Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I see that my “I hate Texas” page is up to #4 in a Google search now. It’s been almost six months since I moved our site to it’s present domain, and I guess that a lot of the sites that archive the Tattoo FAQ have now archived the new versions with my new sig that has a link to our new site. So our page rank is climbing again. Heh. It’s amusing, if nothing else.

Something amusing. Last summer, I posed for some pictures for a photographer for “Skin and Ink” magazine. And now I see that they used two of them in the latest issue. I’m taking up almost a whole page. It’s kind of weird and novel.

Today’s ride was down to Whittier Narrows and back. It was cloudy, but not raining, so conditions were adequate. We went east through Sierra Madre and then straight south on Santa Anita all the way down past the 60 freeway. Along the way, we felt a few little sprinkles, but actual rain never quite happened.

One road we went on was marked closed, apparently due to flooding during the recent rains. It was passable, and it was a nice treat to have the road to ourselves for a bit.

After we passed the Whittier Narrows dam, we turned west and then north, heading back through Montebello and into Monterey Park. There were a few small hills there, but nothing spectacular.

In Alhambra, we saw a car with a license plate frame that said “Nothing’s Fucked”. I’m not sure if that is an expression of optimism or what, but we all thought it was funny. We also got to see how to write “Washington Mutual Bank” in Chinese, in case anyone was wondering.

Heading north through San Marino, we passed Lacy Park and then climbed up the scarp of the Raymond Fault. Then we continued on into Pasadena, where we stopped at Noah’s Bagels on South Lake. That was where we met the little white dog who was sitting outside waiting while his owner got coffee. He was very friendly.

From there, we went south again and went through San Marino some more before heading home.

39 miles.

cycling

I’ve been playing around a bit with bikemetro.com. This site will do route mapping like Mapquest, but for bikes. And they include information about hills and such.

So I decided to look up Fargo St. They say it’s 0.13 miles and 151 vertical feet. Then I looked up Nolden St in Eagle Rock. This is the ridiculously steep hill that I like to ride up. I figure it’s good practice for Fargo St. They say it’s 0.11 miles and 134 feet up. So they are pretty comparable.

Just for comparison, I went to www.topozone.com to get the maps for both places. Looking at the contours on the map for Fargo St and the map for Nolden St indicates agreement with the bikemetro elevation data.

But we know what’s really important here: It’s fun to ride up ridiculous hills.

cycling

We got another 166 spam trackbacks last night. This is getting mightily annoying.

Lucinda wants to have cupcakes for her birthday party at school next month, so Mommy decided to do a test run today. They made cupcakes baked in ice cream cones. They were frosted with a marshmallow cream frosting that turned out to be a nightmare to work with. But the final result was still nice.

We went to see Julia Sweeney’s show “Letting Go of God” back in December, and we liked it so much that we decided to see it again. So we called our friends who are always interested in L.A. culture and asked them if they wanted to join us. So we all met in West Hollywood for lunch at the French Quarter for lunch and then headed over to the show. Even though it was Super Bowl Sunday, the theater was packed. The show was just as good the second time around, and we all enjoyed it tremendously.

Afterward, we all headed over to the Hollywood Forever cemetery so our friends could see the statue of Johnny Ramone.

I went riding today, since we’re going to be busy tomorrow. Since I’d heard about the new statue of Johnny Ramone at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, I thought I’d go over and have a look.

I took the fairly standard route through Eagle Rock to get there, pausing only briefly to ride up and over the ridiculously steep hill. I figure it’s good practice for Fargo Street next month.

When I got into Hollywood, I went straight down Hollywood Blvd. I passed Cheetah’s, which Cathy and I have been to and enjoyed. Then it was on into Thai Town, where I saw a Thai food place with a big hot dog on the roof. What’s up with that?

Then I turned south on Bronson and got to the cemetery. The girl at the information booth gave me directions to Johnny’s statue. It’s a nice setting. And they had a sign up telling us not to disturb the goose, since he is guarding his nest nearby.

After leaving the cemetery, I went west a bit into West Hollywood to visit Guitar Center and the Rock Walk, since the Ramones are there.

Next up was the big hill. I went back east through Hollywood to Beachwood Dr, which is the street up to the Hollywoodland neighborhood, right below the Sign. The ride up Beachwood wasn’t bad. They don’t want people to be climbing up to the sign, so they put up signs all over saying “No access to the Hollywood sign”. But I think people do it anyway.

When I was just below the sign, it was time to turn. I went up Belden St, which goes up a pretty scary hill up the side of Beachwood Canyon. Then when I got to the top, I took a wrong turn. I rode for a while down into another canyon before I realized that I’d made a mistake. At that point, I had to turn around and climb back up that big hill. Near the top, I asked some people who were walking their dog. They said, “just keep going on this street until you pass the castle, then take every left turn until you get to the dog park.” Simple enough. I rode a bit until I came to the house that looked like a castle, then I had to climb some more to reach the top of the ridge. Then it was screaming downhill past the dog park, and I was at the shores of Lake Hollywood. I followed the road around the lake and then up and over one more hill and then down into Burbank.

By this time, it was getting late, since that wrong turn had eaten up a lot of time. So I took the most direct route home, going straight across Glendale and Eagle Rock and then back into Pasadena.

50 miles.

Technorati tags: cycling

Last night we got another 57 spam trackbacks. This is pretty annoying, but I was still able to delete them easily from the command line.

In other news, I asked phpwebhosting to move us to another server, since the server we were on was very slow. I know that they don’t have an easy job, administering shared servers that are used by all sorts of different sites. I’m very fortunate that the web servers I administer at my job are all dedicated to a single site. It’s got to be difficult to deal with trying to please a lot of users all at the same time. Anyway, they finally moved us last night, so the site is a bit snappier today.

We haven’t had any comment spam since I implemented my home-made CAPTCHA some time ago. But last night we got hit by TrackBack spam. 293 separate spam trackbacks. Sheesh. So I went in and deleted them by hand in MySQL:

mysql> delete from wp_comments where comment_content like ‘%poker%’;

Then I implemented the ‘moderate-trackbacks’ plugin from dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/moderate-trackbacks

If it wasn’t so annoying, it would be funny…