Carp-e-Diem ! » Other

Letter to the Editor

matt — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:26:50 +0000

Last week, the below letter to the editor appeared in our local Carpinteria paper, The Coastal View News :

My reply was printed in this week’s edition. I have reproduced it below :

Friends and family moving away

matt — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:43:16 +0000

Over the years we have experienced the heartbreak of friends and family moving away from sunny southern California. All those people made the decision after carefully weighing all their options. After many years (for some) of separation, I just wanted to give them a reminder of what they are missing.

Here is the local weather for some of the places that people have moved to :

Yikes!
Oh, just to make my point, below is the weekend forecast for Carp.

The Tea Fire Burns 100+ homes in Santa Barbara

matt — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:59:43 +0000

Last night from our loft balcony, we could see a fire burning in Montecito. Toby found out that it was burning through Westmont and all the students had been evacuated. The house next door is a rental with 3 Westmont students / recent grads and at about 10p Toby brought them up to look at the fire from our roof. The group lifted up prayers. Carpinteria is relatively far from the fires.

The best information is at The Santa Barbara Independent Newspaper although the website is very slow right now.

A nifty map of the evacuation areas and the fires is at Google Maps

Google Street View

matt — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:39:45 +0000

Google Street View is a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth that provides 360° panoramic street-level views and allows users to view parts of selected cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas at ground level. (from Wikipedia)

Someone went by and took pictures of ~~the neighborhood~~ most of Carpinteria, but when I key in my address, Google shows the alley (Cedar Place) in back. If you follow the arrows around the block you can get to the front of the house. It looks like these pictures were taken at the end of last year, as the scaffolding on the East side came down around January 2008.

Here is a link to 4922 8th Street, which seems to be the closest one can get to the actual address.

http://tinyurl.com/3zaptg

CalVoters.org : The Proposition Song

admin — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:56:22 +0000

>> From Daniel Weintraub’s blog for the Sacramento Bee

Kim Alexander and her Cal-Voter singers now have a video version up of their Proposition Song. As usual, it’s a great summary of the ballot summary. You know it’s going to be spot on right from the start when they manage to make the distinction that Prop. 1A is about the sales tax on gas as opposed to the gas tax. That’s some amazing subtlety for a song that covers 13 props in just three minutes.

Pictures on Flickr

admin — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 06:58:59 +0000

I am trying something new. I will be posting a select few pictures on the blog, but more pictures will be posted at Flickr. So visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/theule to see the pictures that didn’t make the ‘blog cut’. They are still worth viewing.

VSLive 2006 – Day 3

admin — Wed, 17 May 2006 05:23:23 +0000

Tuesday was the first day of the really good technical stuff. Most of the day had high quality content and I think I learned a great deal. I have even begun planning how I will use the knowledge back at Salem.
Tuesday night has a tradition of Midnight Madness where the attendees play games, see more demos of software, raffles, etc. Totally geeky stuff. It is fun when I have attended in the past, but I was just wiped out so I skipped it to go to bed.

VSLive 2006 – Day 2

admin — Tue, 16 May 2006 05:22:40 +0000

Monday –
The 2 morning sessions were a mixed bag. The first session was rather boring as it was on the topic of technology that was not going to be released for about another 2 years, but the second session was extremely valuable. The rest of the scheduled sessions for the day were of the same nature as the first, less-than-valuable session. So after lunch we decided to use our complimentary ticket to one of the parks. We took a water taxi from the hotel to Disney-MGM. It was open until 9p with an additional 3 hours for resort guests. We stayed until about 11:30pm with the last couple of hours spent repeatedly riding the Tower of Terror and the Rock and Roll-er coaster.

VSLive 2006 – Day 1

admin — Mon, 15 May 2006 01:27:24 +0000

Pre- Conference Workshop
Ugh, after a very late night ( I was very wired to finally be here, so I was awake until about 2:30a, and only slept fitfully ) my wake up call arrived much too early at 6:30 am.
I ate breakfast at Fresh
Mediterranean Market. No character breakfast, but a pretty good buffet. Lunch was a box provided by the conference that I only nibbled at because I want to save room for dinner. We will be going to Downtown Disney to see what restaurants are available. If we run out of options there, then we will drive over to International Drive, which apparently has many more choices.
UPDATE:
Downtown Disney was packed, probably due to Mother’s Day. We ended up having take away from a fish and chips shop.

VSLive 2006 – Travel Day

admin — Sun, 14 May 2006 01:16:56 +0000

Travel Day
I love Santa Barbara Airport. After a wonderfully short ride with Toby and Max, I got to the airport about 50 minutes before my flight to Orlando with a plane change in Salt Lake City. Everything went smoothly, and I believe that we left a couple of minutes early. I know that we arrived in SLC 15 minutes early. The flight to Orlando was not very full, and the couple that was sharing my row decided they didnt like my company and left for more spacious digs. I have the whole row to myself. I started and finished Painting the Map Red, by Hugh Hewitt during my plane flights. The pilot stated that we had good tailwinds, so we arrived in Orlando about 30 minutes early. Woo hoo!
Even though I left the airport with my bags at 11:30p, by the time I got the rental car, and checked into the hotel, it was nearly 1 am. The car had the Magellan NeverLost
GPS system which was cool.