No-wax, easy maintenance, bacteriostatic, and anti-slip.
Friends,
Our gal, The Idyllwild Weather Clam loves a good celestial event and she couldn’t be more excited than she is for today’s solar eclipse. In fact, she’s been splashing around in her tide pool all morning listening to this cheery little number.
Have fun folks. Stay safe and don’t burn your eyes out, okay?
Your best pal,
– bob
You might wonder how the various investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections and the now 45th president’s cooperation and coordination with said meddling are coming along. At this point, it’s hard to know. The independent prosecutor, former FBI head Robert Mueller, isn’t sharing status updates. The House and the Senate, however, are holding hearings this week featuring the former FBI Director, the director of National Intelligence, and some other folks who are making Marmalade Mugabe very nervous.
This is gonna be great.
Your best pal,
– bob
So long, weirdos.
Friends,
It’s been a very long time and we’ve had a lot of laughs, but it’s time to finally bid the Jaunty Little Blog at Blogger farewell. Their interface isn’t playing nice with the tools I use every day, Google has made it very clear in revisions to their terms of service that content I post can be sold by them however they see fit, and maintaining two sites has been a real impediment to my willingness to post new content. Something had to give and Google has made the decision for me. The nice people at Squarespace, on the other hand, have been generous with their support (maybe because I’m paying them a nominal fee) and their tools work all the time, unlike the advertising behemoth that Google has become.
I’ll miss the old site a little only due to nostalgia, but there’s more cool stuff to come at therieau.com, so please take the time and follow me over there. You won’t necessarily be glad you did, but you’ll be sad if you don’t.
Good night Blogger.
Your best pal in the entire world,
– bob
Friends,
Banjo the dog was tied to train tracks by a fellow in Mecca, CA suffering from dementia according to this article in Riverside County’s newspaper of record. He was saved by an alert train engineer, but what lessons can be learned here?
Easy. Living in Mecca will make you a little daft. Obviously.
Your pal,
– bob
Friends,
It seemed like a good idea when my hours at The Festival of Dirt were cut in half to go out and get a new job. The job numbers are looking up, I hear. Plus, the Great Recession (as we’re calling it now) is finally over. Good news! Nifty! Should be a piece of cake to find new employment!
Well dear readers, this has not been the case. I’ve submitted resumes for positions that are essentially what I do now and for jobs that I would love to do, but I haven’t heard from anybody except spammers who will rewrite my resume for a fee or provide me with a sure-fire job finding toolkit, also for a fee. I find this infuriating on two levels, as I’m sure you do. The end goal of my job search isn’t actually to give other people money (which seems intuitive, but when you’re busy being evil, maybe you miss the simple stuff) nor is it to provide personal information to a mailing list instead of an employer. This country’s economy has gone through a very rough patch, but that’s no excuse to prey on the desperate.
Speaking of desperate though, if I’m going to embark on Plan B, to get some freelance work to make up the other half of my salary, my poor website would need a refresh. You remember the old, tired, iWeb template site, don’t you? No?
It was pretty simple and I didn’t update it very often, so nobody showed up. The hit count was low and very few people gave it a second thought, but that’s about to change!
The new site, pictured at the top, is better in every way. It has pages and links, which makes it a proper website. A picture of the Mighty Jeepster is now on every page to lend some much-needed dynamism. The webcam is still there, plus there are now colored rectangles, which make it more modern. Also, the web development software I’m now using has some settings that make the thing render differently depending on the browser you’re using, which I hadn’t intended.
Overall, it’s really great and you should visit!
Your pal,
– bob
Friends,
Thirty years ago today, Xerox introduced to the public a computer that changed the world, the Xerox 8010, commonly known as the Xerox Star. Why should you care? Well, it was the first computer available to the public with a graphical user interface. The first with a mouse. The first designed to be networked into workgroups with shared printers and files. The first to use a document collaboration protocol based on hypertext, with embedded links to other documents.
Essentially, everything you know about how computers are supposed to look and how they’re supposed to work was either invented or refined at Xerox PARC and marketed first in this machine. And you could have all of this for the low, low price of $16,595 back in 1981 (which would be worth roughly $41,525 today, in case you were wondering).
So go out today and hug an interface designer to celebrate, won’t you?
– bob
Friends,
This fine photo showed up on Cult of Mac this morning and it brightened my day. Seriously, how is Apple’s market share still 10%?
– bob
ATTRIBUTION UPDATE: Yes, this great picture came from the Cult of Mac blog, but where did they find it? It was taken by Anita and Amit Vachharajani (both of them? -ed Yes, both. Shhh.) while on a trip to Tamil Nadu. If you have the chance, please go visit their blog about “books, babies, life, and everything in between.” That’s a lot of ground to cover, but they seem to make a bold effort to cover it all. Thank you Amit and Anita!
Friends,
We’re doomed. Doomed! Just look at all of the terrible warnings about the coming deluge after five days of steady rainfall here in Southern California. Just look at it…
Even Mount Baldy is closed. Mount Baldy, people!
What’s hilarious about this, on top of the idea held by people down in the Festival of Dirt that they might melt if they get wet, is that this weather event (an event! we can feel the gravitas. – ed) is a phenomenon with an actual name. Ready? Wrap your head around the idea of Atmospheric Rivers. A jet stream picks up moisture from the ocean and keeps running for days and days, dumping on the coast, until it’s perturbed in some way. This time, it’ll be upset some time early Thursday morning, but until then: WATER IS LIKELY TO CONTINUE TO FALL OUT OF THE SKY!!!
While you’re waiting for the storm and its attending panic (which I do not share, btw) to end, here’s something cheery for your listening pleasure…
Your pal,
bob
Friends,
I seem to have missed a little bit of news where the infallible head of the Roman Catholic church has relented on the use of condoms under “certain circumstances” to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. We can speculate on the reason for the change of heart, but it’s certainly an important first step. My big question is whether the CEO at work will allow the clinics to start stocking condoms in the clinic dispensaries. There’s certainly a need there, and since his boss’ boss’ boss’ boss now says it’s okay, why not?
Interesting times, eh?
Your pal,
– bob
P.S. But what do the little creatures think about all of this?
Friends,
I was tipped to the story by the good folks at Metafilter that retired Air Force officer Stan Fulham has written a book predicting that a fleet of alien spaceships will be breezing by Earth today as some sort of first contact. The 13th? Really Stanley? You clearly didn’t consider the dimensional rift that cuts through my little town right in the middle of the parking lot outside the Village Market. Yesterday.
They’re here.
– bob
Friends,
Some societies consider visitation by giant beetles to be a good omen (which ones? -ed Just go with me on this.). Sure, it was odd to find this minor monster hanging off the screen door a couple days ago… 
…but maybe it was a sign. After all, the family was scheduled to stop by my place the next weekend. I wasn’t sure if I’d have time to prep the house, fix the broken toilet, clean up the leftover bits of dog. What I needed was another sign. Something that might, I don’t know, convince me that this wouldn’t be a complete disaster. 
Right! All that was left was for the kiddos to arrive… 
…and maybe line up on the staircase for a picture… 
…or even collapse the swing together… 
Even through my barbequed berry pancakes, minor meltdowns and a whole lot of mosquito bites, we even managed to get together for a great big family photo. 
Totally worth it.
I’m pretty lucky, don’t you think?
– bob
File photo: The birthday girl enjoying a brisk afternoon.
Friends,
Today is my sister’s birthday and to celebrate, I will share with you a new feature we’ve been working on up here in our Secret Alpine Laboratory. We call it Song to Text© and it’s sure to revolutionize the internet. All I have to do is sing a few lyrics of a song and they show up here as text. For instance…
Happy birthday to you,
happy birthday to you…
Happy birthday, dear Denise!
Happy birthday to you!
Pretty amazing, don’t you think?
– bob
Friends,
Today is the 23rd of May and it’s been snowing here in my delightful Alpine village all day. It snows, it sticks, it melts, it snows some more, repeat. It’s chilly, of course, but it’s absolutely lovely.
The Highway Patrol is requiring chains or snow tires from Pine Cove to Lake Fulmor this afternoon, which seems like an alarmist reaction, but I guess it weeds out the kids on racing slicks? Hard to know.
– bob
Because Oscar Mayer has a way with b-o-l-o-g-n-a.
Friends,
I don’t know what’s going on with the last 1,000 meters of my mountain commute, but after the skaters had cleared out I thought that was it. Not so, dear readers. This morning, I got stuck behind a large truck whose exhaust fumes reeked of bologna. Or, rather, baloney.
This only raises one important question: has the Pacific Slope Tree Company stumbled upon a way to convert deli meat of questionable provenance into fuel for their vehicles? Why are they keeping it such a secret?
Okay, that’s two questions.
– bob
These look comfortable.
Friends,
Today in the United States, we observe the Mexican army’s defeat of the French at the Battle of Puebla in a cleverly named celebration we like to call “Cinco de Mayo” (hey, that’s pretty catchy! -ed). In this grand festival, we honor the decision made by Mexican President Benito Juarez to stop paying interest on debt owed to Mexico’s largest creditors, including France who sent their collection agency to seize the collateral for those loans—namely, the entire country. Thankfully, our modern financial system is much more sophisticated and would never be subject to ham-handed tactics like those.
But those details have been washed away over the years by Americans who were looking for an adjunct to Saint Patrick’s Day, except with tequila. No harm in that, certainly.
This year’s celebration, though, is likely to be marred by protests against Arizona’s new immigration law. I’m not sure I see what all the fuss is about, actually. Have you ever been to Arizona?
– bob