As it were...

The other night there was a fan plugged in my kids room. Sophi didn't want it plugged in any more, so what did she ask me to do? Plug it out. How else would you handle it when something is plugged in and you don't want it that way any more?

Recently we were listening to a Nancy Drew audio book on a road trip. For the most part it's simply a reading, no dramatization. But once in a while they play some tension music when something big is about to happen. When we got home this last time, Ema was quiet as she went into the house. I asked her what she was thinking and she said:

"It's just so thrilling! Every time that music comes on, I get so scared my ribs tickle!"

This month Garrison Keillor did an article about State Fairs in National Geographic. It's a wonderful synopsis of all my fair experiences of course, but here's my favorite line:

Sport is a seductive metaphor (life as a game in which we gain victory through hard work, discipline, and visualizing success), but the older metaphor of farming (life as hard labor that is subject to weather and quirks of blind fate and may return no reward whatsoever and don't be surprised) is still in our blood, especially those of us raised on holy scripture.

Check out the whole article, it's great.

Now then, eager young space cadet... here is the course we shall pursue to find Planet X. Starting from where we are, we go 33,600 turbo miles due up. Then west, in astro arc deviation to here. Then, following the great circle, seven radio lubes south by downeast... by astro astrobal, to here, here and here. Then by space navigal compass... to here, here, and then to here, and here. By 13-point strato cumulus, bearing four million light years... and thus to our destination.

SimplePie is some sweet php to help you render RSS feeds on web pages. It can do so many different things that it can be a bit hard to figure out how to make it do the thing YOU want it to do.

I wanted it to render an unordered list of headlines, so I wrote this function:

// get rss and convert it to an unordered list
function feed2ul($feed_url = "", $end = "5") {

    // Initialize new feed
    $feed = new SimplePie();
    $feed->set_feed_url($feed_url);
    $feed->init();

    $num = 0;

    $output .= '<ul class="feed">' . "\n";

    // Loop through all of the items in the feed
    foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {

        if($num < $end) {
            $output .= '<li><a href="' . $item->get_link() . '">' . $item->get_title() . '</a></li>' . "\n";
        }
        $num++;
    }

    $output .= '</ul>' . "\n";

    return $output;

// end feed2ul
}

You just feed it a url, and optionally how many feed items you want, like this:

<?php print feed2ul('http://www.sportsspectrum.com/daily/daily.rss', '5'); ?>

Google tells me:

From your 180 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,890 items, starred 21 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.

When we take our dogs for a walk, they almost always leave a special treat on someone's lawn. For years now we've carried a couple plastic baggies to take care of that, just typical sandwich bags. The other day at the pet store we checked out the "official" bags, and there was a fairly nice selected of bio-degradable (except as defined by California) bags.

We got a package with a little dispenser and 30 bags for $5. Based on usage, that should last about a month and a half. That's worth $5 to me.

In other news, SunChips® is doing a really cool thing. Today, 33% of every 10 1/2 oz. size SunChips® bag is made with renewable, plant based materials. The cooler thing is that by 2010 they intend to have all their bags 100% compostable. That's really really cool. We've been avoiding chips lately for both health and plastic, and SunChips fills that hole nicely.

Additionally, SunChips® has built a solar energy collector at their Modesto plant to help power that plant, with the intention of putting them at all their plants.

Lastly, they've published documents on how to compost, as well as how their solar energy array works, so other people can benefit from what they've learned.

Yay SunChips!