Friday, March 20, 2009

My wife decided to go to Birmingham to spend time with some old collegiate (Montevallo) buddies today...

I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day and the properties of the Huntsville Land Trust...

This picture is a path of the hike I took (click the image for the full size version of the path snapshot from Google Earth):



That made for a nice 6+ mile walk. A movie of some of the pictures is coming right up next....

Monday, February 16, 2009

I mashed up five minutes of video....

Part of this video is taken from the previous video with about 3:50 of different stuff. Additionally, I muted the original audio (the camera shaking on the roof of my car was kind of annoying) and added a track from Tiƫsto:


Sunday, February 15, 2009

Woo-hoo....

New video. I might make a little montage of the other few minutes I captured today. Nothing spectacular, but heck, I was having fun...

Friday, January 30, 2009

By the way...

The Papa Murphy's in Athens, AL tastes just like old times:

YUMMY

Facebook has a pretty cool feature (several, actually).....

However, the one I am talking about is a "profile badge". You can leave your mark in various and sundry places online. Like so....



Create your own (you obviously have to be on Facebook) here.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Without further ado (and slightly later in the day than necessary).....

Happy Birthday, Mom!

One of those things in life that you just can't beat is happening by the old Krispy Kreme shop when they've just made a fresh batch. I had almost forgotten how excellent their fresh doughnuts were. See, I made a midnight run to Krispy Kreme last night, but they didn't have anything ultra-fresh (but the blueberry cake doughnut and bottle of milk were still great). After dropping a card off to my mother tonight, I figured I'd give it another shot. The reward was fresh and doughy and glazed goodness this time. Yummmmmmmmm.....

Been a while....

I know, I haven't even been griping about politicians or anything of that sort. Just getting a little bored with that, I suppose......

I hope Obama can get a better balance between the powers of the government versus the rights of the people. Maybe he'll get some things right.

And so, to the mundane little point of this post...

Having come to north Alabama from northern Illinois, we left a few good restaurants behind. Mind you, I don't miss them enough to go back, but I did/do fondly recall places like Granite City Food & Brewery® and Biaggi's. I was driving around the fairly sedate town of Athens last night and saw a little promo/pop-up canopy in front of one of the numerous strip shopping centers in Athens. I was very surprised to see a restaurant name that I didn't figure I would see again. Athens, AL has a Papa Murphy's Pizza. "Take and bake" isn't that new of a concept. Hell, grocery store delis have done take and bake pizza for years. However, these pizzas from Papa Murphy's are really good. I did find it slightly ironic that this new store is in the same strip mall as Papa John's...


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Thursday, December 25, 2008

Friday, December 19, 2008

Saturday, December 06, 2008

I just found a tremendous set of vids/music via YouTube.....

Props to Gamer2k4......

He put up a compilation of all the songs from Praise The Fallen by VNV Nation (probably my favorite band). I selected the ones that would be most fitting when running on ye olde treadmill to drop into a little playlist. And here it is:

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Ummmm, yeah?!?!?

I just finished scanning a story from the news that folks who self-identified themselves as "elected officials" averaged a 44% on a quiz of civic knowledge. The report on this sad state of affairs was released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I haven't yet taken the quiz due to time constraints, but I will. It's very scary when some of the folks we elect to represent us and administer our towns/counties/states/what have you fail a quiz like this....

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

-George Santayana

Thursday, November 20, 2008

This certainly isn't one of the better vids I've ever put on YouTube......

but here, in all it's glory with the President-elect's likeness and voice (and my music), it is:



I am sure that the folks who will be in power over the next four (or eight if they don't screw things up more than where we find ourselves right now) will provide plenty of fodder for jokes and/or criticism. I just felt that this would be a sufficient point to start....

Hopefully this next tidbit can help someone...

Several months back, I became unable to play music with MySpace's music player. I had sent them several e-mails and NEVER RECEIVED a response. I started fooling around the other night (vamping out to get ready for the night shift) and solved the problem. The MySpace music player is Flash based. It was changed to a much slicker interface several months ago. However, the new player requires the ability of Flash to be able to store third-party content on your machine. I don't even remember when I had changed the setting in Flash, but I do know that the MySpace music player didn't work after they retooled it. In any Flash animation, you can right click the animation and change a number of local settings for permissions and various settings that allow some access to your computer. There is also a series of "Global settings" that can be accessed via http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html. I discovered that my problem was in the "Global Storage Settings Panel". I changed the settings via this control to allow sites to store 1MB on my machine and now have the "Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer" and "Store common Flash components to reduce download times" checkboxes checked. After I closed the browser, the MySpace music player worked like a charm. This problem was a total annoyance because I've discovered some great music via MySpace.com. I just wonder if there's anyone else out there who has had this problem.....