Geek Habitat

I’m now limiting RSS feeds from all my sites to excerpts vs. fulltext articles due to MFA (Made For AdSense) and other scraper sites harvesting my fulltext RSS feeds and republishing my content on their spammy commercial, zero-content of their own, websites. I don’t have time to track down every URL to content they’ve harvested and submit a DMCA request to Google and elsewhere to try (often in vain) to get the site, or at least the offending page(s), taken down. Those that want to harvest will still find ways, but no sense laying out the fresh meat for the pack o’ wolves…

Apologies to those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed(s) and are now receiving truncated excerpts. Think of it like airline security–a sign of the times, and a necessary evil.

Photo Credit: NASA

Hehehe… I just pulled up the live NASA TV feed and it took a moment to figure out why an astronaut (Clayton Anderson) was wearing a long black, flowing cape. HAPPY HALLOWEEN.

Here’s Sara’s “Happy Halloween” for y’all –

“No, but those three others just swelled right up!” (Jeff Foxworthy, I think Bill Engvall… I thought that didn’t sound right!)

Yeah, for I think the fourth time since we bought the vehicle, I’ve managed to pick up a nail in a tire on my Ford Escape Hybrid. It has nothing to do with the hybrid, of course, but the irony is I drove my Corolla for 14+ years with ZERO tire punctures (save a hasty meeting with a curb in college.) I’m starting to think that my habit of driving in the “slow”/right-most lane of roadways is putting me in the “debris zone” where my larger (SUV) tires kick stuff into each other. Ah well… just getting tired of constantly changing tires and visiting the shop to patch tires.

I should have known it wasn’t a rock when the clicking as I drove (windows down–weather’s beee-a-utiful!) didn’t clear up after a trip on the highway, which would have worn down a rock or dislodged it. Instead, I have a flathead nail with a couple millimeters of its shaft sticking out of my tire, surrounded by white dust (metal shavings and concrete bits).

Justin just called the latest Garmin blog to me — it features Justin and his family’s (father, brother-in-law, nephew and brother-in-law!) participation in the Conquer the Coast ride several weeks ago. Now we just need to get them to public the picture of Sara in her Baby Bjorn “using” my Garmin Forerunner 305.

While surfing Wikipedia’s recent changes page, a nuclear testing related page caught my eye and it led me to share the following with Justin and my family via email …

Beautiful, yet sobering, images of nuclear tests performed at Bikini Atoll (part of the Pacific Proving Grounds — where more than 65 nuclear tests were performed) from 1946 to 1962.

Further Reading:
Pacific Proving Grounds
Castle_Romeo
Castle_Bravo

Pics attached (they’re not copyrighted due to U.S. gov’t creation.)

One of the black and white photo’s caption includes the following –

Surely the sailors aboard those vessels didn’t fare too well from the exposure.

The other black and white image’s caption includes –

Amazing what we’ve done and lived to tell about it, as a species, eh?

ADDED LATER: My dad responded with the following family anecdote which I wanted to share –

Sugarplums

Is it wrong that it’s not even Halloween yet and I’m looking forward to Christmas as much this year as I used to look forward to it as a young child? I need to work on Sara’s Amazon.com (and ThinkGeek!) wishlists…

Sara is doing awesome, as always; I swear she’s packing on an additional pound every week. She also seems to have hit a major growth spurt in height, such that she is stretching out of her 9 month (and a few, gasp, 9 to 12 months!) outfits. While not “vertically challenged,” neither Justin nor I are particularly tall so it’s a little surprising to us how tall/long Sara’s become.

“Dada” continues to be her primary recognizable word, although “Mamamamama” gets brought out for moments when she wants to let us know she’s really ticked off. She’s also said “Hi” twice in mimicry of us, as well as (this sounds weird, but I have witnesses!) “dead bug”. When a cat sleeps on its back with its feet in the air, we call it a “dead bug,” and Sara heard this one day at my parents’ and enunciated it perfectly… it was freaky. Thankfully, in this case, she hasn’t repeated it… can you imagine being in Target, blue haired ladies cooing over your adorable baby daughter and waiting for a flicker of acknowledgment from her, only to have her blurt out, “Dead Bug!” Hehehe… that’s my girl! It could be worse… I still haven’t successfully cleaned up my language, particularly when I’m driving. (WHY is my red small-size SUV invisible? I swear I have more people cut me off now than when I drove a little 4-door sedan, which incidentally was also red. I also never got rear-ended in the Corolla, but now we can add that to our incidents in the Escape Hybrid… thankfully, it wasn’t serious.)

Ampersands

Gotta run… I’m flying solo today (Sara’s with Grandma and Grandpa Moore) to squeeze out web application updates and tweaks. I try to do that while with Sara every day, but it’s fractional time so larger tasks, or tasks I haven’t prepared to do in advance (eg. need to dig out backups, renew licenses, research, etc.), tend not to see much progress.