Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Critters Photography

San Diego zoo

Hi! This is your favorite professional writer who hacks a weblog even though we’re not supposed to. I’m bringing you today’s copy of “Where the Blog Turns”.

When last seen our intrepid weblogger was braving the wilds of San Diego zoo. We’ll go live to Burningbird, at the zoo:

Hello? Hello, can you hear me?

The San Diego zoo is everything I’ve ever heard. Wonderful fun. And San Diego is a beautiful city, and the people are very nice. But who designed the freeway system here? Alfred E. Neuman on drugs?

Today’s funniest moment — guy walking around in a plain white t-shirt with masking tape across the back and “Ralph Lauren” printed on the tape.

Second funniest moment — trying to explain to the two older women that, no, there was only one hippo in the water and that the nose above water belonged to the same hippo that’s underwater seemingly right next to the glass.

“Yes, I know that this hippo looks close to the glass and the nose looks further away, but water can bend light and further away objects can appear close.”

“No ma’am, there really is only one hippo in the water.”

“Yes, it is neat how the zoo was able to accomplish this.”

Also, I brought you all a souvenir! A photo of flamingos. What else would someone like me bring back?

And a panda!

Warning: Cat Photo Ahead Three younger tigers were having a great time with a semi-deflated basketball. On in particular was having the best of time with his toy. Big or small, exotic or domestic — cats is cats is cats is cats.

My favorite of all the zoo animals was the Buharan Red Deer, also known as the Bactrian Wapitir. These deer were originally located in Afghanistan and surrounding area, but were hunted to extinction in the former Soviet countries at the end of communist rule. With the religious civil war in Afghanistan every last known member of this species in the wild was killed. Aside from the approximately 100 deer in captivity, this species is extinct.

I was the only person looking at the deer while everyone else was off with the tigers and the gorillas and the pandas. This quiet herd watched me as I watched them. Not sure why, but I started talking to one of the females near the fence. Instead of ignoring me or shying away, she came down to the fence and stuck her nose through it near to where I was standing. Not sure if I sounded like her normal zoo keeper or if she’s just naturally curious. Beautiful, gentle creatures.

I’ve long had a theory that we’ve been visited by members of advanced species from other planets. However, when they get here and see how easily we exterminate species and each other because of such trivial things as political or religious differences, they fly away again, in a state of total disgust.

Anyway, I liked the deer. I hope her species makes it. With that small a gene pool though, chances aren’t good.

Categories
Weblogging

Jonathon Delacour web design

Jonathon is still into CSS land, and Chris has tired of orange. Blue looks pretty good.

Foxy Gary seems busy — a new blogicon item, JOHO, and now he wants to re-design his site. Sigh. Is everyone looking to re-design their sites? Am I the lone bastion of tasteless weblogging design?

The Mighty Geek beat me out for Color Scheme Most LIkely to cause Epileptic Seizures in the anti-bloggie awards. Well, the site does have orange in it.

I like Rogi’s new Radio weblog. However, Rogi, the crowd is out to get anyone doing white on black. Your days are numbered, man.

Sharon got a new car. I understand her excitement. Cool. You’ll have to teach more 3rd graders now, Shar.

From the Treetop has a nice essay on spam. I find that she has this great common sense outlook to life that’s rather refreshing. Problems with spam? Just delete it. End of story.

Allan Moult is talking about trekking through the Northern Territory by camel. Now that is an adventure. This follows on his tale of Dizzy that promises to be a very good story, and which I hope Allan continues, soon.

I’d cover other favorites, but I can’t stand this modem any longer!

G’Nite.

-earlier-

“It’s the words. They’re all that matters”

Jonathon struggled with a new weblog design because folks were having trouble reading his content. That was a cool thing — being more concerned that people were having problems and wanting to resolve said problems than worrying about abandoning his earlier carefully crafted design.

Take a moment, stop by, and tell him you appreciate his effort — or the Orange Worman will get pissed. Very pissed. And you don’t want this because Orange is spreading over the land — damn, even the sky was orange yesterday!

I’m like a plague.

BTW, I also wanted to congratulate Karl on some very tough conversion work lately. Trying to pull sanity out of an insane mess is not easy or trivial. There’s been grumblings about the effort, but any major effort will have ups and downs. Whether it’s the re-organization of a major set of web sites, or the release of a new product such as Radio 8.0, regardless of what you do and the best intentions — someone somewhere won’t like it, and shit happens.

Was that crude? I think that was crude. I’m feeling much better today.

My connectivity sucks, to put it delicately. I’ll post when I can. Today, I’m going to go play at the San Diego zoo. I’ve never been there, and have always wanted to go. If I have time, I’ll hit Seaworld, too

JOHO will be blogless for a day or two, and I can understand where he’s coming from. When you’re used to weblogging, not blogging is the same as leaving the room at a party — you know you’re missing the interesting parts every time you go pee.

Oh that was crude, too. I’m feeling MUCH much better. Time to go feed the fishies.

Categories
Technology

P2P for Radio

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When I return from vacation land, I’m going to build a true P2P cloud for Radio. I’ve been wanting to test some functionality and needed a good user-interface vehicle. Looks like Radio is a good fit.

I need a golden gateway, but I imagine Userland would provide the server space for that.

One nice thing about long drives, you have a lot of time to think of new and interesting things. Unfortunately, this can lead to driving frantically across 6 lanes of fast and crowded California freeway because the I5 split was to the left, not the right. California drivers are very cool, and made space for my mad manuever.

Or was it just being smart?

Categories
Travel

Miss me?

I was thinking about doing a guessing game — but I like to talk too much for that 😉

I posted the original photo pf me and the US outline offline as too many photos really drag down the load of the pages. Needless to say, I’m accessing this from modem. I really hate it, too.

Photos in previous posting are from a major fire that’s hitting the area north of San Diego. On the way, I hit some of the winds that caused the fire and it was a difficult drive, made even better by the LA freeways. Among the debri in the road was a complete front fender of a car. No sign of the rest of the car. Beats hell out of me where it came from.

The fire’s smoke is so thick, it changed the color of the sunlight, which in turn, changed the color of the ocean to this burnt red color. I imagine that the Australian’s are familiar with this because of recent fires in that country, but this is first time I’ve seen smoke change the color of the ocean.

I was bad and drove where I wasn’t supposed to, to get these photos. But you only see something like this once. Only a few photos came out, but I hope I’ve captured the impact of the smoke.

Really tired tonight. Actually not feeling all that hot. Hanging in San Diego through tomorrow and then heading to the Navajo reservation.

Miss me?

Categories
Weblogging

February 7 2002

Victor’s another person that likes to play with his web statistics. Me, too.

(I also found someone snooping around my webstats today — time to start cleaning up after a run.)

Anyhoo, back on topic: Victor thought it would be cool to pop up a box to chat with folks when they’re accessing his site. Offer them help, direct them to the right page.

Would this work? We’re used to a sense of anonymity within the Internet — surfing from site to site, lurking within the wires, hiding behind nameless IP addresses. Even when sites remember us from previous visits, or remember our logins, whatever, there’s still a sense of this is a machine, not a person I’m dealing with.

Still we have the technology for Victor to have exactly what he’s asking for. Garth talks about how to do this in Radio and XML-RPC web services.

Question is should we?

I’m not bringing this up on my tech weblog, because the issue goes beyond technology.

Would you like to be notified by popup when a certain person comes to your weblog? And if you’re visiting a weblog, how would you feel if someone popped up a box and said “Hi (name). Why did you read this posting and not leave a comment?”

Interesting subjects. Interesting uses of technology. Questions to explore.

BTW — I’m watching you now. I know who you are. And I know where you’ve been, and where you’re going. Hee hee hee.

-earlier-

If you look at the Plutonian list, you can see why I can afford this trip. Boy, is this going to cost Jonathon, big time….

-earlier-

And I go down to the mail and there’s my new license plate and registration.

Kismet

-earlier-

Kick self in butt. Time for adventure, Orange Woman.

Saturday morning, in the early hours, I am finally getting in Golden Girl and heading out on the road. Final destination: Boston, with select points in between. I figure if I’m writing, I can do this just as easily from hotel rooms in the evening, and spend the days getting out in the world.

Can I afford this? Hell, no. But I’ve never let that stop me in the past, why should I let it stop me now? I am an American! I have credit cards!

My direction? Not sure. As in the movie Chocolat, I plan on following that old wind, seeing which way it goes.

So check back for installments of Where in the Weblogging World is Burningbird.

-earlier-

Note to self: Do not throw a world class hissy fit at senior editor until you make sure there’s no additional message attached to an email.

End Note to self

-earlier-

Exceptional! Art is alive and well and living on the web, thanks to Flash. Their Circular Life — an exploration in human behavior.

A subtle celebration of life.

(Thanks to Photographica for the link)

-earlier-

I am looking for a ISP that provides 1-800 dial-up access from anywhere in the United States, charged on a per hour of use basis, only. Not a monthly plan — something I can use on the road.

Anyone have any suggestions?

-earlier-

Another person with something terrific to say today, Jonathon has this charming and wonderful story about Brian, who he termed a “battler”. Reading it, I wish very much I was in Australia and could meet Brian. I also think I could learn a lot from the man.

Thanks, Jonathon — puts life into perspective.

-earlier-

I may not have anything to say, but Rogi has a short fairy tale that made me choke on my Diet Pepsi with a lemon twist.

And that’s not necessarily something you want to choke on.

Rogi, you got style.

-earlier-

I find I have absolutely nothing funny to say today. Nor anything profound. I can’t communicate with any intelligence. I can’t argue with any merit. I can’t reason with eloguence, or capture attention with sagacity.

You’re right. Today would be a good day for me to just not say anything.

-earlier-

There was some concern that since I can be bought, cheap when it comes to position within my Plutonian list, some of the weblog links would lose their positions near the top of the list.

One Australian, in particular, was concerned about the fact that the entire Australian Delegation was being pushed down as a unit. He’s rumored to have said “When we said down under, we didn’t bleedin’ mean out of sight!”

In the interests of international diplomacy, I’m issuing a special invitation, just from the Down Under Down Under gang:

The Australian Delegation cordially invites everyone to come visit their weblogs

Please visit them — your pings are the only thing standing between me and missiles from Oz.

-earlier-

Now this is good, Satirewire’s Axis of Just as Evil.

Chris, this one’s for you.

-earlier-

Couldn’t sleep and thought I would surf weblogdom. Weblog after weblog, same story: a fat cat and a web site by a pre-teen girl. Here you go.

A fat cat and a pre-teen girl who says things like “TUBCAT IZ NOT MY KITTIE!!!! I AM ONLKY A FAN”.

Put that poor cat on a diet and someone please wake me up when this particular phenomena is over.

Thank you.