Blessed by the Potato

I just spent my long weekend Sunday writing a stupidly long article on hybrid cars, and it’s not even as helpful as I was hoping it would be. Ah, well, it’s up as a permanent link on the right there. Have a look (if you dare), and I welcome any other questions that it may have left unanswered! To give a quick reason for doing this, Wayfare suggested I take some of the insane amount of research I’ve been doing on cars and write an article, perhaps try to sell it freelance to the London Free Press or another paper that would have it. I don’t think either of us expected something like that to result.

I haven’t included many references, but I don’t really think too many are necessary for an article like this (plus, there was a long link list in one of the previous posts on the issue, which is linked in the article). There are probably mistakes, both factual and grammatical lurking in there: it’s why something like that can be churned out in one afternoon, but a scientific review paper of the same length languishes for years unwritten :)

It was just brought to my attention that there’s a strange error on the site right now where the sidebar is not loading properly (at all) for many people. It’s very strange because it loads fine for me when I use the local address for my webserver (192.etc.) but it doesn’t work for me when I go via the web (www.holypotato.com). I have no idea what could cause behaviour like that, so if anyone has any ideas I’m open to suggestions.

Edit: As soon as I posted this, the problem appeared to go away. I wonder if the extra post pushed the image (a few posts below) far enough down the page that it wasn’t interacting with anything on the sidebar or something along those lines…

Sorry for the brief outage today. Turns out I broke the little tab on the network cable that holds it in place a while ago, and when I was under the desk installing my new monitor I tugged the cord out enough that it wasn’t making a good contact. Of all the stupid ways to kill a website, eh?

I saw this short story and had to share. Originally found via Boing Boing.

Also, found a smashed pumpkin in my parking lot today. What the hell is wrong with people? (Our lot is a dead-end off the alley, so it’s not even like people would be walking through and accidentally drop a pumpkin… that thing was brought/thrown in and smashed there). Plus it’s December! Who has a pumpkin?

Well, it took a few days to unpack the router and everything, but we’re back up here.

The move was absolutely crazy, and we still have more to do! After that last entry, I ended up staying up until about 6 am doing “last minute” packing, and even then we’ve had to make a half dozen trips back to the apartment (to clean, paint, and take things like food, toiletries, clothes, etc.).

The election here was somewhat close, but my preferred candidate ended up coming in second (stupid Liberal stronghold!). Nonetheless, it’s seen as a victory as it’s the first time the Green party has beat out both the Conservatives and NDP. It was interesting to see the voting pattern displayed when strategic (or as some say, tactical) voting isn’t a factor (for most, that is — I’m sure many people still voted Liberal to keep the Conservatives out rather than because that was the candidate they liked the most).

Anyhow, I’ll probably post in more detail later, but for now I’ve got to put some stuff away in the kitchen and hit the sack!