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I started this as a reply to Kelly’s blog entry about Halloween, but it got to be too long so I decided it should be it’s own entry. Oh well, that’s one less comment for Kelly and one more entry for me . . .

I ask people what they are as much as a I can. Sometimes the answers are pretty funny, even though I didn’t have any Zombie Pirate Clowns come by. I had a record number of people come by without costumes. Three of them showed up and I asked what they were dressed as. They said “Nuthin'”. And I said well, you don’t get any candy. They looked shocked as I shut the door.

I wound up giving out Sweetarts, Starburst, and Sugar Babies. I wanted to get the Sweetarts that come in the paper package with 3 pellets because they are so cheap. I figured they would be good for people who didn’t wear costumes. But this year the store didn’t have those so I had fun-size packages which had about 10 or so in each package. I had some left over packages of saltines from getting chili at Wendy’s the night before so I thought that would be good to give to people without costumes. I put them in the bowl with the candy and gave one of the packages to a girl without a costume. I don’t think she noticed. Then in the next group this guy (in a costume) says “Oh, man saltines! I love saltines!” so I gave him the other package of saltines.

The funniest group was a little girl in an Incredibles outfit. Her Dad was with her too and *he* was wearing an Incredibles outfit. But then behind them was the girl’s little brother who could hardly walk, also in an Incredibles outfit and then behind him, the mother Incredibles! So it was the whole family.

Avondale was a zoo as always. There are just tons and tons of people. I went through half of my candy in the first half hour and saw only one white kid, so I know most of the people weren’t local. Later on I got a better mix of people but ran out of candy after about an hour and a half. That’s okay because thirty minutes later (at 8:00) Halloween officially ends and the police drive around with their bullhorns telling people to go home. It turns out the Starbursts were pretty cheapo because each pack only had two squares, but I had a lot of them so the candy held out longer than in most years.

Yesterday I was checking the web page statistics for my website and saw a bunch of referrals coming from digg.com. Almost all of the hits on my web pages come from search engines with a few exceptions. This one showed up over and over again. I visited their website and found that digg.com is kind of like Slashdot where people submit links to websites or news stories they think are interesting. Then other people evaluate those articles and the ones that the most people approve (by clicking the ‘digg it’ button) are listed in their directory.

So it looked like someone had submitted my iPod battery pack page. I saw that 4 people were diggin’ that page and I had gotten about 50 hits. I remember when iLounge’s site came to a standstill when they posted a story by a guy who had taken apart and ruined a just-released iPod mini and someone had submitted a link to it to Slashdot. Would I have the same problem?

No, not really. The mini was brand new and it seemed amazing that anyone would willfully destroy something so hard to get. But most people aren’t interested in battery packs. I did get up to about 80 hits per hour from digg, before that submission slipped to Page 2, then Page 3, then Page 4. Originally posted at 7:00 PM, by 11:00 I had been pushed down to the fifth page and had still only garnered 9 diggs. By this afternoon, I had stopped getting hits from digg entirely. It did push visits to my site past 500 for the day and I got 4 ad clicks.

When I first started riding MARTA to work I would buy weekly or monthly passes made out of paper. They would be a different color each time and the monthly cards had a pattern on them. But nothing exciting. Then, in September 1995, they started making plastic cards. These had full-color pictures on them and they started with a series of cards with pictures of Olympic athletes for the upcoming 1996 Olympics. After the Olympics they started other series featuring local colleges, MARTA station artwork, MARTA employees, holidays, and even had one with the color-coded terrorism threat levels (I guess it would make a handy reference . . . they said “red”, now is that good or bad?).

I’ve gotten my money’s worth from each one, using one 40 times or so a month. Then they go into a drawer with all the others. With each trip being 10 miles, I have saved 48,000 miles of wear and tear on my car and saved about 2,000 gallons of gas from being burned. So now I have 120 cards. At about $40 each, that’s almost $5,000 worth of MARTA cards in my drawer. Now worth zero.

Today I got off of work at about the normal time (6:00) and walked to the MARTA station. Just outside the Georgia State Station a guy asked me which way Five Points was. I pointed and asked him why he was going there. He said that the MARTA system was shut down because someone jumped on the tracks (usually people do this as a suicide but sometimes they fall or are pushed; between the high voltage ‘third rail’ and a rapidly moving train, they usually die if they don’t get out quickly). I asked where they jumped and he said Candler Park.

But just then a train pulled into the station above going Eastbound. The guy ran back to the station. I entered the station and went to the top of the steps. There was a MARTA guy up there who said the train that had pulled in would be going back towards Five Points (to the West) and that the only way to go East was to catch some buses at street level that would go to East Lake Station. MARTA calls this a ‘bus bridge’ since they are bridging a gap in the rail system with buses. It sounds great, but the trains carry so many people that it takes a lot of buses to carry that many people and those buses take a while to mobilize, plus it’s not like they have a bunch of unused buses and drivers that need something to do during rush hour. As Samantha Baker said in Sixteen Candles ‘I loathe the bus.’

Continue reading “Bus Bridge”

My yellow headphones for my iPod have started sounding scratchy sometimes. I don’t know if the ipod’s audio jack is getting worn, if the remote is causing the problem, the cell phone in the same pocket is interfering, or some combination. But I thought it might be time to get some new headphones. The best small headphones I ever had were the ones that came with my Sony CD Player that I bought in 1990 or 91 at the same time as Jeb. They kind of go in your ear, but just barely and they had three hinges so they would fold up. I found out later they are called vertical in-ear headphones. When I bought the yellow ones I was looking for something similar but they weren’t quite the same (didn’t fold). Then I found a review on the Macintosh newsletter, Tidbits, that mentioned Sony MDR-A44L’s as being pretty good. So I found those at Amazon for $19. Then I checked buy.com where they were only $16 plus they were giving 10% off that day. Shipping was $6, but on orders over $25 you could get free shipping. I had been thinking about getting one of Elton John’s older albums, so I started looking for those to put me over the minimum.

Continue reading “New Headphones”