I was just poking around the “Army Corps of Engineers website”:http://www.usace.army.mil/ and I found the following (and apparently recent) FAQ on unwatering New Orleans in Word format. I’m reprinting it here so that it will be more accessible and in a web friendly format.

*Q. How long will it take to get the water out of New Orleans?*

A. We are unsure. A number of factors play into this. First, Lake Pontchartrain is at roughly 4.5 feet above sea level and falling. The city is at a lower elevation so water will continue to flow into it until it equalizes.

Once the breach on the 7th Street Canal is closed, Pump Station 6 can pump 10,000 cubic feet per second.

Once the breaches are closed and all of the pumps are running, the pumps can lower the water level 1/2 inch per hour or about a foot per day. We can get the water level to sea level in four and a half days. The 1/2 inch rate assumes the late is at normal levels. That would create pumping inefficiency, as could trash in drains and canals that feed into the pump stations.

That‚Äôs a “Best Case” scenario. We don‚Äôt know the conditions of all of the pumps. Fortunately most of the pump motors and controllers are at an elevation greater than 5 feet and we hope they weren‚Äôt submerged. There could be other unforeseen problems.

We assume the pumps have not been submerged since most pumps are at an elevation greater than five feet above sea level.

Pumps are operated and maintained by the local sewage and drainage districts.

*Q. Why did the levees fail?*

A. What failed were actually floodwalls, not levees. This was caused by overtopping which caused scouring, or an eating away of the earthen support, which then basically undermined the wall.

These walls and levees were designed to withstand a fast moving category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a strong 4 at landfall, and conditions exceeded the design.

*Q. How many other areas do you need to get water out of?*

A. There are at least five ringed levees (areas surrounded by levees) that need to be emptied. New Orleans and Jefferson; New Orleans to Venice (Hurricane Protection project – Port Sulfur to Venice, LA); Chalmette Loop (lower 9th ward of Orleans Parish and Urbanized part of St. Bernard Parrish ); and, Plaquemines Parish non-federal levees have also been overtopped.

*Q. What will be done to unwater these areas?*

A. The unwatering plan will be used in these areas as well. Crews and equipment will be mobilized to breach the levees at predetermined locations and allow for gravity drainage into Lake Bourgne or other surrounding water bodies.

I just noticed that “http://www.spaceimaging.com/”:http://spaceimaging.com currently has images from August 30 in Mobile, Alabama on their front page (but nothing yet from New Orleans). You can zoom in on the image and move around so I was able to locate and clearly see the bridge where the oil drilling platform floated under it. I’m not familiar enough with Mobile to immediately spot any other effects from Kantrina with just a quick scan of the images. Let me know if there’s anything significant that I missed.

Rob Kline has asked that I point people towards “katrinahelp.info”:http://katrinahelp.info a collaborative Wiki that has been setup to get people information and assistance in dealing with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. According to the site:

bq. This page is intended to be modeled on the excellent tsunami wiki site that was created around December 26, 2004. Please take a look at the work done there. I am also looking for people to take blog postings and classify them properly on this wiki.

If you’re web savvy and interested in helping out, this looks like a great way to help out from afar.

New Orleans isn’t out of the woods yet by any means, but it looks like the strange course change that Katrina made shortly before making landfall prevented the predicted worst case scenarios from happening. Here are a few different links with more up to date information:

The SuperDome roof didn’t hold up too well as “Wonkin’ in Detroit shows”:http://raywert.blogspot.com/2005/08/superdome-not-so-super.html.

New Orleans Metroblogging has the “best coverage of damage and flooding”:http://neworleans.metblogs.com/archives/2005/08/how_do_you_not.phtml in the various parishes in and around New Orleans.

“Flickr”:http://flickr.com has a “Hurricane Katrina Photo Group”:http://www.flickr.com/groups/45871688@N00/

“Josh Britton”:http://www.joshbritton.com/ has also been doing a ton of posting on Hurricane Katrina (although he just lost power).

“This guy”:paul2.net is running a “photolog”: http://paul2.net/?cat=5 on the hurricane and he’s doing it via cellphone, car battery power and a free dialup AOL account.

And of course “brendanloy.com”:http://brendanloy.com still has a ton of good information as well.

Was anyone else irritated that the bulk of President Bush’s speech was about the Iraqi constitutional process? I walked in on the speech after he was already going on about the situation in Iraq and sat there watching in disbelief until Mary told me that he had actually talked about Hurricane Katrina in the first part. To me it’s completely ridiculous that he spent one iota of time discussing the situation in Iraq when New Orleans is about to get wiped out.

The country and economy that are President Bush’s primary responsibility are about to take a hit that could approach 100 billion dollars by some accounts. Something like a third of the nation’s oil processing infrastructure is going to be affected by this hurricane. This is not just a problem for the people of the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. This is a situation that we’re all going to feel the effects of for a long time and it’s extremely disappointing to me that he spent time defending his pet project in Iraq in the face of a looming disaster on U.S. soil.

*Update:* I definitely wasn’t off base. “The Lumberyard”:http://thelumberyard.blogspot.com/2005/08/bush-is-completely-out-of-touch.html did the math and here are the stats:

bq. Entire speech: 1022 words total
Katrina: 203 words
Iraq: 819 words
That’s right, a Category 5 hurricane is poised to hit one of America’s largest cities, and the president only spends exactly 20 percent of his speech on this issue, and 80 percent on Iraq.

I just came across “brendanloy.com”:http://brendanloy.com in my referer logs and it has some really good in depth coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Brendan has put together a ton of highly informative links on possible outcomes and has been beating the evacuation drum since yesterday. I wish that Mayor Nagins had taken things as seriously as Brendan has been because it’s looking really bad at this point. There are going to be a lot of people stranded and the projections for devastation are unbelievable if the worst case scenario comes to pass.

I’ve started looking for weblog posts by various New Orleans and Louisiana residents to get more of a firsthand perspective on the approaching hurricane. Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with so far.

“Electric Mist”:http://www.electricmist.net/archives/001626.html who is located in Baton Rouge comments:

bq. The traffic coming out of New Orleans is insane. No one can find a hotel between here and Houston, and I’ve been told that it’s also pretty booked as far away as Dallas. There’s a lot of advice being bandied about on TV about it being better to head north or east, but the path of the hurricane is going to be north-east when it hits land. At the best, if you can get far enough away, you’re only going to have heavy rains, but if you’re east, you’ll have that a lot longer than those in the west. Hence, most people head west.

The pictures I saw on “cnn”:cnn.com showed a virtual traffic jam on the interstate heading out of New Orleans. I read an estimate somewhere that a complete evacuation of New Orleans would require 72 hours so a lot of people are still going to have to ride this one out.

“Yaddoshi”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/yaddoshi/18693.html seems to think that everyone is taking things too far:

bq. My stance is the same as usual – everyone is overreacting as usual, thanks to the news and the human sheep mentality I watch and am forced to interact with on a daily basis… People are putting plywood on the outside of their windows as usual (morons) and a number of businesses are already shut down.

It will be interesting to see if he has the same attitude a few days from now. It seems to me that it’s better to be over prepared than under prepared.

“Richard at New Orleans Metroblogs”:http://neworleans.metblogs.com/archives/2005/08/katrina_and_her.phtml echoes this sentiment:

bq. Dear Evacuation Monkeys: This one is different. You officially have my permission to freak out.

Brendan83 (who might actually be a classmate of my friend Steve’s since he’s also going to medical school in New Orleans) “writes”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/brendon83/2567.html:

bq. Katrina will probably be a category 3 or 4 when it hits, but we will be long gone before then. I have spent most of today picking up anything that could potentially blow or float away in the yard, helping my dad load his work machinery onto his trailer, and packing up everything that is valuable to me into a small duffel bag and a box. Everything else, its fate lies with the hurricane.

“Michael Homan”:http://michaelhoman.blogspot.com/2005/08/hurricane-katrina.html is going to be sticking it out:

bq. Hurricane Katrina has her eyes set, seemingly, on my fair city of New Orleans. Therese and the kids are either heading to Jacksonville or Purvis Mississippi at 4 AM Sunday morning. Me, the dogs, and various other critters are battin’ down the hatches.

Hopefully he and everyone else staying put will pull through.

*Update 8/30/05:* Rob Kline has asked that I point people towards “katrinahelp.info”:http://katrinahelp.info a collaborative Wiki that has been setup to get people information and assistance in dealing with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

I “discovered”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/27/tropical.weather/index.html this morning that Hurricane Katrina is going to pass very close to (if not directly over) New Orleans on Monday. While this is pretty big news in and of itself, it especially hits home for me because my good friend Steve Wilhelm and his family just moved down there so that he can attend medical school at nearby Tulane University. I was able to get in touch with Steve this morning via instant messenger and he was already making arrangements to evacuate if necessary. I asked him what the weather was like there at the moment and he said it was a perfectly normal 90° summer day. Just another reason to be thankful for modern weather tracking technology that can give people time to avoid major catastophes like this.

Speaking of weather tracking technology, this “Google Map Plot of Hurricane Katrina”:http://compooter.org/sandbox/code/google/hurricane/atlantic/?year=2005&storm=katrina I just found over at “digg.com”:http://digg.com/science/Google_Map_Plot_of_Hurricane_Katrina definitely suggests that evacuation is going to be the prudent course at the moment. My thoughts and prayers definitely go out to Steve and the all other the people in Mississippi and Louisiana who are going to face the effects of Katrina.

It’s been a long time since I’ve shopped at the “Boeing Surplus Store”:http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/surplus/index.html, but a “recent post on Cool Tools”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/ jogged my memory. If you like to fiddle around with old computers and electronic equipment it’s definitely a cool place to visit once in a while. Back when I lived in Seattle for a couple months in the late 90s I ran down to Kent a few times and bought a couple used large screen monitors there for a fraction of their original price. If I still lived in that part of the state I’d probably visit at least once a month to see if there were any cool deals. There’s a lot of stuff that could best be classified as junk, but it’s cool junk and there’s usually some good stuff mixed in as well.

Applelinks has some “interesting news related to the new Google Talk and SIPphone”:http://www.applelinks.com/p5/index.php/more/shareware_beat32/#3 (a company with a product similar to Skype only based on the open SIP protocol).

bq. SIPphone has also agreed to expand their network by linking with the newly launched Google Talk network. Gizmo Project and Google Talk users will be able to exchange instant messages and voice calls among each other in future versions. “Our goal is to link the entire world into one giant free dialing directory and joining forces with Google is a great step in that direction,” said SIPphone CEO Michael Robertson. “Gizmo Project users can now call more than two dozen voice networks and 150,000 University phones using GUPS, which makes us the largest SIP based network in the world.”

This is especially good news for Macintosh Users since there is already a free downloadable “SIP”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol client available at “gizmoproject.com”:http://www.gizmoproject.com/.

I think a Google/SIPphone combination is going to be a pretty serious competitor for “Skype”:http://skype.com since their approach is based on a non-proprietary standard. I found a post with some “good comparsion information”:http://www.randomthink.net/archives/2005/07/08/skype-vs-gizmo-project/ between the two services at “randomthink.net”:http://www.randomthink.net.

I’ve got a couple different weblog projects that I’m working on right now and my appreciation for “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org just keeps growing the more I use it. Thanks to the experience I gained while setting up Axodys and the simple WordPress install process I was able to migrate “Mary’s classroom weblog”:http://mrsgilman.net over from an old version using MovableType in less than an hour. I still need to set up her events calendar, but it looks like it will be pretty easy to do thanks to the “Event Calendar 3.0 plugin”:http://blog.firetree.net/2005/07/18/eventcalendar-30/ that a quick google search turned up last night.

Once we have the basic functionality on “mrsgilman.net”:http://mrsgilman.net set up the next phase will be to give it a theme that is more customized to Mary’s liking than the default theme. Yesterday morning I sent her a link to the “Word Press Theme Browser”:http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/theme_browser.php at “alexking.org”:http://alexking.org and had her look through the themes and pick things she likes as a starting point. It sounds like she’s already picked out a few different ones that she likes.

Besides Mary’s weblog, I’ve also got a bigger weblog project that I’ve had in mind for a while. It’s still strictly in the formative stages, but I’m hoping to have something rolled out for by the beginning of September. Now that my kayak is functional and I’ve scaled back my efforts on it I’m going to put a lot of my efforts into the the new project. Stay tuned for more information.

The Sneeze has a “great interview”:http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000408.php with Adam Savage from the Discovery Channel’s hit show “Mythbusters”:http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html.

bq. *Adam, why is it so entertaining to watch you get hurt?*
(LAUGHING) Well, I think it’s a function of exactly why the show is entertaining. Jamie and I are not scientists. We’re not experts in any field. But we have a lot of curiosity, and an uncommon ability to really throw ourselves in just about any corner of science, and really seek out what’s going on. And when I get hurt, I think people like to watch it because they identify with us. We’re not white lab coats, we’re not, you know, boring doctors, we’re just like anybody else, maybe with a few more skills. And everyone get hurts when they’re building stuff^1^. Even Jamie occasionally. Although, that never ends up on camera.

I still can’t believe that Adam pierced his tongue for one of the shows that I saw recently simply for the sake of an experiment on the effects of piercings on lightning strikes. It would have been one thing if he had actually wanted to have his tongue pierced, but based on the fact that he took it out at the end of the show (and he was happy to finally be able to remove it) it seemed like a pretty drastic thing to do in the name of science and television. Then again maybe that’s the kind of thing that makes me enjoy the show as much as I do.

*1* As the scars on my lefthand demonstrate, that statement definitely held true for me over the course of building my kayak.

Google Talk talk is “everywhere”:http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/08/im-on-google-talk-right-now.php tonight. Their jabber server is running (I know because like half the blogosphere I was able to connect to talk.google.com via Adium), but I haven’t seen any sign of an official announcement yet. I also tried going to “google.com/talk”:http://google.com/talk to see if I could download the Windows chat client for my XP machine, but as of Tuesday evening at just after 9:20 PM it didn’t work.

Apparently once Google Talk is officially available tomorrow the Windows client will also support Voice over IP which is fairly cool. I haven’t been much of an instant messaging user for close to five years now, which not coincidentally, is about the same length of time that Mary and I have been married. Since Mary was the primary person I IMed with any regularity it shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t keep it up.

Interestingly enough, my friend Jesse Jones and I experimented with the venerable unix “talk”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk command line utility quite a bit back when we were in college, but found the technology a bit rough at the time. With laggy network connections, weird overwriting glitches and a tendency to hold two distinct converations at the same time the technology was definitely in its infancy back then, but it was still a pretty fun way to communicate. I can’t speak for Jesse, but it’s interesting to me that I never really embraced Instant Messaging in quite the same way. Maybe with the advent of ICQ and AIM it just got too mainstream for me. Or probably more likely, I just never got in the habit of running my chat client in the background at all times.

“Engadget 1985″:http://features.engadget.com/entry/1234000430055334/ is by far the funniest piece of computer geek humor that I’ve read all day. It took me right back to the day I got my first modem– which was actually back in 1991. Cell phones have definitely come along ways since their brief case-sized ancestors debuted. And thank goodness GPS receivers have come down in size and price. Gadgets that cost more than your house just don’t seem like a wise investment no matter how cool. Catch it all and the trendytapecast over at “Engadget”:http://engadget.com.

Well, after “Robert’s ringing endorsement”:http://www.bump.net/2005/08/plans-for-resilience.html I had to hear Plans for myself and… wow. It took me a couple listens to really start to assimilate things, but once it started settle in I was blown away. As good as “Death Cab for Cutie’s”:http://deathcabforcutie.com first single Soul Meets Body is, I think there are at least six or seven songs on the album that I liked better.

As a point of reference, I really, really liked DCFC’s last album, “Transatlanticism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlanticism. But I have to admit that there are a few songs on that album that I regularly skip. It’s not so much that they’re bad songs, it’s just that they don’t really reach me on the same emotional level that the rest of the songs do. And in DCFC’s defense when they hit such a home run for me as they did with the album’s title track I can accept a few ground outs. Well, baseball analogies aside, I can honestly say that they’ve taken it to a whole ‘nother level and succeeded on every single song on Plans. I’ve been listening to it straight through repeatedly all weekend. Albums this solid just don’t come around very often.

Since missing my planned deadline a week and a half ago I’ve scaled things back a bit on my kayak building. I worked on the coaming roughly every other day this week and devoted quite a bit more time on it today as well. Even though I’ve generally taken my time I’ve still made a few more mistakes than I would prefer. It hasn’t been a big deal though because the vinyl coated polyester I’ve been using to make the skin and coaming is very easy to work with and fix mistakes.

As of this moment the kayak is finished enough to safely launch and I think we’re actually going to finally take it for a spin at a nearby lake tomorrow afternoon. The coaming needs a little bit of additional work between now and then, but it’s mostly just for some additional reinforcement and general aesthetic improvement– it’s already totally functional.

I’m excited to finally take my “Sea Raider”:http://yostwerks.com/SeaRaiderLCChuck.html (that’s the design not the actual kayak’s name) out and see how it does. It’s been a long, but fun journey building it and I’m really curious to see how it performs.

h4. Arrival

Yesterday Mary called me out of the blue to to ask me about a small package had been dropped off on our doorstep commando style. That is to say, a DHL delivery person jumped out of an unmarked van ran it up our front steps, dropped it off without ringing the doorbell and took off. I knew my new glasses were coming via DHL, but I was expecting them sometime around the middle of next week. Mary was a little bit weirded out, but I reassured her that the package had to be my new glasses and gave her the okay to open things up and confirm that everything had arrived in order.

Mary opened the package while I listened and immediately seemed impressed with the quality of the standard case and the glasses within. She even decided to try the glasses on to get a feel for what they looked like even though her vision is pretty close to 20/20. Everything seemed to be in order so I thanked her and we got off the phone so I could get back to work.

By the time I got home from work last night I had completely forgotten that the glasses had arrived. After a few minutes of catching up with Eawyn and the dogs I came to my senses and started looking around the house for them. Mary directed me to their location on the kitchen counter and I grabbed them and headed for the bathroom to remove my contacts.

h4. Initial Review

At first glance the “Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html model frames seemed pretty similar to my “previous Eddie Bauer pair”:http://axodys.com/1999/02/11/new-glasses, but I discovered that they’re actually quite a bit different on closer inspection. The material on the new frames was more of a shiny brown metal than the more natural bronze patina of my EB pair. Plastic only covers about half of the ear pieces while on my old EB’s the plastic ran all the way to the hinges. The “Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html lenses are similar in size to the EB’s, but streched a little wider horizontally and slightly narrow vertically with outer edges and corners that while rounded are much squarer than my EB’s were.

Overall I’m really happy with the look and feel of the “Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html model I chose. They’re a nice change from my previous glasses, yet the difference is so subtle that I felt completely comfortable with them the moment I put them on. The over all quality of the frame and lenses seems quite good and the delivery time was completely awesome. It’s alway taken at least a week for my glasses to arrive when I ordered them directly from my eye doctor.

h4. Conclusion

If you’re looking to order quality prescription eye glasses with the best value possible I heartily recommend “39dollarglasses.com”:http://39dollarglasses.com. They have a nice selection of “plastic”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/12000.html and “rimless”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/14000.html frames as well. You can even get “tinted prescription sunglasses”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/rx_sunglasses.htmlfor just under $50 (which I may buy next summer). The ordering process is easy and painless if you know your prescription and delivery time was surprisingly fast for the $5 standard ground. I received my glasses 3 days after placing my order despite living on the opposite side of the country from their New York location.

“Robert”:http://bump.net (who has never steered me wrong with his musical reviews) says that “Plans”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plans_%28album%29, “Death Cab For Cutie”:http://www.deathcabforcutie.com/’s new album coming in September is the best album he’s heard this year. I’m really looking forward to it myself since “Transatlanticism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlanticism and Ben Gibbard’s side project “Give Up”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postal_Service#Give_Up have gotten massive airplay on my iPod this year. “Ben Gibbard”:http://www.bengibbard.com/ is a lyric writing laureate as far as I’m concerned. On top of that, I just like seeing bands from the Northwest do well and it looks like “DCFC”:http://www.deathcabforcutie.com/ is poised for a real breakout.

I just noticed that “WordPress 1.5.2″:http://wordpress.org/development/2005/08/one-five-two/ has been released. I guess I should check the WordPress dashboard a little more regularly. It sounds like it’s a straightforward upgrade, although it’s kind of a pain to have to copy over the entire installation. I wonder if there’s a list somewhere that states exactly which files have changed since version 1.5.1.3?

Here’s a nice explanation of the “WordPress 1.5.2 changes in plain English”:http://asymptomatic.net/wp/2005/08/14/1887/wordpress-152-changes-plain-english/, but that isn’t exactly what I was looking for. Time to dig a little bit further.

Okay here are the file changes I found for 1.5.2:

	wp-comments-rss2.php
	wp-settings.php
	xmplrc.php
	wp-admin/
	     users.php
	     post.php
	     edit-page-form.php
	     categories.php
	     upload.php
	wp-includes/
	     version.php
	     template-functions-category.php
	     pluggable-functions.php
	     comment-functions.php
	

I just changed the above files and everything in WordPress seems to still be functioning normally. I don’t understand why this information isn’t provided standard with the upgrades.

Back when in I was in elementary and middle school I loved to draw on graph paper. It was perfect for creating plans for underground caves/dungeons, giant spaceships and everything else that captured my imagination at the time. The biggest hangup I ran into was acquiring more graph paper when I ran out. It was more expensive than regular paper and sometimes hard to find. Luckily, twenty years later our friend technology has pretty much eliminated that problem if you know where to look.

Kevin MacLeod at “incompetech.com”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/ has created free downloadable pdfs of just about every kind of graph paper type imaginable and tools to generate customized versions as well! Kevin also provides some really esoteric graph and lined paper designs as well including “hex”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/hexagonalGraphPaper/hex.html, “tumbling block trapezoid”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/hexagonalGraphPaper/tbgp.html, “dots”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/hexGraphPaper/squareDots.pl, “musical staff”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/linedGraphPaper/staff.html, “writing and penmanship”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/linedGraphPaper/writing.html, and much more.

h4. Link Rot: n. The natural decay of web links as the sites they’re connected to change or die.
Source: “Jargon File”:http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/

When the number of months you’ve spent running a weblog starts creeping into the teens, link rot becomes inevitable. If you’re running a weblog that counts its lifespan in multiple years it can be even more of a problem. Is it a serious problem? It certainly can be, even if you create the bulk of your own content because without functional external links hypertext simply becomes isolated text. The strength of the web is its connections. If a web page isn’t providing the information being sought or access to additional relevant information it has extremely limited value.

A related issue that I recently stumbled upon here at “Axodys”:http://axodys.com is when an older weblog entry has a high ranking in a search engine like “Google”:http://google.com, but the primary link that the entry centered around is defunct. Your weblog loses credability and hurts its chances to cultivate repeat visitors. There’s no chance that someone will link to your page if it doesn’t actually provide access to the information it’s supposed to. The “internet routes around damage” and that’s the last thing you want to happen when you’re trying to maintain your weblog.

So what can you do to avoid this problem? I’ve come up with a few ideas, but it’s by no means comprehensive. If you have additional ideas let me know in my conments.

h4. Be proactive and regularly check your old content.

This is probably the most obvious approach and also the most difficult as your weblog grows larger. If you can only devote a limited amount of time to your weblog it’s hard to find time to write new content if you’re spending time on your old entries. That leads me to the following approach:

h4. Keep tabs on your server logs and make sure that your popular entries continue to be relevant and up to date.

Put your server logs to work for you and figure out which entries are your most popular. In addition to analyzing your logs adding some kind of web counter can make tracking these issues much easier as well. Once you’ve determined the entries that need more of your ongoing attention you can make sure that they continue to be relevant.

h4. Use tools like the “internet archive”:http://web.archive.org to replace the defunct link with a functioning link to their copy.

Today I noticed that my “post on an IP/NAT Primer”:http://axodys.com/2000/06/22/ipnat-primer is currently turning up second on the list for this “google search”:http://www.google.com/search?q=ip+nat+primer. When I checked the primary link I discovered that “Damien”:http://mrbarrett.com had moved the original file at some point (probably when he switched over to “Movable Type”:http://movabletype.org. I could have contacted Damien since his site is still active otherwise, but I wanted to try the Internet Archive this time around. I went there plugged in the original URL and sure enough, they had a copy of the original page in their archive. I changed the URL to point to the archive and made a note of the change in my original entry.

h4. Make sure that your posts can stand on there own. “via Hyperborea”:http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2004/02/04/linkrot-part-deux/

This is a really good point. Eventually you’re going to run into links that are not archived anywhere and can’t be fixed. If you’re thorough about creating content in your posts and also include things like block quotes from the pages it links to, your page will retain value even if all the external links vanish without a trace.

h4. Further ideas for dealing with link rot?

The approaches I’ve listed above are by no means comprensive. I’d love to here about any additional approaches/tools/ideas about link rot you have in the comments below.

My “last pair of glasses”:http://axodys.com/1999/02/11/new-glasses were just over 6 and a half years old and though they served me quite well, finally gave up the ghost this past weekend. I was working on my kayak, and for reasons that escape me now, set them on the floor, forgot about them and promptly stepped on them a few moment laters. They’ve been bent up a few times in the past, but this time around I managed to sever the plastic on one of the earpieces and worse yet, break the center bridge piece that joins the two lenses. If they were still under warranty I’m sure I could have had the two halves welded back together, but with the lenses as scratched up as they are it’s just not worth repairing them.

I definitely need glasses though. While I have enough contact lenses to last for another year easily, I don’t prefer to wear them everyday any more and on days that I do wear them I like to take them out in the evenings around the time they start to dry out. I mainly passed on getting new glasses this spring when I had my eyes examined because of the expense (and the fact that my insurance doesn’t cover glasses or contact lense). I also thought that my old glasses were holding up well enough, but in retrospect they were already overdue for retirement.

With my glasses finally broken beyond repair I figured I was just going to have to bite the bullet and come up with the 200+ that a new pair of glasses from my eye doctor would require. Then it occurred to me that I should check around the internet and see if there were any sites that offered inexpensive online ordering. Sure enough “39dollarglasses.com”:39dollarglasses.com popped right up on Google when I started searching. I hopped over for a quick look and was immediately impressed by their selection and pricing. Even better, ordering was simply a matter of choosing a frame, specifiying your glasses subscripton and then supplying your credit card.

Last night I showed Mary several different models and between the two of us we managed to narrow down the possibilities to a select few. Today after a short delay and further contemplation I finally placed my order for “the Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html?id=TpzKs5wk&mv_pc=581 in brown with the anti-reflective coating. The total cost came to $70 after shipping and is easily under a third what I would have paid to buy it locally.

Based on shipping times I expect to get my new glasses at the beginning of next week and I will post a further hands-on review at that time.

“Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/08/15/hybrid.tinkerers.ap/index.html

bq. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret — a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car’s high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel.

It sounds like the “secret” to enhancing hybrid performance is increasing battery capacity and offering a way to charge up cars by plugging them into conventional outlets. Up until now car manufactures have been reluctant to add this capability and I don’t really understand why. I think most people would be more than happy to plug a simple power cord into an outlet if it means saving trips to the pump. I’d be curious to find out how much the daily battery charging would add to your electrical bill, but for people that have a short daily commute like I do I’ll bet the saving would be significant.

“The California Cars Initiative”:http://calcars.org has a lot more specific information and a “list of resources”:http://www.calcars.org/resources.html covering hybrid improvement. I’m going to have to read through their information a lot more closely when I have a little more time.

*Update:* “CalCars FAQ”:http://calcars.org/calcars-faq.html, “CalCars Vehicles”:http://calcars.org/vehicles.html

I just came upon a nice article by “Steve Pavlina”:http://www.stevepavlina.com about “Dynamic Planning”:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/dynamic-planning/ that I wanted to mention because it has a couple points about working on projects that I found very useful. The following part really rang true for me:

bq. My preference is to focus on a single project for as long as possible, doing a variety of actions in a row. Once I’ve loaded a project into my brain’s active RAM, I don’t like to unload it. Much efficiency is lost in the process of rebuilding awareness of a project. If I haven’t worked on a project for a while, it can take me anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to fully reload the project into my brain — this is especially true for technical work or very large and complex projects.

Steve also goes on to suggest in the article that one of the hidden causes of procrastination for many people is that it forces you to put yourself in a situation where you have to focus entirely on one particular task to get it done in time. If you recognize this in yourself (as I certainly do) you can change your approach to always specifically scheduling continuous chunks of time to work on the things that are best accomplished without significant interuptions. In my case it would probably also be wise to factor in some “warm-up” time for a given task because sometimes it’s hard for me to just jump back into something cold.

I finally stumbled across “digg.com”:http://digg.com a couple days ago and I’m actually kind of surprised I had never heard of it before. I’ve seen it get mentioned in a lot more blogs (“scoble”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/08/12.html#a10833, “wilwheaton”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/wwdn?m=166, “connectedinternet”:http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_archives/2005/8/12/1133883.html, “braytek”:http://www.braytek.com/2005/08/10/can-you-digg-it/) recently, but it seems like it should have shown up on my radar a long time ago. I wonder how long digg has actually been around?

Speaking of questions, the digg.com FAQ has a pretty good explanation of what exactly it is for those that haven’t heard about it yet:

bq. Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

From a blogging perspective “Digg”:http://digg.com looks like it could be a very useful way to drive traffic to quality weblog posts/articles (with a technology bent). Even if your links never reach the front page, they’re still more likely to be evaluated by a few more people than would normally find it.

As an experiment I decided to try digging a post I did last month on “Honda Element Roof Racks”:http://axodys.com/2005/07/12/honda-element-roof-racks. The post is probably kind of a stretch even for Digg’s deals sections, but I wanted to go through the link submission process and see how it worked and this seemed like a reasonable post for those purposes. The link submission process worked quite smoothly, but at the end of the process digg’s duplicate submission detector flagged it as being similar to three other submissions that contained the word Honda, but were otherwise completely different. I had the option at that point to submit anyway so I went ahead and did that.

With the post link submitted I waited a few minutes and then checked my logs to see if I was seeing any significant traffic. Happily I was. The numbers weren’t huge by any stretch of the imagination, but several people had actually come to take a look at the article and after an hour a few people had even clicked “digg it” on back on digg.com.

Based on my simple unscientific test above, I think digg.com is a great potential traffic vector to your site if you have quality content with the proper internet/computer/technology bent for digg. If your weblog and content doesn’t quite fit within those topical constraints it probably won’t work very well. That being said, it would be pretty cool to see other digg like sites that focused on other types of news and information, but I haven’t seen much evidence of that other than a “diggclone project”:http://www.talkingpixels.org/diggclone/index.php that looks like it could be used to power such sites.

“Wall Street thinks that Apple ITunes and Google are getting together….are they right?”:http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/hardware/10237939.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

Now this seems like a crazy rumor to me. What exactly is the benefit either side would get from such a partnership? It seems to me that iTunes is running quite smoothly these days so what could Google offer Apple that they don’t already have? The one thing that comes to mind is Google’s new video service, but iTunes doesn’t support video stuff yet, although I bet it will once when Apple finally releases a portable video pod (vpod? avpod?) in the next couple years. Anyone else have any good ideas as to why they would get together? Doesn’t look like John Gruber at “Daring Fireball”:http://daringfireball.net has anything to say about this rumor yet.

read more | digg story

*Note:* This post was originally created from within “Digg”:http://digg.com and then edited, categorized, tagged and cleaned up within WordPress itself. It’s kind of a cool feature, but lacks the overall functionality that would lead me to use it regularly.

“Search Engine Journal”:http://searchenginejournal.com has an interesting post this morning on a possible “Technorati Bombing”:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2048 by anti-Bush bloggers. It seems that for a while this morning “Bush Indictment” was the number one search topic at Technorati (although it wasn’t when I checked a few hours later). “Organic Warfare”:organicwarfare.blogspot.com has “additional thoughts on the matter”:http://organicwarfare.blogspot.com/2005/08/bush-indictment-hoax-political-netwar.html as well.

It will be interesting to see if the many weblog posts like this one (and the above) help clarify and spread the word that’s it’s in all likelihood a hoax caused by a concerted effort by various hackers and bloggers to game Technorati’s system. I’m going to keep tabs on things and report back here what transpires over the next couple days.

I’ve been adding Technorati tags to my Axodys posts for most of 2005 and it looks like the tag craze is going mainstream nowThe “latest rumor”:http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/08/12/technorati-sale/ around the blogosphere seems to be that tag portal “Technorati”:http://technorati.com is on the verge of being acquired by a large search engine company. To me and others that pretty much means “Yahoo”:http://yahoo.com or “Google”:http://google.com. I think such a deal would be a winning situation for just about all parties involved. The one complaint about Technorati that most people seem to have is that it’s a fairly slow loading site. Getting some serious search engine engineering brainpower and infrastructure to shore up the backend would have a nice positive impact.

I’ve been adding Technorati tags to my Axodys posts for most of 2005 and it looks like the tag craze is going mainstream now.

I made a lot of progress on my kayak yesterday, but I finally reached the realization shortly before midnight that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it in time for today’s lake outing. I still need to attach a couple final pieces of deck at both stems, but installing the coaming the single biggest remaining task. I was able to create a very servicable one out of half inch aluminum tubing last night, but attaching it to the cockpit and covering it in vinyl is a task that shouldn’t be rushed.

On top of everything else I’m fairly sore this morning from yesterday’s marathon kayak building effort. I drank a lot of water and did a lot of sweating as I toiled in our basement, but I didn’t realize I was exerting myself to the extant that my whole body would be a little stiff and sore today. I’m glad that I quit when I did though because I’m sure I’d really be in a world of hurt if I had stayed up a few more hours.

My friend Jesse recently mentioned in an email that he had watched “Murderball”:http://www.murderballmovie.com, a documentary about Quad Rugby and the U.S. team’s effort to win gold at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. Murderball sounded familiar to me, but it took me a few seconds to remember that I had read about it in Sports Illustrated a few months back. It turns out that Scott Hogsett, a guy from our high school graduating class, was a member of the U.S. team and figures prominently in the movie.

Scott and I definitely moved in different circles in high school (as his “bio”:http://www.murderballmovie.com/players.html puts it “he studied sports and partying” in Spokane) I don’t remember any significant interaction with him there, although we may have been in a few classes together. I do remember playing four square with him out at recess at least one time back in fifth grade and that we both played flag footballI in sixth grade, but beyond that I can’t say that I really knew him very well. Following graduation I heard through the grapevine that he had been in some kind of accident at a party that had left him paralyzed, but I hadn’t heard any news about him since. Based on the articles I ‘ve been able to find since get interesting in the movie it sounds like Scott didn’t let his condition slow him down a bit, graduated from ASU(Arizona State University) and has been leading “quite the life”:http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=calendar&story_id=072805ca_murderball_side&page_number=0 down in Phoenix in the intervening years. It’s cool to hear that he’s been doing so well.

It looks like Murderball is playing at The Met here in Spokane on August 15. murderballmovie.com has showtimes for everywhere else in the U.S. if you’re interested in going and don’t live in Spokane. I wonder how hard it will be to get tickets since this is Scott’s home town and a lot of people will probably come out to see it? I’d definitely like to go if it’s not too big of a hastle.