Moving a House on Eastlake

This past Saturday night the last residental home on Eastlake Ave E was moved off of its lot, thru a parking lot, and onto a barge. The Seattle PI has a photo slideshow of the event as well as an article. So, in short, this is what is going on:

The yellow, 3,000- square-foot house had been lifted and then rolled on a dolly with wheels as big as airplane tires from the spot where it had sat since 1908 (since before there was even an Eastlake Avenue East), down to within a hundred feet from where a barge waited to carry it to the San Juan Islands.

Pretty dang impressive if you ask me. It was a huge house and there wasn’t a lot of space to move it.

Update to Metro Stop Tracker Gadget

After releasing the Metro Stop Tracker Widget last week, I went a head and completely rewrote it from scratch to make it more efficient and offer greater flexibility in the future. However, in the process, some formatting changes were made. You will no longer see the listing of stops grouped by route then by destination. They will be ordered by stop time. In a future release I will fix this. Also, there is currently no way to get data on which routes are express versus which ones are not. So, be warned. This is a data problem from the web service.

Despite the limitations, there has been one feature addition: limiting routes displayed. Your stop may be one that has several buses coming and going all day long. This can make it troublesome to find your route. So, in the preferences you can select your routes that you want to see by entering them in with a space between each different route (e.g. “49 70 66”). By default the widget will display all of the stops. Also, if you clear out the field that is used to limit the buses it will show all of the routes for the stop.

So, enjoy the update and leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

Use the following URL to add the widget: http://www.lazyi.net/google/metro_bus_widget.xml

Update @ 8:23p: If you get a message about allowing the widget to be “inline”, select OK. I have changed it so that the height of the widget will change depending on how many rows of data there are to be displayed.

Metro Transit Google Personal Homepage Gagdet

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:

  1. Head to your google.com/ig page and click “Add Content”
  2. To the right of the search button, click “Add by URL”
  3. Enter in the following URL: http://lazyi.net/google/metro_bus_widget.xml
  4. Accept the URL
  5. 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:

  1. Head to http://tracker-loc.metrokc.gov/
  2. Search for your stop by bus number or whatever means works for you
  3. 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)
  4. 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.

Plus Confusion

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.

Schools and the Internet

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. Continue reading “Schools and the Internet”

No Vendor Week at Microsoft

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.