Bad things happen in eights

This has been an, ahem, interesting past 24 hours or so...

1. Storms with 80+ mph winds blew through the area yesterday morning around 8AM. They took out the electricity at MPOW. When the lights came back on, one of the three transformers that serves the school did not. The transformer is so old that all three need to be replaced. Apparently, the new ones are coming via slow boat from China since it is not predicted that they will be in place until late today.
2. Our main Internet router and e-mail server for the district comes though this building, so no Internet or school e-mail currently district-wide. Dozens of computer training sessions to be rescheduled. No access to our finance system. No cheap or easy solution to moving the backbone to another location.
3. Power was knocked out at home. It was restored last night at about 11PM. No electricity means no water since we are on a well. No electricity means no recharging laptop batteries, no home Internet, no landline telephone, no television, of course.
4. Still no cable service this am.
5. We lost two great big tree branches. The chain saws are electric.
   
6. Took the boat out last night to survey the damage. The oil pump went out on the motor.
   
7. The transmission on my son's car failed yesterday. You'd think after paying $2000 for a '91 Ford Tempo, a guy'd get more than 6 years' worth of use out of it.
8. I have two speaking engagements next week. We have about 2 million relatives coming for my son's graduation party the following weekend. Work is nutty busy.
   

But it is all relative...

1. We all got our offices cleaned at work.
2. School is still out for the summer so nobody is hollering too loud.
3. The local coffee shop is a pleasant place to work.
4. Reading on the porch last night after a supper of grilled chicken, potato salad and fruit couldn't have been nicer. Silva's new book Moscow Rules is pretty good.
   
5. A bath in the lake can be refreshing.
6. The ice cream in the freezer didn't melt.
   
7. Our neighbor lost three entire huge trees in his front yard and his trampoline looks like a goner.
   
8. Lots of places lost roofs or had more serious damage.
9. A plane crashed nearby, killing eight.
10. My relatives will all still have a good time even if the boat isn't running.
    
11. My son is moving to New Zealand in a couple months and I didn't really want to store his car anyway.
12. My credit card company was beginning to worry something might have happened to me.
    

Overall, life is good. We'll see happens tomorrow.

The '91 Tempo (aka the Babe Magnet). Rest in Peace

Happy Birthday, Blue Skunk

The Blue Skunk Blog is now three years old.

Such milestones seem to be a good time to review and revise, so I took a good look at my Why the Blue Skunk? and My Biases pages and made a few tweaks.

In 36 months, there have been 787 posts (averaging of 22 posts a month) on the Skunk. In July 2006 I posted only 3 times and in May 2008 I posted 36 times. 

Over the past year (August 2007 to July 2008) these are the stats generated by my blog host:

Page Views	606,323
Page Views / Month (Avg)	50,489
Unique Visitors	245,184
Unique Visitors / Month (Avg)	21,197
Robot Hits	491,142
Robot Hits / Month (Avg)	40,968

Or in a more graphical format:

The Skunk has 2,213 subscribers and GooglePage rank of 5/10. The Technorati authority rating is 183 and ranking is 28,458. I am not sure the significance of any of these numbers and I hope I haven't embarrassed myself. I've never gone out of my way to try to increase readership or ranking. As I've opined before, the Blue Skunk is the boutique not the Wal-Mart of blogs, appealing to only the most intelligent and discriminating of readers. (Deep enough for ya?)

Enough navel gazing. The important thing is that this entire experiment is just about as much fun as one can have with one's clothes on. Onward and upward.

Is everything making me stoopid(er)?

Some days it takes all the courage on can muster just to drive into crime-ridden Mankato, MN: From this morning's paper:

Mooning suspect remains at large
The Free Press,
MANKATO —

A pepper-spray-wielding woman who sprayed a bar bouncer after mooning police officers early Tuesday remains at large.

Police were called to Choppers on South Front Street about 1 a.m. to report that a woman was causing problems in the bar.

The woman reportedly stepped outside the bar, dropped her pants, and displayed her buttocks to officers passing by in a squad car. The officers apparently didn’t notice. When the bouncer chastised the woman for her behavior and attempted to remove her from the premises, she took a pepper spray container from her purse and sprayed the bouncer’s face and the bar area. Then she took off running.

The only description given of the woman is that she is heavyset.

"Heavyset?" That doesn't exactly narrow down the set of suspects around here.

Has anyone else noticed that newspapers are getting thinner - in width, in length, and especially in depth? News magazines like Time and Newsweek are getting thinner on editorial content. NPR and CNN are now catering to our sub 5 minute attention spans. Most movies seem to run about 90 minutes instead of two hours and critics complain when they run "long." I am not holding my breath hoping for a political debate where participants could actually treat issues in depth.

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic asks "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Motoko Rich asks in the NYT's article "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading," if reading on the Internet is the cause of poor reading test scores.  I've worried about my change in reading habits for some time.

If the snippitization of information was made popular by Internet sites, it has certainly gotten a good deal of help from the regular media.

OK, here it comes. You KNOW I couldn't resist...