Jay Dreyer

Another Test...Trip to California

Big test…why won’t Flock let me update blog postings…testing again.
Update test.  Let’s try again.

Comment | posted 11/01/2006 07:02 AM

Happy Halloween!

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth…it’s just been pretty crazy up here as of late. To tide you over, I’ve uploaded a few new pictures of Jack and Lucy in their Halloween costumes.

I’m not sure how it is everywhere else, but it was COLD here today. Below freezing during trick or treat time. I’m still warming back up. Poor Jack’s little ears were all red. There was no slowing him down from accumulating candy for his father to eat, however. What a trooper.

Comment [1] | posted 10/31/2006 11:23 PM

Let it Snow???

So it’s October 12th, and as I look out the window of my office here at work I see that it’s snowing. I’ll say it again. It’s October 12th and it’s snowing. It snowed yesterday, too. It was 25 degrees this morning and now it’s snowing.

Oh boy.

Comment [2] | posted 10/12/2006 02:59 PM

Does ESPN.com Know What They're Doing?

Bashing ESPN is a popular sport these days. A lot of my friends love to bag on it, even though they watch it religiously. I’ve got my own beefs with the station, but overall they’re minor criticisms (for instance, how many Yankee-Red Sox games do we have to see?). I’m just happy to have sports 24/7. (Please spare me the “poker isn’t a sport!”, blah blah blah stuff.)

Having said that, I do have a complaint with ESPN.com. Primarily, does anyone over there know what they’re doing? Why does their web site go down every Sunday during the fall? Ahhh…football – fantasy football. ESPN has been hosting fantasy football since at least 1996, I believe – maybe a few years earlier or a year later. You would think that after all these years they would recognize that many people like to check on their fantasy football teams on Sundays. When many people check the same web site at the same time, it tends to crash, or at least slow to a crawl. The solution is to add more webservers to handle the load (actually, there are many, many solutions to the problem, most of them would bore you to tears.)

I write this not because I’m mad I can’t check on my fantasy teams – they both suck and I couldn’t care less. I just find it funny that the last two weekends when I go to refresh the front page of ESPN.com, it just keeps clocking. Fortunately for me, yesterday’s front page has a nice headline about Michigan stomping Notre Dame, so I really don’t mind that the page won’t refresh.

Comment [3] | posted 09/17/2006 11:15 PM

IE CSS Problems

You know…you use Firefox long enough and you forget that there are still people out there using Internet Explorer. Such was the case with me when I started tinkering with the look of the site here. My xhtml validates, as does my css, but just because it’s right doesn’t mean it will work with IE.

Our good friend Amy dropped an email today and said the site looked like garbage on IE. She didn’t say it quite like that, but after I took a look, I concluded it looked like dog poop. I made some small changes, made sure everything validated and hit the refresh button in IE and voila! It works. I can’t tell you what I did to make it work because I have no idea.

So, thank you for the heads up, Amy. Now all of you IE users have no excuse not to visit my Amazon store and buy something.

Update
I really should have checked this sooner. Looking at my site stats, over 50% of the people who check out this site use Internet Explorer. Bad webmaster!

Comment [3] | posted 09/06/2006 10:45 PM

Get Al Gore off your back...Use Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

There is an interesting article in this month’s Fast Company magazine about compact fluorescent lightbulbs and how they will “change the world”. I’m not sure I buy the hype completely, but it does make some sense to me. The bottom line is that a CFL bulb can last about 10 times longer than a conventional incandescent bulb and it uses 75%-80% less electricity. So, although a CFL bulb costs around $3 compared to around 40 cents for a traditional bulb, the energy savings and longer life of a CFL will actually save you money in the long run.

I’m sold on this reasoning. I’m not so sold on some issues I have, though. For one, I question whether a CFL can produce the same type of light as an incandescent bulb. I haven’t made the switch yet so I’ll have to test it out to see what it’s like. Another problem I have is that I have a bunch of lights in the house, and very few of them use “normal” light bulbs. I’ve got flood lights, lots of candle-type bulbs, and some of those annoying torch lights. I don’t think there is a replacement CFL bulb for these fixtures/lights. If there is, please let me know. I’d love to find a CFL replacement for the flood lights in the ceilings of my house. Just reducing the time between replacing these things would be worth it for me.

Finally, some fixtures I have that use a normal incandescent bulb don’t have room for the funky-shaped CFL bulbs. I tried to replace the bulb in my garage door opener with a CFL and eventually gave up because it didn’t fit. The glass was a little wider and the base had a slightly different shape than a normal bulb. It wouldn’t fit no matter what I tried so I gave up and used an old-school incandescent. There are probably many different bulbs I can try so I’ll have to do some research.

I’ll wrap up with another interesting point from the article. Two big sources of the push for CFL bulbs are GE and Wal Mart. Wal Mart is really pushing the CFL bulb and has pushed GE to help meet their goal of selling 100 million CFL bulbs in the next 12 months. GE is going along with this even though they’ll end up replacing a steady cash-cow (incandescent bulbs) with a far less dependable source of revenue. Because it can take 10 years or so before you need to replace a CFL bulb, compared to a year for incandescents, GE is bascially destroying one part of their business. Their reasoning makes sense, however. If they don’t provide CFLs, someone else will and GE will be left out of the smaller revenue stream. Sounds like a business school case study.

I also wonder if Target is being as aggressive with the promotion of CFLs as Wal Mart is. I’ll have to sniff around here and find out.

Comment [3] | posted 09/06/2006 01:00 PM

My Very Own Amazon Store

Get yer checkbooks and credit cards ready…I’ve got my own Amazon store here on JayDreyer.com. Just look up on the navigation bar for the cleverly titled “Store” link and click away. It’s kind of cool, but I don’t have a lot of control over it. I get to pick the 9 items on the first page, and the categories on the right. But, I don’t have any control over what displays when you select a category. At least I haven’t figured out how to do it, yet. So, Dixie Chicks albums may appear, or an Al Franken book. Just ignore and move on.

You can do all of your usual Amazon stuff here, plus my site even has a fancy shopping cart. Everything goes through Amazon, so if you’re worried about me getting your personal info or tracking your shopping habits, forget about it. The only thing I’ll ever know is if somebody buys something, I’ll get a 5% cut. It doesn’t tell me who bought what, though. When you checkout, it takes care of that through Amazon so I don’t even get your credit card info.

Buy some stuff and make me some $$$! Have fun and let me know what you think about it.

Comment | posted 09/04/2006 11:32 PM

The Mall of America

This weekend’s grand adventure and immersion into Minneapolis living was a trip to the insanely huge Mall of America. (Of course, we couldn’t go to the Mall of America without stopping off first at Ikea. We just couldn’t.)

We have tried to stay away from it, and reserve going there for when/if friends and family visit. But, few friends and family have visited, it was raining, and it has an indoor aquarium. And it’s next to Ikea – key in DeAnne’s reasoning.

So…what can I say about this place? It’s big. Really big, as Shatner would say. It has an indoor amusement park, an underground aquarium (complete with sharks you can go swimming with – for $200. I asked if the sharks had frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. I was the only one who found this humorous besides Jack, who is my personal Ed McMahon.), a gazillion stores (I counted!), and tons of crappy fast food restaurants.

I think DeAnne and I are still dazed from the experience. We didn’t even really shop. We just walked around, looked at stuff, checked out the aquarium and left. I tried to find a pen (I need a small pen I can hang on my keychain…these exist, right? Where can I find one?) but I didn’t have much luck. We also went to Brooks Brothers where I found a great sports coat for, gulp, $500. “No way,” said DeAnne. “That’s our new bathroom from Ikea!” I couldn’t argue with her.

It’s not a great place for really little kids, unless you’re trying to lose them, in which case it’s an excellent place. Jack liked the aquarium, Lego-land, and hide-and-seek in Brooks Brothers. Lucy seemed to enjoy the aquarium. It was like a real-life Baby Einstein video for her. DeAnne liked Ikea.

What did I like? Leaving.

Comment [3] | posted 09/03/2006 11:44 PM

Visit to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

We ventured downtown today and checked out the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. It's a neat place right next to the Walker Art Center and the Basilica. Lot's to see, although it was a little bit toasty for Jack and Lucy. All in all, however, it was a nice time. It's good to get out once in a while! Click on the picture to check out the rest of the gallery. Or you can view the whole set.

Comment [1] | posted 08/27/2006 04:32 PM

Lists of Bests

I stumbled upon a cool website the other day if you’re as big into geeky “best of” lists as I am.

It’s called Lists of Bests and it’s free. It’s fairly simple…people create “best-of” lists on the site that everyone can see. You search for a list that interests you and then you can start filling it out.

For example, I am into movie, book, and music lists. If you search my site you’ll find I’ve completed the AFI Top 100 American movies list, and I’m currently working on the Time Magazine top 100, as well as Roger Ebert’s list of great movies. I’ve been maintaing the lists on my site on my own and it’s kind of a pain. Now you can just go to Lists of Bests, find a list and it will keep track of where you stand as far as completing it.

A nice feature of the site is that (usually) it will update other lists for you. How can I explain this…say you start filling out the AFI Top 100 films list. One of the movies on there is the Godfather. Well, as you can imagine, the Godfather is on a lot of “best of” lists. So, if you also decide to tackle the Time Magazine Top 100 list, the Godfather will already be checked off on it. I’d say this works about 90% of the time. It’s pretty handy.

You can work off of lists that people have created or you can make your own. There is a list for just about everything on there so check it out and see if there’s one for you.

Comment | posted 08/26/2006 10:54 PM