Miscellany – CraigDidIt.com

Where to find me

Since I’m not writing here often, even though I’d like to be, the best places online to find me are:

I guess I didn’t do a very good job last year of blowing the dust off of this site or my work blog. One big reason for that has been the sheer busy-ness at work this year. And working here is a lot like work, even more so this year, and I want to unwind from work when I’m at home. I hit my 10-year anniversary at UF last March and it’s still my dream job. Two other reasons for inactivity here are called Facebook and Twitter, which make sharing brief updates very convenient.

But the biggest reason is that I’ve been working on something very big offline and it’s shown wonderful progress. I’m happy.

Here are some photo albums from the past year:

New Year’s Eve Ichetucknee River kayaking 2011
St. Augustine Ice Skating and Lights – Dec. 28, 2011
Dana and Craig – 2011 – Photos of us from some of the year’s adventures.
Cockspur Island Lighthouse and Fort Pulaski – Nov. 12, 2011 – Kayaking near Savannah
Gator Growl – November 4, 2011 – featuring the Goo Goo Dolls
Duran Duran in Concert – October 13, 2011 – at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre
UF Gator Football 2011
Spirit of America concert – Sept. 24, 2011 – at the Jacksonville Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum
Ichetucknee River Tubing – Labor Day weekend 2011
Atlas V Juno launch – Aug. 5, 2011 – shot from Playalinda Beach
Ichetucknee River Tubing – July 15, 2011
Rainbow River Kayaking – July 14, 2011 – A new favorite place
SW High Class of 81 30-year reunion weekend – May 20-22, 2011 (on Facebook)
Launch of Endeavour – May 16, 2011
Green Cove Springs 3rd of July Fireworks 2011
St. Augustine Alligator Farm – May 7, 2011
Launch of Discovery – Feb. 24, 2011
Weekend at the Postcard Inn – Feb
GCC Chilly Chili Picnic – Jan. 29, 2011 – My favorite bicycle club event at O’Leno State Park.

Some older stuff not linked here previously:

Favorites of 2010
Best of 2010
Vampire Weekend in Concert – Oct. 14, 2010
Space geekery – Various photos related to space from all years

Find me elsewhere online:

Check back. I might not be done yet.

Blowing the dust off the blogs

I started by blowing the dust off the work blog last week. And yesterday it got a new template with an assist from my departing work assistant Charlotte Porter.

I’ve got plans to do more here, too. I changed the template last weekend to the new WordPress default after discovering a problem with the old one. I’m also planning to shake up the content a bit, first by getting rid of the old photo galleries. Some of those may move to my Flickr, others will just live forever in an archive on a hard drive at home.

I also have some cool new content plans that I hope to start executing in the near future (hint: think kayaking). And there may be a new template, too.

Happy Holidays 2009

Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2009:

Kayaking

Travel

Miscellany

Garden and butterfly pictures from the year.
Palatka Fourth of July fireworks over the St. Johns River – July 4.
Ichetucknee River tubing with my cycling club group – August.
Midnight launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery – August.
Gator Football 2009.
My Best of 2009.
Happy Holidays 2008 – last year’s version of this.

Find me elsewhere online:

Happy Holidays 2008

Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2008:

Travel

Kayaking

Kayaking Turkey Creek near Palm Bay with my brother Andy – Dec. 2007.
Ichetucknee River – New Year’s Eve 2007 – a.k.a. “Hernia Day.”
Ichetucknee River – May – wherein I met the Whites, who became my kayaking buddies.
Santa Fe River – June with the Whites.
Silver River – July – a new favorite place.
Salt Springs Run – July – not as interesting as I’d hoped.
Oklawaha River – September – I may seen enough of that side of the Ocala National Forest now.
Lake Washington and the St. Johns River with my brother – December.
Ichetucknee River – New Year’s Eve 2008

Miscellany

Lunar eclipse – February
Garden and butterfly pictures from the Summer.
Night launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour – November.
Happy Holidays 2007 – last year’s version of this.

Keep checking back. I might not be done yet.

MyCokeRewards vs. PepsiStuff

I’ve been thinking about a quick and probably oversimple financial analysis of the benefits of the MyCokeRewards.com and PepsiStuff.com rewards programs. I’m typically more of a drinker of Coca-Cola products–mainly Coke Zero and Powerade (after kayaking or cycling)–and have participated in that program for much longer, but the affiliation of PepsiStuff with Amazon.com and the ability to buy music there with the points has gotten me interested in that program as well.

The simpler analysis is probably PepsiStuff. One 20 oz. bottle gets you one point. Five points gets you a song download on Amazon. A song typically goes for 89 cents. So each point is worth about 18 cents. The caveat is that not every song is buyable in this manner.

With MyCokeRewards, I often redeem 220 points for a gold movie pass good at AMC Theatres. The maximum current price of an AMC movie ticket is $9.50. The makes each point worth about 4 cents. One 20 oz. bottle of soda gets you three points, making the value of the points per bottle about 12 cents. I often buy my Coke products in 12-packs, however, and the point value on the 12-pack then works out to 40 cents.

I also saw a sign on the convenience store door that said MyCokeRewards was like, “buy eight, get one free” on 20 oz. bottles. In that case, if the store charges $1.39 for your 20 oz. bottle, the value per point is close to 6 cents and the point value per bottle works out to about 18 cents, which gets us back into the PepsiStuff value ballpark per 20 oz. bottle purchased.

I might have to do a further exercise to see if the point differential would make it beneficial to buy six-packs of 24 oz. plastic bottles rather than 12-packs of 12 oz. cans. Then you’d have to get into the eco-friendliness of plastic bottles vs. aluminum cans, too. I always recycle both, btw.

Happy Holidays 2007

Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2007:

Keep checking back. I might not be done yet.

I’m not that Craig

I noticed some interesting search-engine driven hits while reading the web traffic reports for this site over the past week. I’ve actually gotten some traffic as a result of the political downward spiral that Sen. Larry Craig has found himself in. I’ve received hits on the seach phrases “what craig did” and “why craig did it?” At the office this week while the story was breaking, I kept seeing “____ says Craig should resign” all over the news channels in the lab so I looked at Dave at one point and said, “I quit.”

This is not my first experience with politically-driven off-target search-engine hits. Back when Rep. Mark Foley was in his own tailspin, we saw some hits at work on the phrase “Foley humor” because we happen to have a Prof. Foley on the faculty.

Category: Miscellany