I have wanted a few good alarms on my phone.  Seems like a few of these military bugle calls would be perfect.  I prefer my ring tone to be that of an old rotary phone so waking up to reveilee would be great.

Sleepy Mike

Originally uploaded by zieak

Last Saturday we rallied at Mike’s. He was sleepy.

Completely unrelated… Britney Spears has a new song out with the chorus “cold as fire, hot as ice.” She puts the you-know-what into oxymoron. Oh how she has fallen. once upon a time I wanted a 50 hour marriage to her.

A year ago i was still settling into the new swimming pool as featured on the Alaska Public Radio Network.  I was prepping to play music for Matt and Val’s wedding reception which was held at the Sons of Norway Hall.

Two years ago i was trying to get the old pool to work after it had been shut down for the summer while the school replaced the boilers.  Turns out that the three phase electricity had been connected reverse of the original connection so all of the pumps were running backward.  I kind of did a similar thing at our house this past week with the dryer connection for the apartment.  It was a good thing Tim was around to help track the problem down.  Also two years ago i was installing a computer in my car.  Yes, i have a Windows XP computer with a touch screen monitor in my dash.  It is hard to believe that i was doing that two years ago.  I don’t use it as often as i would if i lived somewhere that i drove more than 7 minutes at a time.  It is also hard to believe that i only need to make two more payments on my car before it is totally mine (to, say, cut a big hole in the dash and install a computer).  Right now i owe $646.86 on the vehicle.  Once that is paid off it will eliminate one more thing that Naomi and i have connecting us since the divorce.  We kept the car title in both of our names because i would have had to refinance in order to have her removed.  The loan was a 0% interest deal for the life of the loan and that was not available for refinancing.  The last thing we’ll have on paperwork is the timeshare deed that is in both of our names.

Three years ago i was playing music at Kito’s on a Tuesday night for a 21st birthday party.

Four years ago we were putting up the roof rafters for the gazebo at Outlook Park.

For a few reasons i hope to be living oil free within three years. Weaning myself off of oil will provide a few gallons of crude less to fight wars and deplete natural resources. It will reduce my carbon footprint and probably help with greenhouse gas reduction. It should even save me money. Here are the goals.

Change household heat to electric. Our community has hydro power for all but a few weeks of the year. I might consider buying carbon credits to balance that use. Our electricity is plentiful and cheap. By using it instead of oil i support the local economy instead of foreign oil and distant refineries. I will keep a Monitor or Toyo stove in our house and the apartment though to help with resale value and in case of some emergency that calls for a long term reduction in electric use.

Drive a vehicle using an “alternative fuel”. I am hoping to buy an electric truck next year. If i can not afford it or they are unavailable for a while i will try to convert another vehicle to run on waste vegetable oil.

Switch my gas powered tools to electric ones. This is the only step on my list that i am not looking forward to. I have a good chainsaw, a brand new pressure washer, a powerful weed eater, and a lawn mower that all suit my needs quite well. Considering that all of them use perhaps 5 gallons of gasoline a year i probably could cheat on these. It really is not practical to use an electric chainsaw. Using a robotic mower would probably convince me to make that switch to electricity. The pressure washer was selected because of the pressure – electric ones tend to be far inferior. Electric string trimmers usually are adequate though. I’ll leave this switch to last because it will be the least expensive and also have the smallest impact.

Kaleb asked what equipment i had so here’s what i have. My primary setup is a pair of Mackie pre-amped SR1350 loudspeakers with a Numark DXM01 mixing board. The board has USB inputs for better sound. Just add laptop. My second set is a more traditional setup built around a Mackie M2600 amplifier. It has a Gemini BPM 500 mixer coupled with a Gemini CD 24 dual CD player. There is a bass boost unit and a rack mounted light control panel. All are mounted in a carpeted case. The speakers are lightweight – i just can’t get to them to see their make and model quite yet.

I also have a decent collection lights and other accessories like speaker stands, a light rack, fog machine, and motorized mirror ball.

With five months of weekly data of my Alexa traffic rank things finally are looking on the bright side.  Back in April i started keeping track of my site score (even though i was well aware that the traffic rank was biased toward IE focused websites).  Here’s a graph showing those weekly ranks.  The lower the number the better – the most popular website in the world (according to web browsers with the Alexa toolbar installed) would have a rank of 1.

You can see that i just broke below the 400,000 mark.  These ranks are actually the three month average for the site.  My one week average is currently 155,913.  Eventually my chart should level out at about that point.  The big change happened on June 20th when Alexa introduced the Firefox toolbar.   If you want to see my score get even better just install that and then visit daily.  Here’s why i didn’t give Alexa much of a thought…

The blue section of this pie chart are visitors to zieak.com that use Firefox.  Green is Internet Explorer.  Orange is Safari and yellow is Opera.  Over 60% of the last 10,000 visitors use Firefox .

Today i booked tickets for the National Recreation and Park Association congress and exposition which is in Indianapolis.  Kevin plans on moving from NY to LA and asked me to do the drive with him a while ago.  We decided this would be a good trip to do it.  I fly into Washington DC on September 22nd and out of LA on October 5th.  We plan on popping by Uncle Phil and Aunt Gwen before hitting Indianapolis for the conference.  We’ll leave there and visit Cece for a day, head toward Colorado to meet up with Mike VanElzakker, and then head for Los Angeles.  2,692 miles and 13 states using the most direct route.

I have a few ideas of things to do along the trip.  One would be to set up a computer (laptop with an inverter) with webcams set up out the front and sides set to capture an image every minute or so.  Then we could set up an art display that would involve sitting in car seats in an open room with projectors broadcasting a time-lapse video of driving across country.  Or i could work on collecting information for the field guide i have wanted to write for 10 years: the roadside field guide.  It would have information collected like most field guides – by type – and then details on specifics.  So if you saw something on a power pole you would go to that section and then flip through information on transformers, spacers, and those orange balls that are sometimes attached.  Even details on the differences between creosote poles (What kind of wood is it? What is creosote? How are they put in the ground?), metal poles (What kind of paint is it?), and the large trusses made with lots of triangles.  Perhaps sections on pavement types, roadkills, trees and shrubs, mile markers, bridges, water towers, fencing… and then imagine the details… fencing: chain link, barbed wire, birds commonly seen on fence posts.  How grooves are cut into concrete for rumble strips, or what kind of adhesive is used to glue those reflectors in the middle of the lanes.

Or we could just drive and have a good time.  Maybe steal a lawn ornament and have pictures of it sent to the owner along with the stolen gnome (how cliche).

The weekend before i leave for this trip, Cena and i are zipping up to Juneau overnight.  Then the weekend after i get back from driving across country i have to bop up to Anchorage for an ARPA meeting.  I’ll be there from Friday until Sunday.  Then the weekend after that i have a SEAtrails meeting in Sitka that will have me gone from Saturday through Tuesday.   So from today i only have two weekends in Petersburg between now and Halloween.  I better start thinking about my costume.

1. Technorati Authority: 99 (down 1) rank: 53,381 (down 666)
2. Google Page Rank: 4
3. Alexa: 381,269 (improved 69,463)
   
4. Silktide Sitescore: still not working
5. Page Strength: 4
6. Feedburner subscribers: 27 (down 4 – now using 7 day average)
7. SocialMeter: 41 (broken – decreased 2)
8. BlogTopSites: 156 (decreased 37)
9. How much my blog is worth: $29,920.62
10. Blog Juice: 2.0 (improved .2)

My recent fascination with parkour led to Cena putting the movie District B13 on her Netflix cue.  It is a French film produced by Luc Besson – the director of The 5th Element.  I was not expecting the movie to actually be very good and was just hoping to see some great stunt work.  We were pleasantly surprised.  It is a violent movie but the cinematography is crisp and the action spectacular.

My Shopping Cart Bike entry in the Instructables Go Green contest sponsored by Popular Science and TreeHugger won one of 10 second prizes earning me an Instructables robot t-shirt and year subscription to Popular Science magazine.  It wasn’t the entry that i really wanted to do – a motorized compost bin with a soil tester at the bottom to help create perfect dirt.  I’ll get around to that some day.  I have most of the parts – just waiting for the right motor to come my way.