Ever since I was a kid growing up in my orange and blue bedroom, I’ve been waiting for the New York Mets to host the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Yesterday the Mets were finally awarded the game. CitiField will be the site of the 2013 MLB All-Star Game, ending a 49-year drought – the longest of any team.
Motorcades with police escorts are a daily occurrence in downtown Washington, DC, but something was definitely different about this one. It was smaller, it was incredibly slow, it included an odd looking truck, it made a U-turn, and most odd of all it kept repeatedly going up and down the same street over and over again all day long. Huh?
The truck was a specialized flat-bed film truck rigged with cameras. They were filming something. Maybe a movie. Somebody suggested that it may be the HBO show Veep. The fake motorcade first went by in the morning and the last time I saw it go by was 4:40 in the afternoon. Several times they had the camera rig in the front of the truck to shoot a black SUV from the back. Other times they had the rig in the back to shoot the black SUV from the front.
It was kind of interesting the first time it went by, but the fourth round trip down Connecticut Avenue (eight times passing by if you count each direction after it U-turned) it got a little annoying. Each time they had two cameras going simultaneously so they basically got at least 16 different mile-long shots of this motorcade. Each time they came back I become more perplexed. Why did they have to keep shooting the outside of an SUV in a motorcade? I mean, two trip up and down the street should be plenty enough to get shots of the motorcade. So why all the additional trips? Were there actors acting inside the SUV? If so, then why would you need the external shots?
More importantly, they had police escort surrounding the entire shoot (not just in front of the camera), clearing traffic out of the way and stopping pedestrians in their tracks. Did they really need to keep disturbing DC traffic over and over again, just to get the same exterior shots over and over again? Getting the shot a few times is OK but doing this over and over again all day long seems irresponsible of the city to allow this unnecessary disruption.
Here’s a really good shot of the same film truck during a break, from an Instagram user that I found on Twitter.
Maegan is heartbroken that her pet rat Pixel died today. She loved that rat and played with her all the time.
Pixel died of salmonella poisoning from contaminated pet food sold by Kaytee. The company recalled a batch of its Forti-Diet Pro Health Mouse, Rat and Hamster food, and the bag we were feeding Pixel was from this poisoned batch. We didn’t even know about the recall until after she suddenly became very ill and then very lethargic. It was too late when we got her to a veterinarian the next day. Poor Pixel. Poor Maegan. 
We had to scrub down and disinfect pretty much everything in Maegan’s room and we’re now keeping a close eye on all the girls (especially Maegan) because humans can get salmonella poisoning from handling the infected animal and/or food.
Patty contacted the Kaytee company that sold the poison pet food. They asked a lot of questions about the batch we had fed Pixel but showed little interest in our sick rat. Our trip to the vet cost well over a hundred dollars. They’d better be paying our vet bill, but even that won’t make things better for Maegan who lost her pet.
Here’s some video I took when Maegan first got Pixel, just a few months ago. This was before we got her a larger cage.
Amy was looking for furniture online and came across this “patio hanging egg chair”. $446 seems like an outrageously high price for such an ugly chair… but how can you pass up the opportunity to save over $79,000?!
Even more ridiculous is the fact that the minimum order is two of these hideous things.
This past weekend Patty and I took the kids (and Olivia) to an Earth Day Fair at the Dairy Barn. No, not the Dairy Barn drive-through convenience stores on Long Island. The Dairy Barn is part of the Anne Springs Greenway in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
Maegan and Olivia took off hiking down a long trail (after participating in a 5K earlier that morning). Patty and I took Darah around the fair. Darah climbed to the top of an old silo and waved down at Patty. Patty sat with her on a full-size tractor. And there were lots of farm animals all around, which Darah loved.
Here’s video:
I was just sent this photo of Darah in dance lessons.
This reminded me of when Maegan took dance lessons. Here’s a photo from a 2005 blog post, which would make Darah the same age as Maegan was at the time:
Today the Space Shuttle Discovery did several fly-overs over Washington, DC, on its final flight before being put on permanent display in Virginia. It was pretty cool to see the shuttle fly by. Here are two photos I took from my office window.
Last week I got to take the kids to Florida, but Patty couldn’t make it due to her nursing school. We did a lot of swimming, some mini-golf, went to the Palm Beach Zoo, and went to the beach. Here are photos from the trip.
This morning Amy and I were getting ready to leave for work when we noticed the sounds of a jackhammer. There’s road repairs going on at the end of the block. At first we thought that must be pretty loud for those living down there if we can hear it so clearly all the way up here.
Then it got much louder. Way too loud to be from the road construction down the street. So now we figured that it had to be a neighbor nearby. But why would a neighbor be using a jackhammer, let alone at 7:40 a.m. on a Thursday morning? And why in such short bursts too? Not long stretches.
The sounds seemed to be coming from the east side of the house so we opened up the back door and stepped out on to the deck to see who it was. But now it sounded like it was coming from north of where we were standing.
We quickly went through the house and out the front door to see what was going on, but now the sounds were coming from south of our current location… and upwards. Was somebody on our roof?
Yes, sort of. Looking up at the roof we saw nothing. Then we saw a little bird head pop up into view. The jackhammerring sounds were coming from a woodpecker who was banging on the chimney’s metal endcap.
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(Unrelated P.S.: This whole blog post was written on my Android devive, off-line, during my morning Metro commute.)
Google Plus is a great service with many incredibly useful features. The problem with Google+ isn’t with the service itself. The problems with Google+ is with adoption.
The first of two problems preventing widespread adoption of Google Plus is the complete misunderstanding that Google Plus is actually a social network. Well it kind of is, but not in the way that Facebook is. And when you start to compare Google+ to Facebook, your comparing apples to oranges, and you’re going to lose in that comparison. As a closed network destination, Facebook has a lot more to offer than Google Plus. It’s easy to make the comparison because G+ has a way for users to post status updates and and a news stream to see what all their friends have posted. But that is not the true point of Google Plus. The true point, and biggest strength about Google Plus is that unlike Facebook, G+ is not a closed, self-contained system. G+ is not one location you go to. G+ is everywhere, all throughout the most popular sites around the internet. Unlike Facebook, you don’t have to go to a single destination to use it. Search Google and you’re using G+. Watch videos on YouTube and you’re using G+. Upload photos to Picasa and you’re using G+. Some have keenly described Google Plus as a “social layer” to the websites you’re already using. When you consider that Google Plus actually includes all of Google’s vast web empire, G+ is actually much larger than Facebook.
The other problem with Google+ is one that I haven’t seen anybody else write much about. It’s a problem that is easy for Google to fix instantly if they actually wanted to. The problem is their highly deceptive “suggestions” for people to connect to (add to their circles).
Everybody I know has at first mistakenly thought that those suggestions were people who were already on G+. I did this too. People see people they know as suggestions to their circles and don’t realize that those are all the people in their Gmail contacts list. They continue on to spam friends, family, and even business acquaintances who were not on Google Plus – never even heard of it before, and are then utterly confused. I for one will not connect to any new people on Google Plus anymore because I don’t want to spam my friends like that. And I’m definitely not alone. A lot of people I’ve spoken with about this are also refuse to add new people to their G+ circles anymore because they’ve been burned before by it. This may sound like a minor issue but Google needs more people to sign up for Google Plus and for those people to add other people to their circles. If everybody is afraid to add their friends and family to their circles then it completely kills the viral adoption of their service, draining the social aspect out of their social “network”.
If only Google would limit their circle suggestions to only contacts who were already on Google Plus, I (and others) would start using it again!