Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today we went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the science museum. This is an exhibit of real bodies, preserved with plastic and on display for us to see in gory detail. It was really quite interesting. Cathy’s friend Cathy from Texas came here for the weekend to see it, and she liked it a lot. So overall, it was an interesting adventure.

A while back, I had the number one match in Google for the phrase “I hate Texas”. That was before I moved our web site to the new domain name. After the move, Google crawled us again, but that page had fallen to #73. But now that we’ve been on our new domain name for over four months, it’s climbing again. Today I see that my page is now up to number 34 in a search for “I hate Texas“. Things are looking up.

As I noted a while back, our house is falling apart. We managed to make it through the torrential rains without too much leakage, and today the roofing guy came out to fix the roof. He put a new roof on the laundry room and put a new crown on top of the house. But when he came down, he said we should have a look at our chimney, as it appears to be falling apart. I went up and took some pictures of the cracks in it. Most likely, they were caused by earthquakes, as our house has experienced several significant earthquakes nearby over the years.

Anyway, I guess we will have to decide if we want to do something about this.

I saw that Ryan at News to Hughes joined up with Google Adsense recently. I serve about four times the traffic of his site, so I thought I’d give it a try. So far, I’ve only put ads on three sets of pages:

http://www.1134.org/stan/dot-com – My gallery of dead dot-com web pages.
http://www.1134.org/stan/tattoo-faq/display.php – The interactive database of tattoo artist reviews
http://www.1134.org/stan/tattoos/gallery – Photo albums of tattoo conventions

These are the pages that people mostly seem to come to from Google searches, so they seemed like good places to try it out. And I see today that I got my first $0.03 from a click-through. Woo-Hoo!

Lucinda lost her first tooth this evening. It’s been loose for a few weeks, and it finally gave up and came out. Lucinda asked Mommy to pull it, and it came right out.

Today we went to the Skeptics Society talk. The speaker was Jared Diamond talking about his new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. We’ve seen him before, and he’s an engaging speaker. I also read his other book, Guns, Germs, and Steel and enjoyed it immensely. From what he said today, it sounds like his new book will be worth a read. Also, he said that the L.A. County Natural History Museum is going to be doing a special exhibit on this topic starting May 1.

It’s been raining for three days straight here, and the lake is back in our yard. Today was the biggest we’ve seen it get in nearly 10 years in this house.

Today we went to the big Body Art Expo at the L.A. County Fairgrounds. As tattoo conventions go, this one is kind of lame in that it’s not put on by tattoo people, but at the same time, all our tattoo friends are usually there. We took Lucinda along, since she said that she wanted to go. We wandered around there and visited with everyone we knew. Lucinda got a little temporary henna tattoo, and we generally had a fun time.

We had an earthquake this morning. M4.4 centered near Fontana. This wasn’t a Big Deal as these things go, but it did make for a busy morning at my office. The non-seismologists at Caltech tend to measure earthquakes by the ‘news truck’ scale, and by that measure, this was only a ‘two truck’ earthquake. Still, it made a traffic spike on the Earthquake Hazards Program web servers, and generally made things busy for a while.

Lucinda wanted to play dress-up with Mommy today. She picked out the clothes for both of them to wear, and then she insisted that I take a picture. They’re awfully cute, no?

Today was another chilly day, threatening to rain. The general plan for today’s ride was to get as far away from the remnants of the Rose Parade as possible. So we went west to La Tuna Canyon. Gene said that today is the one-year anniversary of the Sunday Moderate Ride. We had the one obligatory flat tire on the ride up through La Crescenta, but aside from that, the climb up the canyon was pretty uneventful. At the top, I put on my jacket so as not to freeze on the way down. At the bottom of the big hill, we turned left on Glenoaks and headed back down through Sunland and Burbank. The snack stop was in Glendale at Paradise Bakery, where I had two chocolate eclairs. They make the best eclairs there. After that, we headed back on Kenneth to Mountain Ave, where I saw the nativity scene with signs pleading for the return of the baby Jesus. Then we turned left on Verdugo and headed back up Hospital Hill. From there, we took the standard route back through La Cañada.

42 miles.

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