I read an interesting article today about “Building a safer MySpace“. Apparently MySpace is being sued by the family of a 14-year-old Texas girl who said she was assaulted by a predator she met on MySpace.

This is not new. Not to defend them, but MySpace has been taking measures for well over a year to prevent such things from happening. It seems you can’t turn on the news these days without it coming up in some story or another. They have already blocked kids under 14 from using it, and deleted existing profiles of those who fell under that age. They have put other profile-related security in place. They are now blocking those under 18 from crossing profiles with those over 18, which when you think about it essentially creates two MySpace sites (MyKidSpace, anyone?).

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In addition to the obvious addition of my local weather (which is handy for me and a few, just FYI to others), I have added another additional feature. Now when you make a comment, you can elect to “Subscribe” to the comments for that post. That way, if anyone replies to your comments, you will be notified via email. Even without registering with me as a user, you can still manage the comments to which you are subscribed. You can also remove yourself from specific or all notifications at any point. I am experiencing intermittant problems with the weather function and am working to debug it. When it breaks, it goofs up the entire site. I’ll see if I can fix it, but bear with me if the page does not display right and you get an error where the weather output should be. I’m either working on it, or it will resolve itself in a few minutes.

Nothing major, but hopefully a nice little feature. I have debated on whether to implement a “Subscription” function which would allow you to subscribe (or unsub) to this site to be notified by email any time I make a new post. But that could get annoying if I stick to this and post a lot, so I’ll hold off on that for now. LOL!

Finally… if you have a blog or site, let me know and I’ll check it out. If you meet my rigid quality assurance standards, I’ll add you to my list (on the right). Of course, if you see your site pop up there and you do NOT want it there, let me know and I’ll pull it down. That’s not a feature I’m 100% committed to right now.

Wow… I was getting ready to shut down, and noticed there was a new version of WordPress available (v2.0.7). Apparently there is some vulnerability in certain versions of PHP, so they released this emergency update. I don’t want to screw up my friend’s server, so I decided to upgrade. But in doing so… I broke my gallery! It took me a few minutes to figure out I had deleted some pretty important files for the integration to work. Go figure. Once I found it and got everything back in place, I was back in business. But what a pain in the butt!

Ok… I’m going to bed now!

Well, it took some time, but I managed to import ALL of my entries from previous blogs to this one! That means anything I’ve written going back to 2003 is now right here for your reading pleasure. There are actually a few things I’ve written which I’m proud of, so I encourage you to take a look back.

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Just a couple of updates today…First, a “Week 1″ update on my workout resolution: I managed to get in five last week, which was a “short” week for me. You could say I actually only got in three, but two days counted as two because I did both upper body and cardio on those days. My total exercise time was 3 hours, and I managed to burn through 1965 calories (a few short of my goal). I sort of ate too much over the weekend. We had some REALLY good pizza on Friday night, and then my mom cooked for us Saturday with a few of my favorite foods. I’m back at it this week, though… worked out upper body and cardio again yesterday, spending 35 minutes on the exercise bike. Today I’m supposed to run 40 minutes, so I guess I’ll do that shortly. 

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I’ve been playing around tonight trying to set up my new Polar F55, which I bought with my part of my $250 “Wellness Dollars” I earned through a new program at work (I also have a Cateye Enduro 8 cycling computer on it’s way). It’s a pretty complex little gadget and will take me some time to learn and use all the features. Hopefully it will serve as a little extra push to keep up my workouts. Between that, my cell phone + headset, my pager (when on call), and other stuff, I’m beginning to feel like Inspector Gadget (or Luke Skywalker). Go Go, Gadget FitnessWatch!

Outside of that, had a good day. Woke up w/the kids and got them breakfast (cereal, of course) while the wife was at the grocery store. We then played for a little while… listened to some Christmas music, etc., after which they helped me wrap presents for mommy. After naptime, we watched “VeggieTales” before they went to help mommy bake cookies. I wanted to help, but instead spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with Best Buy (more on that saga later). After that, just misc. stuff. We went to grab something quick for dinner, so I drove through a couple of neighborhoods so they could see the lights. I needed this vacation time! It’s been awesome just to hang out and relax with the kids. I have to admit, I’ve worn nothing but pajama’s since Tuesday night. It’s awesome!

I ran across a really cool web site today, http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/. This web site allows you to measure a distance (very handy for running/walking/cycling), calculate approximate calories burned for that distance (based upon your weight), view the elevation changes for the span, set mile markers, print a map, and even export the map to a GPS! All of this is free, using Google’s Gmap API’s.

There is also another version of this at http://www.mapmyrun.com/, which is quite similar and allows you to add some additional points of assistance such as water, first aid, etc. Mapmyrun can also export to Google Earth to provide 3D images of your map (although I’m not quite sure what benefit that brings you), and allows for a few more factors such as age, height, and speed, in calculating potential calories burned.While playing around and mapping a few known distances, I found these to be fairly accurate. I mapped out a route I typically ride on my bike and it came out to just over 11 miles. That’s pretty accurate and close to what I measured with my car. The down side to both sites, of course, is that if your neighborhood is newer (like mine) it doesn’t show up on the map. In that case, it does me little good in trying to map those short “around the neighborhood” jogs. But I can see a real benefit here for longer distances, or if you want to map a run while out of town.

Give it a spin, and have fun!