This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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Lung Power!

Time for another new graph. My lung power over time!

Sam’s Peak Flow History

Since I was a child I have had asthma.  It used to cause me quite a bit of trouble.  With modern medicines it bothers me much less than when I was a teenager and younger.  But it is still there and likely always will be.  So I monitor it on a regular basis.  What follows are charts I have kept of my “peak flow”.  This basically measures how strongly I can blow out, which in turn is one indicator of my lung strength and how well I am breathing at that moment.

As with the weight graph, there is some data which I have but is not yet reflected on the chart. This will slowly be restored as I go through a few places where I have the data and get it entered.

The Weight Graph Is Back!!!

After many years, the weight graph is back!

Sam’s Weight History

…you can see my steady rise over the last 12 years, starting in 1994 and 1995 when I was trying to gain as much as I could because I was too skinny.  And you can also see quite clearly the “weight contests” of 2001 and 2002, especially the big one, where to win the contest (which was a very stiff competition) I ended up eating only something like 10 times in the entire last month of the contest, and not at all in the last 10 days (other than one SlimFast shake on the 8th day) in order to ensure my win (barely!).  Um, that was stupid.  Very stupid. But I recovered quickly.  :-)

I’m a bit above where I really should be right now, but I’m not too concerned. And the trends are right at the moment.

This is the first of several new graphs I’ll be adding to the Graph Section. Some of them will be the return of graphs from the distant past with new and exciting updated data. Others will be brand new.

For those that remember abulsme.com from that far back though (1996 I think), do not expect an immediate return of the “Temperature in Sam’s Mouth” graph. Maybe someday, but not right now. Sorry.

Updated Ecosystem Graphs

The graph I do of the rankings of this site and some others on the TTLB Ecosystem has been updated. Since the last update, this site dropped behind Al’s Phatback site. Drat.

Also, since the last time I did an update, there have been some changes to how the ecosystem works that means these graphs won’t be quite as nice as before. Oh well. Anyway, for the actual graph and the explaination of what changed, see below.

Ecosystem Graph

Sometime in 2004 Q4 the Bear who manages the ecosystem changed how the details pages at his site are set up.  He added some very cool graphs and such, but took away the historical listings of rankings over time.  So since I do not check these rankings daily, but only once every couple months, I can’t do like I did before and when I do check, go back and fill out all the daily rankings for this chart.  Instead I can only chart the rankings as of the date I look.  Thus, after the last day I have daily states (19 Sep 2004) the charts will be much rougher and have many straight lines rather than the nice jagged lines from before then.  Sorry about that!

Random Spot: Orotukan, Magadan, Russia

OK, I’m procrastinating for a few minutes. Went to play with my Random Spot Tool. Decided to do a little google research on the first place on land that came up. (I will NOT be planning a random vacation there however, the next one of those is still to Chacchoben, Quintana Roo, Mexico.)

So, the first place that came up was 63°43.421’N 152°38.658′ E. It is 5470.02 miles from the house we are staying in, at an original bearing of 338.48361°. It is in northeastern Russia:

image

Zooming in:

image

OK. So it is about 50 miles outside of Orotukan. So lets find the first 10 interesting things about Orotukan we can find on a Google Search on Orotukan:

#1) It is a mining area. (via InfoMine)

#2) There is a Russian blog named after it. (via Orotukan LiveJournal) Unfortunately, I can not read Russian.

#3) A company named Western Pinnacle has an exploration licence for mining there. Apperantly for an “alluvial gold placer mine”. You can invest in Western Pinnacle (WPN:CNDX). (via Placer Mine News)

#4) It was a location for one of Stalins “penalty camps”. When you got “sent to Siberia” this would be one of those places I guess. (via Yale Review of Books)

#5) It is on the path of something called the “International Peace Trail” that some idealist group is trying to get set up as a ring of parks and trails circling the earth. (via The International Peace Trail Project)

#6) The chief manager of one of the gold mines (Orotukansky GOK) is Alexander Grinenko, and I have his address and phone number now. (via InfoMine Research Group)

#7) A company named Geometall says about their operations there: “The geological prospecting and exploration operations at the facilities “Chai-Yurya” and “Orotukan” performed by the enterprise are oriented towards identification of ore deposits containing gold and silver in the Kolyma area; their opening up will permit compensating for a reduction in the mining of placer gold and stabilizing the socio-economic situation in the Region. ” Iiya Rosenblum is the Director. (via Grand Encyclopedia of Russian Goods and Services)

#8) Estimated Population of Orotukan in 2004 was 2,800 people. (via World Gazetteer)

#9) Asdu Oll, Chairman of the Board of the Estonian Institute for Human Rights, used to work in Orotukan from 1962 to 1970. (via World Security Network)

#10) In 1998, there was some illegal panning for gold: “Police seized 170 kilograms of gold from illegal gold prospectors in Magadan Region’s Khasynsky County Aug. 23. According to the regional Internal Affairs Department, five villagers from Orotukan were caught panning gold on a stream 30 kilometers from the village. Police fired several shots when the prospectors resisted arrest. No casualties were reported. Two of the detained are 9th graders at a local school. ” (via Vladivostok News)

OK. That is ten items. And I have procrastinated and wasted enough time for today. (Although it is surprisingly quick to do this kind of search. Really only took a few minutes. Ain’t the Internets wonderful? :-)

Sounds like an interesting place though, no?

Oh, I have to add one more thing cause I can’t resist…

#11) The town is mentioned in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. The quote is: “In Orotukan the earth thaws only in summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter.” (via Poshlost)

Time for lunch, and then a fully productive and procrastination free afternoon. But this was fun. Maybe I’ll do it again with a different random spot the next time I have a few minutes to kill between things.

Found by CrazyBrave

A while ago I made a post about various people using my pictures. Well, one of them found that post through their own referral tracker and posted about me:

The dying whimper of Pandagate …
(Zoe, CrazyBrave)

My sister told me, after seeing her compost bin on the internet, that I needed a new hobby. Not as badly as this guy does.

She was refering to my Email Contest which she linked to in her post. Now, now, I know I am behind a bit on the count at the moment due to having to reconstruct September in the way I am, but no need to toss that out completely as a hobby!

But perhaps a couple new hobbies too wouldn’t be bad. :-)

The Happy Haunting Red Thing

Well, it is now Monday, and the nice four day weekend is over. In just over six hours I need to be getting up to get ready for work. Which means I need to head to sleep shortly. But as I am returning to work, I thought I would share something about work.

At work there is a painting. It is above the copy machine. Near the printers. I walk by it many times. It haunts me throughout the working day and it follows me home and torments me in my dreams! This is it:

image

OK. Naked girl in a funny pose. I’m perfectly OK with that.

But what the hell is the red face thing floating above her and taunting her??? It looks like it is happy and celebrating in her obvious agony. What kind of sadistic pokemon sort of thing is it?? I have visions of it bouncing up and down in glee as thousands writhe in pain and torment. And probably singing some sort of song in a voice somewhat reminicent of Barney, but higher.. and perkier… and more insistant! A cross between a happy gurgling baby and a floating disembodied demon head spawned from the depths of hell. And she can do nothing but slap her head in disbelief and pain as it tortures her through all eternity!

Um, or something like that.

It is signed “B. Zong”. But I could not find any reference to such an artist googling on the name. If anybody knows more, feel free to let me know.

B. Zong, whoever you are, your painting is slowly driving me insane!!!

Um, or something like that.

Place the States Quiz

Saw this Drag and Drop State Thing. (via TivoCommunity)

I got:

Score 98%
Average Error 1 Mile
Time 352 seconds

I messed up Tennessee. Right general location, just a few miles off E/W from where it should have been. (I had it slightly too far west.)

Anybody else want to try then report their scores?

(It randomizes the order of the states each time, and some orders are definately easier than others.)

Ooo… they have a bunch more!! The “expert geographer” ones for the various continents are really hard!

Frump Watch

A few weeks ago Bob Frump, one of the many bosses I had at my previous employer, emailed with this note:

The History Channel will run a documentary on the sinking of the Marine Electric on Nov. 22, 9 PM EST as a part of its Deepsea Detectives series. The producers seemed to know what they were doing and I have high hopes for it.

I had been waiting to blog this until right before the broadcast. Because I waited, I can augment the above with this additional detail Jon sent me a few days ago:

When the History Channel airs its TV documentary “Ship of Doom” on November 22, […] employees at the corporate campus in Princeton, New Jersey, will see a familiar face.

That’s because the show is based on a book written by their colleague, Bob Frump, the editor in chief for GPC Marketing Brand Communications, and he is interviewed by the TV network’s historians during the show.

Frump’s book, Until the Sea Shall Free Them, is the nonfiction narrative of how an old ship, the S.S. Marine Electric, sank with most of her crew off the Virginia coast during a winter storm in 1983. Frump said Disney/Buena Vista has optioned film rights for the book, which was published in 2002, and has budgeted production for a feature film.

The History Channel airs the show on Monday, November 22, at 9 pm Eastern time as part of its Deepsea Detectives series, whose episodes feature the attempts by divers and technical experts to discover the reasons behind famous shipwrecks over the centuries.

For the “Ship of Doom” episode, divers searched the rusted hulk of the Marine Electric 134 feet beneath the Atlantic to discover what caused the merchant ship to sink. The History Channel’s website synopsizes the theme this way: “Survivors blamed the owners for sending an unsafe boat to sea. But the owners charged that one of the survivors caused his crewmates’ deaths by failing to observe basic safety procedures. In the shadow of these allegations, the wreck is a potential crime scene.”

That is from an announcement sent out to employees back there at the old job.

In any case, congratulaions to Bob, this is great! Now everybody go set your Tivos!

Uh, and Brandy, I forgot to set our Tivo to get this. Can you set it so I won’t forget later? Thanks! :-)

Safer Once Again

The world is continuing to get safer. Grenada and Cuba have both had their travel warnings lifted. Presumably because the hurricane damage has pretty much been taken care of. This brings us back to a level of 26 countries with State Department travel warnings… which in the little more than a year I’ve been doing this seems to be the “normal” level.

State Department Travel Warnings Over Time

A chart of how many countries world wide have US State Department Travel Warnings as that number varies over time.  Serves as a proxy to chart roughly how dangerous the world is as the world situation changes over time.  Perhaps not the best measure of that, but an interesting one perhaps.

So anyway, start planning those trips to Grenada and Cuba! They are OK now!

Sam’s Pictures in Odd Places

OK. So for the last year or so, when I’ve looked at stats or logs from my site, I’ve actually looked at filtered logs, with just the hits to actual PAGES. Yesterday I decided, for the first time in ages, to look at the FULL logs. I found some fun things.

Just like the picture of Sara was in the email going around, several other of my pictures are in use on other websites. For now, I’ll highlight the ones I found from looking at the full logs for my website for 11 Nov 2004 (UTC of course). These are fun! (Listed in order by the first time each appeared in the log during the day.)

#1) 00:10:55 UTC CrazyBrave: They use my picture of a sad panda to illustrate a point about “PandaGate”.  PandaGate is apperantly some sort of scandal going on in Australia. The sad panda is very sad. I found it on the ground by the dumpster in the rain one day. I almost saved it from its fate, but in the end I just took pictures. And now it is immortal!

#2) 00:23:49 UTC The Condominium: Someone on this discussion group thing uses this picture of Spaghetti from my site, but the discussion board is members only, so I can’t see the context. My context was that I picked up the box of spaghetti not knowing that the bottom of the box was open, and it spilled all over the floor. I wish I could see what they were saying about it! (But not enough to try to join their little exclusive club or whatever it is.)

#3) 02:37:44 UTC Kelliee’s LiveJournal: A user named “heartsofarmor” posts a picture I once took of a daddy longlegs type spider thing with a caption “that’s what they look like here in Georgia”.  Actually, I took the picture in New Jersey. South Brunswick, New Jersey to be specific. But to be fair, they probably do look pretty much the same in Georgia. They were trying to show someone on the West Coast what East Coast daddy long legs look like, because apperantly they are different. I did not know that.

#4) 02:37:48 UTC Quick Impulses’ Live Journal: Uses a picture I took of a Fuzzy Road in some sort of angst ridden passage about fear:  “I’m experiencing a third level of fear – not that I desire to fit in and fear I can’t; not that I fear directly what other people think of me; not that I think the standards of appropriate behavior as observed by the rest of the world should necessarily be mine – but that one day by something I do not fear now, I will learn to fear all these things, that I will learn to hate myself when a stuffy establisment doesn’t accept me, and to change for it so that they do.” That is what he says right before my picture.  OK.

All four of those got repeated hits all through the day. Very interesting. A little odd, but fun. (And no Rebecca, I don’t mind at all that they are using my pictures without permission, I think it is cool, although it would be cooler if they dropped me a note telling me!)

There are even more places like this that I’ve found by googling myself that just didn’t lead to any hits yesterday, but I’ll save those for another day. Some of them are pretty funny. I’ll post about those sometime before too long.

I’ll do one as well sometimes on just all searches that lead people here and similar things. But not today.
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