Dedicated IP

Ok, I know I’m going to lose a bunch of you here (especially my buddy Betty) but in a virtual sense I already have lost you for the last few hours. I was getting ready to renew my web hosting account (a yearly event costing $137.50) and I decided to drop my dedicated IP Address of 67.20.82.114.

A dedicated IP (Internet Protocol) is a unique Internet address dedicated exclusively to a single hosted account. The only reason I had it was because I could. It was also costing me $30 a year and I wasn’t using it! (Did I get you back Betty?)

Unfortunately, these web address’s live in a world of propagation, which means that any changes you make have to work their way around to all the servers in the world. It’s an amazing process but it means my stuff is down for a bit. Maybe viagra would help?

My new yearly cost to keep this thing going is $107.50 plus $13.99 to renew each of the 14 domain names I own, as they come due…

If you want your own web site all you have to do is pick a unique name, select a good hosting company (like Bluehost) and pay $107 bucks a year.

Oh, and knowing how to work with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, MySQL and PHP along with knowledge of the Apache server logic regarding the htaccess file, is good!

Sorry, forgot about that…

Published
Categorized as Site Stuff

South Tourist Park

This Park is an Idaho Falls anomaly. It’s a Rest Area off the old Yellowstone Highway which once was the main road through Idaho Falls. I-15 now has that honor.

The city has been nice enough to keep the park open for free overnight camping, one night only. Unfortunately, it was being abused this summer. I came through here one day recently and it had turned into a homeless camp. Tents, kids and dogs everywhere. Everyone glared at me as I drove through, like new outsiders are not allowed, were full!

The place has since been seriously cleaned up by the local gestapo and is now back to it’s original charming purpose of providing a convenient place to stay overnight.

It’s bordered on the north by a gravel plant and to the south by the old SkyVu drive-in theater. The great Snake River flows serenely to it’s west.

SlideShow (South Tourist Park)
Published
Categorized as Travels

Nexus8.US

The company is making me cut back my weekly hours to 32. I can survive on that but Friday afternoon’s are wide open. After finishing my morning run I shop at the local market and if it’s my turn, do our weekly shopping at Broulims.

I’m a domesticated dude, with a twist! I bought my first PC in 1981 and began programming it. This was after a computer science degree and a ten year IBM consulting career. My creativity in this arena has been the driving force of my life.

Today I was thinking about buying a Nexus 7 tablet from Google and then I thought I’d wait until the Nexus 8 came out and then I wondered if the Nexus brand had hooked up with the new domain extension .US?

Nope! So now I own the domain name: nexus8.us

My provider Bluehost is offering domain names at $5.99 so it didn’t break my bank to do this. You never know how these things will work out…

Published
Categorized as Site Stuff

The Point

Seventeen year old LeeAnn Hartner was working on her cousins potato farm here, out by the Big Holes, forty years ago. She spotted something unusual on the combine belt and snagged it. It lived in a box with her family until she finally took it down to an archeological road show in Utah a few summers ago.

She walked up to a table and said “I think I’ve got something real neat” and when she set it on the table Bonnie Pitblado, the museum’s director and an archaeologist specializing in North America’s oldest Native cultures, screamed out “LeeAnn, it’s Clovis”!

It was a prehistoric Clovis spear point that had been shaped by a member of the Clovis people, the first humans to occupy North America. It’s really cool to think that they lived here in the valley 13,000 years ago.

Ms. Pitblado brought a team up here and they started hunting for more artifacts at the spot where LeeAnn found it. I’ve been researching this and I still don’t know if they ever found anything more. I think I’ll go dig around in the back yard :-)

Here’s the Valley Citizen article from our friend Mike Polhamus back in 2005.

Published
Categorized as The Valley

Auto Parts

There’s a few more things I want to do on my sweet little truck. I firmly believe in giving business to our local outfits, but I’ve given them enough work this summer!

My auto-body/mechanic son is coming here for a few days next month so I’m just buying parts. I found Napa Online and I like this site a lot. Create an account, specify your vehicle(s) and then pick the closest Napa dealer to you. Mine is in Rexburg…

You can search for the parts you want and they present all of the available brands which you can then select and compare. When you see what you want, click Reserve and your order is sent to your store. You only pay when you show up. Slick!

I’m getting new headlights, a clutch master cylinder and this morning I added front and rear shocks. The rear shocks indicated Warehouse so I called the store immediately and said “Hi, this is Jim in Driggs and I just reserved some parts”. The guy said “I know, I have the order right in front of me”. Everything will be ready for pickup on Saturday.

I’m also paying Idaho some sales tax as opposed to paying shipping charges :-)

Published
Categorized as Vehicles

Summer Swag

The day started out this morning with one of my Community School kids, Owen, giving me a homemade pop-tart (delicious). A few minutes later Kalub’s mom Gloria drove up and gave me some homemade peach jam (delicious).

Taylor’s mom Summer asked me yesterday if I liked brownies. After she assured me they were unaltered, I said yes :-) I was thinking they were going to be there today, but maybe tomorrow…

Finally, to end the day, K-Dawg handed me a brown paper bag as I picked up D.J. I could tell by the shape what it was but I wanted to wait until I got home. She couldn’t resist and told me it was from our brand-new Potato Vodka place. I was thrilled, homemade right here in the valley. Thanks guys, much appreciated.


Pinterest…

SlideShow (Summer Swag)

Published
Categorized as The Bus

Humvee Hauler

I was at our 5th Street base today when a military rig arrived and hooked up with the big Emergency Generator that’s been parked next to our backup bus for months.

This powerhouse generator exists for emergencies but there are none that I know of at the moment and the two guys in the Humvee weren’t in a hurry. In fact, they stopped in front of me so I could take this shot :-) I wonder what’s up?

And my little truck is there in the background…

Published
Categorized as The Bus

Peace Sign

It’s very interesting to me that the peace sign has made it’s way across so many generations. Riding up the main lift at Grand Targhee these kids see an old guy taking pictures and their reflex is to send a message from the sixties!

…and why is she bare-footed heading up to the top of Fred’s Mountain?

Published
Categorized as The Valley

Springs Barn

This old barn was left standing next to the million dollar Teton Springs homes built before the bust. I always liked that about this valley, they appreciate the history from whence they came. (This was photographed last week, painted today…)

Published
Categorized as Paintings

Outed

I just took the Political Party Quiz put out by the Pew Research Center. They have determined from my answers that I’m an ultra right wing conservative Republican.

How did they know I was voting for Mister Rogers?

Published
Categorized as Various

Homecoming 2012

The great Teton High Homecoming Parade of 2012! The last couple of years they’ve kept it off the main highway, which allows every school kid in Driggs to attend.

I was hanging out with a group of 5th graders, chatting with my friend Sue who was keeping them in line and out of the street. This is the finest small town in America!

SlideShow (Homecoming 2012)
Published
Categorized as The Valley

Smoke In The Hole

The locals all agree that this is the worst smoke day so far. I think of Teton Valley as a big beautiful bowl, surrounded by mountains and crisp clean Rocky Mountain air. Today I feel really sorry for any tourists that spent their gas money to experience that.

Jackson’s 3,400-acre Horsethief Canyon Fire is almost contained so I don’t know where this is coming from, maybe Yellowstone, maybe those big fires to the West…

I’ve been noticing a pool of dark water around my feet after shampooing my hair in the shower. I don’t have much hair but that soot and smoke is sticking to it.

Looking South through Victor. It’s actually worse than it looks here!

SlideShow (Smoke In The Hole)

Published
Categorized as The Valley

Fall Is Coming

The Fall colors are starting to come alive around here and the temperatures are perfect. Now, if we could just get the smoke out of the valley, life would be good.


SlideShow (Fall Is Coming)

Published
Categorized as The Valley

Page Scraping

This reflection in the mirror as I was about to pre-trip my bus this morning has nothing to do with this post. I just thought I’d share how cool it is to work here :-)

I wanted to show the headlines from Google Hot Searches here on the blog, so I whipped up some web-page scraping code that grabs the links from that page, dumps them into arrays and I take it from there. Here’s the result: Hot Trends.

Then, I tried the same trick with a Pinterest clone that has photos which link to content, and it works well: Gentlemint. Finally, I tackled the Drudge Report.

These three apps are available on the right under Functions. The content is dynamic and changes regularly. Just three more reasons to make my blog your new home page. :-)

Here’s the PHP global regular expression code that perfoms the magic:

$page = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly');
preg_match_all('(<&#97 href="(.+)">(.*)<&#47&#97>)siU', $page, $matches);

Sweet huh! (Yea, like you really needed to see that :-)

Update: If you would like to see how this works, check out the Scraper code here…

Published
Categorized as Site Stuff

Another Crop

I’m not a real wealth of information today, just a purveyor of pretty pictures. Not sure what this crop is but I do know this is barley country, and I don’t know if this a second or third crop this season. But they are going for it!


SlideShow (Another Crop)

Published
Categorized as The Valley