I've always enjoyed canoeing. As a kid my dad used to take us out in rental canoes when we were camping in Vermont or upstate New York. Once when we were horsing around on Emerald Lake in Vermont we flipped his canoe and the car keys fell out of his pocket which would have been a horrible mess h...
This site has undergone a fair amount of change over the years. I've tried to keep a changelog of sorts every time I've moved the furniture around. See the Site History page for more details about the various software I've used. Most recently I was using a self-hosted Wordpress install. While...
As the nor'-easter passes over the pressure is definitely dropping. The brass pointer shows the lowest pressure observed on it during Sandy. I wondered how accurate this old barometer I got from my grandmother might be so I compared it to a digital barometer I have mounted outside which read 28....
I was cruising around Saratoga Springs, NY on Google Street View tonight checking out the area around Union Ave. by Congress Park to see what the pink palace was looking like these days (thats what we called the Skidmore dorm Moore Hall in the early '80s when I was there over the summers) and I ju...
I was first introduced to D&D in 1979 by some friends in school and was soon addicted. I spent inumerable hours creating maps and dungeons for my buddies to explore, and rolling up characters to populate my own worlds or to play in another kid's campaign. I played straight through high school bu...
Its been a while since I've written anything here. I've written plenty on various social media (G+, twitter, reddit mainly) but these places aren't under my own control and eventually whatever I write there will likely be lost as these companies grow, change, acquire and get acquired and their pr...
One thing I need in a vehicle is a working radio. It doesn't have to be flashy, or even have bluetooth or a touch screen - I just need it to be able to tune in AM and FM radio and have a clock in it. The Van of Doom didn't have a radio. It was supposed to have had a radio, but when I went to pi...
Several years ago the transmitter for my car alarm died. Before I got around to changing the battery on it the plastic loop by which it would hang on my keychain broke. While my car has an alarm, I had put it permanently into valet mode a long while back because it was just a pain. I would use...
Back in early June I developed what I have self-diagnosed as tendinitis. I had started off the season's mountain biking hard, switching from the easier trails to the more technical ones earlier than usual and going much harder on them then I usually did. This is my 7th season riding since buying...
Its been a long time since I've written about anything here! There are a couple reasons, not the least of which is that I hurt myself and developed some kind of tendinitis. This was probably because I ignored some early warning signs and kept mountain biking despite pain and weakness in my elbows....
The weather was stunningly beautiful with highs of only 70, a cool breeze and clear skies. I started off with a morning ride at Glacier Ridge (PDF map) where I finally was able to get in the entire track (including all the black diamonds). I was pretty slow, it took me nearly two hours but I sto...
What is the Book of Song?
In late 2008 I was getting tired of lugging around the thick three ring binder that held all the songs my little troupe of folk musicians had learned up to that point. Over time the lyrics to the songs we did, complete with chords and sometimes with some of the history b...
Luckily I really haven't had to go shopping since I got married many years ago. I hate it, and usually avoid stores, malls, etc. at all costs. Needless to say I'm a very happy Amazon customer and a big fan of UPS. Today I had a few extra minutes after hitting the bank and I knew that the company...
There are many reasons so many folks who work the web are opposed to these bills. Beyond the fears of enshrining government sponsored censorship (ala China) which could easily kill your access to non-American news media (especially important in a crisis) and stifling innovation (by creating a preca...
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Buy Nothing Day. A day to protest the hyper-commercialism that has led to people being trampled in stampedes at Wal-Mart for deals on video games that glorify mass murder or any of the tons of plastic crap imported from China. This year the protest against...
I don't pay for TV. Right now I pay for a cable connection to the internet which I really have no reason to complain about. It goes down sometimes, but for the most part Cablevision provides me with a fairly decent (speedy) connection, and they offer pretty good service to boot when things go bell...
Its been some years since I've flown a kite, but I used to do so all the time. Not a Charlie Brown kite, I'm talking about a stunt kite - the kind with two lines so you can control the flight, do figure 8s and loops and such. The wind this weekend was just too perfect, blowing pretty strong al...
Freshly back from open house at the Jr High I was tickled at first by some of the needless nomenclature changes. Studyhall is now called an "academic preparation period" (thankfully referred to by its more obtuse acronym, "APP". Home Economics (Home Ec) is now "Family and Consumer Science" which,...
If you've ever been struck dumb by a Story Corps interview, you might appreciate these animations. Recently they've been trying to do at least one interview for every life lost in the 9/11 attacks. This one was particularly good.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were horrible, nearly 3,000 people perished in the planes and on the ground. The memorials made yesterday on the 10th anniversary of the tragedy to the familys' loss and the individual's untimely passing were both heart breaking and moving. While the attacks on th...
There was a time when my friends and I would recite this incantation from the movie Excalibur at the slightest provocation (in my own phonetics):
Anhaal nathrak Uth vos bethod Dothial tienvay!
I've come to find that this line was constructed from Old Irish:
In Old Irish:
Anál nathrac...
I am sick of "Political Correctness." I know a lot of black people, and not a single one of them was born in Africa; so how can they be "African-Americans"? Besides, Africa is a continent. I don't go around saying I am a European-American because my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfath...
One of my daughters friends has been getting into anime and manga of late, so I asked her to write down some of the titles shes been reading / watching so I could check into them. As often happens this has caused a bit of a problem because after a quick investigation it appears none of them are app...
The family celebrated New Years in our annual New Years, GMT fashion. To my mind its only really the New Year when it is midnight on the first day of the year at the prime meridian at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Every other time is only relative to that time, and while just as arbitrary, t...
I wholeheartedly appreciate and endorse Adele Stan's essay entitled How I Gave Up Christmas and Saved My Sanity which I would highly recommend to anyone feeling overwhelmed by the familial obligations and rampant commercialism that constitutes the typical American Christmas. Driving anywhere on C...
Since the puppy is still a bit too unruly to visit Grandma, and since we didn't get him a reservation at the local puppy hostel our Thanksgiving was of the quiet, stay at home variety, mostly. I didn't get a turkey from work this year - they offer a choice of 'Turkey' or 'Other' and I opted for 'o...
Running a blog is very different from writing in a paper-based journal. You don't need to know anything about servers, domains, hosting companies, DNS, php, databases, html, sftp, site security, interface design, web design, graphic design, operating systems or really anything much more technical...
Why don't we just abolish the income tax all together since the only people who are paying it are poor working slobs anyway. As this Bloomberg article from May details, major corporations are using loopholes in the tax laws to avoid paying what conservatives like to call the "high US tax rate" (a...
I'm starting to hate social networking websites in general. I enjoy using my computer a lot more when I'm the one deciding what to do with it without the constant unsolicited advice about what I should be reading or investigating from all of my "friends". Unsolicited messages are called spam when t...
A friend and I were kicking back in easy chairs in my home office recently, sipping some wonderful Cream Ale that my friend had brewed when the girls burst into the room pointing at the window. "Look! Look outside!" one yelped, "I see our next door neighbor with a camera!" said the other. A bit g...
Several years ago I wrote a piece about my old GE portable radio. It was just a cheap portable AM/FM/cassette which got lugged around to keep me company while I was painting or doing chores. That radio eventually got relegated to the kitchen and was usually tuned (to the best of its ability) t...
We recently decided to cancel our cable TV service. At $75/mo for what they consider BASIC service, it just wasn't a good value. We still have internet service through the cable company, and that product has been very good. After waiting for an hour on the phone to complete the cancellation, th...
Some of the sites I run are database driven and allow a lot of user interaction. For users to participate on these sites at some elevated level with rights to create, modify, or delete content I usually set the system to require email authentication. Since most of my sites are fairly low traffic dealing with new applications for user accounts hasn't been too taxing, but even with Captcha in place (which makes you type in the funky letters you see) there are still plenty of obviously bogus applications.
We recently had a full physical for one of our kids at the pediatrician. It was a well visit (we get one free a year so theres no co-pay for that), she got two shots, we filled out a questionnaire, they took urinalysis, did a visual test and a hearing test. Oh yeah, they weighed her too. We had a...
Autumn is definitely my favorite season of the year. There are a few reasons, but among them are the cooler temperatures, the colors of the leaves, kids going back to school, the approach of Samhain (Halloween) where we have an excuse to set out all the skulls, pumpkin and apple picking, and the...
I gave a little thought to how I might proceed with my journal printing project, and I've spent a little time poking through the mess that is my digital life. Piecing together a log of what you did and thought about ten years ago from various disparate sources like emails, notes, documents and photos - even when you can be sure of the date on the files - is a lot like doing archaeology. I've started peeling away the dirt, finding clues in snippets of text files and bookmark backups, things I wrote and things written to me. The information abounds but its all disjointed and disconnected, located in folders here and there, and no simple algorithm exists to pull it all together and easily create a cohesive story. The job seems monumental even if I only aim to create a simple linear log of entries.
I've been using lulu.com to print a song book for the last couple of years now, and recently bought Wil Wheaton's latest book from there as well. The experience has been good - I'd definitely recommend their service if you have something you want printed up and bound in a professional way. All the...
I opened one of my old journals this morning and this loose typewritten sheet fell out. It is dated Sept 26, 1996. There are a bunch of errors and misspellings, but I'm pretty sure that fact only adds to the charm of this particular piece. There's nothing otherwise particularly notable about the...
We used to quote a line in a punk song when we younger: 'you're only bored when you're boring' and it's proven to be a truism. I've had just way too much to do lately to spend very much time writing about any of it as well. This entry is really just a summary of several recent activities - altho...
The heat here earlier in the week was awful with highs around 94 and humidity as high as 90% which made it difficult to do anything, but finally a cold front moved through which has brought us back down to reasonable temps. When it rocked through, it brought with it a violent thunderstorm knockin...
Sometimes there's just no way to do something unless you know somebody. Seeing an advance showing of the Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King would have been pretty much a fantasy but for my buddy Seth. Thanks, man! Seth was kind enough to extend his extra tickets to my brother and myself,...
update 2021 - The Sensation Mowers website was archived here.
update 2008 - If you have a Sensation mower, you might like to help maintain and expand the Sensation Wikipedia article or visit the Sensation-Mowers.com website for help with your old Sensation mower
For the first time in w...
Moved from the Message Board
I dragged out the guitars and an amp. I got some lyric sheets ready, and plugged in. My eldest was strumming on the acoustic, and I fiddled around on the Gibson for a bit, but there was nothing there. I thought about revisiting CORN, but it only sounds good when I...
The previously reviewed Bela/Edgar concert inspired me to fix the fallen soundpost in my 'cello! Using the method Mr. Biava taught me, I was able to get it set correctly in about 40 minutes with a minimum of cursing. Certainly no speed record, but at least I didn't have to bring it someplace.Bas...
I can't remember when I had bought that old radio, a GE model no.3-5636A with dual tape decks. It says "1976" in the embossed plastic lettering on the bottom, right next to the Indiana customer relations address beneath the slightly larger "Made in China".Its certainly not that old. It has the re...
I found the following links on http://slashdot.org tonight and thought you might find them interesting (as an aside, I found it interesting that the Journal Nature has a website and you can read it online)
Original Nature article [link dead, 2008]
Seth, Aron, Ned...
