If you ride the King County Metro at all you probably ride from the same stops a majority of the time. What is nice about our local bus system is that they provide up to the minute data on all of the buses in the system. This can tell you if your bus is coming early, late, or on time. So, if you use google.com/ig I have a little plug-in for you. To use it, do the following:
- Head to your google.com/ig page and click “Add Content”
- To the right of the search button, click “Add by URL”
- Enter in the following URL: http://lazyi.net/google/metro_bus_widget.xml
- Accept the URL
- Re-visit your google.com/ig home page and enter in your bus stop number
Hey, that’s great Ryan, but what’s my stop number? Ah, if you don’t know your stop number like I do, you can do the following:
- Head to http://tracker-loc.metrokc.gov/
- Search for your stop by bus number or whatever means works for you
- When you find your stop, look at the URL in your browser. You should see something like: http://tracker-loc.metrokc.gov/avl.jsp?id=114. Remember what the id value is (e.g. 114)
- In the plug-in settings put in that number and press “save”
Yes, the stop number thing isn’t ideal, but given the data that is available online, this is really the only option available to us.
Also, you can repeat the above steps to add this plug-in multiple times, since many bus riders have a starting and ending stop to pay attention to.
I’m sure revisions will be forthcoming, but right now I am basically screen scraping the Metro site so, that explains a lot of what you see in the plug-in. I might take the initiative to see if I can get the data in a different format, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on it. Also, I don’t think it’s working right in IE… but that’s an issue I can deal with for now.
So, there you have it, my first foray into google.com/ig plug-ins.
In their infinite wisdom, the IE team thinks it’s a good idea to differentiate the versions of IE7 for XP and for Vista. It is a valid concern to have; especially for support calls. But, since they run on different operating systems, they needed yet another modifier in a product name, because saying you run Vista or XP is much more difficult. So, here you have it: IE7+ is IE7 for Vista and IE7 is IE7 on XP. I would have just left it as IE7 on Vista and IE7 on XP, but I guess the + makes much more sense.
What ever you do… don’t click it.
Recently, for some reason or another, schools, parents, and the media have found out about teenagers habits on line and are beginning to use their postings as leverage against them (see this MSNBC article: “District to monitor students’ MySpace pages”). Mainly, these issues revolve around one site, Myspace.com. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anybody who posts material on line on a semi-regular basis, uses a search engine, or understands how the Internet works. With the arrival of search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!, it is fairly easy to find personal information for people who wish to post it on line. And, if you put it all in one place, like Myspace.com, it’s made even easier to find. Now, where this information gets used can sometimes be disturbing (see NBC’s To Catch a Predator series), enlightening, and informative. Read more…
From the Seattle Times:
More than 1,000 temporary Microsoft workers are taking a seven-day unpaid leave in a move meant to keep the company on budget as it nears the end of its fiscal year.
And I got an exemption to be here this week. At least the weather is bad.
Many months since the last update, I have a new update to my Amazon Wishlist Plugin for WordPress. I must admit that this update was not made by myself, but my Chris Benard. This is a pretty minor change, but it will now make your wishlist page validate! So, there aren’t any “feature” updates to this, just an update to the XHTML that I was spitting out. Many thanks to Chris Benard for the patch!
Two days ago Kony got a deep fryer. It is something that came up on slickdeals.net and we figured that it was small enough and we’d enjoy it once it arrived. So, a couple of weeks after he purchased it we had it in our kitchen. Last night was the first time we were able to use it, the first night we had it we found out we didn’t have enough oil. So, since we have a love for chicken, we decided to make it our inaugural meal in the deep fryer.
It has been a long time since I have personally deep fried anything and probably the last time that I did, it was probably chicken. So, off we went getting the eggs, flour, and others seasonings and preparing our chicken for the tasty delicious that would become of them after a little bath in the greatness of hot oil. The deep fryer that we have is kinda small, so it took some time to cook enough chicken for Jamie, Kony, and me. But, it was worth the wait. Coupled with rice and corn, gravy, and biscuits, it was a perfect first meal to break in our deep fryer; the newest addition to our kitchen family.
