I visited the Anza-Borrego desert state Park in California today. One more desert, I know! The thing about Southern California is that most of it is a desert. Except the small 50 to 100-mile wide strip of land along the coast-line where people live and a few high-elevation mountains, socal is a desert!

Anza-Borrego is East of San Diego,t it is not the greatest desert I saw but I found the variety of cactus quite interesting there. So I took some pictures and made a little of homework. All the pictures below were taken there, click on the pictures to get a bigger version, click here to see all of them.

American aloe (Agave Americana) aka "century plant" (on the right).
This is actually not a cactus but is a weird plant you find a lot in the desert. I am sure you have probably heard about the "Aloe Vera" used in cosmetics, the American Aloe is another aloe which is not used to make cosmetics but to make Tequila! Much better:-)

The barrel cactus (Ferocactus cylindraceus), picture on the left, my favorite.
The pulp of barrel cactus has been widely used for making cactus candy. Native Americans also used the cactus as a cooking pot by cutting off the top, scooping out the pulp and inserting hot stones together with food. The spines were used as needles, awls and in tattooing.
I'd like to know what Cactus Candy is btw. Is that something you eat???

Beaver Tail cactus (Opuntia basilaris). Picture on the right. This one is a classic. Obviously named this way because it reminded people of a beaver tail.

Two chollas, the Buckhorn cholla (Opuntia acanthocarpa) on the left, and the Teddy Bear cholla (Opuntia bigelovii) on the right. The guy who named it "Teddy Bear" probably had a difficult childhood...
Anyways "cholla" in Spanish means joints or jointed which makes as much sense to me as the teddy-bear thing.

The Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens). This one looks like some kind of weird small tree or a big brush. The closer you get, the less friendly it becomes:

The Prickly pear cactus (Opuntia macrorhiza). It looks a little like the Beaver Tail. There is a medicinal interest for this cactus. Both its pulp and its flower have good medicinal properties. The Incas have been known to cultivate it about 5000 years ago and it is still grown in Mexico.

The hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus engelmannii):

Finally, the soaptree yucca (yucca elata). This is not a cactus either.
The soapy material in its roots and trunks made this plant a popular substitute for soap. Native Americans used the coarse fiber of the leaves for weaving baskets.

Sources:

• http://www.cactaceae.net
• http://www.desertusa.com
• http://www.cactiguide.com

You probably noticed that my blog has a link "Syndicate this site (XML)"". What's that? I finally understood what having a syndicated version of my blog in XML (a.k.a. RSS feed) was used for. I can be slow-minded sometimes, I know.

A RSS Feed is a standardized XML version of a blog or a news site. It is used by many news portals like yahoo news. The good thing with RSS feeds is that you can use a RSS feed aggregator to centralize a set of feeds you are interested in. If you frequently read John Smith's blog, yahoo international news and the latest news about the Zimbabwe Cricket championship, thanks to the aggregator you can have a place where all this information is gathered (assuming that the websites that displays the information you are interested in support a RSS version of their entries...)

A feed aggregator can be a plugin for mozilla or outlook, a stand-alone software that runs in the background and notifies you when a new entry is posted or a centralized web page (server-side aggregator). In all the cases, the aggregator takes care of downloading the RSS feeds and displays the headlines to you. One click and you can access right away to articles you did not read yet, no need to check individually all the blogs, news sites you may be following.

I am using MyYahoo as an aggregator and I have on my yahoo main page a mix of blog headlines, business, international news headlines, etc... The great thing is that all is configurable to your needs:

Anyways that's great. You did not understand a word of what I just said? Doesn't matter, as I said, it is a geek stuff.

I have been told there was a small earthquake about 2 weeks ago. Magnitude 3, nothing serious. I live in California since January 2003 but I did not have the "chance" to feel an earthquake yet. There have been a few small ones during this past year but I was either out of town, like two weeks ago or sleeping! I was looking at info about the latest one and I found this fault map on the USGS (US Geological Survey) website. 3 major faults within 20 miles of where I live (the x) including the San Andreas fault. Well well...

Source: USGS Earthquake Hazards program - Southern California

Take the quiz at presidentmatch.com to find out which candidate matches the best your position on current issues.

This is the candidates scorecard generated from my answers:

1. Kerry: 100%
2. Kucinich: 99%
3. Dean: 97%
4. Sharpton: 95%
5. Edwards: 91%
6. Bush: 22%

I'm surprised Kucinich and Bush scored so high... This seems to be based purely on where the candidates stand politically on various serious issues and is therefore completely irelevent for most voters;-)!

Have you ever asked yourself what the location of the world URLs is? Go to GeoURL. GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory.
You can register your website and its location, find your "neighbour", or websites next to a location, etc...

They use all that stuff to generate cool maps like this one:

This is my neighbor list.

Four years ago, at around 2pm eastern time today, I landed in Washington DC. I have been in the US for 4 years! Time goes fast.
I could make a very boring summary of my four years in the US but instead since it is dinner time, I am just going to say this:

I am a little ashamed to say that during the last four years, I think I have been eating junk food about three times a week, sometimes less, sometimes more... Most of the time a hamburger or cheeseburger. In-N-Out, Carl's Jr, Jack in the Box, Wendy's, Burger King, McDonalds, etc... there is a lot of choice.

Wouaw that's a lot, I don't believe it. As a matter of fact, during the first 23 years of my life, the ones when I did not live in the US, I estimate the number of times I have been eating hamburgers to just about 20.
Tonight anyways it will be garden salad.

Visit of the Valley of Fire this week-end. Located in Nevada, about one hour North-East of Las Vegas, not as famous as the National Parks nearby (Zion, Grand Canyon, etc...), it is only a state park, but it is well worth the visit.

Named because of the rock vibrant red colors that makes them look as if they were on fire. 150 millions year of erosion beautifully shaped the rocks, you can find many arches there. A lot of spectacular vistas in the park as usual in this part of the USA.

My pictures.
Some links:
Desert USA
Nevada Division of state parks
Sunsetcities

Right next to I-15, at the California/Nevada state line, here is what the "Whiskey Pete's" Casino giant screen showed today:

This was visible from the freeway, by thousands of people on their way to Vegas:-) The message said:

...ast one server or driver failed during...
...ier to examine the event log for detail...

Even those kind of stuff are running windows? I wonder how big the mouse is:-) Anyways, like everybody else they are having software issues! OK I admit it may not be Microsoft's fault, but they built such a solid reputation, that well, this is probably the safest bet of the week-end...

A little of politics for a change. I have been following the democratic primaries with interest and till yesterday my favorites were Gephardt and Dean.
Gephardt left pretty early in the race so I was left with Dean which I have to admit is 100% right, but 0% electable! The more I listen to this guy the more he makes sense to me. Anyway, I know he cannot beat Bush and so do democrat voters so it seems Kerry has taken the lead.

Till yesterday, I did not like Kerry too much, I am not very sensitive to the demagogic speeches from the the Vietnam hero. And I don't know, there is something about his face and the fake smile I don't find sympathetic.
Since my favorite candidates are almost out of the race, I was slowly losing interest in the primaries and going back to my life-long passion: Collecting wings from genetically modified flies, a very demanding hobby that requires a lot of patience...

However I learned this HUGE news today:-):

Who the hell is Brice Lalonde? Well I am not surprised you do not know him. Brice Lalonde is a French politician, in the "has-been" category. He once was part of a left government in the late 1980's. He pretty much switched side and his party is now some kind of "right green" party. Kind of a mix between a republican and green politician if you prefer. Yeah, pretty weird... Most of his election results range in the low single-digits, sometimes even lower!

Believe it or not, Kerry and Lalonde have a common grand mother. The interesting part in this story is that this grand-mother has lived for a while in Brittany (western France) and it appears Kerry speaks French fluently!

Kerry president, that would be the most French thing to go to the white house since Jackie Kennedy (born Jacqueline Bouvier)! And him speaking French and probably being a little more open-minded concerning cultural differences, etc... would probably help a lot to fix the strained relations between the USA and France which I would appreciate a lot, being myself a French living in the US...
Looks like I just found myself a new candidate! Too bad I cannot vote...