Sunshine Point But a Memory
Many of my fondest memories from growing up involve day and camping trips at Mount Rainier. When a friend of mine told me about flooding that had completely destroyed parts of the mountain that are an integral part of those memories, I was, needless to say, intrigued. It wasn't until tonight, though, that I finally got around to looking into it.
Last month, the mountain received 18 inches of rain in a 36-hour period. The flooding that ensued changed the landscape and personality of the surrounding park in a myriad of ways. A video and slide tour document the effects and aftermath of the flooding.
One of my favorite places at Mount Rainier National Park is Sunshine Point:
Memories of your first apparent UFO sighting, of rafting with one of your best friends down a 2-foot-deep stream with a seemingly deadly current, of being chased by a single bee for nearly a mile, and of your first camping trip with the girl you'll eventually marry aren't the types of memories you lose easily. All of those memories, for me, are thanks to Sunshine Point.
As the aforementioned slide tour explains so simply:
Only a small section of the campground remains. The rest is now river bed.
It is kind of a shock to me that Sunshine Point is no more. Looking at the impact the flooding had on the rest of the mountain, it is clear that man-made devices, no matter how wonderful or seemingly timeless they may be, really cannot hold a candle to the power of Mother Nature. Seeing the aftermath of the November flooding and realizing that Sunshine Point is now but a memory in my mind (and doubtless many others'), I can say I am glad that I knew of such a place. I've made yet another adult realization that the places we love in life aren't guaranteed against time, just like the people we love aren't. Again, the last slide of the slide tour states it best:
Mount Rainier is a restless mountain. The roads, bridges, trails, and campgrounds we build are secondary to the elemental forces that created — and continue to transform — this landscape we love. Our great works of human enterprise will fade away with time. The mountain will endure.
I look forward to experiencing many more memories-to-be at Mount Rainier. The sheer vastness of it is enough to ensure that any one missing part won't change the greatness of the whole.
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Scattered Thoughts on Google Zeitgeist 2006
First off, I love that they use the German word, Zeitgeist. Second, what is Bebo? Third, "cancer" and "autism." Fourth, did the spammers impact the What is... list, or were they just being opportunistic? Did Nelly Furtado confuse a lot of people this year? There are obviously varying degrees of "scandal." American Idol is a force to be reckoned with. Nobody knows who the Seahawks are, but their jerseys look pretty cool. And finally, everybody loves a headbutt.
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Blogging Tips from The RSS Blog
A couple months ago I was getting quite a bit of traffic from an article at The RSS Blog titled Top 10 Mistakes Made by My Blogging Friends, which was linking back to one of my posts on Google Juice. Curiosity got the best of me, so I read the entire article. I had some thoughts on several of the points made in the article, so I figured I'd jot them down here:
Forfeiting Google Juice
I think the 301 Permanent Redirect option is a bit understated here. If you really care about your Google Juice, put in the extra research and put redirects in place. Relying on an h1 link seems too old school to me, and definitely too risky.
Forfeiting Your RSS Feed
Redirecting your feed may be a nightmare, but it really depends on how well you did your research. It is most certainly not impossible. Redirecting your feed is just as simple as redirecting individual blog posts, your entire blog, etc. Again, this is worth the effort, especially if you have a lot of people who rely on your web feed as consumers of your content. I'm still a bit bewildered why Robert Scoble never did this with his original web feed. Instead, he seemed to take the old school approach.
Invalid RSS Feeds
This is an important one. I remember there was a period of time where Ryan's web feed was down for several weeks. I just assumed he wasn't posting anything. Eventually I dropped by his blog to find that he had been posting for quite some time, and I had been missing out. Subscribing to your own feeds is a good idea (I guess that answers a long-standing question), since you'll notice before anyone else does that something's not quite right.
Making it Difficult to Subscribe
You're doing yourself a disservice if you don't make it easy for users to subscribe to your content. I've gotten used to copying and pasting web feed URIs into Bloglines, but don't expect your average Joe user to know how to do this, or to want to even if they know how. Now that Firefox has made the subscription process even easier, you really need to have something like the following in your blog's meta data:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog Feed" href="/xml/blog.xml" />
Not Reading Your Readers
This is another good point. If people are going out of their way to leave comments on your blog, it isn't a bad idea to stop by theirs every now and then and provide feedback or comments where you think it is relevant. People who show interest in what you have to say are probably interested in similar things (or the exact opposite, in some cases), so you're very likely to find something comment-worthy over at their blog. You might even find comments from other people who share similar interests. It's that whole six degrees of separation thing.
Putting Yourself on a Pedestal
Let your actions speak for themselves. I can think of at least one occasion where I was excited at the thought of subscribing to a particular blogger's feed and then quickly unsubscribed when one of the posts registered at Kanye West levels on the ego-meter.
Partial Feeds
You already know where I stand on this one.
All-in-all, Top 10 Mistakes Made by My Blogging Friends is a solid list of pointers, so definitely head on over and read the original article. If you've got any tips of your own, feel free to share them here in a comment.
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Christmas 2006
Looking back, this month has been a pretty lame one for me blogging-wise. I suppose if there's any time of the year to spend more time with family and friends and less time blogging, this would be it, though. Plus, it isn't like I didn't have any other excuses.
Anyway, hopefully all you faithful visitors out there have found yourselves too busy and/or too merry to notice. Whatever holiday you do (or don't) celebrate, I hope December '06 has been a memorable one for multitudes of good reasons. Happy holidays, and merry Christmas!
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Big Blow 2006
Blogging from phone. Power's out. Cold as a devil. Tree on roof. Good times.
Update: Well, I survived what New York Vinnie called the "Big Blow 2006." If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can get all caught up over at The Boston Globe.
On Thursday night, just after the Seahawks disgraced their city, the winds started to blow and the lights began to flicker (it's a bit strange spelling that word with an 'e'). Around 11pm I was walking in the bedroom when a loud thud shook the entire house. The impact made me duck a bit, and next thing I knew I was telling my fiancée to stand in a threshold in case anything else fell to the roof in the immediate future (I think my earthquake experience was to blame here).
Not long after, our curiosity got the best of us and we made our way outside to try and find out what caused the big thud. We noticed a big branch hanging off the gutter and realized that we couldn't quite see where it ended. The wind was still blowing hard at that point, though, and we didn't want to risk having anything fall directly on our heads, so we quickly scampered back indoors.
It wasn't long after that that the power finally gave out, and we started hearing the sounds of transformers exploding in the far off distance. That and loud gusts of wind which sounded very eerie given that almost everything else had gone silent.
The next morning, I made my way out into the front yard, camera in hand, and snapped some pictures of the "branch" we had seen only a fraction of the night before. As it turns out, it wasn't a branch at all, but the upper half of one of the two large trees in our front yard. The wind had snapped it off completely, and it was the trunk landing on the roof above my head that created the abrupt thud the night before. Here's a glimpse of what I saw:
Having made it through The Inaugural Day Storm of 1993 when I was thirteen, I knew what the aftermath of a windstorm could look like. I hadn't experienced such a storm as an adult, though, so there were some surprises. For instance, I had no clue just how crazy people could get about gasoline during such a scenario. As we tried to stay warm underneath layers of clothing and piles of blankets, we listened to good ol' fashioned AM Radio and were amazed at all the stories of gas station yelling matches, especially the ones happening over in Bellevue. Little did I know I'd be involved in a gas station exchange of my own over the course of the coming weekend...but that's a story for another time. We were also pretty amazed by how lame AM radio hosts can be, but then again, there's a reason we never tune in to that frequency unless we're lacking electricity.
There were some positives that came out of the storm. We now know that the trees left standing are darn tough and probably won't be going anywhere until the next 10- or 20-year storm comes blowing through. We also know that it isn't a bad idea to have supplies on hand — like batteries of all sizes, a propane stove and a space heater, for instance — in case a similar situation (or God forbid, The Big One) arises in the future.
I also finally got some hands-on experience with Opera Mini after reading so much about it over at Opera Watch. I'll probably blog more about that in a separate entry in the near future. I do have to say, though, that it's pretty funny that my first ever blog post from a handheld device contained the phrase "tree on roof."
Before I put an end to this update, I should point out that I posted a slideshow to my B-Sides earlier today that contains some pretty telling photographs of the storm's aftermath. I also tracked down some pretty cool pictures over at Flickr tonight, which I'll leave you with...
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Skydiver Ventriloquism
Once in oh, say, every 692.3 days, some spam comes along that, while still infuriating you to no end (it is spam, after all), manages to make you chuckle a bit.
I got a chuckle out of an email I received today that had the subject line, "skydiver ventriloquism." If that won't test Bayes' Theorem, I don't know what will.
However, I should note that skydiving ventriloquists aren't impossible to find. I bet Ted Watkin would consider himself one.
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uTorrent Acquired
I read via ExtremeTech this morning that uTorrent has been acquired by BitTorrent.
If you've followed my blog for any considerable length of time, you might remember that I've ranted and raved about uTorrent here before. I've always been impressed by the lack-of-bloat and ease-of-use that uTorrent brings to the table. The best part is, it just works.
My fear, after reading that uTorrent's design and UI "will be incorporated into the BitTorrent official client," is that I will, someday soon, have to make the switch to that client. However, I do see that there are plans to integrate BitTorrent features into uTorrent "in a manner that will remain seamless to the community of users." Hopefully that means I can keep on using the uTorrent client I know and love and that the acquisition will remain as transparent as possible.
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Who Farted?
Running a major business with a website like this (via Robert Scoble) is almost as bad as walking around in public with one of those Who Farted? t-shirts on.
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Asking the Right Questions
Opera Watch asks "is your site ready to be browsed on the Nintendo Wii?"
The article talks about preparing your site for the Wii's browser. It talks about how many Wiis have been sold, and how we (web developers) need to make sure we aren't "locking out" users from accessing our sites. It isn't until the very end of the article that the following statement is made:
The Opera browser on the Wii includes Flash support and will support all web standards that are included in the Opera 9 desktop browser, including full support for JavaScript and AJAX.
How about asking the right questions right off the bat, instead of beating around an unnecessary bush? If you've designed your site to web standards that any standards-compliant browser can interpret, you've already done your job.
Posing the question the way Opera Watch has is the equivalent of asking an author whether they're locking out book readers or online readers or audible book listeners. If you've written something in plain English (or whatever language) that someone can read, you've done your job. It's as simple as that.
If it's not as simple as that, and I really do need to pay attention to the specifics of your Wii's browser's interpretation, then maybe you need to stop "locking out" web designers and support standards. Just like I won't bend over backwards for IE5, I won't be doing any bending for you either.
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