http://www.busdriverjim.com
It’s not too often that I look at our driveway and know that I would probably bottom out my little truck trying to get out. Visions of calling in stuck were unfortunately just shattered by the subdivision plow guy, though.
What’s he doing out on a Sunday anyway? Damn…
I launched a new website today. I swore I was going to scale back this addiction but my ISP offers new domain names for $12 bucks and then a year later they want $16 bucks to renew it. Oh well, my ability to snag short names still remains suburb. Here we are a couple of decades into the internet revolution and I can still find them.
Introducing: DahMap! Type in a search, or drag and click anywhere in the world.
You know, when you want to explore, you go to dah map. It’s a Leaflet map mashed up with the MapZen geocoder (cool huh…). It’s still under development but you can certainly try it out if you like (right…).
Here’s the Santa Cruz Boardwalk as an example:
And here’s my bus at our base:
I had a new rider today, going from 36 South Main in Driggs to Lupine Drive in Victor, at noon. The pickup address is our lovely little alternative grocery store Barrells and Bins so I grabbed the streetside spot and went inside. The customers name was somewhat ambiguous and I didn’t know what gender to look for so I just hung out inside and stayed warm for a bit.
At noon, I went back to the bus and took note of the Targhee shuttle bus that entered the parking lot. Sure enough, a young guy exited and climbed onboard. He was a great kid, came here from Michigan, lived in Tetonia and worked up on the hill. I drove him to Victor to pick up his vehicle at Teton Valley Auto Repair. Story closed…
What the hell is wrong with me? Do I have some compulsive disorder that kicks in when I get an idea for a code project and then go grab a domain name for it and then create it? It appears I’ve done this way too many times, and this doesn’t include all of the ones I let expire!
I don’t lose my code when that happens though, I just strip out the server stuff that makes it a unique domain and let people access it from my main domain. You can see this under Websites Retired on the side panel.
I’m about to do that with one of them tonight, rahton, which is a great current movie tool by the way. The thing is, it cost around $16 a year to re-up these domains and I just don’t feel like spending the money for a site that I have no idea if anybody is using…
What’s interesting about that list is that it’s ordered by creation date. You can see where the core site (from whence all others are attached) is the first, followed by this blog, and there’s my most current project zypdown sitting at the bottom. Fascinating…
There are some that I just automatically renew, like my boy and his wife’s sites, Steph’s site and a few others. Current count is 27…
Update (10/14/17): All of this is now gone…
Tristen put his daughter on my bus this morning out at Hatches Corner, and copped to being a lurker on my blog. Hey, that’s cool, I appreciate lurkers, that’s why I blog! He said he liked my moose shots and then he made my morning when he said that he tried out my Zyp program.
I consider Tristen a friend, we’ve known each other for a few years now and he said he sensed my frustration that nobody runs my code, so he ran it, and he liked it. He typed in his hometown zip, found his old high school, and discovered they had a website now. Feedback is always great but to get it early in the morning in person as a red sunrise rose over the Tetons, well, it don’t get no better than that.
I shot a moose from my drivers side window today…
She was just mosying around the Gemstone subdivision as I left my base.
It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I finally convinced Piper to venture outside. She’s having a fine time watching the birds still remaining around here…
That’s my baby, have I mentioned that I really love my cat?
I’ve been writing code lately as a means of ignoring irritating seasonal illness. Last year, with my Cayenne Pepper regime, I managed to dodge everything, but now I’ve got the shit that’s going around the Valley.
Even the best health practices can’t ward off the flu/cold crap, but you can minimize it. The way I do it is by taking nothing! No pills, no pharmaceutical fluids, nothing but natural things. Like lemons, honey and brandy mixed into a big cup that knocks you on your ass to the point that you don’t care if you’re sick. Then you sit back and write code!
The code coming out of my old brain lately has been, well, if I may say so, pretty damn fine. It’s all state of the art stuff. I could be working for a cool start-up right now, with millions in my viewport, but I choose not to. Instead, I just take value from the fact that as the years have advanced into the future I have continued to play on the cutting edge.
I take pleasure from the creation but am saddened by the lack of observance. I passionately await a response from anyone who gets my code. To receive a sincere comment that states “wow, what great code, I love this app!” would justify my effort. Sadly, over the years, this has not occured, but for a few rare occurrences…
Still, I rock on, to my own internal special cayenne pepper heartbeat: ZypDown
Sadly, we have a dysfunctional law enforcement system here in our valley. I have no clue what the politics are, I just know that many of our deputies have bailed and we’re down to just a couple. I’ve been listening to our local responders with my state of the art scanner for a while now and all I have to say is, thank you!
I think the folks remaining are doing a great job, and this includes the fire and ambulance crews. I hear it all, and the professionalism is right on.
Thank you Teton Valley!
I read an interesting piece today by a lady who as a college student watched a blind person approaching a low hanging tree branch and because she was with her friends and didn’t want to look foolish by jumping up and warning the person they were about to hit their head, let it happen.
As the collision occurred and the person went down, she said it changed her life. She failed to act that day for no reason other than a notion of peer acceptance.
What she learned was to never freeze, never falter, and never fail to do the right thing. I love this, especially since I have no friends to impress, and I embrace this philosophy completely. I also carry a vicious heavy head banger underneath the driver seat of my truck that I would not hesitate to use if I saw a man on woman assault taking place.
While we’re discussing ethics, I listened to a great drama going down here in the Valley today, on my scanner. Two male roommates get in an argument, perp steals 60 hydrocodones from the 911 rp, crashes in the snow, has warrants from back east, and is ultimately arrested for extradition. I could go into the explicit details but I suspect there are laws about discussing events you observe from law enforcement radio, in a public forum. I’ll check it out…
One of the most worn out phrases of human interaction is “How ya doin?” or simply “How are you?“. Come on folks, don’t you wish people would just stop saying this! How do you reply? One response I thought up, but have never had the gonads to apply was, “Well, I was fine but now that I’ve seen you, I’m really horny!” and I came up with a new one today, “It depends, do you know CPR?“.
The real questions are, why do I continue writing this blog, why do I continue writing code, Hank, why do you drink? Hank, why do you roll smoke? Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?
God, I don’t know. So many times I’ve considered blowing this thing up but it represents years of my life. The other day I couldn’t remember what the little gadgets were that I used to separate the ribs in my crockpot, so I searched on my blog. (here)
A seriously maintained blog, like mine, has value, and I will somehow continue through the fog of my doubt, to speak to you… Thank you for listening!
Around mid-December, I got a registered letter from a natural gas company in Oklahoma. They told me that my dad, who died in 1989, had some money sitting around that they wanted to get to his heir, and off their books.
Really? So we got in touch, I verified who I was, and they said they would cut me a check as soon as I returned the form contained in the registered letter. I was cool, I didn’t ask how much the amount was, but we’re talking natural gas royalties here!
I didn’t want to waste any time since Xmas was coming up so I went to my local Fed-Ex and overnighted the form directly to the agents desk at 1000 the next morning, and it cost me $44.71 to do it.
Meanwhile, as the year came to an end this last weekend, another registered letter arrived and visions of big money were dancing in my head. This morning I walked into the Driggs PO to get my check, took it out to my bus, and opened it.
The check amount was, wait for it…, $44.27. Which means that after the $44.71 to overnight the form, I ended up $.44 cents in the hole!
Sheesh :-)
I’ve created a new app called ZypDown. It uses a lot of the cool code I wrote for Scwelch that you can’t use because you’re not a member, so here you go…
Enter a zip code or a place and see all of the places around there that you didn’t know existed, and can now explore. You can also just scroll the map around the U.S. and click anywhere to get a zip code. Enjoy!
We trudged several miles through the bitter cold tonight to visit my nephew and his clan. Ok, he’s my next door neighbor so perhaps I exaggerate a touch. Brian’s been creating an amazing musical experience in his music room above the garage. He’s wired a Moog synthesizer, along with an old classic synthesizer with a modern processor, and his new electronic drums into state of the art software with a touch sensitive keypad thingy. My description does not do this setup justice but as Brian was sliding sliders and tweaking knobs he was mad scientist at its finest definition.
This is an amazing setup and as I was applying my totally inept keyboard skills to it he was recording with his phone. We didn’t stay long tonight but this place has hangout written all over it. I just need to figure out how to wire my bongos in…
