Archive for October, 2007

Happy Halloween Everyone.

If you really want spooked out, check out my list of Haunted Places from around the world, including some ghost videos and so forth. I’ll expand it as I find ‘em. Wait… what was that noise?

Ashmore Estates - A haunted building has for the last 20 years been off-limits to the general public. Many have visited the site illegally and experienced the haunt first hand.

Ghosts and Stories - Pretty Extensive Site, with videos.

Library Ghost - Willard Library in Evansville Indiana is the oldest public library building in the state of Indiana at over 110 years old.

GhostsOfAmerica - Ghost Sightings

Haunted Vending Machine - very cool.

ForgottenUS.com - a directory of haunted, abandoned, and the just plain weird places in the United States.

GhostGuides.com - Jim Graczyk has produced a series of books of alleged hauntings that included directions to get the reader to the location.

Ghost Research - Photographs of Ghosts

Ghost Videos - From YouTube

Weird Chicago Tours - A tour of Chicago’s Ghosts, Gangsters & Ghouls.

Haunted Louisville - Louisville, Kentucky has long been regarded as one of the most haunted cities in America with dark tales of haunted theaters, hospitals, hotels and crumbling mansions.

History and Hauntings Book Co - Historical books with plenty about hauntings.

Ghosts and Critters - Washington and Oregon Area Ghosts

Haunted Travels - A Guide to Haunted Houses and Places (by State.)

The Moonlit Road - Haunted Tales from the American South

Strange USA - Haunted Buildings, places, Urban Legends, and more.

Finding a Good Haunted House - Tips from the Denver Post

13 Haunted Houses that will make you Wet Your Pants - from, er, inventors spot. Definitely need to hit the Newport, KY boat thing.

Haunted House Stuff - from NCSU

Funny story about how ghosts make things hard for homeowners.

(ps: someone asked me where the photos came from. I took these at Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum in Gatlinburg TN. )

Hi Scott, good evening. My name is (??) calling from company called (??) Worldwide (??). Actually called regarding a partnership program companies that I’m investing (??) to people like you all across US. Reason for as association (??) bigger projects for some reason handle on your own since we have strong (??) for us in the development center (??) India. We’re providing outsourcing services to our customers (??) very very (??) prices. I was just wondering if I can (??) program because I still (??).

(??) inserted by my voice mail transcription service

Reminds me of mad libs.

I guess I better actually listen to this voicemail. Or not.

Yet another expansion on Google Transit.

Yesterday, they moved Japan to the top, so we knew something was up.

This complements Vancouver’s existing NextBus Info and Trip Planner services.

“….TransLink, the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority, is a small organization involved with transportation planning, administration of service contracts with subsidiary companies and contractors, the management of capital projects, financial management and planning, public affairs and supporting business functions. …”

They are having a celebration, and here’s the invitation.

image: wikimedia public domain

Well, it’s not a “TOTAL” migraine cure, but damn close - for me. I wanted to share this online in case others might find success. My history:

Average Migraines Per Month:

Month	Severe Migraines
June	13
July	14
August	12
September	2 *
Oc	2

“Severe” meaning that I had to stop whatever I was doing until it lifted..

*The only change:

Shifting from Equal (aspartaime - Phenylalinine, Methanol, and Aspartic Acid) to Spenda (sucralose) sweetener (or plain sugar.) 100% of the time.

Diet Coke with Splenda is the main thing that I did to cure my migraines, and I drink Ale-8-One when I want a small change (it’s a Kentucky thing.) I talked with a representative at Coke about it and they told me this wasn’t selling well (thus the difficulty getting it in some cities.)

Coke may Kill This Drink….Click here to tell Coke to keep carrying it.

I hope this helps you.

The Sacramento Regional Transit District (RT) operates 97 bus routes and 36.87 miles of light rail covering a 418 square-mile service area. Buses and light rail run 365 days a year using 76 light rail vehicles, 254 buses powered by compressed natural gas (CNG) and 17 shuttle vans. Riders can now use Google Transit to plan their mass transit routes.

While the SRTD already had a route planning system, Google Transit offers directions on Google Maps, making for a very simple way to get around.

....Annual ridership has steadily increased on both the bus and light rail systems from 14 million passengers in 1987 to more than 30 million passengers in FY 2005. Weekday light rail ridership averages about 43,600, which accounts for approximately 40% of the total system ridership. Bus weekday ridership has reached an average of 67,000 passengers per day…..

See also the Friends of the Light Rail and Transit site.

Well, it happened again.

I have a whole database of new friends from SMX Seattle and SMX Denver, yet have not done a good job of following up, reviewing their stuff and generally making friends. I’ve been utterly slammed with the disappearance (figuratively) of a programmer resource, I’ve needed to make up slack on several fronts.

So don’t take it the wrong way. To those of you who’ve followed up without a reply, I have every one of those messages here and will do my best to contact you… if not today, soon.

I’m replying to Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networking pings pretty much realtime, btw.

Oh yeah… does anyone know what happened to the SMX Local Mobile group photo?

In a report in CRN Australia, Xerox Chairman and CEO Anne Mulcahy said Friday the company would have little use for Lexmark if the company bought it out, tossing cold water on a question over whether they would buy Lexmark: “There is nothing that Lexmark would bring to the table that would really be value-creating for us.”

“….Lexmark, Lexington, Kentucky, is in the midst of a difficult year in which it has seen sales and earnings under pressure, an underperforming consumer business and pressure in the part of its business that makes and sells printers to OEM customers, like Dell….”

Lexmark reports its earnings Tuesday. It is one of the largest employers in Lexington, and the biggest employer of high-tech talent in the city. It has been the subject of increasing takeover chatter in recent weeks despite stock upgrades by some analysts last month.

Weather, Newspaper, TV Stations, and other news-specific blogs should have “full posts” selected in their RSS feed settings. No exception. This way people can actually keep up-to-date via non-broadband devices.

If you are publishing such a blog:

It is ridiculous to use exerpt-posting for these types of weblogs. It undermines your reputation as a news provider and makes you look stupid. Weather blogs and “Breaking News” blogs are prime examples. In these cases, forcing people to hit your bloated, banner-covered home pages to read the rest of the information does nothing but make you look greedy IMO. It’s fine if you want to do this for broadband users, but RSS readers shouldn’t have to deal with it. If you must pacify your sponsors, why not intermingle sponsored messages within your feed, where it makes sense, rather than proven-not-to-work banners on your regular web pages?

Bad weather was around Lexington so I put in the WKYT weather blog RSS into my mobile google reader. I tried to keep up to date using RSS, but it was impossible.

The weather blog excerpts looked like this:

Hey gang… I decided to start a new post as the amount of comments in the last one were slowing it down a bit. Please keep up to date with my live blogging in the comments section. Be sure to post your weather and thoughts on this severe weather outbreak …

Trying to load the “video-enhanced” home page of the Blog Page (and its fat banners) using dial-up or blackberry was simply out of the question.

Not very helpful.

My blog has a mix of topics, all generally related to web business consulting. But I also put a few humorous topics as well as a few relevant (business web) posts about Lexington, KY.

I receive casual comments all the time about people saying they like it, but my subscriber counts are stuck and often fall off dramatically after one post or the other.

So, should one split up topics into different blogs, or is the categorization within a blog enough? What would YOU prefer?

Please continue discussion at Sphinn.

This reminds me of some websites I’ve evaluated lately.

vs. A Purposeful, Prioritized Design

photo credits: unknown. If these are your photos, contact me for attribution and a link.