An exciting day yesterday, to say the least. Shortly after noon, as Susan, Aimee and I were preparing to head out to have some lunch and do more siteseeing in the Pocatello area, Aimee got a phone call, presumably from the police department. It was a recorded message saying that a bomb had been found at a nearby Exxon station and that we were to evacuate the house immediately for an estimated eight hours. It also said that the Red Cross had set up an evacuation center at a nearby church.
Being the skeptic that I am, and, although the voice on the message sounded real, I got in my car and headed for Exxon station to check if it was real. I didn't get far before I discovered that the streets were blocked off by fire trucks and police units. It was the real deal.
When I got back home, Aimee was on-line with Brian in Jakarta telling him what was going on. We then packed up our laptops and headed out. As we traveled about during the day, I kept checking the radio for updates and found nothing. Local radio have become pretty worthless these days in keeping citizens informed about local emergencies, but that is the subject of another blog.
So, after lunch, the girls headed out shopping and I perused a local used book store while watching the clock. About 4:00, I headed back toward the house to see if I could get there, and the roads were still blocked off. So I headed back to town, eventually meeting the girls at a coffee shop with free wireless connections. Aimee was anxious to keep Brian informed as to what was happening. But no luck as Brian was probably asleep or on another airplane to Shanghai.
Around 5:00, I headed back towards the house to see if the roads were still closed...and they were not...in fact, there wasn't a cop in site. I got all the way to the house and called the girls to give them the all-clear. From that point on, life returned to normal. We did get a call from the Pocatello Police around 6:00 that we could return to our homes, but they called the house phone, which presumably no one would be there to answer if we hadn't already returned home.
If you would like to read about the bomb scare, here is a link to a local news site.
Now, about those widgets. If you remember my Thanksgiving blog about playing with Aimee 's MacBook computer, you will recall I was impressed with a Mac-only program called "Dashboard," not really a true program but an engine for a series of small little programs that sit on top of your computer's desktop. Those little programs are called "Widgets."
I got to thinking about it and wondered if there was such an item for us folks in the PC world. After a little research, I found there is. It's a program called Konfabulator. Then, a little more research showed that the company that made it had been bought out by Yahoo!
Their version of the program is called the Yahoo Widget Engine and is available on its own Yahoo web site. I decided to give it a try, since it was free, and downloaded and installed it. The engine came with a few widgets already installed so I could try it out. I liked what I saw and immediately headed to their "Widget Gallery" to see how many more w
idgets I could get.Low and behold, I found almost 3,500 widgets available to download. Most widgets are made by independent programmers and are all free. There are some that most of us would not find any use for such as a Green Bay Packer schedule, Ottawa traffic cams, or the music programs for a high school in Texas. But, I found several that I did like and downloaded them to try it out. They are small in size and download immediately into my computer to try out.
On my desktop, I have widgets that show me the current gas prices in Ephrata, a note pad, a Soduko game, a calendar of daily events, a clock with calendar, the Ephrata weather, a search engine bar, an RSS reader, an e-mail checker, and many more that are not open at this minute.
Its fun and productive (well, mostly) and really brightens up the appearance of my desktop. I can open and close those widgets at will. Its a fun project and I suggest, if you are so inclined, to check it our for yourself. You just might find something useful.
Tomorrow, I am off to visit Aimee's school and meet her students, then I am off to Salt Lake City to pick up a very tired Brian who is coming in from Shanghai via Los Angeles. Then, on Tuesday morning we head home. It is bright sunshine here today, but snow is forecast for the next couple of days, so driving should be interesting.
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