Best cat website ever!

Check out Stuff On My Cat

Bird/Backyard Cam Offline

For those that are visiting the site to view either the Bird Cam or Backyard Cam... neither is up at the moment.

I tried to rearrange the cam to get a better view of the backyard and wasn't successful before I had to head to work. Will get the Cam situated correctly this weekend.

For the record: have already received an instant messenger disappointed that the Cam wasn't on the backyard.

Great Web Site

I stumbled upon a great web site, fark.com. It's a site that mostly links to odd and amusing stories. I checked it daily.

My favorite feature is when they post a normal (relatively) photo and invite people to "enhance" it with Photoshop. This thread had me laughing so hard that tears started coming out of my eyes. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time! The original photo is at the top of the thread.

Watch out for seals with revenge on their mind!

Fireworks

Here is an interesting website: Fireworks

The link was sent to me by a good friend that has brought some "fireworks" into my life recently... but that is another story. ;)

Volcano webcam

Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam

Hopefully when Mount St. Helens erupts, it will destroy the mutant monster flies...

The Sneeze

Very interesting and "laugh out loud" (at times) blog.

The Sneeze - Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions.

This posting is a good example of "laugh out loud". Love & Methane: An Open Discussion.

My Pad from Space

Did you know that you might be able to find an image of your house from space?

Terraserver: http://terraserver.microsoft.com/default.aspx

Here is my house

Below is a slightly correct view, the little push pin isn't correct on the site. My house is the one circled with the bluish color. You can click on the image to see a bigger view of it.



UPDATE: I knew there was another site that does something similiar: GlobeXplorer - http://www.globexplorer.com

Another picture of my house (first house on the bottom from the left (next to the park). You can see my old Mustang in the driveway. This picture was taken 6/22/00. At this point, the Mustang had been parked and not moved for ~ 2 years. Very glad that I finally got rid of it this year.



In this picture, you can see the condos where the vineyards were located. The watermarks are annoying...



I had meet a friend of a friend that worked for GlobeXplorer at a little party (I think during the Christmas time frame last year). Small world...

Imam Ali Mosque from Space

Interesting site that has images of Najaf Iraq from satellite imagery.

The link: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/an-najaf-imagery.htm

One Year for Everett Family Blog

167 postings and 147 comments later... Thank you to everybody that has viewed (about 40 viewers a day), provided material, and commented on a topic now and then.

Here is the post that started the site: http://everettblog.blogspot.com/2003/07/getting-old-or-just-maturing.html

Wikipedia

Here is a good resource via the internet: Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia.

Still doing research on a question from Nephew Dale about the relationship of speed and time. The question is basically why does time slow down when speed approaches the speed of light.

Both Steve and I bumbled around trying to answer but essentially all that we could come up with was "because"... Never a good answer.

I believe it has something to do with E=mc2 but that was a weak attempt on my part. Answer simply because I know that is an equation associated with Einstein and his Relativity Theories.

I need to do some reading on Special Relativity and General Relativity to understand enough to boil it down into "lay man's" term or at least "nephew Dale" terms.

Based on very little reading, I have hope that my initial of answer is at least partially true.

Internet Archive

Amazing site: Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

I have used the "Wayback Machine" in the past to view cnn.com and msnbc.com as they appeared during 9/11/2001 (cnn.com first 9/11/01 view, the site was updated many times during that day).

Lately I have enjoyed downloading concerts such as the Grateful Dead, Bruce Hornsby, and Pat Methany to name a few.

Just found out that the Internet Archive is also archiving music as well. Listening to this Grateful Dead show right now: Grateful Dead: 1979-08-05.

Julie E. State Map

create your own visited states map or write about it on the open travel guide

Searchs for the Site

Here is the list of searches that individuals have executed to get to the Everett Family Blog:

The list is in this order: search string, search engine used, # of times used

musicmobs Google 3
pair of trousers why pair Google 1
yooper clipart Google 1
samantha everett family blog Google 1
Steve Everett michigan Google 1
windows was a car Google 1
jeff miller website Google 1
yooper blog Yahoo 1

Looks like somebody searched for Steve E. (though it might have been Steve doing the searching, just to see if the site will appear via google)

My State Map

I found this interesting web site. It allows you to create a map of that shows all the states that you visited. Feel free to send me the html code that was created if you use the site. I will put it up on the site.

The majority of the states that I have visited have been because of extensive car trips.


create your own visited states map

Christmas Cheer

Santa and his reindeer - link was forwarded to me via Sheryl. (click on the reindeer as well as on Santa)

Couple of links

I recently moved the one legged bird downstairs into the computer room. I have a webcam that I don't really used so I decided to make the bird a web star. By the way, the bird's name is simply Bird. I tend not to be overly creative in naming of pets.

BirdCam - The BirdCam should automatically update every 15 sec.

Sam's Aunt and Uncle have an elaborate Christmas light display on their property. So elaborate, that it has its own web site.

Brown's Christmas Lights

Interesting Site / Itunes Related

Interesting site that uses a file that is generated by Itunes that allows me to find possibly other music that I might enjoy.

Music Mobs - Musicmobs is a community for iTunes users that allows you to share your listening habits and discover new music.

My collection is located at http://www.musicmobs.com/user.php?userId=327.

I like the site because it will give you the total number of times I have played a particular artist. Gives a better perspective of my music taste.

Based on the total number of songs played by a particular artist, here is my top 5 artists:
1. Smashing Pumpkins - 51 songs played
2. Joe Jackson - 46 songs played
3. The Rolling Stones - 45 songs played
4. Talking Heads - 43 songs played
5. Eminem - 32 songs played

Headache Maker

Not sure what this has to do exactly with math... but I found this on the site MathWorld.

Description from the site:

In the above illustration, black dots appear to form and vanish at the intersections of the gray horizontal and vertical lines. When focusing attention on a single white dot, some gray dots nearby and some black dots a little further away also seem to appear. More black dots seem to appear as the eye is scanned across the image (as opposed to focusing on a single point). Strangely, the effect seems to be reduced, but not eliminated, when the head is cocked at a 45' angle. The effect seems to exist only at intermediate distances; if the eye is moved very close to or very far away from the figure, the phantom black dots do not appear.

The illusion is known as the scintillating grid, and was discovered by E. Lingelbach in 1994.


Link to the Grid on MathWorld.

Miniature Earth

Check out Miniature Earth (http://www.thesustainablevillage.com/miniature_earth/miniature_earth.htm).

It will give you a perspective on the world that you might enjoy.

The Site was crawled by Google

The Everett Family Blog was visited today by the "crawler" from Google.

What does that mean?

Google is one of the most widely used search engine websites on the Internet. To allow people to search for sites, Google needs to effectively visit every website at least once to find out what is on the site. That work is done by a "crawler", as in a webcrawler.

A crawler is a program that simply goes and visits a website, making sure to visit each and every link on the site, recording information about each page.

How do you know a crawler has visited the site?

The crawler on visiting a website will first try to access a file called "robots.txt". If programmers were consistent, I would have expected the crawler to look for a file that was in the motif of spiders (like the world wide web, crawler, etc)... but nope, Instead they went with to a different idea for this particular thing.

robots.txt is a file that tells the crawler what they can and can not crawl on a site. Allows a website to be able to pick and chose what they want searchable vs what they want to keep private. If robots.txt doesn't exists, then the site is telling the crawler to feel free to visit every part of the site. Everett Family Blog does not have a robot.txt file.

OK, I kinda understand that, but how do you know a crawler has visited?

That is simple. A log is kept every time somebody visits the site. I have another piece of software that does log analysis. In the log, information is stored including files that were requested that did not exist. Tonight for the first time, the file "robots.txt" was requested and it was displayed in the log analysis tool.

The last piece of the puzzle is that I can tell what domain each request is from. A domain being for example: aol.com, comcast.com covad.net, etc. Today a request was made from the domain googlebot.com.

So what did we learn today. Programmers have a strong tendency to mix metaphors... In this case the mixture was between the "spider" metaphor and "robot" metaphor. Makes all of this seem even more difficult than it actually is to people not as initimately familiar with it.

Enough computer crap for today...