Day 158

I usually try to do something useful around the house on Saturday. Sometimes, I actually improve things and other times I just make a mess. Today I finally hung a large picture that had been leaning against the wall in my office for over six months. I must have left the picture leaning against the wall too long, because when I hung it in the living room, I noticed that the wood frame had become warped and developed a pronounced bow in the middle. I hung it up anyway. With the picture hung, I tried to use bleach to get rid of some rust stains in the ceiling that were caused when water was leaking through the roof this Winter. I should never be allowed to handle bleach. I did a good job of getting rid of the stains in the ceiling, but I also spilled bleach on the pair on jeans I was wearing and ruined them.

When I was walking the dogs this evening a woman stopped me on the bike trail and asked if I knew the name of this part of the park. At first it seemed like an odd question, but then she explained that her car had been broken into while she as jogging and she was trying to get the police to come out and investigate. She said they needed an exact location to respond to her call. It wasn't long ago that you could have just told the police that you were over by the bicycle bridge on the North end of the park and they would know exactly where to come. Then somebody at city hall got the bright idea of putting hundreds of small round signs in the park, each printed with a unique number that corresponded to the sign's GPS coordinates. Now, the police won't answer any calls in the park unless you give them the location number that's painted on one of these signs. I guess if you get mugged in-between a sign, you're just out of luck. At any rate, I pointed out several of the ubiquitous round 911 signs to the woman and told her she could take her pick. Another example of our tax dollars at work. We used to have actual park police who patrolled the park all the time. Now we've got a lot of round signs.

I've been thinking about adding an RSS feed to my business website. Technorati and some of those other website ranking authorities seem to take you a lot more seriously if you have a feed and feed subscribers. It certainly wouldn't be hard to add a feed. It's basically just a little text document on the web server. Every time I get ready to create the XML code though, a little voice in my head says "Hmm, if someone actually subscribed to Sealander & Company, what would they get?" I don't know. If you subscribe to this blog, you get a new post every day. I seldom change anything on the website though, so I have no idea what I'd be actually be sending in the feed. Probably nothing. Maybe I need to learn a little more about feeds.

The dogs seemed tired all day. I don't think they are quite the party animals they think they are. A little birthday celebration, a plate of fresh chicken, and they've both got to sleep it off the next day.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day