Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

An entertaining accident of Google Ads “working as intended”: a John McCain campaign ad appears on the page for a YouTube video criticizing crude commentary McCain made about his wife (and the media’s complete lack of coverage of that comment). My assumption is McCain’s ad campaign with Google Ads is targeting pages that mention John McCain, which would make sense except that every once in a while ads will end up on pages that mention John McCain in a negative light.

I noticed the ad last week when dreda linked the video. I went back today and somewhat unsurprisingly… it’s still there. Google Ads is useful and pervasive, but there’s a reason a lot of big advertisers don’t want to take the chance of advertising on pages containing "user-generated content"…

So kudos to the McCain campaign for trying to reach out to the small donors one might find randomly on the Internet… but a bonk in the head for not doing it quite right. It did make me giggle a lot, so thanks guys. Oh, and when I was done giggling, I marveled at how some people stay employed.

YouTube Video pictured above - it is not safe for work and contains offensive language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euu_DMhsXQo

As a random coda to this story, this morning I received a junk IM from a known spam source that simply said, “John McCain is aware of the Internet!”

tags: ad placement, advertising, campaign ads, election 2008, google ads, internet ads, john mccain, presidential candidates, youtube

Join Carbonrally with Monster Cat!
That’s right, Monster Cat has a Carbonrally team and you can join!

Carbonrally.com is a nifty little site that raises awareness for just how easy it is to reduce your environmental impact. You sign up, join a team (optional but Monster Cat would love to have you), take on challenges and watch your CO2 savings grow! It’s a fun toy! Several of the challenges take very little effort and they are taking suggestions for new challenges. I’m not sure their math is perfect (in terms of CO2 impact), but it’s the thought that counts and the challenges do make a difference.

Kick the Catalogs
My favorite recent challenge is the Kick the Catalogs Challenge. I signed up for Catalog Choice and started going through the pile of catalogs that came in while I was in Chicago. I do like catalogs - they’re great for getting ideas and finding interesting little things - but we get so many at the house it’s not even funny. I think our postman does weight training to prep for the holiday season. Catalog Choice will, hopefully, get me off the mailing lists for all the catalogs I don’t really read or want or ended up getting duplicates of. Oh, and the recycling bin will be a little less over-stuffed in the future!

So join up if you’re interested! Monster Cat is here to lead us to a greener planet!

tags: , carbonrally, catalog choice, environmentalism, green, kick the catalogs, monster cat, save the planet, save the world, tennyson

I finally hit the halfway point in my writing for Nanowrimo. This is farther than I’ve ever gotten before! YAY!

However, I’m behind. I’m also starting to not like the plot and how it’s developing, or not developing as the case may be. I didn’t get a lot of writing done today but I did do some outlining in the hopes that it will help me fly through the rest of the week. My original plan had me not writing on Thanksgiving but I think I’m going to try to write that day anyway in the interest of actually finishing. It’s definitely an interesting and productive experience - I’ve learned a lot having gotten this far finally, despite no longer liking my own book. Hopefully that will change by the end of the week so I can finish this with a bang!

tags: nanowrimo, writing

Sometimes I get up in the morning and the cats ignore me. They’re no where to be found and I’m left in peace to do my pre-coffee routine.

This is not one of those mornings. One of them followed me to the bathroom. Both of them have been sitting and staring at me as I do the pre-coffee e-mail check. Evil, in particular, has a mean stare perfected over the eons to be quite effective on humans.

I’m guessing the food bowls are empty. I’m going to go try to negotiate the stairs without tripping over two eager fat cats who are rushing to the kitchen to be fed.

tags: cats

I just got off the phone with the Philadelphia Parking Authority people. I received a notice that I hadn’t paid a ticket I got for an expired inspection except I never got that ticket.

We’ll ignore the fact that my inspection is indeed expired at this moment (it expired after the ticket was issued though and my car is sleeping over at the mechanic’s tonight to get a sticker). We’ll also ignore the fact that I often make a habit of going a month or two before re-inspecting my car because I either flake or get lazy. We can even ignore the fact that in the past I have indeed received the exact same citation. I just don’t go into Philly anymore and I have barely driven my car since the knock sensor issue was identified in July.

I checked the date on the ticket against my calendars and blog, and at the time the ticket was issued I was posting the notice about the Fop getting an LJ account… so… really totally not me. (Hey, I wouldn’t put it past me to completely forget a trip into the city on an errand or something.)

Now, for those of you who have never experienced the joys of Philadelphia, the Parking Authority has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to deal with and impossible to resolve issues with unless you go down there in person… and even in person, it is hard to resolve issues to your satisfaction. A good tactic is to bring a bottle of pain killers, preferably prescription-strength. Is a $61 ticket wondering worth my time to try to fix it or should I just pay it?

I decided to try calling the “pay by phone” number to see if I could get to a real person. The auto-answer menu was either deliberately designed to confuse the caller or just poorly setup. The 2nd level of the menu sounded something like this:

Press 1 … to pay a ticket by phone … press 2 … to get the status of a ticket … to [do something else] press 3 … press 4 … to dispute a ticket … press 5.

Guess what I pressed? 5. And it worked.

After a few moments, I was talking to a real person. A nice person who was able to look up the ticket number and listened to my confusion about getting a ticket when I was neither in the city nor out of inspection. Then she was able pull up a scan of the original ticket to determine that the license plate number was a typo. Well, duh, of course it was a typo but it’s always nice when people agree with me on that kind of thing. She updated the ticket, gave me a confirmation number, and the whole call took less than 10 minutes. I am amazed. I honestly expected to have to provide proof, in person, during business hours (which would have taken me 2-3+ hours round trip and displaced my workday). Hurray for being able to fix typos over the phone!

In other car news, the little Green Hornet is getting all its bits fixed at the new mechanic today and tomorrow. See, the Hornet started to roar a couple weeks ago… now I know that can mean the catalytic converter is dead. The new mechanic gave me reasonable estimates for both exhaust work and the knock sensor, less than 2 car payments if I were to buy a new car right now. Then I looked at the blue book value of the car again. At this point I might as well drive it at least another winter. I’m an expert procrastinator. Besides, Subaru doesn’t have any greens in its color options for 2008.

You know why replacing a catalytic converter is so expensive? At least in part because platinum is used as a catalyst to convert carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide. This is what I learned from NPR and the Nobel Prize committee today.

tags: car, catalytic converter, parking, parking tickets, philadelphia parking authority, state inspection

I have a lot of plants, many of them trees of various sizes (including the big, 6 foot Norfolk Pine my mother rescued from my piano teacher when it was a wee tree 20+ years ago). When I lived in the partially submerged condo, indoor gardening was a challenge. I used painter’s lamps with grow bulbs to keep my plants happy. Now that we have a fabulous sun porch, I have tried not to go too wild with plants. Really. Well, at least until this year’s flower show when I came home with a bunch of small trees and plants. (As always, you can click on the thumbnails of the photos below to get the bigger versions.)

Last month one of my plants did something I didn’t know it could do: it blossomed! darwins_fox turned me on to the awesome purple passion vine and gave me a cutting from her plant way back when. The vine was a little more finicky than my plants at the time, so it didn’t survive. A couple years ago when Sarah and Don came down to Philly, I bought a new little purple passion vine in a 3″ pot. Like almost everything living on my porch, it has flourished and grown and is now living in a much bigger pot and is quite a plant. (And I learned through trial and error that this plant really likes good drainage for its pot.) And then… there were flowers. They’re bizarre little flowers - just a tuft of yellow on a long bud until it goes to seed in a big puff of white wispies. Very cool.

In other indoor gardening news and in the category statements that sound like euphemisms but really aren’t:
My pomegranate tree has a large fruit. (It’s really a dwarf pomegranate tree.)
My kumquat is in bloom.

Oh and both my crown of thrones plants are still flowering. The older one has been flowering non-stop for 3.5 years.

As always, I have potting and repotting to do. It’s time to start saturating the plants with water more often than usual so that they’re less picky about watering while we’re at Pennsic. I need to pick up more seed for kitty grass too.

tags: blossoms, dwarf pomegranate tree, flowers, gardening, houseplants, indoor gardening, kumquat, kumquat tree, plants, pomegranate, purple passion vine

The dogwoods have been blooming a while now. This is from the tree in my backyard. I suspect the snow from the nor’easter damaged most of the blossoms. All the trees seem to have petals tipped with a bit of brown. I love dogwoods - they have such a simple, uncrowded elegance to their blossoms.

Breakfast came late this morning due to the boys. The Fop needed a ride to the train station first thing this morning which meant making sure he got up and out the door with minimal fuss then taking him in to 30th Street Station. I originally intended to get up and have breakfast but opted to try to sleep a little more instead. Why? Because some cat was howling alllll night. As you can tell from his photo, he’s thrilled.

This whole morning would have been easier if Tennyson had let us sleep. He’s not a happy kitty. He had surgery on his foot to remove a toe yesterday. A growth that had been removed in December came back, so removal of the toe was the best option unfortunately. One foot is all bandaged up and he’s wearing an Elizabethan collar around his head. (Poor little conehead!) This makes for one very unhappy cat and he’s certainly not hesitant to let us know that. Overnight I was up at 3:30 and 6:30 to comfort the poor little thing since he was yowling rather loudly. He’s truly pathetic. He quieted down around 7 a.m. I got up at 8 to find him “resting” in the litter box. So sad yet so funny, especially since he’s so big he took up most of the box and had knocked the top lip askew. Apparently propping his head up on the edge was comfy so I made him a better bed out of a box in my office. (He’s currently on the floor outside the box propped up on it… he lounges like nobody’s business!)

From observing him today, I think the collar is the worst part. He’s tentative on his foot, but it doesn’t seem to be causing him too much pain. I got him to eat and drink a bit. He’s not enthusiastic about the stairs so I will probably end up setting up food and water upstairs for the week. We’ve already dumped 2 cups of water on my office rug. Once he’d had a little to drink he perked right up and demanded attention, hopped in and out of my lap and wandered about knocking things off my desk. He’s calmer today than yesterday as well. The vet’s office says he’ll figure out how to eat and drink and get used to the collar. I hope so because I feel so bad for giggling when he misjudges a corner and ends up coming to a sudden full-halt when the collar gets caught on something. I’m also worried that he’s not getting enough water.

Hopefully he’ll let me sleep tonight. I need to sleep off some of the intense guilt I’m feeling for … putting a photo of him in the collar on my blog… among other things.

tags: cat, dogwoods, elizabethan collar, flowers, mornings, silly, spring, surgery, tennyson

Academy Awards
I didn’t actually watch the Oscars last night but I did catch Scorsese’s acceptance in Italian… which induced very entertaining dreams in Italian. I’m not even sure which award he was accepting at that point. This morning I browsed the results over at CNN. I loved The Departed so I’m delighted it took so many awards. Pan’s Labyrinth also deserved all the awards it got and more. Little Miss Sunshine, a film I never would have seen if it hadn’t been for slyppi, had a good showing too. I think Abigail Breslin should have been awarded the best supporting actress Oscar, having only heard about Jennifer Hudson’s performance in Dreamgirls (which was described to me as amazing except when she wasn’t talking or singing - apparently she showed no ability to react). Breslin was just amazing in every way.

Apple and Cisco and iPhones! Oh my!
Last week it was announced that Apple and Cisco will share the iPhone name. All lawsuits connected to the iPhone name dispute have been dismissed and both companies are quietly going about their business. Very quietly… like there aren’t any exciting details leaking out about the deal beyond, “Under the deal, they will also work together in the areas of security, consumer and business communications.” (BBC News) This agreement was just in time for them to debut the iPhone commercial during the Acadamy Awards though no actual product name is mentioned. It’s a cute commercial and says absolutely nothing about the product except that it’s coming in June. The montage of movie clips of famous actors and actresses answering phones is fun, with a final “Hello” harkening back to the original Mac commercial just in case you missed the implication of all those other hellos.

Weekend and SNOW!
It snowed here last night! Another couple of inches fell to cover over the greening areas of the lawn. Unfortunately this week is likely to be too warm for the snow to stick around long. It actually started snowing mid-afternoon sometime. I was driving back from visiting lisaf in NY. As soon as I crossed into PA the sleet started. Within 10 miles it had turned to snow. By the time I got home it was seriously snowing!

The weekend was good. We wore ourselves out romping around NYC Saturday. I didn’t spend nearly as much money as I feared I might. LUSH and Crumpler were my weaknesses, but I knew that going in. I did get a new camera bag (which was the whole pretense of going to Crumpler in the first place) but I also got an awesome green handbag too. Not that I carry handbags, but this one is GREEN! LUSH was… an adventure in impulse shopping. We ate good food, drank good wine then spent the evening being lazy (which was good since we were whole-heartedly exhausted). Sunday involved really tasty breakfast food and driving home (which was tiring before I hit exciting driving conditions).

tags: academy awards, apple, cisco, iphone, movies, nyc, oscars, snow, travel, weekend

Now I’ve actually watched the keynote (The crib notes were pretty amazing! But I stayed up way too late watching most of the Quicktime version of it last night.)

AppleTV

Apple also announced AppleTV yesterday. It’s a pretty cool little box at a sweet price point! AppleTV brings the Mac to the living room allowing you to view everything you can view in iTunes right on your television. Movies, music, tv shows, podcasts, album covers… if you can enjoy it in iTunes, AppleTV allows you to enjoy it on your television. It has all the appropriate audio and video ports to connect to HD televisions. You’ll also find USB and Ethernet ports on the back and wireless (802.11n) built in. AppleTV will synch with one Mac quite happily. Just like an iPod, you can select what actually is moved over to the AppleTV from your computer (Mac or PC running iTunes). But that’s not all! It will also stream from another 5 computers. (I believe you can only have 5 computers authorized to connect at a given time rather than having a lifetime cap of 5. When you need to stream from the 6th computer, I expect you’d be able to de-authorize one of the other computers.)

The price is right: $299. And if that USB port can be used to connect additional storage, the 40gb hard drive becomes less prohibitive. It starts shipping in February and you can order it now over at the Apple Store.

AppleTV is a cool toy. I personally don’t watch much on my television (well, on the Fop’s television because I don’t really want to claim ownership to that monstrosity) so AppleTV isn’t very valuable to me personally. I can see how the Fop would have use for it more. If we had one, I would load music onto it for parties and when I’m kicking around the first floor as well as play with looking at my zoo photographs on the big screen. (Yes, I’m a little vain that way.) And maybe I’ll get into watching more video in iTunes over the next year…

And then, the iPhone demo…

I want the iPhone even more now. A lot more. I had full-on fangirl moments while watching the iPhone demo. The most amazing part is not the rich browser, the full e-mail client, the iPod functionality or the widgets. The most amazing, astound, revolutionary part is the interface itself. Apple took out over 200 patents during the development of this phone. Go Apple.

Remember yesterday I said that I didn’t want to have to remember the complex key combo to make my smart phone convert into a waffle iron? I’m pretty sure the iPhone can make waffles with fewer than 3 clicks of buttons labeled with intuitive icons.

The iPhone interface is just… smart.

Navigation is so incredibly simple. Touch the buttons, scroll up and down with a quick drag of the finger, and if you get lost (or just tired of playing with the Weather widget) there’s a handy-dandy Home button to take you back to the main screen. Apple has built in a cool little elastic band effect. If you drag your finger up and off the touch-screen (i.e. run over the top margin of the touch-screen) while browsing, whatever is in the window (songs, messages in your inbox, a Google map) keeps scrolling as if you gave the list momentum with your finger drag. It’s Very Cool.

The zoom feature - it’s a 3.5 inch screen which is big but still quite tiny. If you’re surfing a complete web page (the NYT was the example), you can double-tap the screen to zoom in on any point. You can also use a “pinch” move (opening or closing your fingers against the touch-screen). This multi-touch functionality is at least one of the patents.

The iPhone is an Apple product and therefore the switch between portrait and landscape display is beautiful and automatic when you turn the phone. Go, go, go accelerometer! Other terribly smart things the iPhone does include: pausing your music when you get a call, switching off your speaker when your bring the phone to your ear, and sensing the ambient light so it can adjust the screen brightness appropriately to your environment. Pretty cool stuff though not individually revolutionary.

Cover Flow

Cover Flow is quite possibly the coolest new feature of the iPhone. Cover Flow sounds like a fairly mundane feature and for some reason makes me think of surfboards. The demo on the Apple web site doesn’t do it justice. When you’re in landscape mode you can go into Cover Flow and scroll through the cover art of all your music. Drag your finger to move left or right, click a cover to view it (the album and artist info appears below the image quite helpfully), click again to go into the track list, keep clicking to select and play a song. It’s beautiful (and somewhat mesmerizing) and the closest thing to 3-dimensional data interaction I’ve seen on a 2-dimensional screen on a consumer electronic. As well as surfboards, this feature reminds me very much of descriptions of interacting with data in science fiction. If only the covers were flowing holographically in space for us to manipulate with our hands instead of just our fingers on this amazing little device…

A new revolution, thanks Steve!

Steve Jobs spent over an hour of the keynote just on the iPhone demo. I think I could have watched him play with the iPhone for another hour. It’s an incredibly device. Just incredible. I was ready to buy an iPhone, before touching one myself, just a few minutes into the demo. What did it? It runs OS X. OS X. On. A. Phone.

What makes this phone revolutionary is the innovation and the whole package. This touch-screen is amazing. Taking the keypad off the phone is almost as cool as taking the floppy drive out of the computer. This is not just an iPod+Phone device. It’s a tiny little Mac for your pocket that happens to also make phone calls.

tags: apple, appletv, iphone, macworld, os x, steve jobs, technology