c-log

Kelsey Smith was only 18 years old and had just graduated from high school two weeks ago. Last Saturday she was shopping at Target across the street from a mall where I shop for clothes. As she entered her car, someone rushed up from behind her, overpowered her, and drove off with her in her own car. Two hours later her car was found parked at a Macy’s across the street from the Target. Kelsey was missing.
I followed the case with trepidation, watching news reports, reading the paper. The news showed video footage of her entering and leaving the target store. Then there was grainy footage of activity at her car that was interpreted as a struggle. The following day there was footage of a person of interest leaving the store, with nothing in hand, just before Kelsey exited. The guy was casually dressed, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. He had very short hair, maybe some facial hair under his chin. He was thin with an angular face. As he walked through the foyer he looked side to side, as if scanning the parking lot.
The day after that there was footage of a Chevy pickup truck entering the parking lot, parking in the same lane as Kelsey’s car, and leaving about two hours later. Everyone immediately realized that the driver of the pickup was most likely the person who abducted Kelsey. The footage of the pickup was very distinctive. It seemed like only a matter of time before someone recognized it.
Her body was found at a semi remote location near a local lake. She had been strangled. Searchers were able to triangulate on signals from her cell phone that had pinged various towers as she was being driven to the spot where she was killed.
Her dad is a big guy. It was tough to see him on the news in so much pain while she was missing. She vanished in broad daylight in a busy parking lot on a Saturday. Her body was found on Wednesday. I knew he had hardly slept in between.
Today there was a motorcycle ride in Kelsey’s honor. I saw the flyer on the door as Kim and I entered the café. More than 200 motorcyclsits rode around Kansas City on the 435 loop. With each bike paying 20 dollars to a memorial fund, the group raised more than $4000. Kelsey’s parents joined the ride. I was really sorry I missed it. Having followed the story so closely, it would have been nice to connect with some other people. The highway ride with 200 other bikers would have been quite a memorable experience.

Last night as I was falling asleep, a strong wind shook the house. I felt a ripple of movement and heard the walls creak. It reminded me of an earthquake, but it was only wind. And then it was gone.

I can’t believe I lived my whole life so far without using tomatillos. Whenever I would see them in the market, they looked foreign to me. I had no idea how to use them, and wondered why anyone would want little green tomatoes covered with papery leaves. I never realized that they were the sole reason behind some of the sauces I loved, and that they are very easy to work with. Until today.
While shopping at the Mexican Price Chopper – the name we’ve given to a market a few miles away that has fresh tortillas, all kinds of chiles, nopales, masa, and all kinds of other things I like to cook with, I decided to pick up a few tomatillos. I only bought 8 of the little round sticky spheres. But with just a few minute in the oven and a blender they turn into a mouthwatering salsa that I will be making over and over again. When I think of all the years I cooked for people without them I feel such regret at not trying something unfamiliar much much sooner.

Eating light and drinking an espresso must be the key to good writing. I came home really tired from work, but when I went back after dinner I had the clearest writing session in weeks.
Today at lunch there was a goose on the patio outside the cafeteria at work with a little flock of 4 green goslings under her wing. The mother perked up her attention whenever anyone came near to the glass.
Web stat snippets: Two weeks ago my google gadget had 87 hits in one day. Today it had over 5000. Some guy who takes content from one of my pages and makes his own google gadget out of it is causing my site to get 100,000 hits/day from google servers.
My original homepage has a counter that stopped working at 87,000 hits last August because I upgraded my server, but didn’t recompile it, so it’s been broken like a lot of thigns on my site. It took 10 seconds to recompile and replace the old binary.
I learned enough css create a new decent looking homepage for myself and have decided to slowly start revamping my network of websites to be consisten and functional. I’m happy to finally understand the difference between html and layout – hopefully I can make use of it.

Today was a gorgeous day, one of only a few so far this spring. It’s time to start filling pots with plants, and doing projects around the yard. I’m still wrapped up in chapter writing, but I managed to take some time for other things.
For the first time this year, I spent money on gasoline for the Moto Guzzi. Two and 3/4 gallons for $8.53. I took a ride over to what’s left of the old Oak towers and took some pictures. The buildings have been reduced to a pile of rubble. The new structures are being advertised for Fall 2008, and look to be only 3 or 4 stories tall instead of the 10 or 15 stories of what was just knocked down.
I also spent $35 on a round cement ball for the fish pond. I had looked into building one myself, but coudln’t find information on water resistant or fish safe formulations of concrete used for making solid structures for water. I’ve read that some formulations can leach alkali or phosphate and change the water chemisty. I don’t like the ball just yet. It will make the pump difficult to access, and I worry that I used a clay pot to elevate it and I don’t know if clay gets soft over time in water. I hope the ball doesn’t leach anything into the water. The person at Van Liew’s guessed that it was fish safe. The fish have grown long beautiful flowing fins since they’ve been there.

I signed up for google analytics, just curious about what kind of information they collect. To track pages I had to insert some javasript calls back to google in the pages I want to track. The two pages I wanted to track are the most popular pages on the site. When I looked at the last time I had modified the pages I was surprised that I hadn’t touched them since 2001.
There’s a lot of pages on my site that haven’t been touched in years. I feel a small internal hesitation when I fire up emacs to change something that hasn’t been changed in several years. Kind of like when I used to buy records just because I felt like I should be able to say I have that record, instead of asking myself whether I really needed or wanted it.
Anyway, within 2 hours of enabling google-analytics I had the following picture of people accessing my site:

After years of neglect I’ve been mucking around in the guts of my website. I have a book chapter due, so of course any activity besides that needs immediate attention. There are some message boards I created in the late 90’s – when such things were rare and cool, that have been getting spammed by robots. One of them had accumulated 52 MB of text referencing viagra, drugs, and pornography in every way imaginable. The first 731 lines of text were conversation from 1998 about story writing, followed by 278,000 lines of SPAM. I decided to remove the spam and turn off the ability to add new posts, and found that I hadn’t modifed the code in nearly ten years! According to the logs, one of the message boards had received 1700 posts in 12 hours from 49 unique IP addresses.

This morning I left the house in my leather jacket. The sun was out. The air didn’t bite. I opened the garage and wheeled out the Moto Guzzi. It started right up. It was my first ride in 3 months. The bike felt great. But my ride lasted only 4 minutes because my commute to work is so short. I parked right near the entrance. I didn’t see any other bikes. I felt a small amount of joy that my motorcycle was the first to make an appearance this year. A little announcement to the others that it’s time to start riding again.

It took a while, but as the election draws near I’ve started to see more and more of the blue signs. A few days ago it seemed as if the red signs were outnumbering the blue signs with a ratio of 5 or 10 to 1 depending on which roads I travelled. Was the opposition really that overwhelming? Or are they simply better organized? Something I’ve noticed about the midwest is that a lot of people go to church. Since the Catholic church has some out against the amendment, I wonder if the signs were handed out at church. Perhpas the abundance of red signs is really just an indicator of church attendance.
With each passing day I see more and more blue signs popping up. My feelings of angst about anti-research attitudes in the midwest are letting up. I’m feeling hopeful.

Driving along some Kansas City neighborhood, a square little blue friend said hello to me from someone’s front yard, “Yes on 2”. A campaign sign in favor of stem cell research. In contrast to the “No on 2” signs I had been seeing, which were an alarming red color, the “Yes on 2” sign were a smart optimistic looking blue color. I was so glad to see the lone sentinel as I drove by. There is hope, now where do I get one of those signs?