Keith’s Amusing Musings

Happy Independence Day, America!

One of the more interesting Deep Zoom examples I have seen since Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia, the Deep Zoom Obama Fan Site is also a great homage to presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. Consisting of over 12,000 individual pictures uploaded by Obama supporters, this massive composite in Senator Obama’s likeness provides a sense of his broad appeal and the universality of his message.

Fan sites like these tend to go away as quickly as they appear so I recorded a short video—about 70 seconds—showing the site in action.

[Warning: The following video may contain embedded ads. I am helping beta test Microsoft’s ad publishing platform. Hide the ads by clicking the ‘X’.]

Almost 120,000 words and over 270 posts in, I figure it is time to recap some of the top posts by traffic and some of my personal favorites. This post is also a good reference if you are new to Keith’s Amusing Musings and don’t want to sift through 55 pages separating wheat from chaff.

Leave a comment with your personal favorite posts, categories or topics. I like comments.

By the way, the nifty “greatest hits” graphic to the right is a Keith original. I “borrow” most of the other images used throughout my blog.

And now a smattering of oldies-but-goodies and posts worthy of dubious praise…

Most Inaccurate: My Lists for 2006

Verbose: Honeymoon & Amsterdam travel series

Funny:

• Ghost Riding the Whip
• The Corporate Costume Party

Adventurous

• We Are Back from Super Bowl XL
• The Abominable Snow
• “Stop Freakin’…Call Beacon” series
• Bussin’ it in the Sea 

Informative

• Wealth Score series 
• 1-800-CALL-411
• Buying Light Bulbs at Wholesale Prices
• Buying a Mattress for Dummies
• Creating a Digital Panorama

Nerdy

• Revenge of the Nerds
• The Obligatory Gas Mileage Chart / Gas Mileage Update 
• Apple iPhone/iPod 6G Compared to Microsoft Zune
• Building a Vista Media Center 

Tech Support

• How to Make Windows Vista Faster
• Using Windows Live Messenger to Send & Receive SMS Text Messages
• How to Test Your Internet Connection Speed
• Microsoft Office 2007 SP1 install fails with error 78F

About a year ago I wrote about tracking the gas mileage for my Mazda 626 and the price of gas here on the eastside of the Seattle metro area. Here is a quick update so you can see how both have changed over the course of a year.

The "AVERAGES" row above is cumulative from June 2004 when recording began. Below are the averages restricted to the date range displayed in the chart above (Oct 16, 2006 through Sep 12, 2007).

Comparing this past year to the overall numbers:

• I go slightly longer between refills (27.5 vs. 23.9 days) and put more gas in my car (12.6 vs. 12.0 gallons) each time.
• My mileage (MPG) average of 25.6 continues to trail the historical average of 26.8 since moving closer to work. Considering how much closer we live (5 mile vs. 17 mile one-way commute) my MPG average remains very respectable. (Hypothetical high-five to the Mazda engineers.)
• All the "Price Per" entries (PPG, PPM, PPD) are more a reflection of the increasing cost of gas than my driving habits or car. Below is a chart showing how gas has increased almost 50% in our area between June 2004 and Sep 2007.

Note that May is still the worst possible month to take a road trip. I am considering making May my official public transportation month.

Talk about making a point (or points).

This picture arrived in my inbox earlier today.

I just upgraded Keith’s Amusing Musings to support tagging and also added a fancy tag cloud for visualizing the tags as they are added to posts.

Check out my new tag cloud by clicking the “Tag Cloud” link under Pages in the navigation bar to the left or just click here.

The categories (to the left) are pretty rigid but handy for grouping broadly related posts. Tagging will provide me more flexibility to attach more detailed keywords to each post. You, my readers, get more flexibility by being able to filter posts that share one or more tags.

You can do this filtering by grouping together tags in the URL using the following syntax:

http://lesia.com/tag/[TAG]

-or-

http://lesia.com/tag/[TAG1]+[Tag2]+…+[TagN]

For example:

• All posts marked with the Saving tag (view)
• All posts marked with the Humor tag (view)
• All posts marked with both the Investing and Retirement tags (view)

You will also notice a few of the recent posts now have “Tags” at the end which you can click on to see related posts.

[tags]tag cloud, tagging, blog update[/tags]