No Mod Required

Went for a hike today and saw several of these cute little guys on the trail:

And here's another shot from the hike today:

Random stat of the day: in the past year I've had visitors from 190 countries, including single visits from:

Niue looks like the place to be, by the way.

(photo thanks to flickr user fearlessRich)

Check out the photos at this post by Todd James (AKA REAS AOK):

"The Look Out"

On a cold November night 36 years ago, in the driving wind and rain, somewhere between southern Washington state and just north of Portland, Oregon, a man calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a plane he’d just hijacked clutching a bag filled with $200,000 in stolen cash.

Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? And what happened to the loot, only a small part of which has ever surfaced?

It’s a mystery, frankly. We’ve run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios. And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved.

Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely. And we have reignited the case—thanks to a Seattle case agent named Larry Carr and new technologies like DNA testing.

You can help. We’re providing here, for the first time, a series of pictures and information on the case. Please look it all over carefully to see if it triggers a memory or if you can provide any useful information.

Check out the photos and the rest of the evidence at the FBI Press Room

For my money this is one of the best stories in the history of crime. Period. The story still resonates with me as strong as it did when I was a kid and saw the story covered on "In Search Of…"

via NPR

[3-29-2008: update!]

Cooper's parachute found?

Chute Find Rekindles D.B. Cooper Legend

AMBOY, Wash. (AP) — A tattered, half-buried parachute unearthed by kids had D.B. Cooper country chattering Wednesday over the fate of the skyjacker, who leapt from a plane 36 years ago and into the lore of the Pacific Northwest.

While the FBI investigates whether the fabric came from the world's only unsolved skyjacking, the discovery re-energized a legend in the southwestern Washington woods where Cooper may have landed, and where time has helped turn him into a folk hero.

I'm crazy late on this, but William Gibson posted it just today, so I can't feel too bad about posting it here. If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me

Anyway, here's an insanely good Latvian Le Parkour video

I'm posting this completely non-ironically. I think it's massively cool that Rod Stewart, of all people, has created one of the "best train sets" the unnamed experts in the Daily Record article have ever seen.

I'm not an expert, but it looks pretty cool to me.

Rod Stewart's Train Set Dream Comes True

Here's the big catch all post for links to cool shit in Italy. This will mostly be restaurant/bar/cafe links, but there are a couple of other things sneaking in as well, so if you're thinking of going to Rome or Florence, maybe something here will be useful to you

First and foremost I want to recommend Vatican Art Walks. This was the first time we've ever hired a guide for anything in Europe and it was worth every penny. Scot, the owner, was our guide and he was nice, knowledgeable and definitely into the subject matter. We did a tour of the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica. It took the better part of an afternoon and I walked away pretty much stunned. Most of that is obviously because of the incredible works of art there, but Scot certainly helped me along the path to stunned-dom pointing out things I would never have noticed on my own and providing the sort of detail and background that I'm always curious about in a place like that.

One other benefit of Scot's experience in Rome was his restaurant recommendation for that night. We went to Ristorante Margutta, a vegetarian restaurant (!) on a hip little street near the Piazza del Popolo. It was fantastic. I had the best pasta of the week there and everything else was excellent.

Speaking of the Piazza del Popolo, here's a great view of the Piazza from the Piazzale Napoleone:

Well worth the walk up if you're there by the way. It's a bit of a stretch for tired legs, but the view is awesome.

Continuing with the food, we also ate a small lunch at the cafe at the Musei Capitolini. Which is only really recommended if you're in there already, but the view from there is excellent, encompassing a large swath of Rome and the food was pretty good for a museum.

Our final night in Rome we ate at the frenetic, but fun L'isola della pizza. It was no more than five minutes from our hotel and came recommended so it was a no brainer for our last night in Rome. It was surprisingly good. The food was excellent, the service was great and it was downright inexpensive. The lively atmosphere was also a bonus. The blend of locals and tourists all out enjoying themselves made for a really good time.

Capping our night that night we went to Gelateria Old Bridge, another recommendation from Scot. It was our one gelato experience for the whole trip and thankfully it was a good one. If you ever need to wait in line to get into the Vatican make sure to head over to this tiny shop to fuel up in advance…

In Florence we stayed at the impossibly cool Monna Lisa Hotel Firenze. This converted Palazzo is probably the coolest hotel I've ever stayed in. Everything about it was top notch. The service and food (breakfast) were excellent, the small bar was comfortable, the room was large (for Europe) and the location was fantastic (about five minutes from the Duomo.) It's not cheap, but if money's not your first concern I can't recommend it highly enough.

Our favorite restaurante in Florence has to have been Ristorante Posta. For me, it was great as I had my one "got to have it" meal of the trip- a killer Bistecca alla Fiorentina, but everyone we were with had a great meal. Judy and I enjoyed it so much we went back on Friday for lunch…

That'll do for now. I'll add to this post if there's anything that springs to mind after I hit "publish"

There's absolutely nothing groundbreaking about the following code sample. People (who are lucky enough to have more time to mess around) have been doing this sort of experimentation for a while now. Thing is, this one is so simple and so plainly useful I just have to toss it out there for your (my?) enjoyment.

Check out the following sample. It's just a simple show/hide, but I just love the simplicity of the code that runs it.

With a class="more" attached the DL, all we need to run the above is this


dl.more dd{
display:none;
}
dl.more:hover dd{
display:block;
}


There are two things I like about that:

1. It's as simple as it gets. The only thing simpler than coding that would be not coding anything.
2. It makes sense. A lot of times those "more" links are the spitting image of a dt dd pair, except it's unrelated tags in an arbitrary structure (something like DIV > P + DIV) so using ready-made structure just feels right.

Yeah, there are potential issues. The one that sticks out to me is it's not accessible, since with no mouse there's no :hover. That said, with any solution involving a mouse, accessibility becomes an issue, so it's not better or worse than any other solution that doesn't address the mouse-less users.

The other obvious issue is that IE6 doesn't support :hover on anything but links, so there would need to be a script based solution to get this to work in what is still one of the biggest browsers out there.* But I can dream, can't I?

*For this site, Firefox is actually the number one browser, followed by IE6 and then IE7. The combination of IE versions are still the dominant browser platform.

From the out of left field department…

I went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and while I was there I bought a piece of malachite. Why? Because it's crazy cool looking, that's why.

What's Malachite? Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Malachite is a carbonate mineral, copper(II) carbonate hydroxide Cu2CO3(OH)2. It crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal system, and most often forms botryoidal, fibrous, or stalagmitic masses. Individual crystals are rare, but do occur as slender to acicular prisms. Pseudomorphs after more tabular or blocky azurite crystals also occur.

In other words, minerals are cool.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters for DVD While I enjoyed it (I'm a super fan of the show,) the best part of it was probably Todd James/Reas' animation at the beginning. Killer stuff.

The rest was just a really good, really long episode (with raw cussing.) Which is kind of what I expected it to be, so I'm 100% satisfied.