Monthly Archives: July 2005

Nessie Insurance

By Dougal | Published: July 8, 2005

Silliness from the land of my forefathers: Triathalon competitors get monster insurance for swimming Loch Ness.

One of the world’s most famous fables faces a serious financial test in two weeks’ time when 100 international athletes plunge into Loch Ness – each insured for Â£1m against monster bites.

[...]Not everyone welcomes the insurance deal, though. . [...]

Posted in Fun, News, Scottish | Tagged clan-campbell | 2 Comments

Any day now, we will have a new life to watch over. The doctor’s estimated due date is July 18, but there’s no real accuracy to those predictions. The baby is engaged, so it will probably be pretty soon. I’m hoping that she’ll wait about another week, to give us more time to get our house in order. . [...]

Posted in Family, Personal | Tagged Baby, House | 6 Comments

London calling

By Dougal | Published: July 7, 2005

Our hearts go out to all of those affected by the terrorist bombings in London earlier this morning. Those of us in the U.S. know what you’re feeling right now.

I’ll never understand what terrorists hope to accomplish by their cowardly acts. History has shown time and time again that terrorism is an ineffective tool for change. Rather than weakening their enemies, the attackers will galvanize their victims and their allies. . [...]

Posted in News, Politics | Tagged London, Terrorism | 26 Comments

Now playing…

By Dougal | Published: July 7, 2005

About a year ago, I started to work on some code to include a “now playing” feature here. It would track music I was listening to in my media player (Winamp, at the time), and put the info in the sidebar of this site. I looked at various canned code solutions, but I usually like doing these things myself. But it wasn’t a high priority, so I just tinkered with it here and there, and never really finished it up.

Since then, I’ve changed jobs, moved into a new house, switched from Winamp to iTunes, and I generally have had less free time available. [...]

Posted in Music, Tech | Tagged Amazon, Commerce, iTunes, Media, MP3, PHP, plugin, Programming, this-site, Web | 14 Comments

Bugged!

By Dougal | Published: July 5, 2005

About a week ago, a yellowjacket stung me twice on the ankle while I was mowing our lawn. Obviously, it hurt like hell when it first happened, a feeling akin to being stuck with a hot soldering iron. The initial pain subsided fairly quickly, going down to a persistent itch and a constant dull (but firm and distracting) pain. After I finished cutting the grass, I applied ice, which helped for a little while. Later that night, I applied some anti-itch creme and took some advil, and by the next morning, I had all but forgotten about it.

Then, after nearly a week, the sting locations started itching like mad. [...]

Posted in Personal | 21 Comments

Map Service APIs

By Dougal | Published: July 1, 2005

Both Google and Yahoo! have announced APIs for their mapping services. I’ve already gotten a developer key for the Google service. But it doesn’t support address searches, only lat/lon coordinates. So I’m thinking about applying for a Yahoo! key, using their service for geocoding (translating from street addresses to coordinates), then using Google’s mapping interface with all of its Ajaxy goodness.

I don’t know what I plan to actually do with this stuff, or when I’d find time to do it. [...]