There's a Noise in the Bin

I may have saved a life today. Well, not maybe, I definitely saved a life today, the question is how did I save a life today?

Just like every other morning in my life I woke, showered, dressed and then took the dogs for a walk. We walked our normal route around the neighborhood, around a nearby park, through another neighborhood and back to ours.

Just like every other morning. Nothing different at all.

As we came back around to our neighborhood from the opposite direction I heard a rustling in the dumpster on the corner. This wasn't uncommon as squirrels like to get in there and tear apart the garbage bags looking for food. However, the attention Rufus gave to the noise was uncanny. Usually when he hears the squirrels he searches around the dumpster and when he doesn't find anything to chase he follows me. I rarely stop walking this is so common.

Believe it or not, there are four

But this rustling seemed somehow larger and Rufus seemed way more interested in what was making the noise. I stepped into the dumpster's corral and looked inside the big blue box. Obviously the garbage collection service had been by within the past 24 hours as the dumpster was nearly empty. Well, empty of trash. In fact, there were some raccoons in there looking for a free meal.

One of the raccoons stuck it's nose out of a water drainage hole in the bottom and Rufus just went bonkers trying to get to it, but I held him back, releasing him only after realizing there was no way he could harm or be harmed by the animals through that small hole.

I snapped an image of the raccoons and then for giggles picked Rufus up and let him look at the furry bandits as I saw them. I think he went to hunter's heaven for a second there before I set him back down.

Realizing the animals were small, possibly the size of a house cat, I looked around for any avenue of escape for them. There was nothing. As I stated before, the can was nearly empty, the walls were four feet of sheer metal with no hand holds or anything else to grab hold of and climb free. The raccoons were stuck. For a second I feared the next garbage pickup would just dump them in the back of their truck and either kill them or deposit them at the local dump.

One raccoon remains hidden beneath the others

With that scenario in mind I walked the dogs home, dragging Rufus who didn't want to leave, and then walked the neighborhood looking for something to put in the dumpster that would give the animals an escape route. Usually, the dumpster areas have furniture or extra wood people toss out, bicycles and electronics but I found nothing. Not only had the service been by recently, but the grounds crew were clearing out the dumpster enclosures as I looked.

Finally I remembered an area on the other side of the neighborhood where extra building supplies were stored. I walked over there and found a handful of 2x4s as well as an old pallet. While in route to this area I went ahead and called the city's police dispatch and asked them if they had animal control who could help these guys escape. The dispatcher, Brad, took down the address nearest the dumpster and said he'd send someone along. In the meantime, I grabbed one of the 2x4s and walked it back to the garbage bin and dropped it in leaving the end of it sticking out for the animals to make their escape.

I let the dispatcher know what I'd done and went home. Surprisingly, it wasn't 20 minutes before I received a phone call from the animal control officer. He'd helped the raccoons escape and was letting me know they were in a nearby tree. He asked if I was the person who put the 2x4 in the bin and I said yes, I was. He told me that was a brilliant idea and if the animals were still in there come sundown they would have used it to escape, but as it was, raccoons don't typically make their way around during the day.

I did not know that. I knew they were more active at night, but not that they were unwilling to move about during the day.

The officer also mentioned the four raccoons were young and that full grown raccoons would have the muscles strength to jump out of the dumpster of their own.

I didn't know that, either.

I thanked him for not taking the animals in for euthanizing and he admitted that, per law, they are not allowed to put an animal down unless it's sick or aggressive. As these were neither, he just helped them along.

Now, off to traffic court. Yay!

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Chilies, Chilies Everywhere

It wasn't my decision, honestly. In fact, I'm not really into "spicy" foods, preferring well balanced flavors over the tongue and gums burning of jalapeno, ghost and habanero peppers. However, I was invited down to the Pueblo, CO Chili  Pepper Festival and having never been, I decided it would be fun to go for an afternoon.

While chili peppers aren't necessarily my thing, I do love doing experiences that are outside my comfort zone. Besides, I thought if I brought my camera I could get some good cultural shots of the festival to share with the world on Blogger and Google+.

But this morning didn't work out the way we'd planned. My friend sent me a message after 9AM citing her alarm clock didn't go off and she was running later. That was fine by me since I didn't even set an alarm, just trusting that I would awake far earlier than she. She asked me if dogs could go tot he festival.

How the heck would I know? I've never been there.

So, we each took turns looking online for info on whether dogs were welcome. Since the original plan was to head down to Pueblo (a roughly two hour drive) spend a couple of hours at the fest and then take the long way back through the mountains for photo opportunities, neither of us made plans to do anything with our dogs while we were gone. We really thought we'd bring them along.

Then my friend decided there was too much of a chance of rain in the mountains to make driving through them worth while. She knows as well as I do that cloudy conditions and rain can sometimes improve chances for photo opportunities, but she was driving and it was her "fest" that I was invited to attend. In the end, we decided not to go do any of the plans for the day.

The Aisles at Costco

Instead, we decided to go to Costco. Don't get me wrong, I love Costco, but I can go to Costco any day of the week, I don't need to burn a Sunday just to go there. On the way to Costco there was a chili stand on the side of the road. It's been there for a few weeks now, but neither of us have stopped there before today. Me, because I really don't care about chilies that much and her because, well, I don't know.

 So we stop at the chili pepper stand. I really do like these roadside stands for shopping. Many times you're buying directly from the manufacturer, much like a farmer's market, bypassing the cost-raising expenses of middle-men and you get to sample flavors, meet the owners and watch as the item, or food, is made right in front of you.

We parked right up front and walked into the pop-up tent. Pumpkins and peppers were everywhere. Baskets and bags full of red and green peppers of some sort, jams, jellies and even something called "cherry juice." Up front was a table with various salsas spread out with tortilla chips for taste testing and when we wanted to try something that wasn't already out there one of the stand's workers opened up a jar and let us take a bite. Luckily my friend wanted to buy it so they just gave us the jar, but when was the last time the giant supermarket chain opened a package so you could try it before buying? Sure Costco has their tasters and even some of the supermarkets in the area will let you taste their deli offerings, but will they open a jar of jam or a bag of potato chips for your taste buds?

 

 

 While I didn't purchase anything (again, not my scene) my friend did spend a bit of money there. We did spend quite a but longer there than I thought we would, but -- again, this is new to me -- if you buy chili peppers, apparently they roast them right then and there for you in some giant fire roasting contraption straight out of Mad Max.

I haven't checked yet, but apparently there are over 500 chili pepper recipes at their website: roastedchili.com.

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Google Maps Strikes Again

I really really hate Google Maps. This is no easy thing to admit since I'm incredibly immersed in the Google ecosystem. Recently I had to wonder if I was going to leave the Android experience for, perhaps, the Windows Lumia experience or even the Blackberry experience. Having loved both my earlier Nokia and Blackberry handsets, I would have no misgivings about going back to those particular companies. However, as I looked at their online app store offerings, I cringed. Sure they had Facebook and Twitter, music and movie apps and hosts more, they didn't have +Google+ , +Snapseed (one of my most used apps) or very many of the Google suite of apps at all. I suppose I could use more Flickr than Picasaweb/G+ Photos, Skydrive over +Google Drive  or a variety of other workarounds that give the same functionability but without the Google ecosystem.

This brings me to Maps which is by far Google's worst product. Sure, they keep adding features to the service, feature that no one but Googlites seem to actually want (rolling Places and Hotpot into the service) and adding tons of mobile features that, again, are wishlist features, not necessities. Seriously, I can search for restaurants and bars in Maps, get reviews of those places, directions and even call right from Maps, but for some reason Maps can't actually find the business I'm in when trying to tag a location and rarely gets the closet location for food or shopping correct.

And then there's trying to create a Map. I don't know anyone in the real world who uses Google Maps for anything more than setting a placemark for a "I was here" marker to share with friends, or in the case of my motorcycle riding friends, we use Google Maps to plan out routes and that's where Google Maps fails spectacularly. I've talked about it HERE and HERE in the past.

Today, I decided to open up Google Maps for the first time in more than a year to actually create a Map. Yeah, more than a year. For some reason Google likes to create a Map every time I tag or rate a location, but I'm not talking about those "maps" I'm talking about a route. My friend and I thought about killing two birds with one stone tomorrow; one, hit a chili festival in Pueblo, CO and two, take a circuitous mountain path back home to Denver to witness the fall colors.

So, naturally, I fired up Google Maps and tried to create a route. First I tried using the new Google Map Maker to create a Map, but as feature rich as that tool is it's completely useless for create a road route from Point A to Point B. So, back to "classic maps" I go.

I select my starting point, in this case, it's Pueblo, Colorado and I choose the option to create lines following the roads. And I 'draw.' I draw and at each turn I leave one of those white waypoints with a click. Follow this road this long, then turn and follow that road that long, etc. Finally I get to the edge of the screen and have to pan to the right. Click and drag? Nope. It turns the entire map blue and doesn't move a thing. Click again? Nope. Now it's creating a line off on a tangent. Try to delete that tangent? Nope, it deletes the entire line you just drew and now you have to start over.

So, I start over. Follow the same route, get to the part where I have to pan the screen and I click and drag. This time is seems to work, but you can only drag so far before your cursor is off the screen and you have to click and drag. So, I head back, click and drag... nope. Now the entire screen is blue again, no dragging, and when I try it again, another tangent off into the forests of Colorado. Try to delete that short 3 inch segment and the entire route is gone again.

Fuck!

So, I start over. This time at each junction I stop the route, click it as finished (which is clicking the little white waylay point thing twice) and then start a new segment. Why?

This is incredibly inefficient. I can't put a start point where an end point is, but instead I have to place it next to the end point. Sure, if I'm zoomed into street level view that might not be too bad (except for all the panning which results in the above fiascos), but if I'm looking at a quarter of the state then I'm actually setting the waylay marker tens or even a hundred feet apart. Then I have to draw a new line and do this all over again: start the line, follow the roads, click for a turn and find a stopping point. Double click it to an end. Start a new one. Stop it. Start a new one and so forth. Over and over and over again.

It takes hours to create a map that would only take a few moments to actually trace out in ink on an actual map.

If I'm creating a neighborhood map this wouldn't be too big of a deal, but drawing a route through a major city such as Denver or worse yet across the state or region this is incredibly cumbersome and frustrating. And then to have one little thing go wrong, such as Google choosing to follow the wrong route, or even a more frustrating maneuver, when the lines change on their own to the "shortest route" or whatever it's chooses. Sometimes the route "follow the roads" chooses are tens of miles outside of the route I want and then I have to go back and change it. If I click (because I have to pan, or gods forbid I sneeze) and suddenly that route is my route and the only way to change it is to delete and start over.

I just want to draw a friggin map!! I don't want Google to do shit for me, I want to draw my own route. You know, sometimes I don't want the shortest route, such as when finding a motorcycle route, or mapping out a path to my camping location so friends can find it, or going on a scenic drive instead of a direct route home.

What is wrong with Google Maps? At this rate I'd rather just get my Rand MacNally out of the garage and put it on my passenger seat instead of relying on Google Maps to do anything at all. It is by far Google's least consumer friendly tool and Google has a lot of less than friendly products.

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Movies to See: Hobo and Rubber

Just saw two preview for two movie that look ridiculously fun:

Hobo with a Shotgun

and

Rubber

Who doesn't want to see Rutger Hauer as a hobo with a shotgun dispensing hobo-justice? And a killer tire? Sure. Why not?

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Atheists Can be as Dumb as Everyone Else

The truth of the matter is, atheism isn't anything more than being an atheist, and an atheist isn't anything more than someone who does not believe in any sort of gods. It really is that simple. Yet somehow, somewhere along the way, people began trying to attach more significance to atheism. Not only are we supposed to be not believe in any sort of god/s, but we're supposed to be anti-religion, hyper-scientific, super-intellectual and even dismissive of all other forms of the supernatural that have nothing to do with gods.

I've noticed a growing trend on social networks to mock religions with invalid and fallacious arguments. For example, the post linked to above:

Day 1: God created light

Day 4: God created the Sun

If you click through to this post you'll see I'm getting a lot of flack for tearing this argument apart. The premise of the anti-religious statement is that it's illogical that an all-knowing all-powerful god would create light before creating a light source. However, the above statement does not indicate where that light (from Day 1) was coming from, merely that light was created.

And as we all know, there are many forms of light in this universe that don't have the Sun as their source. For example, fire. Fire in no way relies on the Sun for it's light emissions. Neither does star light. And while, yes, the Sun is a star, it is not the source of light from the billions of other stars in the sky.

My point is simple: if we're to take apart religious texts and show the world their fallacies, then we as atheists need to do so in a logical manner based on scientific method and critical thinking. Just making a meme-image with no basis of fact isn't helping our cause to bring enlightenment to the religious masses, but rather just to poke fun or ridicule one's faith isn't helping anyone. Such actions only show that atheists are just as callous and petty as religious adherents.

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Embedding G+ Posts into Websites

Just testing out the new feature +Google+ rolled out yesterday. Since I finishing up a book I didn't get a chance to get online and and learned about this until late last night and nearly forgot about it earlier today except for a random comment I saw elsewhere which reminded me of the news I saw late yesterday evening.

Above is the Mashable article on how to actually embed the G+ post into websites, and it's fairly basic: copy the code Google gives you and then past that code into your website.

But I'm using +Blogger and Blogger works a little differently. Sure for some people, coding in Blogger's HTML interface is par for course, but there are millions of people just like me who aren't coders, where do we paste that code? In the Compose window or the HTML window (located in the upper left hand corner underneath your blog's name in the blog post editor)

I chose to post the code provided by Google+ into the HTML window, just like when I post iframes and other code into this blog. No previews of the G+ post displayed in the Compose window when I switched back from the HTML editor, but the Preview showed the Google+ post perfectly clear. 

So, back to the HTML screen and I typed a couple of words "Just testing..." which gave me my typing point when back in the compose window to finish typing out this post. The Google+ post still doesn't preview in the compose window like a YouTube video will, but the preview window shows it just fine and soon I'll find out if Publishing the post will show up as well.

Like right ... Now!

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