by tweaking pages to your own needs. Stylish lets you apply your own stylesheets and Greasemonkey runs your own Javascript. They’re great for sites with minor annoyances, or those at work that your IT department is too lazy to fix, which is actually what inspired my first script.
At home, my prime target is the dating site eHarmony, where some tweaks allow you to keep better track of your matches’ information, act faster, and bolster your geography by mapping their locations. (I also recommend someone else’s that shows additional pictures.)
The other site I tackled tonight was digg, which is a popular scripting target. My particular focus was their top 10 list, and eliminating the double-hop it takes to go through digg’s comments page on the story to get to the original.
My scripts page also revealed how much Google-karma userscripts.org has. Within a week of creating my account there, it was the number 5 search result for “Matthew Botos” on Google, right behind my own heavily search-optimized pages.
I was Googling myself today, and noticed Google had grabbed an odd excerpt for one of my category pages instead of the meta description. It turns out the page had none, because while I had installed a Meta Description Plugin, most categories had to description to display. These can easily be filled in from the Manage > Categories admin page, providing higher search engine rankings and more descriptive snippets.
The LA Times asks Is 24 running out of time? My answer: yes. You can only recycle plot lines so many times in six seasons before the audience gets bored. In fact, the main reasons I’m still watching are for the cliches and Dave Barry jokes.
Where the show really missed it’s big opportunity was the season 4-5 transition. Without spoiling anything, Jack was more isolated than ever and they really could’ve taken it in a different direction. Instead, things quickly returned to normal after a strong start the next season.
It’s tough to keep any show going past the first few seasons, when fresh ideas start to run out and it’s easier just to keep cranking out the same plots to keep the money coming in. Perhaps 24 has hit that point and it’s time for Jack and the gang to take a much-needed early retirement before someone blows up the office for the 16th time…
After my previous blog entry and photos on Sonicare Battery Replacement, I got an email from Ed Elliott, who detailed his own more successful attempt at replacing the batteries in his Sonicare 4100
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