Pigeon Point, Northern California

Jasmine and I went for a drive with my brother to Pigeon Point late on Saturday. Pigeon Point is nice, but we were warned to be very careful (see below)!





It was a good end to an afternoon which had begun more ponderously when Alamo had taken 2.5 hours to issue the car we had booked, due to overbooking and assorted other inefficiencies!

It's not just lettuce that Ashley loves to eat

She loves eating other green things, too. Here she is with Jasmine's flowers earlier this month.

Our cat, Ashley, loves to eat lettuce!

It's true. It's one of her favourite foods! Here's proof:

Girl drives Rubik's cube champ to new record

Jasmine pointed me at a news.com.au article today about the factor that helped the new Rubik's Cube world record-holder, Eric Akkersdijk, over the line with his time of 7.08 sec:

"I met a very nice girl there who worked at one of the stands at the tournament that sell puzzles, she was quite interested in the cubing tournament and I felt pretty attracted to her," he said. "We chatted the whole time.

"So instead of waiting nervously for your next solve and over-focussing, I was a bit distracted by something else. The result was no more nerves for the competition."

Moving my blog to Blogger

I'm in the process of moving my blog to Blogger after previously hosting it myself on a shared server, using Blosxom. The extra effort of managing server and Blosxom configuration were just getting to much, so software as a service seemed like a much better option.

There are a few cobwebs at the moment, as I slowly resurrect the long-abandoned blog and move content across.

Snow in April!

Ridiculous! We have been having a number of days in Washington, DC, in the upper 20s Celsius (low 80s Fahrenheit)... and then Jasmine and I woke up Saturday morning to see a light dusting of snow outside! The weather forecast tells us that there's a chance of more snow, too.

According to The Washington Post (login required):

Washington has had the occasional snow dusting in April. But the last time the city got more than an inch in the month was in 1924, when five inches fell, Weather Service meteorologist Dennis Feltgen said.

Michael has reminded me why I disabled comments on this site

My brother, who (like me) uses Blosxom for his website, has reminded me why I gave up on comments on this website. Michael writes:

664 real comments on this site, 18361 I manually said no to, 32111 were blocked based on originating IP, and 5007 contained a bad word. Andrew currently donates 506 mb of disk to hosting just comments.

My experience with comment spam was similar -- and it took more time than it was worth to try to block the spammers. Even now, when I look at my website log, there's a huge amount of traffic from spammers trying to use long-disabled comment links.