John’s Ramblings

I saw this tidbit come across my Snopes.com rss feed, and had to check it out. It is an interesting concept, to say the least.

FreeRice.com is a website that went “live” on the 7th of October, 2007. The concept is that you play a word game that helps you to expand your vocabulary. When you guess a word’s meaning correctly, you “donate” 10 grains of rice to feed starving people. The rice is paid for by the sponsors whose advertisements appear in the banner underneath the word game. The rice is to be distributed through the United Nations World Food Programme.

OK, so what? What is 10 grains of rice going to do against the millions of people without adequate nutrition in the world? That would be my question. Well, since the website’s inception, the “grains” that have been donated are growing at a fantastic rate:

Total Donations by Day

A quick search on the internet reveals that there are approximately 29,000 grains of long-grain rice per pound. 2,840,667,010 grains divided by 29,000 = almost 98,000 pounds of rice. Not bad.

So, go expand your vocabulary!

This ad appeared next to this article on the little website for our local rag.

My first thought was the picture should be of the Publisher to whom we are being introduced. Instead, it’s a rotating ad in a frame. The public service announcement for energy conservation comes up once in four reloads.

Check this out. I was doing a little post-NaBloPoMo surfing this morning, and found this cool emblem generator. The NaBloPoMo organizer(s) have apparently been using this to generate the official seals of our writing exercise. So I clicked in and created this little gem. Click the picture, and you can create your own, for whatever subject you wish.

Do they have a bicycle emblem, you may ask? Hell, yes!

I think I’ll go for a ride today.

I was doing a little surfing through some other bike related blogs (easily accessible through yonder links, oh web-ish one) when I happened upon this curious logo. A little click in that direction led me to a page describing NaBloPoMo. The principle of this exercise is to post to my blog every day for the month of November.

Now, understand that the best friend I’ve almost never met, Jim Carson, is embarking upon NaNoWriMo on this very day. Way, way more ambitious, he and many other souls will attempt to write a complete novel during November. He’s checked out books on writing books, and made a regular science project out of this (who would’a thought it?). No doubt he’ll be magnificent.

I, on the other hand, can walk past the computer for days on end, and only cast the keyboard a furtive glance. I can sit here for 3 hours a day, surfing for cycling googaws and anatomy lessons, and never feel inspired to be creative. Writing an entire novel in a month would be a bit of a stretch for your hero, dear reader (both of you). In the immortal words of Dr. Leo Marvin, what we need here are “Baby Steps”.

After a couple of Cabernet’s (purely for health reasons, mind you. French paradox and all that.) it sounded like it was quite do-able, so I signed my sorry ass up. All through the day today I’ve been mulling this little venture. It was close to that kind of feeling when you have an optional hill to climb on the bike, you are alone, no time constraints, and you stand at the bottom and look at the hill as you consider your options. Will it be “You know, I really need to get home and run the dishwasher”, or “What the hell, climb the damn hill”.

At 3:30 I quit walking past the computer, loaded the bike, and went for a ride. I needed to get out of the house, and I felt like I needed to get in the 15-20 miles that I didn’t get last night because no one showed up for the night ride. So I rode a variant of the valley route, from Kent to the north toward Tukwila. I went up Frager Road instead of my usual Russell, found a short steep little hill that ended at a little turn-of-the-century cemetery on Orillia Road, then doubled back down to Russell Road and the Green River Trail (I know, boring, TMI, but I’m going somewhere with this). I reached the construction site at 228th and Russell Road, and the work crews were finishing up their concrete pours for the day. The road is not open yet, but with a few sidewalks and some landscaping this project to put a truck route from the valley up to I-5 will almost be complete. One of the workers waved me through and said “Go ahead, try it out”. The sun is setting, I’ve got my mileage in that I needed, and I’m 2 miles away from the car… almost done. “Go on, see where it takes you, man”, and he gives me another gesture that I should proceed.

So I did. Once I weaved my way through the barricades and cars at the bottom, I had the whole hill to myself. It must be about .7 or .8 of a mile long, and the usual for around here of about 350′ feet of climbing. Nice new concrete road with no potholes and no traffic. So I got my hill work, got my mileage, and I got something of an inspiration to start typing entry one for NaBloPoMo.

It ain’t War and Peace, but tomorrow is another day.

15.4 miles today, 3,798 ytd.

To have this blog and website, I have purchased my little corner of the web through a hosting provider. In my case, this is Dreamhost.

Dreamhost (and I presume other hosting providers) have utilities that allow you to report on statistics associated with your site. Some of this is pretty useless to me (such as how many of the people visiting my site use Internet Explorer vs. Firefox, etc.).

Some statistics are quite interesting, however. I like to look at the section which shows what search terms folks typed into their seach engines (such as Google or Yahoo) that landed them on one of my pages. For example, my highest hit rate for a while was coming from “colonoscopy”, because I had recently blogged about having one.

There’s also a section called the “Request Report”, which will list for me where folks are coming from in order to access information on my site(s). I started noticing several entries coming from “My Space”. I followed some of these My Space links, and found that folks were not actually providing links to my pages, but rather “hotlinking” to photos on my website and displaying them on their My Space pages. Therefore I end up providing the bandwidth to host pictures for other people. It’s not stealing the Mona Lisa or anything, but I got just a little peeved. Time for my inner geek to take action…

Step 1 was to flag these directories on my website so that search engines would not catalog their contents. This was how these folks found me in the first place, by doing a Google Image search for, say, a guy on a bike in spin class (that would be me). This flagging is accomplished by editing a small text file located on my website which tells the search engine robots to skip specific directories. This would theoretically help prevent future occurrences.

Step 2 was to move all my existing image directories to new directories, with new names. This was the more tedious step, because it also involved editing many of my existing web pages and blog entries to change the directory name. I have taken to hosting most of my blog pictures on Flickr now, so this was not as huge a chore as it could have been.

Step 3 was to have a little fun with this process. Because some of these folks don’t allow you to see their My Space blogs without permission, I could not see in all cases what pictures they were using. There was one fellow, however, who’s blog I could readily see. There about halfway down the page was my picture in spin class, illustrating an entry about how he was going to attend a spin class himself that night. By adding the picture at right to my old pictures directory, and giving it the filename of the original picture of me in spin class, he and his readers received a special greeting.

Since shutting down external link-access to my pics, I now see what pictures they were actually using in my “Failure Report”. The shot of me in spin class was getting the most hits, followed by pictures of a face on a tree, a Trek Madone bicycle, an old brochure from the 1960’s for Schwinn Varsity bicycles, a shot of the Green River Gorge, and last but certainly not least, a shot of my colon polyp that was removed during my colonoscopy back in November ‘05.

I know I could have been “direct” about this and asked the poachers to stop. I also could have stopped with Step 2, and call it a day. Step 3 had a lot of appeal, however.

I was surfing my cycling links on the web the other day, and ran across a entry on Our Obligatory Blog, a cyclist in the Los Angeles Area. This particular entry was about the new music release by Disney of pre-teens performing the music of Devo.

I read the article, then clicked the link to the CD website, curious to see if the tracks included “Whip It”. It does.

That got me thinking about how I had always been led to believe that “Whip It” was a tribute to, well, self-pleasure. Being the curious and surf-capable dude that I am, I popped up another window, and started running Google searches on “Masturbation Songs 80s Whip It” and the like (it never ceases to amaze me how many hits you can find seaching like this. I suppose now this page will be among them [gasp]). As I started to find out by delving into my search results, the song wasn’t intended to be about THAT subject at all. Go figure.

My work phone then rang upstairs, which forces a mad-dash around the corner and up the stairs to get to my work phone before the end of the 4th ring. Forgotten was what I left on screen downstairs. Needless to say, the wife was quite curious about what I had been doing when I was supposed to be working!

Regular readers (both of you) may remember that I wrote about Podcasts last October, and how I had found a few cycling related programs that were of interest. I have bad news and good news to report on this front.

First, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Bike Talk, the radio program from Davis California ended it’s programming in January. Although much of the content was specific to Davis, it was still an interesting program and well produced.

The good news is that I’ve found another program that appears to be as good, if not better by virtue of it’s more generic content: The Fredcast. A “Fred” is not a name, but rather a label for a high-end recreational cyclist that loves riding, and acquiring cycling gadgets. Well produced, and well thought out and presented topics.

Jon Winston continues to produce Bikescape a cycling related program centering on cycling life with an emphasis on his home town of San Francisco. Jon presents some interesting topics in a very relaxed style.

No new podcasts out of Sheldon Brown, so I assume he’s decided not to pursue podcasting beyond the few shows he produced last year.