I figured out where we are camping...

jI think I figured out the wacky campsight map at Assateague. If you follow this link

Map of Assateague State Park

Then click on the circle with the 'I' , we can then see our campsite, 102.

So we are loop 'I' not '1'.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Harry Potter theme park planned

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Harry Potter theme park planned

Camping on Assateague Island...

"Here’s a wimp warning — there is absolutely no shade on the island. The sun can be brutal during the summer, especially when reflected off the water and white sand..."

Camping on Assateague Island, Go World Travel Online Magazine

Just looking forward to our little vacation here. Bummer though it looks like the Oceanside camp sites do not have ground fire pits...

SPC » newbies

I Found a new Google tool bar button that when clicked will give you a list of all web pages that link to the page you are looking at.

Well I did it for my blog and found this one linked to me.

SPC » newbies

I didn't know what it was at first, now i remember I was doing something called self portrait Thursdays or something like that.

And on this page http://selfportraitchallenge.net/2005/09/page/2/ You can see that I was the 57th person to join (Sarah got in before me, although the link up there does not point to here page anymore)

612 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94105 - Google Maps

This is pretty cool. You can now zoom down to street level in some cities on Google maps. not only that but you can then creep along block by block and look around like you were standing there.

612 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94105 - Google Maps

Got my extra sections in place...

As you can see I now have three columns and even went back and added the bar under the name and address. All of the new sections work with Bloggers layout editor too.

Geocaching on May 26th...

We went with Friends Nick and Leslie. I had 4 caches planned out, two in Harleysville and 2 closer to the Indian Valley Library (we had to drop off some books).

Since it was their first time out GeoCaching, I had the first two relatively close together as to give some quick and easy satisfaction and then the 3rd if they wanted more and the 4th if we were making good time and wanted a challenge (it was a micro-cache, meaning it is the size of a film canister.)

1. Explorers Cache :: Blah, we had three GPS's between us and the parking coordinates seemed to put us a half mile from the cache. We ended up driving around until we got closer and found a somewhat close parking lot. The cache coordinates seemed to put it into somebodies garage... hmmm. Nick had been a surveyor and was able to check and convert all of the styles of coordinates we had (It turns out that different GPS's can take different styles of coordinates). They were all right... we gave up on this one. i checked the caches log later and people did not seem to have a problem finding it. We will have to go back and try again.

2. pack 137 cache :: ugh... There is a fair in town and all of the roads are blocked or say no parking. i think the cache is probably very close to the fair and we would have had to park very far away or pay to park, No thanks... we pass on this one too.

3. Chestnut Grove cache :: This one is a car trading themed cache (they only want car stuff to be in the cache) We find this one pretty easy, Sarah gets the find.

4. We called it quits after the last one so we will have to go back for the micro cache another day.

I hope this doesn't turn them of to GeoCaching. We sometimes do not find a cache but not because of wonky GPS's or lack of parking.

Google Trends: May 28, 2007

Google trends is neat. it shows what ever the most searched for things are through out the day.

Being that it is memorial day and we are not busy at all, we decided to see if we could get something up on the charts. Well we did. we choose cai (the company we work for). We just did a search and kept clicking search. I would say we clicked less than 200 times. Anyway a couple hours later cai shows up at #97, :o)

So now we picked google sucks, just to pick something. We should have picked like "lets be number one". So the two of us clicked search for about 3 minutes straight. lets see what happens.

Google Trends: May 28, 2007

TheForce.Net - Latest News - "'Family Guy' meets 'Star Wars'"

TheForce.Net - Latest News - "'Family Guy' meets 'Star Wars'"

Lucas hints at new Star Wars film - Oh Please, oh please, OH PLEASE!!!

Lucas hints at new Star Wars film - New Zealand's source for entertainment news, gossip & music, movie & book reviews on Stuff.co.nz

Angelina Jolie's Geocache Tattoo « Google Sightseeing

This is pretty geeky cool. She tattooed the coordinates of her adopted and natural children's birth places on her arm!

Huh, I didn't realize that Angelina was so nerdy. I wonder how she came up with this idea...Angelina Jolie's Geocache Tattoo « Google Sightseeing

Google Talk Not displaying the Current Music Track as Status message: « My Collection

Found an easy fix for a small issue I had with WMP not telling Gtalk what I was listening to...Google Talk Not displaying the Current Music Track as Status message: « My Collection

Bump in the right direction...

I had a classed get canceled out from under me again at Delval. The Continueing Ed person said i might be able to take on of the classes online. Hmmm... well I looked at the available courses online and WOW, there are allot that I can take. So this term and any term i can swing it i will be taking all of my classes online.

I have English Lit. which, I am going to be able to scoot by with out a book as the stories we will be reading are all public domain and the questions we have to answer are in the online class room. I did have to buy access to the Elementary Functions class. it was only $52 compared to the $100 or so if I had to buy the book.

The math site is a bit complicated and takes extra plug ins for Internet Explorer (it doesn't work with Firefox) but the English Lit site has a setting for PDAs so I can sit outside of my house and work on my iPAQ :o)

Three column success...

Ah ha! With help from flysheep's show I was able to get the three columns to work...

The Cure RENNES (France) 5 OCT. 1981 LIVE !!!

>
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1vwzQQ-QBAQ

Messing with the layout...

You might be able to see that I am starting to tweak the layout here. So stuff might be broken at times.

I think i found my Social Networking site of choice... del.icio.us

del.icio.us, is more my kind of social networking 'thing'. MySpace, Orkut, and countless others are more for people who like to chat and such. They take up a ton of time. myspace was kind of neat because you can add 'famous' people to your friends and have their cool little icon show up on your list. But, I am not chatty. The site, like I said, takes to much time with little return of anything of use, for me. Kinda cool to look up old friends but then it stops. MySpace will be vacant very soon.

Kyle introduced me to del.icio.us.com. Now this i can use. It is basicly a site to keep your favorites at. When you add a page to your favorites you get to tag it with key words and you can see what others have tagged it with. Back at your home page for del.icio.us you can see how many other people have tagged sites that you have tagged and add people to your network and such. You can then add a button to your browser to access your favorites and sort and search them. Cool for me. It is something useful, get a bit of the 'Friends' thing and it tweaks the little bit of geek in me. I like my blog, I can add stuff here and there and have fun with it. Look at the bottom of this page for my 'cloud' of tags.
Bye

Amazon Stuff...

I put some code in that is supposed to pick up on key words and link to their site. Like if you want Harry Potter, you should be able to click the name and have a little ad pop-up. If you buy the book from my site I would get a little bit of credit. So lets see if it works.

Ahh.. now its working. Just look for links in light green with dotted lines... cool. Not that I think i am going to make money, I just wanted to see it work.

Star Wars

The Cure

This happened at work...

... not to me obviously.

Why MySpace...

... Why (now) am I drawn to this hard-on-the-visual-senses social networking mess? I tried to avoid it. I have ad an account for awhile now just to check out a person's space here and there. I never looked there to much. Most sites are very hard to look at and hard to listen to and well hard to take in altogether.

Wendy (damn you!) showed Sarah how to search for people from school... That's what started me looking just to see who I could find... and then it started. I'll just add that person and this person to my friends list to see if they would respond or remeber me. Then I had to look at the horrible default profile and I think that is when it clicked that if I was going to have a space in MySpace I would have to dress it up a bit and figure out what the deal is.

So I borrowed some layout code and will look at it to see what needs to be done to make it mine. The crazy thing is how many people are doing MySpace and how horrible the UI is. My god! Man, the editing pages and "home" page is choked full of adds and very hard to work with. They don't give you a blank page that you can wipe clean. From what I can tell so far you have to use a hacked up CSS code to hide all of the pre-filled sections and even that code you have to put into the "About field" or one of the others. Weird stuff man...

It looks to be a decent place for bands and other pop culture type things to promote themselves though. In my smattering of real people I have also befriended Mike Vallely and They Might Be Giants. I am still waiting on the Cure and Robert Smith... hmm lets see... Grr... cant get to MySpace from work... ahh, yea. I don't really care... I'll have to have Sarah check my site and see if I get new friends and give me an update on it :/

Anyway, I guess, check out Never A Dull Moment on MySpace .You will have to search for me since the firewall at work will not let Social networking sites filter through. (and make me your friend)

I'll add a link when I am at home.

I still want to check out Google's Orkut.

Disintigration...

Doing my none-on the phone duties here at work today and listening to The CURE. In the book I am reading, the Cure are in between Pornography and The Top. At this time they put out a bunch of singles; Love Cats, The Walk, Lets Go to Bed and some others as they transition to a more pop-ish band. Anyway I just wanted to say that when ever I hear a song from Disintegration it really hits me how great that album was... Give 'Last Dance' a listen if you have it...

3hive - sharing the sharing

I've wanted to look for sites that have new free music available. This is one that I just came across. I haven't had time to look at it in length but I will... 3hive - sharing the sharing

The car story continues...

So i think when we left off in this post'Car fun, car fun, yhea, yhea, yhea...' with "Up next, pick up the Taurus, get the Jetta and hope the Stanza is as good as it feels."

So... Yhea the Stanza is holding up fine the clutch is good and it seems like a nice reliable car again.

The Taurus, yea... well I went to pick it up that night and it still felt like the power steering was out and such. Stupidly i drove it off all the time thinking "nobody is going to buy this car..." i was just getting angry as I went along that I even agreed to take it back. As we got to Main Street in Lansdale the engine light came on and the power started to decrease in the car. I was stopped at a light and again had to make a quick decision about how to handle a dying car while driving it... I started moving forward and the power drained out. I had enough momentum to get around the corner and then I had to open the door and push with one foot... I managed to get it into a side street and parked safely by the curb... Very angry at this point I open the hood and see the serpentine belt sitting in the engine instead of around the pulley things... Sarah is right behind me in the Stanza so we race back to the AAMCO to take care of things. I am done with the Taurus so i get the guy to call a tow truck for it. i also complain a bit and he agrees to do some future work for free. So, we truck back to the Taurus to unload all of our stuff. I try to get the serpentine cable off but the car just wants to keep it. So long taurus. That car was 600 bucks and wasn't not expected to last long but until this day it was pretty much rock solid for the 5 years or so that we had it...

So moving on we get the Jetta. Sarah and get used to the aging clutch and the car is a fun car to drive. Its got the sun roof and the cd player and once you get used to the clutch, it can still get going pretty quickly. Then the engine light started coming on and now a week ago the OIL light started blinking and Buzzing at 2200 RPM. In our fleet of cars we did have a 80 something or 90 jetta that had the same issue. It turned out to be a bad sensor that I was able to replace... I wonder if that is blogged somewhere... I tested out these sensors and could tell if they were bad plus I had put to much oil in and hadn't a chance to drain some of it. Anyway we will be taking that in for the freebie promised by AAMCO. hopefully its not in need of something since our money again is nil.

But what will we do if we have to ground the Jetta? Go back to one car? NO! We have added another car to our fleet. We got a call last week from one of Sarah's friends that her husband was going to give there car away since they were getting another from her Mom... they thought of us first for some reason. So Monday we added a 1996 Plymouth Breeze. Excellent condition with the possibility of a slight oil leak. Its a no frills car but probably the nicest one we have had yet. For now it will sit until we figure out what the Jetta is going to do. Then we may get the Breeze ready to go or see what we can do to just have it with out insurance and registration or something... we will see.

So we end this leg of the story. Jetta going to the shop, Stanza holding steady, and a Breeze in the wings ( Breeze in the wings.... ugh)