Doggies in the Window

Pictured on your left are three of the canine residents of Château Brooks. They are looking out the window at me as I returned home after running errands.

Unfortunately, I did not get a decent image of all five dogs in one window, as either a) some dogs were in motion while others sat; or b) they appeared in both windows at the same time.

And yes: I normally keep the windows lowered to a crack, and this photo was somewhat staged as I opened the windows further to catch a better view of their faces. Make sure you alert the Academy Award people of my ineffective mise-en-scène techniques.

On Playing Hooky for a Few Hours

Left: Internet Explorer error message

After waking this morning I went to check my email and noticed that the mail website would not work, and joining the mail website was my primary work platform. After a few minutes of refreshing, reloading, and clearing various caches, I decided I would wait out what appeared to be a significant outage.

Perhaps the temporary down time was a mixed blessing, though: I woke up in a groggy state of mind not particularly conducive to writing, thinking, or grading. I then spent the next few hours in a state of not-work, or at least not-work-work.

I cleaned up the yard, finished the dishes, threw some laundry in the washer, played with the dogs, and even killed time reading while in the hammock. Instead of my normal anxiety when the Internet is down, I worked on a variety of nagging chores that in their own way cluttered my mind.

And when normalcy returned to the Web, my morning ended up being much more productive than it looked to be when the Web sat silent.

First Crocus of Spring

The other day I documented the first flower of spring in my backyard, which was a purple violet. Today I noticed the first crocus to bloom in my yard, a single striped purple flower with a bright yellow stamen.

I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the croci (or is it crocuses) since last fall, when I planted over a hundred of these bulbs.I opted to follow my wife's suggestion, which was to spread the crocus bulbs around the yard in a randomized pattern. I previously wanted to bunch the bulbs in geometric rows and recognizable patterns, but I lost that landscaping debate.

Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope that the crocus blossoms are hardy enough to withstand the force associated with the running feet of canines.

Local Business Profile: Auto Connection

Living as I do in the middle of the American Rust Belt, whenever possible I like to patronize and promote local businesses. "Local Business Profile" is an occasional feature on this site in which I use this blog to highlight quality Toledo-area businesses. Have a suggestion for a future profile? Email me at mebrook@bgsu.edu .

I have been a regular customer at Toledo's Auto Connection for the better part of two decades now. The company has four Toledo-area locations and specializes in mufflers, brakes, and suspension work.

Originally I started using Auto Connection's location at Sylvania and Douglas out of convenience, as my old business office was right across the street at DeVeaux Village. Yet quickly I learned that the folks who run Auto Connection are honest business operators, and I exclusively take my cars to them for exhaust work because I know they will not rip me off. Between the money saved at a quality repair shop like Auto Connection and the cash one could save from shopping for cheap car insurance, a person could sock away quite a chunk of savings.

One time I drove up a car with an exhaust that sounded as loud as a diesel semi-trailer, and I expected to spend $150 or so on a new exhaust system. Instead, the manager explained that I really only needed a doughnut gasket, and after a mere 20 minutes and $20 I was back on the road.

I would bet that the counterman at one of the national chains would not have hesitated to sell me a tail pipe and muffler that I did not need. However, the guys at Auto Connection have always demonstrated a willingness to keep the costs down and bank instead on repeat business, which is probably why they have been around for so many decades.

I know that I have referred many friends and family members to Auto Connection, and if you are in need of quality exhaust, brake, or suspension work, look no further than the Auto Connection.

Oh, and I just returned from yet another positive experience with Auto Connection today, which is what prompted me to write this post. Excellent work, men!

Quick Plug: The Fresh Air Fund

I recently became acquainted with a non-profit group called The Fresh Air Fund, which is a not-for-profit agency that has been active since 1877. Since the group's inception over 1.7 million children have received assistance, and approximately 10,000 New York City children each year enjoy the various free Fresh Air Fund programs.

The group depends on tax-deductible donations, so if you can spare a few dollars in this cash-tight economy, please consider helping out The Fresh Air Fund with a donation to further the mission of providing inner-city children with a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Follow this link to learn how to become a host family and welcome a child into your home.

"Enter the Sandman": Smooth Jazz Version

I came across an intriguing mashup/rearrangement of the Metallica song "Enter the Sandman" on Youtube created by Los Angeles musician and composer Andy Rehfeldt. The concert video in question retains Mettalica lead singer James Hetfield's vocals, but Rehfedlt replaced the metal with a smooth jazz arrangement that is both hilarious and, well, musically compelling:



Rehfeldt has a number of other unexpected rearrangements on his YouTube site, including a death metal rendition of "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong and a reggae version of "Detroit Rock City" by Kiss that are worth your time, unless you would rather spend your free moments surfing the Internet for industrial supplies.

Your choice, Bubba.

Spring's First Flower

I came across the purple violet in the image while beginning the spring cleanup of my yard. I transplanted this flower last year, and it was a dying remnant of a small flower display someone gave my wife at school. I knew that violets were perennial flowers, but I did not hold out hope that the formerly spindly plant would survive a harsh Ohio winter.

Yet the plant pushed right through a layer of dead leaves and branches to be the first flower in my yard, and it appears that there will be at least four other blossoms to join it in the coming days.

There is an metaphor here waiting to be put into words about perseverance and spring blossoms, but I have more work to accomplish (not involving a life insurance online quote) while the sun still shines.

On Moving a Mountain of Dirt

In the past few years my gardening and landscaping efforts at Château Brooks found me raiding underused portions on my one-third acre of urban paradise for topsoil. This year I decided that I no longer wished to shuffle dirt around my yard, and I ordered four cubic yards of topsoil from Dennis Topsoil and Gardenland on Dorr Street.

The truck delivered the fresh topsoil in a speedy fashion yesterday, though I neglected to consider the effects of an inch and a half of rain on the weight of the topsoil I wanted to spread in various gardens and low spots in my yard. I think I only moved six wheelbarrow loads full of mud yesterday before giving up.

The sun returned today and after teaching I plowed into my work (pun intended) with renewed vigor. I estimate I have moved about 1-1/2 cubic yards of topsoil around my property, and it is amazing for me to look upon the cache of soil I still have left.

The only downside to my decision to have the dump truck driver deposit the topsoil near the street was an absent-minded (or malicious) city trash truck driver. The clown drove right through the dirt pile, spreading dirt approximately the next 30 feet away from the pile. The more I think about it the more I think the plowing was intentional, though of course I would be unable to prove such a claim.

I ended up spending almost as much time sweeping up the still-heavy splattered topsoil-mud mixture as I did actually moving the dirt to useful places. Still, it was excellent exercise: a hearty blend of aerobic workout and weight-lifting that gave me a sense of physical tiredness I have not experienced in over a month, since the last heavy snowfall.

There is also something satisfying about working hard in dirt, something both primordial and visceral. Now, I am not ready to walk away from academia, mind you, especially since it took me almost decade to get where I am today, but I always enjoy getting my hands dirty with the patch of land I call my property.

Quirky Websites: I Park Like an Idiot

The Quirky Website of the Week is a semi-regular feature on this site. Feel free to recommend other quirky websites in the Comments section.

I laughed out loud for the first time today (yes, one of those days) when I clicked on a link that a blog reader sent me. The site in question is IParkLikeanIdiot.com, and the designers have two purposes in mind: documenting egregious violations of vehicular decorum and hilarious vigilantism.

Visitors can purchases stacks of "I Park Like an Idiot" bumper stickers, and then when they see someone in fact parking like an idiot, place a bright yellow bumper sticker on the offending vehicle. Intrepid vigilantes then take photos of the idiot drivers and submit the images to the website for posting.

Here is an image of the bumper sticker:

Left: "I Park Line an Idiot" bumper stickers

People who cannot seem to park within the designated lines have long been a source of frustration to me, especially in lots where parking is already at a premium, like the University of Toledo. I remember a motorist a few months ago who managed to take up three spaces with a minivan with some idiotic parking, an act that almost screamed: "I am FAR more important than anyone else in this lot."

A pox on thee, oh self-centered knave.

Anyways, do not mention this website should you be sued by a yuppie for adhesive damage to his Lexus, but enjoy yourself if you decide to engage in a bit of vehicular karma.

On Automatic Weapons and Political Ads

Left: Jesse Kelly for Congress ad; click for larger version

My eye caught this banner advertisement this morning for the Jesse Kelly for Congress campaign. What intrigued me was not the fact that this United States Marine Corps combat veteran played up his military record, but rather that this advertisement featured Kelly posing with an automatic weapon.

The weapon appears to be an assault rifle, perhaps an M4 carbine or an M16A2 assault rifle. Ostensibly this is an image from Kelly's tour of duty in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Kelly is challenging Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords from the U.S. House of Representatives. His platform is fairly typical for GOP candidates this year: against the recently passed health care bill, for smaller government, supports the overseas wars, for a double border fence with Mexico, and pro-life.

A scan of Google Images resulted in another Kelly advertisement with his rifle:

Left: Jesse Kelly for Congress ad; click for larger version

Clearly Kelly wants to promote the idea of the "warrior in Congress" that his advertisements reinforce. Setting aside the militancy in the ads, I have been scratching my head trying to think of another example of a political advertisement that featured a candidate with some form of weaponry. Theodore Roosevelt and his "Big Stick" comes to mind, but after this I am drawing a blank (pun intended).

I am not inclined to suggest that in this political environment a gun-waving strategy would hurt, though I have some reservations about whether this is a responsible ad (note to driveby posters: I am pro-Second Amendment, so do not start with the "typical liberal" rants). I am rather curious if this is an aberration, a long-standing tradition, or a new trend in which we will see many more arms-bearing political candidates.

If you think of any examples, please post them in the Comments section, and add an image link if you do find some.

Wikipedia Down? Say It Ain't So!

Having some quick questions regarding abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, I surfed over to Wikipedia for a brief refresher. Unfortunately, for the past 45 minutes I have been unable to access this page or, for that matter, any page on Wikipedia. Luckily for me there exists an excellent page on this radical abolitionist at Ohio History Central.

As an academic I find the site to be quite useful for preliminary research into a topic, and some pages have excellent bibliographies. However, Wikipedia is rife with vandalism and misinformation, and some pages read as though they were composed by an eight-year-old immigrant. I caution every college class I teach not to trust Wikipedia as a definitive source, and never to cite the site, Yet every semester more than a handful of students dutifully provide citations to Wikipedia pages in their papers.

Yet the stability of the site and its ability to deliver content have never been issues for me. I am thus puzzled at what appears to be a significant outage at Wikipedia, and I trust that the Wiki-techs will fix the problem in short order.

Update, 1:53 PM EST:

We are now into Hour Two of the Great Wikipedia Meltdown, and the front page of the site is accessible:

However, none of the graphics load, all the links are dead, and every page I try to visit returns an error message. This is obviously a larger issue than insufficient server capabilities, as I would be getting intermittent access to the site.

As it stands, Wikipedia is momentarily dead, and I have yet to see word of this in the blogosphere.

Update, 2:01 PM:

The social networking news website Mashable is the first major site to report the Great Wikipedia Meltdown. Like me, everyone on the site is in the dark, though the site reports a few users can still access Wikipedia.

Update, 2:05PM EST:

The social networking site Twitter has quite a few tweets about Wikipedia crashing. The site is till down on my end, reverting back to the aforementioned Red X version with dead links.

Update, 2:11 PM EST:

The Huffington Post located a Wikipedia Tweet that offered the following explanation for the prolonged Wikipedia outage:

Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.

On my end the outage has been at least 90 minutes, though it may have been longer than this.

Update, 2:18 PM EST:

On a related note, the Wikipedia outage has been a boon for my website:

In the past hour this website's traffic zoomed from about 50 readers to over 1200, and at the time of this post the site had over 500 people from around the world reading this post. Too bad I do not participate in any advertising programs that raise fees based on traffic, though I strongly encourage all new site vistors to use the Amazon links on the right sidebar and make purchases.

:-}

Update, 2:31 PM EST:

Wikipedia is still down on my end (almost two hours now), and the blogosphere is beginning to reflect that this is not just an English language problem for the technicians at Wikipedia. The crash appears to be global in nature and involves many Wikipedia language sites. Conspiracy theorists are starting to claim that this is a hacker-based DNS attack on Wikipedia, but there appears to be no evidence yet for such a claim.

Update, 2:41 PM EST:

WPTV is the first traditional media outlet to report the Wikipedia outage, but they have no more information than anyone else.

Update, 2:47 PM EST:

Wikipedia is still down here in Toledo, OH, and now the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph suggests that the Wikipedia outage may be related to a server cooling failure. The paper provides no evidence for the claim, so this appears to be just speculative reporting at the moment.

Update, 3:01 PM ETS:

I can now access (albeit slowly) individual Wikipedia pages, but images show up blank with the dreaded Red X. This suggests that Wikipedia Commons and/or Wikimedia continue to be offline.

Update, 3:31 PM EST:

I am still experiencing intermittent outages on Wikipedia, though about half of my attempts to connect to a page fail. There are still no images available on the site, and the formatting is out of kilter. So far few media sites have picked up this story, though CNN's science and tech blog reported the news that Wikipedia is offline.

Oh, and to the naysayers: approximately 80 percent of Google's traffic winds up at Wikipedia, and most of Wikipedia's pages wind up in the top 10 on Google searches. While you may be chuckling at geeks like me, the many millions of daily Wikipedia visitors are quite perturbed.

Update, 4:06 PM EST:

We are now into Hour Four of the Great Wikipedia Meltdown, and all websites related to the Wikimedia Foundation are down on my end:

Left: all Wikimedia sites down at 4:00 PM EST

I spent a few minutes trying out all Wikimedia sites, and none of them work. Wikipedia's Twitter page offers a cheery spin, claiming that "we're back," but as far as I can tell Wikipedia is DOA for now. The Twitter page did add that "there still may be some glitches as the data center in Amsterdam is still overheated."

Glitches=site crash. Gotcha!

Update, 4:31 PM EST:

Wikipedia pages once again load without pictures on about half of my attempts to connect with the site, and DNS errors pop up on the other half of my clicks. Most of the other Wikimedia sites are still down on my end. Interestingly, a number of Facebook posters put forth the idea that China is behind the Wikipedia crash, but I have difficulty buying the latest conspiracy theory behind the outage.

This reminds me of a student in one of my classes two years ago who insisted that the presence of poisonous chemicals on toys imported from China was not accidental, but rather a deliberate plot by the Chinese government to slowly kill off U.S. citizens.

There is paranoid, and then there is downright loony, and I think the Chinese are too busy producing inexpensive consumer products and repressing their own citizens to worry about Wikipedia.

Update, 5:03 PM EST:

Most Wikimedia sites now load properly on the first try, though load speed is definitely on the slow side. I received DNS errors on Wikiquote and Wikibooks twice, and I loaded a few Wikipedia pages with Red Xs instead of images, but the crash seems to be over. Total outage time seems to be in the 4-1/2 hour range in this region.

Quirky Websites: ASCII Text Generator

The Quirky Website of the Week is a semi-regular feature on this site. Feel free to recommend other quirky websites in the Comments section.

Admittedly the concept of ASCII art and text designs appeals to a particular class of techno-geek, and I am guilty as charged, even though the number of occasions where I could actually use ASCII text images is fairly limited. Still, if you find yourself in need of ASCII text drawings, check out the ASCII Text Generator.

Impress your friends and coworkers with your mastery of ASCII art using the generator, or at least verify your status as a card-carrying geek.