1. Cars Honking
2. Sirens (Police, Fire, Ambulance)
3. Cars crashing

I’m listening to NPR on the way to work and they’re doing this story on catching tropical fish. For some reason they’re playing background sounds of cars honking. I’m looking around trying to figure out who keeps honking at me. These sounds are often omni-directonal, so it’s hard to tell where they’re coming from, especially when your car has speakers in every corner!

Likewise, these sounds are evil when played on a TV:
1. Phones ringing
2. Alarm clocks
3. Babies crying
4. Cats meowing
5. Doorbells

Maybe I should just kill my TV and listen only to my iPod in my car.

We’ve been busy adding RSS feeds all over Yahoo!

We had previously released Yahooligans! Joke of the Day.

Today, Ask Earl (a daily question and answer for kids) is available too.

In Education, we now have Word of the Day and SAT Tip of the Day available.

More to come soon!

Or pathetic, depending on how you look at it.

A friend has placed a cache in my honor. How honoring/embarassing!

Let me first say thank you for driving up the price of my stock 50% in the last 3 months. Second, I have no idea why you’re doing this. Are we really worth that much more? Will the Google IPO bring lots of other fresh cash into the market? I have no idea. But apparently you know something that I don’t know.

It’s starting to feel like 1999 all over again. From what I remember that didn’t turn out so well, but hey let’s give it another go!

Anyway, just please just keep going, 60 would be nice. Thanks.

What’s a phoon? I just discovered them myself. Some guy runs a site that’s a collection of photos with people in faux running positions in various places around the world. It’s interesting, funny and bizarre.

I had my first Caltrain experience today. We went up to see the Giants play the Red Sox. Unfortunately the Red Sox lost, but I guess I could just be happy that my current hometown team won.

Caltrain is actually quite a nice way to get to the game. They run special trains to get people to the game and they get very full. Anne took the train to and from work for a year, so this wasn’t anything new for her, but I was kind of excited.
It’s cheaper than parking and you don’t have to drive.

It’s certainly not as fast as driving though. Using my fancy new GPS, I observed that we only averaged 28 mph including time spent waiting at stops.

I proabably would have taken the train much sooner, but they stopped the weekend trains two years ago to do some major upgrades on the tracks. That was actually the weekend we came up for househunting and I remember watching the local news about it. The TV journalist informed people who were waiting for a train that wouldn’t come for 2 days and got their reactions. Pretty funny.

One of the upgrades they made to the tracks was to add the ability for trains going the same direction to pass each other. We got to see this in action on the way back as our express train passed another train making all the local stops.

I could see why Anne was so grumpy on the days when she missed the express train – all those frequent stops were annoying.

I found it funny that I often knew what station we were at solely because I had been there before doing the series of geocaches placed near each station.

The new baby bullet trains are very nice. Some of the seats even have small tables. The ride is smooth, especially considering that we reached speeds over 80 mph. Wow. Seeing these trains from the road, they don’t seem to be going that fast.

The new trains also have power outlets. What would be even better would be WiFi. Strangely, Pac Bell park does have it. I’ve never seen someone bring a laptop to a baseball game.

We wanted to make sure that we caught the express train on the way back, so we darted out the second the last strike was called and literally ran the four balcks to the train. The express is supposed to leave 15 minutes after the last out or when full. Once we arrived on the train, completely winded, we waited 25 minutes for the train to fill up.

The ride back was a bit bumpier on one of the older trains, but still relaxing. If you live far away from work, a train isn’t a bad way to commute. But living a mile away from work like me is definitely better. 🙂

Maybe Anne said it best as we left the train platform: “Now do you understand why I bought a car?”

San Jose’s airport is close and convenient for us, but it sure sucks once you get there. It seems that it’s been continually under construction for several years and everytime you go, the traffic patterns are different. You used to be able to get right onto 101 from the airport. Now you have to sit at several lights and take a couple of poorly-labelled turns.

The other stupid thing is that there’s absolutely nowhere to wait for someone. Today we had to go there to buy a ticket. I had to drive around the airport several times because I didn’t want to deal with the short-term parking where you have to drive in, park, walk to the terminal, walk back, then pay $1 for every fifteen minutes while waiting for the booth person to slowly record your license plate number into some useless database. I wonder how much gas people waste doing the same thing. This is probably the only situation where I WANT to get stuck in traffic. It beats making yet another lap around, avoid jersey barriers, traffic cones and confused drivers.

LAX at least had metered parking so you could just stay a few minutes without ‘checking out” and paying in increments of $1.

On the bright side, it’s really fast to get FROM 101 to the airport with the new ramp, but everything else about getting around there just sucks.

Large parts of the web were broken this morning because Akamai, a company that provides critical infrastructure to the Internet, went down.

Have I convinced you to stop typing ‘www’ yet?

Thanks, Dave!

—

Akamai DNS problem

Starting at around 8:30 am EDT (12:30 UTC), a number of sources started to report a widespread Akamai DNS issue. Large web sites, which use Akamai for its DNS service, did no longer resolve. Effected sites are Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Fedex, Xerox, Apple and likely many others.

At this time (10:30 am EDT), some effected domains removed the Akamai DNS servers and are reachable again using their own DNS servers.

Typically, the domain itself (e.g. ‘google.com’) still resolves, but popular hostnames, like ‘www.google.com’ will not resolve. As a result, the web site is no longer reachable.

The effect appears to be world wide. Some of the Akamai servers do respond to pings, but do not respond to DNS queries.

This weekend I found cache #1000. Wow, what a waste of time. 🙂

The actual cache was Ardenwood Scrabble, another excellent multi-cache from GeoWomyn_SF_CA. It was great to do it with friends as well.

I did 455 caches in my first year, so I set a goal of 1000 by the end of the year. Oops, I did it in 6 months! My next goal is to average 2 finds per day. I’d like to find all the caches within 10 miles of my house. Then I think it’s just about having fun.

You’d think that finding 1000 caches would be fairly unique. In fact, I’m only the 17th person in the Bay Area to do it.

I pretty much spent all weekend caching, and I’m backlogged on actually logging them all on the website. This sure is a lot of fun.

We went to visit our friends Dave and Amy last weekend. They had three cats and they were a lot of fun.

We’ve been thinking about getting a companion for Pixel for a while, hopefully to keep him entertained while we’re away and maybe get him used to other cats so he doesn’t freak out and attack us when another cat enters our yard.

Saturday we woke up and decided we would go see about a kitten. After running some errands, we went to the Humane Society Silicon Valley. At first all we saw was older cats, but then we went in the back and they had all kinds of cats including kittens. We looked around at a few in this cramped and smelly kennel and saw this cute little gray one sleeping in the back while his siblings were playing and meowing. He was ‘owner surrendered’ which was good (we didn’t want a stray that didn’t like humans) and he was only 2 months old. His name was Brazil. I have no idea why. We held him for a bit, went outside and decided to get him. That kennel was such a horrible place; I felt that we HAD to liberate at least one of those animals.

We admitted that our method of choosing a kitten was pretty arbitrary. The gray one looked nice. But how else can you really test-drive a cat? We were hoping he’d be a quiet one, which he seemed to be. We’ve had enough meowing from Pixel.

We filled out the short application and then we were told to wait. Problem was, no one told us how long we had to wait. They usually had six volunteers processing applications on a Saturday, but today they only had three.
While we were waiting, another ‘shipment’ of kittens came in. Apparently it’s kitten season and they get 100 CATS A DAY. We ended up waiting two hours before they called us.

The actual adoption process went smoothly and they handed him over quickly. He didn’t really enjoy the ride home in the box and meowed the whole time, but I can’t blame him for that.

The humane society advised us to follow this protocol for introducing the cat to his new home, so we brought him directly into the study after Pixel was safely locked in another room.

I expected the cat to refuse to come out of the box, or make break for the closet, but he carefully stepped out, sniffed around and started making little meowing noises. Soon after he was rubbing up against me and looking to be pet. He’s a couragous fellow. Pixel hid under the bathroom sink for a week when we got him.

He was equally affectionate with Anne and spent most of his time through weekend either sleeping in the chair, playing, or sleeping in our laps on the chair.

He’s very good. He scratches his scratching board, he eats his food, drinks his water, and uses his litter box. He even likes Pixel’s hand-me-down toys. He is very curious and is trying desperately to get out his room. When we leave, he meows at the door for a few minutes. Occasionally Pixel will hear this and hiss at the door, but otherwise, he seems oblivious to the fact that there’s another cat in the house. Well, at least he’ll be that way for another 7 days. Then it should get interesting.

He’s not as quiet as he advertised at the shelter. He meows pretty much continuously when you visit him. Thankfully, it’s not much of a meow right now, more like a scratchy ‘mow’. If this keeps up, we could have two very loud cats. The idea was to make one shut up, not have two mobile noisemakers!

We haven’t quite decided on a name yet. We thought of Signal, which is the name of the Geocaching mascot. The cat spent a lot of time walking across the keyboard this weekend, so I thought Qwerty might be a cute name.

I think our favorite right now might be ‘PC’. For one, it’s computer-related, just like Pixel. Second, there’s a comic strip called PC and Pixel. We didn’t know of it when we named Pixel. Though in the comic, PC is a human. We primarily got this cat to keep Pixel occupied, so it’s less our cat, and more Pixel’s. You could say he’s Pixel’s Companion. Look at that, a triple entendre. A little geeky, but meaningful.

Other suggestions for names?

The next few weeks should be interesting. Hopefully they won’t kill each other. I should say hopefully Pixel won’t kill the new one.

In any event, the cat is damn cute, as you can see from the pictures. He makes Pixel, who’s scrawny next to any other adult cat, look huge. He’s still a little smelly from the kennel, but I’m hoping that will wear off in a few days or maybe we’ll see if he’ll take to a bath. Maybe before I attempt that, I should invest in some very thick gloves. I’ve already got quite a few scratches. Ahh, the joy of kittens.