Month: December 2007

Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water is Gross

Okay, you’ve got to admit, I must be in a strange mood as I’m going to review what used to be the best tasting water anywhere – Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water. In fact, I only bought Arrowhead for decades because it was (past tense) so good. Sadly, a few years ago, Nestlé bought out Arrowhead (if you use a magnifying glass, you might be able to see the word “brand” in extremely small print under to the company’s name) and ever since then it has tasted like something that has been filtered through a cat litter box. Their bottles also state (a bit more prominently than the word “brand”) that Arrowhead has been in business “since 1894” – of course, that water came from the Arrowhead spring located near the base of the San Bernardino Mountains – the water now bottled by Nestlé (they don’t disclose the “source” of their springs) tastes so bad that I suspect it could be the final “product” from sewage refuse plants. Also, in looking at their web site (no, I’m not going to provide the URL), they now refer to their “product” as “Arrowhead® Brand Mountain Spring Water.” You should love custom water bottles.

So, why am I ranting about this? Well, I went to the grocery story to pick up a few things and, once again, they only had Arrowhead on the self and I wasn’t happy. The last time I went to the store, the same thing happened and I was forced to buy a bottle of it as I was out of water. This time, I still had some left so I refused to buy more. Further, I only buy distilled water as I also use it for my CPAP machine: even Arrowhead’s distilled water tastes gross.

That led me to read some of the fine print on other bottles. I typically buy a couple of bottles of orange juice and I always look for brands that are not made from concentrate but that are squeezed right at the orchards. As a brand that I normally don’t buy was on sale, I took a look at the label only to learn that the juice comes from oranges grown in the United States and Brazil! So. . .I looked at the brand I usually buy and it said the same thing! Ugh! Doesn’t anything come entirely from local sources anymore? First, we’ve got “Arrowhead® Brand” water that comes from only God knows where (and tastes awful) and even though I live in California – Orange County, no less – we have to get our Orange juice from Brazil?! Okay, okay, so navel oranges originally came from there (and as navel oranges are seedless, they can only be grown from trees that have been grafted) but heck, we’ve grown oranges in great quantities in this country since 1873! Oh yeah, I wouldn’t want to forget to mention that California oranges are generally used for eating as a fruit (because they are not only seedless, but look “nice”) whereas most orange juice that comes from Florida, as their varieties may not look as good but make great juice. Even so, why do we have to import orange juice from Brazil?

Heck, I’m surprised that we’re not importing oranges and orange juice from China (who knows, maybe we are?) as they originated in southeastern Asia. Just about everything else comes from there – which is going to be the downfall of this country yet – so why not all of our food? Oh well, I guess I’m done with my rant for now.

Up, up, and away

Taking OffA week ago yesterday, I took my boy to the Great Park Balloon, which is the largest tethered helium balloon in the country. We’ve noticed this many times over the past few months on our way to church and other events (as it is plainly visible from the freeway and toll roads) and I finally decided to look it up on the Internet; the balloon just started operations in July. To my surprise, I learned that this was a FREE ride that has been set up on the old El Toro Marine Base which was just closed a few years ago. After a tremendous amount of controversy, voters finally prevented a new commercial airport being established on the site and a huge park is now being now developed on the land (it will take many decades to finish it). The Great Park Balloon happens to be one of the first features of the park and is run by the City of Irvine.

As I had just picked up my boy and we were driving nearby, I Details of the balloon as it takes offdecided to try and find the “launch pad” for the balloon and was surprised at how difficult it was to locate (the road to it is not well marked) , but find it we did. To our delight, there weren’t too many people there (I would guess around a hundred or so) and we didn’t have to wait long. Again, I was really surprised that this was a FREE ride. Even more surprising is how big the balloon actually is and the site was beautifully done. While most of the park area still has, for all practical purposes, the appearance of a military base, the area around the balloon has been specially built up as the balloon will be a permanent attraction. According to one of the “flight attendants,” the gondola rises approximately 400 feet off Here’s my boy!of the ground and is anchored by a single steel cable that is connected to a winch in the ground. If I remember correctly, it contains enough helium to fill 250 million birthday party balloons and it is so large that it holds up to approximately two dozen people!

We probably waited no longer (after signing the usual waiver) than thirty minutes for our flight and watched it take several groups up. Unfortunately, I only had my cell phone camera with me and the sun was, obviously in the wrong direction in order for me to get some decent pictures. Just the samUp in the sky.e, it’s possible to not only see how large the balloon is, but also how high it goes; again, the gondola holds approximately two dozen people and, due to FAA restrictions (really!) the top cannot reach an altitude greater than 500 feet.

Once we boarded, both of us hung on for dear life (smile) but the ride was extraordinarily smooth and extremely quiet – in fact, other than the initial bumps at liftoff, it was difficult to gage just how fast it was actually moving. Considering that there was certainly a cool breeze blowing, the trip up couldn’t have been any more pleasant. As it was a clear day, we could also see quite a distance – unfortunately, I didn’t get too many photos. According to the information we received, night flights are also being planned and, I would imagine, those will also quite a beautiful view.

As with the trip up (BTW, the balloon is just tethered to a single cable), our descent was equally quiet and nearly imperceptible. Ironically, the balloon just received minor damage a couple of days ago and operations have been suspended for the next two weeks for repairs. Just the same, I’m looking forward to another flight.

It’s taken a long time

As I recently mentioned, I finally made the switch from Movable Type 4 to WordPress, as the software behind this blog, and I’m very glad I did. After spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to iron out a few bugs from the new template that I’m using (Cutline), I finally got things to work – tags are now showing up properly (due to a bug in Cutline), random images are now appearing (again, there seems to have been some type of bug in the program which required quite a bit of tweaking to get them to work), and I finally just figured out how to create “widgets.’ Widgets are very small clips of code that allow all of the cool things on the sides of this blog to work – things like the search box, calendar, links to various places, and even the local weather conditions. To be honest, it took far more time to figure out how to create widgets than was necessary as the documentation for WordPress on that matter was about as clear as mud. When it finally dawned on me how to create them, they were actually extremely easy (and quick) to create.Again, as all of the various discussions on the matter (not only on the WordPress site but also on other sites that offer snippets of code that could be used) were very confusing, I thought I’d post the instructions here for my own future reference; here goes:

  1. Open up the WordPress control panel/dashboard (sorry, but only I can open mine)
  2. Click on the “Presentation” tab
  3. Open up the “Widgets” tab that should now appear.
  4. Scroll down the page and click on that dropdown box under “textbox widgets” and select the next number that appears (for example, “1” is set as the default so select “2”). That will create a new box under “Available Widgets.”
  5. Click and drag that new box to the appropriate sidebar.
  6. Double click on that box and a new window will show up.
  7. Enter the widget’s heading in the top box on the new window.
  8. Enter the code into the bottom box on the same window.
  9. Click on “Save changes” which appears on the right side of the screen.
  10. You’re done!

Why there aren’t simple instructions on how to do this in WordPress’ documentation or elsewhere is beyond me. It only takes a matter of a minute or so to create a widget. The only other question that others might have is figuring out where the code for the widgets come from. Of course, it is quite simple to create your own but there are also many sources available on the net: I was able to easily find code to use for the weather, random pictures that I’ve posted on Flickr account, and even books from my personal library that have been cataloged using LibraryThing.com. Interestingly, WordPress and others claim that Javascript (a programming language that’s used on many/most web sites to create simple things) won’t work on WordPress but I’ve found that’s not true. Some of the widgets on this site use Javascript and seem to be working just fine. For example, if your books are cataloged by LibraryThing.com (a free service for bookoholics to keep track of their library), all that needs to be done is to go to their site, find their code for used in widgets, and then cut and paste it as noted in my instructions above. Can’t get any easier than that.

Finally, I’ve now added photos that I wanted to use in my headers for this and my KAP (kite aerial photography) blog so now I can finally get back to blogging instead of dealing with all of the behind the scenes nonsense. I’ve used photos of places I’ve been that I would love to go back to – the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert/Pertrified Forest, on a harbor cruise looking out at Catalina Island, and Tent Rocks National Monument located southwest of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Of course, now that I’ve figured out how to change the random header code to display more photos (found in the header.php file), I’ll add more in the future.

The only thing remaining is that I still cannot find is a good plug-in (another snippet of code that can be used for all kinds of things) in order to post my book reviews, with links to my Amazon account, on my book review blog. About the only thing that still works is a plug-in that works (and not very well) with MT.  Hopefully, someone will come up with something for that in the near future.

At last, I’ve finally moved over to WordPress

It’s taken several months to convert my blogs over to WordPress from MovableType – as noted previously, MT’s latest version (4) gave me so many headaches that I finally dumped it. It was extremely user un-friendly and was nearly impossible to customize in the manner that I wanted to. While the actual conversion process to WordPress wasn’t difficult, I had a LOT of problems with the “theme” (Cutline) that I’m now using. Overall, I really like the new layout but try as I might, I could not get the pictures at the top of each page to rotate (for the most part, every time you click on the refresh button, a new image should appear). I decided to make one last ditch effort to determine what the problem was and, as luck would have it, I was able to get it to work! It appears as if the problem had to do with the order in which WordPress and Cutline are installed: from what I can determine, it appears as if importing the data from MT into WordPress must be saved for the very end of the process. Regardless, it now works and I’m happy with it.

The photos at the top of this blog now rotate randomly each time the page is visited/refreshed. Even better is that I was able to locate photos that I’ve taken and used them for the ones that appear. All in all, it’s been a fairly trying experience but, in the end, everything is now working properly. I’ve still got one of my blogs on MT but that’s only because I haven’t been able to locate a plugin to make it perform in that manner I wish it to.

Same old stuff

Same old stuff, same old gripes, same old everything. It’s been awhile since I’ve added something to this blog – I still can’t get the photos in the header to rotate (Ugh). I’ve been monitoring both the forums and some of the plug-in sites for the new MT4 and no news on all of the problems with it – which is why I’m now using WordPress. However, the problems with the WorkPress “theme” I’m using also haven’t been resolved. If things keep going they way they’ve been for the past few months, I can certainly see that MT will soon be history. I think that they REALLY blew it with version 4 and the lack of response to those problems is indicative of a platform in a lot of trouble. That’s a shame as MT had so much potential.

With regard to other matters, the world is still nuts – I’m not going to go into details now but let’s just say that evil seems to have temporarily prevailed. Whatever happened to honesty, integrity, “doing the right thing,” etcetera? The battles may have been lost but the wars are certainly not over.

I think that we’ve now live in a culture that has changed dramatically for the worst over the past forty years – self-centered, narcissistic socialism seems to be taking over and is having dire consequences for this country. What is right is no longer the standard by which things are measured- what is “good” for the masses (i.e., corporate America) is. One example (of many that I could have used) may be found in a rather unusual place – in reviews of Amazon.com’s latest high-tech item of conspicuous consumption – the “Kindle.” (What a dumb name.)  The “Kindle” is merely an extraordinarily overpriced device that displays electronic versions of books. While the concept is good, Amazon charges an outlandish $400 for the gadget! Then one needs to purchase “books,” subscriptions, and other materials to read on it. While reading electronic documents has some advantages – especially if it is used for pleasure reading – as one can change the font size, it’s allegedly more difficult to lose one’s place in a “book,” and there’s even a dictionary built in that may be used to look up words “on the fly” (yeah, that’s a cool feature), at four hundred dollars, the Kindle is simply an incredible waste of money.

In addition to the cost, the “Kindle” has a lot of other problems – it’s not only extremely ugly but many of the wonderful features of real books are lost. The invention of the printed book is, arguably, one of the greatest of all time. Books are efficient, may be marked up with notes, content may be effectively organized using real book markers or post-it notes, they don’t need batteries, stand up well to all sorts of physical abuse, and may be used for years. They may also be shared, do not require any type of connection to the Internet or wireless services, can be taken to the beach (imagine dropping an overpriced Kindle in the sand). Books may also be sold or traded, have no shelf-life, can be scanned quickly by flipping through pages, often contain content other than text (i.e., pictures, graphs, charts, etc.) , may be scanned and copied, and don’t require a user-manual to operate.

So, what does all of this have to do with the price of beans in Tokyo? Actually, plenty. Reading through the reviews of the Kindle on Amazon.com reveals a lot – in fact, it shows just how arrogant and petty our society has become. There are many reviews that rightly slam the Kindle as a grossly overpriced, poorly designed gadget. Interestingly, there is also another group that is diametrically opposed to any and all criticism. These clowns seem to be obsessed not only with the novelty of the Kindle (sure, it would have some uses – I wouldn’t mind having one if it cost twenty bucks) but they engage in all-out attacks on anyone who complains. Equally interesting is that the attacks are all one-sided – those who support the Kindle attack those against it and, almost never the other way around. Their “arguments” in favor of the Kindle are almost always the same; including:

  1. People have “no right” to review the Kindle if they don’t own it.
  2. “Opinions” are “reviews” and should be posted elsewhere
  3. We’re living in “the ‘twenty-first century’
  4. Technology = good, all else = bad

Of course, all of these whines are indicative of those who are really a bunch of morons. One doesn’t need to purchase anything in order to review it – using the same flawed logic, are only those people who personally own 747’s allowed to review it? Obviously not! We’ve also seen numerous cases in which the above flawed arguments have been used in the past. For example, I very clearly remember argument that CD roms were going to be the panacea for all of the world’s problems – especially in education. CD roms were going magically transfer knowledge to anyone that used them. That example, of course, was (and still is) absurd. A CD rom is merely a storage device that holds a lot of information. CD roms don’t “teach” anything, they don’t participate in the learning process, they don’t alter the manner in which new information is retained, etc. Again, CD roms are just a different way of storing content. 

The asinine argument about “living in the twentieth century” is also absurd – what does that calendar have to do the need for people to behave in a different manner? The answer to that, of course, is also obvious – the calendar has nothing to do with behavior. The acquisition of knowledge is not dependent upon the medium in which it is presented, it is determined, rather, by how we are “wired” physiologically. The passage of time, clearly, has nothing to do with how we are supposed to “learn.” In fact, a good argument might be that it is highly likely that humans learn today in the same manner as they did two thousand years ago – through trial and error, focused study, rote memorization, experience, etc., etc.

The most disturbing part; however, is how arrogant and idiotic these Kindle-loving morons really are – just because someone has the “audacity” to criticize a new gadget is enough to set off the ire of techno-socialists how think that the world needs to change because corporate America is selling a new toy. What a sad, sad state of affairs.