Category Archives: Uncategorized

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

One of my volunteer jobs is to maintain the web site for the Treasure Island Country Club, the homeowner’s association for the island where I own a vacation place. The web site looks dated and could use a professional redesign. It was created in 2002, back when 17-inch monitors were still a luxury, well before social media and Web 2.0. I use an older version of Microsoft FrontPage to keep it updated. Today I added a new feature so at least the URL looks cutting edge when you view it in the address bar or in a favorites list. Instead of the default Internet Explorer symbol, there’s now a custom icon displaying the official Treasure Island seagull.

Microsoft calls these icons “shortcut icons” and has been supporting them since I.E. 5.0. But their popularity has taken off in the last year or so. It’s surprisingly simple to add one. All you need to do is to save an icon to your web site’s root directory with the default file name favicon.ico. (The browser does the rest.) The icon needs to be square in size, at least 16 x 16 pixels, and in icon format. Since I don’t have an icon editor, I created a square bitmap in Microsoft Paint of the Treasure Island seagull on a dark blue background. I uploaded the bitmap to one of the free icon-generator web sites, followed the steps there, and saved it as a 32 x 32-pixel icon. That’s all there is to it.

This year the speed at which late 20th-century events are disappearing in the rear view mirror seems to be accelerating. That might be because of the ease of calculating the elapsed number of years between them and 2010. The calculation was also simple for the first couple of years of the new century, but back then the 20th century was only, like, you know, a couple of years ago. Now it’s been 10 years since we were worried about the millennium meltdown.
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Whatever else it is the San Diego Weekly Reader is a winner when it comes to page count. I learned this yesterday while perusing its latest issue during my return flight from San Diego to Seattle following a family visit in Del Mar. In a short section titled “Thought you’d like to know” the Reader listed the average number of pages per issue in 20 alternative newsweeklies for the period February 9 to March 13, 2009. The Reader led the pack at 148, with the Austin Chronicle (136) and the Los Angeles Weekly (122) finishing second and third. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
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So what movie soundtracks have featured “Crimson and Clover,” Tommy James’s paean to love, sex, and psychedelia? In another example of how you can look up just about anything on the Internet, the Mooviees! web site includes a database with the answer—incredibly, there are seven movies listed, although one used the Joan Jett version. OK, maybe you want to substitute some other song for “Crimson and Clover,” like the one you were humming this morning. If so, I have included the link at the end of the post. I just hope you haven’t started humming “Crimson and Clover” as there is no known cure other than a good night’s rest.

The database isn’t perfect in that it doesn’t seem to include soundtracks from older movies. For example, a search for “Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel doesn’t return The Graduate (1967), just More American Graffiti (1979). But the database handled just about everything recent I tried. And the web site has a Feedback page that solicits corrections and updates, so I assume the database is steadily improving. Speaking of humming, for me yesterday it was “White Flag” by Dido. Her rendition of the song hasn’t been used in a movie, but two films have featured a version by David Young and Michael Sherwood. Hmm, I’m not sure who they are. Back to the Internet.

Soundtrack search