Mike's Page

This guy on Slashdot had a great idea:

I love the idea of a sponsored congressman. They should go to work each day dressed like those NASCAR drivers. Logos all over the place, head to toe.

That mental image just made me laugh. I was thinking someone with some Photoshopping talent should take the political contribution data from opensecrets.org and generate us some brightly colored, sponsored congressmen. Who's driving the Viagra car?

Tonight I blocked the msnbot in my robots.txt file. I've noticed hits from that bot in my logfile occasionally, but recently it's gone nuts. So far this month it has eaten 41 MB of bandwidth and hit 18000+ pages. By comparison, Google has only hit 4 MB (~1300 pages).

I don't have 18000 different pages of content on this site, so msnbot is hitting some pages over and over again. From what I've read, the msnbot results aren't even being used yet in MSN's search. I'm not going to waste my bandwidth on their experiment.

I'll reconsider if they actually start using the msnbot data for search results.

Last Monday I joined the Palmetto Paddlers for a trip to the North Fork of the Edisto River. This river joins up with the South Fork near Branchville to form the Main Stem of the Edisto (it then later splits again into the North and South Edisto rivers near the coast).

We paddled the popular section from Shillings Bridge (Orangeburg County road 74) to the Orangeburg Memorial Gardens. It was my first chance to paddle this section and it was very enjoyable. Paddling South Carolina says that this section (to 301-601) is 7 miles and should take 2.5 hours. After it was over, we were on the water for nearly 8 hours and my GPS claims it was 8.5 miles. Deadfalls, low water, and a leisurely pace all contributed to our trip time. But it's something to consider if you were to run this section during a time of year when the days are shorter.

It was a hot day but there was plenty of shade under the verdant trees surrounding the narrow river. There were only a few sections where you were out in the sun for very long. The river was loaded with fallen trees. I think I was able to get around all of them without leaving my kayak, but some were fairly tricky, and occasionally we needed the help of a saw, or a shove from another paddler. Many of the downed trees were covered in poison ivy, and more dangled down from overhead branches. It was not something I expected to deal with on the water. I had gloves, but a long-sleeved sunshirt would have been a good idea. Another pitfall was the periodic wasp nests that were hanging from low branches. A couple paddlers were stung as they drifted by.

We saw lots of wildlife, mainly birds and snakes. Sean, a master snake spotter, found plenty of them, including a tiny rough green snake. Most of the other 23 snakes spotted that day were brown water snakes. We did come across one cottonmouth while trekking through the swamp looking for great blue heron nests. There were several nesting herons in a big cypress. The other birds we spotted that day were smaller, including kingfishers and prothonotary warblers.

Most of this section is wild and secluded. As you get closer to Orangeburg, some houses start to pop up and later you pass a lot of houses and other properties. In one area near the end, we came across some serious clear-cutting. Acres of trees near the river had been removed with noisy machines and the smell of cut timber was on the air. Not a cool thing to see on any day, but surprising to see on a holiday.

This was a fun paddle and I hope the river can remain wild despite the nearby development.

Click here for a map of the trip.

Thanks to Lee Olson for the photo of me.

Remember how CDs were so much better than audio cassettes? The sound quality was better and the discs were more durable. But I think my favorite feature of the CD was the ability to jump to any song instantly. No more fast forwarding and rewinding.

Shouldn't the move from VHS cassettes to DVDs have been just as good? It could have been, but the power-hungry media companies had to ruin it for us.

Giving the media companies control over when and where I can skip around the DVD was a horrible idea. You can hardly ever begin at the starting menu. There's the copyright screens, title screens, previews, ads, etc. Some of the movies we've rented have previews before the movie and they think they're doing us a favor by telling us we can "fast forward" through them. You can't hit the Next Chapter or the Menu buttons, you actually have to hold down the fast forward button to get through them. Gee, thanks. Now it only takes 2 minutes just to get to the menu...much better!

At the very least, maybe these DVD limitation overlords could throw us a bone and implement "DVD cookies." Similar to web cookies, each DVD could store a cookie on the player which will let the DVD know that yes, I've seen the FBI warning/previews/etc. before and don't need to see them again. Maybe that way I wouldn't have to hit the Next Chapter button 6 times every time I put in a DVD for my son.

I know some of the DVD players are hackable and I was intending on trying that until my cheap Apex player died 5 months after I got it. The cost to ship it and repair it under warranty was more than it cost to buy a new one. Now I'm just playing the movies on our PS2...not the greatest DVD interface but at least it's lasted more than a year.

Hey media companies...how about giving us control over our own property? Until then, I'll spend my money elsewhere.