I took another picture of the rising flood waters as seen from my work window on the 6th floor. Compare this one to the last, and you can see how the levels are defiantly creeping up.
Click the thumbnail for a full sized view.
Archive Page 2
12
Jun
Rising Waters
12
Jun
Flood Sadness
Lots of crazy stuff has been going on here in Cedar Rapids. The Cedar River is flooding, and the city has had to enact its 500-year flood plan. Power is out over many parts of the city (our house was out for a few hours this morning) and power downtown where I work has been out since 7am CST (we’re running on generators here at work, and as a telecommunications company we have an independent internet connection).
My house is not in the expected flood plain, and now that power’s back on I really have little to complain about. But hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes, and dozens of businesses are going to have a lot of cleanup to do once these waters recede some day, all just in our town. Much more damage has occurred in other Iowa cities along the Cedar River.
Unfortunately, heavy rains here and further up the river mean water levels are continuing to rise. Here’s a bad camera-phone picture from out my office window on the 6th floor. I’ve marked how far the flooding has reached from the river in case you can’t make it out on the pic. It wasn’t nearly that high when I arrived less than 3 hours ago.
Cars are expensive to buy, to fuel, and to maintain. But we rely on them more and more all the time. Wouldn’t it be cool if we needed them less? Less gas, less miles, less frequent repairs.
But the explosion of suburban America is killing (if it hasn’t already killed) self-sustaining neighborhoods. City limits housing developments and vast Suburban parking lots are making the way of the pedestrian harder with every new inch of blacktop.
Walkscore.com lets you enter an address and get a “walk score” based on how far away grocery stores, schools, and other such staples of society are from where you live. My house got a walk score of “42 out of 100″, which puts me pretty close to the middle of all the averages. And I don’t feel like my house is in a particularly commercial or residential neighborhood. Just a nice, normal (albeit lower-middle-class/blue collar) neighborhood.
I wonder how it compares to other people I actually know. *hint, hint*
I had so much fun raving about Firefox 3’s new image placeholder icon yesterday, I decided to continue the series today with Firefox 3’s new broken image placeholder.
Hurray progress!
This seems like a very trivial thing to be blogging about, but I can’t find anybody else even mentioning it. I’d like to think that I’m just not using the right search terms, but who knows?
Anyway, the latest test version (RC1) of the soon-to-be-officially-released Firefox 3 has been available for a few days now. Under the hood it’s even faster and less buggy than the last test release (beta 5), and cosmetically the default theme, images, and indicators are all looking much more polished and professional. Unfortunately, the home button still has a yellow roof on Windows XP though.
But one of my favorite little visual tweaks that’s new in RC1 is the new image placeholder icon.
When you’re on a slow internet connection, visiting a site that’s particularly slow, or waiting for images to load on a page FULL of large images, you’re likely to see a nearly empty box representing the spot where a yet to be loaded image will eventually be. These empty boxes have a little icon in the top left corner to indicate that they’re for an image.
But Firefox has used the same image placeholder icon from its first days as version 0.1, and its ancestors (Netscape and Mozilla) used the same one before it. So it’s nice to finally see it refreshed with Firefox 3.
Here are the old and new icons side by side. See if you can guess which is which (and hover over either for the answer).
12
May
Mopy Job?!
The printer I normally use at work was acting a little strange this morning. I have no idea what this means.
Insert obligatory (PG13) Office Space quote here.
One of my co-workers is selling some of her new-in-box iPods (her husband gets her a new one every year, and she’s never opened a single one) to another co-worker. They’re discussing the sizes she has to sell.
“This is a 30gig. I don’t know why anybody would want anything bigger. Did you know they sell a 160 or something? My kids and my husband have every popular song that’s been on the radio for like the past 12 years, and they can’t even fill 5 gigabytes.”
I respond:
“My wife and I have over 40 gigabytes, and we have some CD’s we haven’t ripped yet.”
To which she says:
“What kind of music do you freaks listen to?!”
Apparently, having more just just top-40 radio hits is freakish.
That tricky Google Reader. Sometimes it takes forever to grab the latest item from a feed, and sometimes it’s almost instant. Anyway, for those of your reading via the RSS feed, I updated the Babyproofing the Bookshelf post because it’s the PARENTHACKS (plural) tag at Flickr with lots of good content, as opposed to the PARENTHACK (singular) tag which is almost never used.
We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.
A blog I subscribe too posted about a couple who brought bribe bags of candy with them on a recent airplane trip to help ease the pain and frustration of nearby passengers should their newborn son cause any unpleasantness. (And giving credit where it’s due, my brother-in-law suggested to me this weekend that we could hand out earplugs to airplane neighbors when we fly with the girls.)
The post mentions that the story of these parents doing this was found via the ‘parenthacks’ tag on Flickr. People who think they have a photo (and hopefully an explanation) of some trick to make parenting easier or better can include the tag ‘parenthacks’ on their photo to have it added to the Flickr stream.
So it was through the this tag that I saw this solution for preventing toddlers from accessing a bookshelf and tipping it over (crushing themselves), jumping off the top shelf (breaking themselves), or emptying the shelves and/or destroying books. I rearranged some furniture last night to make room for some new, used, donations, and somehow it was decided that my daughter’s room was the best place for an 8-foot-tall, narrow bookcase. We could screw it to the wall, but then she still has a nice tall ladder to climb and plenty of grown-up books to rip and color on. Covering the shelves within her reach with some kind of adult-removable, kid-friendly surface (I’m thinking magnetic board/paint as opposed to confusing her with a wall-sized surface you can write on) is brilliant.
The Google Reader blog announced some BIG features in the sharing department today. Now you can add shared content from anywhere without having to subscribe to its feed (also meaning you can add from sites without a feed), and you can add notes or commentary to anything you share. Google Reader’s previous lack of these two abilities is exactly why I chose to use Tumblr to import my Google Reader shared feed in to it to be published.
I’m not sure if the Google Reader team added these features to compete with Tumblr (which would be kind of odd since their main purpose is as a sweet web-based feed aggregator, which Tumblr isn’t even trying to be), or if it’s simply because their users have been asking for them. I know I submitted a feature request or two along these very lines. Tumblr still has one-up on Google Reader in that you can add feeds (such as Flickr favorites or Twitter tweets) to automatically be shared as they’re updated.
I’m planning to leave my Link Blog at Tumblr for now. I’m assuming the new Reader features will still work fine in the feed I send to Tumblr, and eliminating Tumblr would mean people subscribed to me would need to change to subscribe to my Reader Shared Items feed again. Still, it’s nice to see the Google Reader team continuing to improve and listen to user feedback.
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