It may look like Tucson got snow last night but closer inspection reveals that, if it was, it was limited to the UMC Hospital. Turns out that what looks like snow is actually Foam from the roof top Heliport Fire Suppression System. Someone activated it last night around 9pm and the foam “runs off” the roof to the street below.

This is especially relevant to me because you see that ramp and stair to the right of the entrance? I did that. Just the stair and ramp part – nothing else. I was brought in at the end of the project’s construction phase to resolve some issues related to a change in parking. Nothing too exciting but sometimes it little things like accessibility that can hold a project up.Similar Posts:

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Snow in Tucson?

For the gamers who frequent my site (especially when at school) I must apologize for the down time earlier today. My wife emailed me to let me know there were some problems with our sites and that I had an email from the hosting company I should read. Here’s what it said:

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s) is consuming a
disproportionate amount of server resources (including memory and/or CPU
time). Because of this, we have had to move your account off of the
shared hosting server to an auxiliary server. We now request that you
consider purchasing a Managed or other Dedicated Server in order to
continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

The decision to move your account was made by the system administrators
in order to improve the quality of service for the rest of our clients
on the shared server from which you were previously hosted. The
resources consumed by your account threatened the ability of that server
to capably operate as as a shared host, so it was required that your
account be moved in order to mitigate server load. Though we could move
your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not
recommended. Your account activity has demonstrated that your site
deserves its own server to better suit its performance needs.

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will
have one (1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to a
1&1 server or another host provider. You can choose to return your
account back to the shared server, provided that you take steps to
reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be
moved off the shared server system again you will only have the option
of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1
Internet.

Please reply to this email promptly. Further questions/comments should
be directed to abuse-team email.

Thank you for your compliance in this matter.

Apparently, the new archive plugin I installed was using over 20% of the resources on the shared server- the entire server. To put it in perspective, shared servers like the one I use can host 1,000 websites or more. That’s entire websites, not just pages.

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Did I do that?

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Oh no! Site Maintenance

That’s all I can say.

Some weeks are busier than others but this past week was jam-packed, thus the blog silence. It all began 37 years ago…

Earlier this year Julia and I signed up for Free Admission on Your Birthday! to Disneyland.

Celebrate your birthday with the most magical birthday gift of all — free admission on your birthday during 2009 to one of the Theme Parks of the Disneyland® Resort!

There were only two hiccups. One, it is only valid on your birthday. Two, Julia was busy on her’s. This may not seem like a big deal but our birthdays are only five days apart (Corbin’s is five days after that) and we’re both late November birthdays. Late November, as in Thanksgiving.

Saturday, we dropped Corbin off at Grandma’s so we can get an early start Sunday to head up to Anaheim before the gates open. You remember Anaheim don’t you. Just over 90 minutes later and we’re at the gates. The off-site parking gates but close enough.

Getting in was no trouble and the day was great, even though Julia was barred from most rides – “Expectant mothers should not ride” is a lot more common phrase than you think until you need to read it. Luckily, Disneyland is still a place for kids so we hit as many “safe” rides as we could (see Family Adventures and Fun For Little Ones).

One of our normal favorites is Astro Blasters. Anytime you can compete for points is fun (so long as you win or look good doing it). This time we tried a few different rides including the Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes (yes, canoes) and Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage (which was being renovated last time we were there). In fact, I can’t remember the last time I went on the Submarine ride. More on the rides later – like what its like to paddle the mighty Rivers of America behind a 6-year old girl.

Oh, I almost forgot. Since its your birthday, they give a big button with your name on it so all the cast members (and more than a few guests) can wish you a happy birthday as you enjoy the park. And yes, its a little unsettling to have strangers wish you happy birthday by name.

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Whew!

Now I may be no Norm Abram but I’m a pretty smart guy and can usually figure things out. Besides being able to decipher complex instructions, I can usually reverse engineer anything given enough time.

Usually.

For those who don’t know, we’re getting ready to move into my in-laws house to consolidate during these tough economical times (what recovery?). There are several added benefits besides the obvious financial ones. Moving from a condo to an actual house will give Corbin a yard to play in. Living with the in-laws will give Julia an extra pair of hands and eyes needed when our second child is born and there’s always the gift of getting closer as a family (did I mention they have cable?)

As a result of this move, we’ve been slowly preparing the house for our arrival. We moved Mom’s office fully into the garage (she works from home) and cleared out two of the upstairs bedrooms (there are 4 bedrooms total). Then we began repainting the boys’ room, adding a chair rail and replacing the outlets and wall switch. And this is where I ran into trouble.

You see, the wall switch didn’t work a ceiling light fixture, but rather powered on of the wall outlets – specifically, one plug on a duplex outlet. Now careful attention to detail would allow me to disconnect the old outlet and correctly connect the new outlet with the same results. But it didn’t work. No matte how I configured the wiring, the wall switch was irrelevant. The outlet was always “hot”. I checked the wiring from the switch to make sure I hadn’t mixed up the wires. I opened up another switch outlet to see if the wiring was mismatch, I tried every reasonable configuration and still, no controlling the outlet from the switch.

Eventually we went online and found a ho-to video describing this very condition. I started watching it and thought – “yeah, I did that” and “but that’s what I did”. It wasn’t until the second time that I caught the subtle maneuver that made all the difference. You see, outlets have a copper piece called a “bridge” that connects the top outlet to the bottom outlet. This allows you to have one “hot” wire and one “neutral” wire power both outlets. The trick to making the switch work the one outlet was to snap the copper bridge in two thus interrupting the power link between the two outlets.

You can learn how to Blow the Bridge at 1:12.

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Blow the Bridge (and other home improvements)

It’s not hard to impress me considering the old phone (LG VX8300) that my new Motorola Droid replaced was three and a half years old. In fact, this is my first foray into the PDA/Smartphone category so it’s a whole new world for me. That said, there are plenty of reviews to compare the Blackberry Storm2 and the Apple iPhone to the Droid but my experience is limited to my phone – so that’s what I’m going to share.

First off, the phone is pretty intuitive to start with. Once activated, turning it on is a simple push of the button and a flick of the finger. The button, which is semi-recessed to avoid accidental pushing, “wakes” the phone while flicking the padlock icon unlocks the phone. Told you it was intuitive.

The home screen comes loaded with some basic shortcuts (icons) to help you get started. There’s the phone (direct dialing) and the contacts (phone book), the browser and maps icons for, you guessed it, internet and navigation. There was also an icon for the Android Marketplace where you can install free or paid apps (think plugins or small programs that run on the android OS). And finally, messaging – which I trashed since I don’t text anybody.

There are a couple main reasons I chose the Motorola Droid over the Blackberry Storm2 and these may not be relevant or important to you so don’t read into this if you prefer the Storm2.

I love the larger screen. Features are important but the bigger screen (and higher resolution) helped put Droid over the top.
Google integration. This may be a problem for some paranoid types but using my Google account info for my phone was a nice feature.
Built in navigation at no extra charge. Since it’s a Google phone (runs on Android OS) it uses Google maps.

Integrating Google is real easy but updating my contacts was not so much. it wasn’t hard, just wasn’t expecting it to work this way. As I said, my old phone was just that, a phone. It had limited web capabilities but I never opted for that plan so I never used it. What I did use was the Get It Now tool which allowed me to download tools and features to my phone such as ringtones and games.

One such tool was the Backup Assistant which basically backed up your phone book to your Verizon account so you could upload it to your phone if you ever replaced it. This worked great fo backing it up, but the Droid is not a “Get It Now” phone so it didn’t work. No worries, when I synchronized my Google account with my phone, it imported all my contacts. Only problem was, My Contacts typically didn’t include phone numbers just emails and some addresses.

A quick search later and I had the solution. Export my Backup as a CVS file and upload that to my Google Contacts list. Of course, now I have two (or more) entries for most of my contacts (one email and one number) so I spent some time merging duplicate contacts until a had one entry per person. A little time consuming but relatively easy and safer than being too automated. plus, it forced me to clean up my contact list – like when I would have multiple emails for the same person under different names (Bob@work, Bob@home, Bob@school, etc). Now I just need to get profile pictures for everybody, but that’s a different story.

After that, it’s all about the apps. And let me tell you, if you’re not familiar with using apps, it can be quite daunting. There are apps for everything from playing games to managing documents to switching themes – some free, some you buy. There are serious apps for improving your phone and silly apps for just being silly. And even if you figure out what you want, just try picking the one app that does it from the dozen or so choices. Don’t believe me? Search for “flashlight” in the Android Market and see what I mean.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to uninstall anything you don’t like but wading through the choices can suck up a lot of time. There are a lot of Top 10 Droid lists out there so start with those and see what works for you. I don’t Tweet or Facebook or Text so many of the top apps aren’t for me. But I do Blog and other things which do have apps that work for me. I’m still sifting through the choices so I’ll follow up with a list of my favorite apps. Feel free to make suggestions but understand, I won’t be downloading anything that makes silly sounds or pretends to be an electric razor.

Here’s a couple links to help you get started with your new DROID phone.
Verizon DROID Support
Motorola DROID Support
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DROID

Things have chanced since then. I get a lot more traffic now-a-days and what surprises me most is what that traffic is for. I’ve discussed it before so I won’t harp on that but with the recent addition of some flash-based games, I am now growing my visitor stats quite rapidly. Unfortunately, my standard visitor tracker (statcounter) has a 100 visitor limit which I exceed by 2,500 unique visitors daily. So the stats have become irrelevant because the top pages never really change.

As a result of this visitor log limitation, I’ve pretty much stopped tracking my stats – until now. Introducing Clicky Web Analytics. This free web traffic tracker is a little more polished than statcounter and integrates with my WordPress install. And unlike Google Analytics, it tels me useful information like who came, where they went and how long they stayed (Analytics isn’t visitor specific – Statcounter is).

So I’m giving it a try and so-far, so-good.

In other site related news, I’m trying my hand at LinkWithin’s related posts plugin – again. I tried it a while back but after several days, it still didn’t show any related posts but it seems to have fixed that issue (somehow) so it now works on my site. The plugin/widget simply adds the “You might also like:” thumbnails at the end of each post. This is similar to the Similar Posts plugin I use but with a couple of differences. One being the thumbnail preview for posts with images. That’s a pretty cool feature. Unfortunately, the LinkWithin plugin is less customizable and seems to link less related posts than the Similar Posts plugin. So for now, i’ll use both and see if the new one gets smarter. Ideally, they would merge and I’d get the best of both plugins. Let me know what you think.Similar Posts:

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Addicted to stats?

These are some pretty great prize packages but there are a couple i will probably avoid entering and a couple that will definitely cause me to update my wish list.

* Week 1 (Oct. 5-11): The Twilight Saga: New Moon Premiere Wish List — A trip for two to Los Angeles to see the premiere
* Week 2 (Oct. 12-18): Dream Kitchen Wish List — New appliances include a range, refrigerator, dishwasher, and espresso maker
* Week 3 (Oct. 19-25): Meet the Jonas Brothers in London Wish List — A trip for two to London to hear the lads in concert and then meet them in person
* Week 4 (Oct. 26-Nov. 1): Kindle Love Wish List — 10, count ‘em, 10 Kindles
* Week 5 (Nov. 2-8): Ultimate Backyard Theater Wish List — $15,000 for a backyard makeover, plus all the equipment needed to start the show
* Week 6 (Nov. 9-15): Yellowstone Photo Expedition with Canon Wish List — A trip for two to Yellowstone National Park, and a private lesson with a professional photographer
* Week 7 (Nov. 16-22): The Magic of Disney Wish List — A trip for four to explore the wonders of Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla., plus a $2,000 Disney gift card
* Week 8 (Nov. 23-29): High-Def Heaven Wish List — A 55-inch HDTV, a Blu-ray home theater, and a Wii
* Week 9 (Nov. 30-Dec. 6): Glamorous Life Wish List — A stunning set of 1½-carat diamond stud earrings
* Week 10 (Dec. 7-12): This one is under wraps until it launches!

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Wishlist Sweepstakes

A new low price for the Wii video game console from Nintendo has recently been announced! On September 27, 2009, Nintendo released the news that the price for the Wii console was dropped from the original $249.99 to only $199.99.

The new $199.99 Wii price point delivers the full iconic Wii gaming experience, including the motion-sensing Wii Remote™ controller, Nunchuk™ controller and Wii Sports™ software, and furthers Nintendo’s mission to expand the gaming universe by making video games accessible to more and more consumers.Similar Posts:

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More Wii for Less

[Helen walks into the room holding a pregnancy test]
Anna: James?
[Helen nods]
Anna: Since last night?
[Helen stares]
Anna: Sorry.
[pause]
Anna: You can’t tell from one. They can be inaccurate.
Helen: I bought three packets. Two in a packet – that’s six. You can tell from six.

And for the record, we could tell from one.

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You can tell from six