i don't live in a county anymore

virginia is weird. i'd idly thought it was a little strange that up to now, even registering to vote and getting my virginia state driver's license (which was finally necessitated not by driving needs but by the desire to get a norfolk library card), i hadn't had to put down a "county of residence" anywhere... but when some odd-looking data yesterday led to trying to look up what county williamsburg is in, i still wasn't expecting the answer to be "none!"

(for reference, my hometown, manchester, has a hybrid school system in which those who live in town go to city schools through 9th grade, at which time they're merged with the county kids, who've already been at the high school for a year... actually, i'm not so sure that i should be pointing fingers at places that choose to have one local government per chunk of land as weird!)

museums!

just found out - saturday is museum day! smithsonian magazine has a downloadable card good for free admission at a whole bunch of neat places all over the country. and a fairly large number of the participating virginia museums are within reach of the hampton roads transit system. yay free entertainment!

(thanks to lifehacker for letting me know...)

commonplace?

i've been reading the paper newspaper a bit at work... it gets delivered to the office, and it's good for keeping up with local agency information that ought to find its way into our database. one thing that strikes me as kinda cool about the virginian pilot is that they're totally unintimidated by pointing their readers to the web... and if it's a long URL, they just send everybody to a tinyurl. i haven't exposed myself to real print media on a regular basis in years. is this the standard now? or are they just that smart?

(they also tend to use google maps with pinpoint locations in their online edition. i'm a little more ambivalent about that... not so sure i want to know exactly how close to my place last night's robbery was...)

update: wal-mart and bicycles

i bicycled to wal-mart to buy a bicycle lock. success.

they didn't let me take my bike into the store. however, the greeter was willing to watch the bike and pointed out a relatively inconspicuous area to stow it. having paid a grand total of about $15 for this bike -- a 70s schwinn world tourist, more or less a slightly more banged up version of this -- that's no problem. i love my bike, but it's not much of a looker. no need to strip to protest its right to come inside.

i always thought the traffic around here was too scary to ride in, but after a few minutes of heart-pumping adrenaline over the audacity of claiming my VERY OWN QUARTER OF A LANE, i got over it and enjoyed the ride.

interwebs!

now at home. cox cable finally sent out a technician who diagnosed that we'd been accidentally disconnected when they hooked up somebody else in the neighborhood. yay rah.

jesse's car is back in commission, too. so transportation issues involved in participating in a bit of dirt cheap blues tonight are largely solved. i asked google maps for public transit directions for getting to beach-side virginia beach... it said i could get there on monday at 9 a.m.! i'm estimating it's actually closer to 3 hours to get there on weekend schedule, but that was amusing.

when i asked my friend kristin (who had to cut off the conversation to head out for a triathlon -- go matt and kristin!) whether she figured wal-mart would let me bring my bicycle inside long enough to shop for a bike lock (my old one rusted out), she sent me this story. tempted to try it anyway...

kait finds her hot-button issue

(i need a real blog update with all kinds of recent adventures, but internet at home's been down. and my car is dead. life's been interesting, to say the least... but more on that when the internet goes up at home... this is an official part-of-my-lunch-break-sized post.)

it's no secret that while i'm not exactly a highly political creature, i'm also not exactly an undecided voter. i'm also not generally a one-issue voter. but here's one that's really not much of an issue in the real world presidential election politics, but that made my eyebrows go way, way up.

seriously folks. you just don't mess with the librarians. even thinking about censoring books is not really funny. even in a town smaller than my hometown. dunno that the mccain/palin fan base would agree with me on this one, but i'd like some better explanation of what was going on...

thanks to dennis, who shared a blog pointing to this snopes article verifying the authenticity of a letter from a wasilla resident... which led, in turn, to a google search for palin + library.

hurricanes and widgets and browsers, oh my

to your right and down, i added a nifty hurricane-tracking widget to the page. this link came out at work, where we're working on making sure we're prepared, just in case anything hits virginia... yes, mom, at this office, i'll probably hear about it if i need to evacuate, even if you don't e-mail me. probably not any faster, but you do have backup if the internet goes down!

the widget seems not to be working yet in chrome, google's new browser. but the browser's pretty. in a little bit of casual, not-particularly-challenging browsing, i can't tell much difference from firefox, but pulling tabs off to independence and regrouping them amuses me far more than it ought to.

*three minutes later* um, the widget does work in chrome now. and it looks like it's going to be a rainy, rainy weekend. who knows...