Wayne Keith Walrath

Beaver Island, Lake Winnipesaukee, NH

wkw — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:17:11 +0000

Some photos from magnificient Beaver Island on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.

If you live in, or grew up in a northern region of the US where there’s a healthy four-course change of seasons, you hopefully appreciate the warm months of summer as much as I do. Fresh berries and corn, the irrepressible surge of life as flowers open up in bloom; relief from the long wintertime, and most of all, time spent on or near inland lakes.

I had a good run of midwestern summer lake time growing up: fishing, catching baby turtles, swimming and skiing, and scratching mosquito bites. But the waters of New England — from the Catskills to the Adirondacks and the jagged Maine Coast — equals in experience all that I read in the history and literature of the area. There is no shortage of books celebrating and embellishing New England life. Moose in Maine. Lobsters all along the northern atlantic coast. Fall foliage, deer and turkey hunting.

This is my second visit to Lake Winnipesaukee this year thanks to a friend, Brad Will, in Woodstock. This last visit rekindled my passion for gliding across the water under wind power. Now I need to find someplace in the Hudson River Valley where I can spend more days under sail. If you have a sailboat or have recommendations for renting them within an hour’s drive of Kingston, NY, please email me or leave a comment.

Steely Dan: The Furry Years

wkw — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:34:21 +0000

My 20-odd-year-old dream of meeting Donald Fagen was realized last Sunday night when he and wife Libby Titus popped in for a late night dinner where I was having a drink. Today I was poking around on their web site and found this humorous note written by Walter Becker.

Hey Craig:

I was over at Tower Records last night, buying CDs for the Radio Free Steely Dan thing - and when I checked the SD bin it was once again choked with all kinds of fake SD records — bootlegs and the same set of crummy old demos, just renamed and repackaged on all sorts of little fly-by-night labels* (list of titles below). I feel sorry for the fans who buy these stinkeroos thinking they are getting the new Steely Dan CD but I also feel sorry for us, because as you are aware we don’t get a penny in royalties from any of these old repackages. It’s just not fair - we work our butts off doing the guitar solo on “Jack of Speed” and some newbie runs out and buys “I Can’t Function.” Is there no justice in the world? In the words of Warren Beatty - is there no protest? Is there no outrage?

Look, I have an idea that will help us get our foot in the door of the booming fake SD market. My engineer at Hyperbolic Sound in Hawaii, Dave Russell, has made a childrens’ album called “The Singing Mongooses.” He sells them in stores in Hawaii and on the internet. It’s a spinoff on the old chipmunk records, with sped-up voices and all - but this time they’re not chipmunks, they’re mongooses, like the ones you see all over Hawaii - get it? They sing cute little songs about living in Hawaii. See what I mean? Dave did all the vocals and played all the instruments too, and he did a great job.

Anyhoo, sales of The Mongooses have begun to slack off a bit and, although Dave hasn’t mentioned anything about this, I couldn’t help but notice that there are several large stacks of unsold Mongoose CDs stashed in his office. My plan, Craig, is simply this: we buy out the remaining stock of The Mongoose CDs. We slap a sticker on the front of the things that says “Steely Dan: The Furry Years.” We promote the hell out of them here on the internet, sell ‘em through the website, maybe even send a couple down to Tower Records in NYC to see what happens. Of course neither Donald nor I are on the record but, what with the sped-up vocals, who’s gonna know that for sure? Nobody, that’s who. I mean, what the hell - it’ll be a rip-off, but at least it will be OUR rip-off. For a change.

W 1/19/00

BlockBuster Video Locator Application

wkw — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 03:03:11 +0000

I’ve been having fun with Google’s Mapping API the last couple days. I wrote a little application for locating BlockBuster Video store locations anywhere in the US and displaying them on a Google Map. Click the map to visit the locator application.

Or you can try some pre-made searches:

Of course, it’s easier to just rent DVDs online from BlockBuster Online.

Michael Dell Bad at Predicting Future

wkw — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 22:55:29 +0000

… or so Steve Jobs says in an email sent to employees this week.
In 1997, after Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped found in 1976, Dell’s founder and chairman, Michael Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple, then deeply troubled financially.

“What would I do?” Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”

Manage Ads on Your WordPress Blog

wkw — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 06:05:34 +0000

Last year (2005) when I started my first WordPress blog, I was looking for a better way to stick Google AdSense ads to the posts, and an easy way to manage where and when those ads are shown. Since nothing existed at the time, I sat down to write my own WordPress plugin, AdSense-Deluxe.

The response to the plugin’s release has been tremendous: ProBlogger readers rated it a “must-have” plug-in, and the turn-key Power Your WordPress software includes it as one of its core plugins. The popularity of WordPress continues to grow and hundreds of thousands of bloggers are earning income from their blogs.

WordPress 2.0 was just released and I spent today updating AdSense-Deluxe to work with WP 2.0’s Rich Editor (a WYSIWYG HTML editor — with flaws…) and to work with Yahoo! Publisher Network ads.

In a nutshell, AdSense-Deluxe allows you to setup any number of ad formats then insert them into individual WordPress Posts or your WordPress theme templates. The Plugin’s option panel allows for globally enabling or disabling ads, or turning them on/off for specific locations within your WordPress blog. It also includes the AdSense Preview tool for seeing the ads which would display on for a given blog post.

About.com Should Be "Annoying.com"

wkw — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:16:39 +0000

It seems that everytime I start trying to satisfy some curiosity of mine — like learning about electric food smokers — About.com pages come up high in the search results. But I can’t stand that site! Maybe I’ve never given them a fair chance, but my intial reaction is always that there’s too many ads intermingled with too little information, and they string you from one page to the next with the hope that following an enticing link will bring you to what you seek. And let’s not forget the framing of offsite pages…. But they are so ubiquitious (and now owned by the Times Corporation … think NYT). Anyone have some good things to say about About.com?