Thanksgiving Weekend 2008

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We spent Thanksgiving up in the Albany, NY area with Amy’s uncle. For some reason I was a lot more snap-happy on the road than at the house itself. Some oddities from the trip, including a Mayflower on wheels, a wooden bear “holding” a trout, a real dead bear on top of someone’s truck, a head mug from 1973, and a fortune cookie typo:

Mayflower on Wheels Bear
Bear on Truck Bear on Truck Assets Protection, Target Head Mug Fortune Fail

Full Thanksgiving weekend photoset here. I also got a time lapse of the trip on I-87 going back down to NJ, and some fuzzy video of the world’s tallest water sphere.

National Museum of American History Reopens

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Sunday after church, we checked out the newly reopened Smithsonian National Museum of American History. I was there on its last day before renovation and was eager to see the changes — and was somewhat disappointed.

IMG_0516 Most of the changes took place in the middle of the museum, where a special exhibit chamber for the Star Spangled Banner had been constructed and the grand central hall was redone as a large, sweeping atrium in “Apple Store” white glass. Exhibits off to the sides were largely unchanged: “America on the Move” and “Within These Walls” were the same as always. Sadly, the “Information Age” exhibit with its Stephen Hansen carousel sculpture was gone, as were Foucault’s Pendulum and the red-carpeted hall. The museum didn’t even really get the full “U.S. history” treatment I thought it would get; the renovation concentrated mostly on getting the Star-Spangled Banner into its new display chamber, while leaving the old “History and Technology” exhibits mostly the same. I wouldn’t mind that so much if they’d just kept “Information Age” where it was.

On the up side, the renovation finished on schedule. That definitely deserves a Smithsonian high-five.

Anyway, I took pictures:

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More stuff: “Farewell” photoset from before they closed up for renovation, photoset from this trip for the reopening weekend, and some fuzzy cellphone video of a quick Friday night jaunt to see the museum on Reopening Day itself.

Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Fall

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These photos are from a week before our Rock Creek hike, so we didn’t catch the island at peak color, but it was quite lovely nonetheless. I experimented a bit with upside-down reflections in the marsh water, got a nice closeup of Teddy Roosevelt’s bronze face, and we caught a bit of tense drama between a fire ant and a daddy longlegs.

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Feed Changes

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As promised before, I have aggregated my relevant content from various sites to one Feedburner feed to rule them all, and redirected the old feed URL to that. Apologies to anyone who suddenly got hundreds of new items from my site feed because of the redirect. I failed to consider that every entry from the new feed location would come up as new and unread in feed readers, and while I can’t really control what your feed readers mark as “new,” I should have given advance warning of a potential flood. Sorry about that.

If you would rather get content from only this site, or if you want to engorge yourself from a firehose of content, refer to the feed page .

Site Changes

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Notice anything different? I’ve moved the site over to Axishost, upgraded to Movable Type Open Source (the latest version, 4.21, up from 3.36), and redesigned stuff.

Inside pages, which were already pretty minimal to begin with, are now even more simplified, with extraneous lines removed and titles devolved into breadcrumb blocks. I’ve also adjusted my use of type with a mind towards mobile users, using a container block width and larger font size which should make reading easier on devices like Nokia tablets and iPhones, without needing pinchy zooming or horizontal scrolling.

Randomizing layouts are off for the moment and the weblog runs on the same template as inside pages while I think about how best to redo the main index with action streams. Meanwhile, a Friendfeed embed will suffice. I’m also going back to a single-column sidebar for simplicity’s sake.

This will all take me a while to get back down to. When you work in code full time, sometimes the last thing you want to come home to is more code.

Vote

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Voting Amy and I will not be voting tomorrow, because we already absentee-voted last week, in expectation of a very busy Nov 4th. However, I do strongly encourage all US citizens to go vote on Nov 4th if you haven’t yet, and know that I endorse Barack Obama for president. I would like him in the presidency because he favors net neutrality, increased funding for rail travel and public transit, voting representation for the District of Columbia, a balanced approach between private and socialized healthcare, better environmental protection, fewer abortions while maintaining choice, an end to unnecessary war, and voluntary pulling-up of pants by brothers. He has shown himself a steady, even-tempered, and experienced politician of distinct eloquence, deep thought, and profound managerial acumen, and would go far in rebuilding the USA’s standing in the world.

Check out these reasons to vote Obama from South Carolina-to-Pennsylvania transplant Fairly Ordinary, West Coast Calvinist libertarian Nowhere “The Dane” sville, East Coast libertarian home-schooler Chris O’Donnell, and some general guy.

Stuff That Needs Doing

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  • Get off this default template and restore randomizing layouts.
  • Redirect current feed URLs to FeedBurner.
  • Get an underscores-to-hyphens RewriteRule into .htaccess.
  • Restyle inside pages.
  • Make a Page Entry Index template.
  • Make a new 404 page.
  • Go back to single-column weblog sidebar.
  • Redo blogroll as parsed Google Reader OPML subscription list.
  • Install Action Streams, consolidated into flow of main weblog if possible.
  • Tag eight years of archive weblog entries.

That is all.