Been off the scope for a while, I guess.........

Around this day last year, I was in roughly the same situation that I'm in now. I was in the middle of training for work and we were in the middle of an outage at my nuclear plant. It's too bad that I didn't have a VNV Nation show to catch in Atlanta this year. That happened on April 7th last year. Just to say it again, that show was excellent. I was completely stoked to have picked up Judgement in support of their tour of the same name! I had new music for the ride home (though I suppose it might have been excessive to have listened to it for the 3-1/2 hour drive). I would have had more of a difficult time making a show like that this year because of the hours. Besides, I had more mundane things to do. I think this was the first time I've ever browned up 10 pounds of meat at 5:30 in the morning. Tomorrow's meal at work will be chili. I'm hoping for a great batch!

Last night was fun! We ate dinner (first time) at P.F. Chang's for a friend's birthday and then visited one of the maternal units. I also got to chat with the daddy-o via webcam. I still think it's cool that I was viewing (and chatting up) a person and a room over 4,000 miles away in near real-time. Thanks for the internets, Al Gore!

All you women out there might find this interesting.....

BTW, my paternal unit pointed out some music of his. Checkit....

Well, you folks have a fine time now! Sleep is calling........

I think that my tenure here yakking about politics and other miscellaneous things is over.....

April Fools'!

Well, week two of our outage at Browns Ferry (as noted by the government info about our 3/18 power reduction here) is done. Always fun....

At least I've been able to hang out with my wife and friends a little bit. I meant to stay up all of this early morning but I didn't. I think my body was telling me that it wanted sleep. I even had a little chance to talk to my daddy-o last night. Speaking of the parentals, check out his latest Improvijazzation Nation. We might even be able to work out a cam chat next week on my day off. That would be pretty cool!

Perusing the news after my grocery run this morning, I was slightly surprised to see that the American Heart Association is making a push for "hands only CPR". The conventional CPR training will still be available but this is for those folks who can not (or might be unwilling to) provide the breaths associated with conventional CPR. Not a bad idea if it can save more lives....

We're up to about 20% of our 1988 grad class over at classreport.org. It'll be interesting to see how many people sign on before the reunion...

Well, I'd better run along. I have to prep for the next six days (technically nights) of work. Peace, y'all!

I just happened to read in one of the local media outlets...

that the local community college right down the road is in the midst of celebrating its 60th anniversary. I just thought it was kind of interesting. I kind of remembered thinking about Calhoun because an old high school teacher of mine (this year marks 20 years of being out for me) is kind of high on their food chain and also the head of the school's Center for the Study of Southern Political Culture. Pretty cool......

It must be nice that the Republicrats (to them at least) have a clear candidate for the general election. Old John McCain can even start in with general election ads....



I myself am partial to the following....



Woohoo, we'll probably get some rain today. In addition to the need for rain and the fact that it will help my yard, I don't even care much that there's a chance that we'll get it over the weekend. Of course, I'm sleeping during the day (like a vamp) anyway and my next day off is Monday. Heck, my only day off is each Monday. That makes for some pretty nice currency.

Kind of switching back to birthdays, ye olde FBI turns 100 this year. I'll bet that someone from the Bureau's early days would be overwhelmed at the changes in the past century. Like....CYBERCRIME!

Well folks, the bed is calling so I must say adieu.....

In the recent months with stories of a slightly floundering net pioneer, one thing has amazed me...

Yahoo! and Google offer a breadth of tools and services in addition to just search. And yet somehow, Yahoo! (even with a slightly longer corporate history than its dominating competitor) just doesn't seem to be kicking it like the old GOOG. The process by which some businesses succeed and dominate (and others don't catch on quite as well) is pretty amazing to watch sometimes.....

Burgerslayer?

Man, all the hubbub......

About Hillary's schedules....and Barack's speech:

As expected....

El Presidenté gave his speech regarding the fifth anniversary of going into Iraq.

As a minor aside and in response to his use of the following sentence:

"Because we acted, Saddam's regime is no longer invading its neighbors or attacking them with chemical weapons and ballistic missiles."

Lest we forget, a look at the era and nature of Hussein's use of chemical weapons in the past leads right back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in some ways.

Greetings, earthlings....

'Twas unhappy news to hear of Arthur C. Clarke's passing.

And....

Lest we forget, today is year five. Here's a song for that....



El Presidenté is supposed to give a speech regarding the anniversary at The Pentagon sometime today. Borrowing from Lil' Cheney and the irreverent romp known as Lil' Bush, "Rah rah rah, WMD, rah rah rah... rah rah rah, freedom is on the march, rah rah rah".

Happy St. Patrick's Day, y'all!

What else does March (that part which hasn't already passed us by) have in store? Well, Wikipedia (as always) has juicy tidbits of info about the day and the month.

Among other things, March is Women's History Month and National Nutrition Month. From a health standpoint, including National Nutrition Month, there are 7 month-long national health observances in March.

I'm sure that it's probably a "week of" many things, but here are a couple of specifics:

National Inhalants and Poisons Awareness Week



National Poison Prevention Week



Sunshine Week - Your right to know

Somewhat along that line of thinking, the FBI Inspector General's most recent reports about the FBI's use of national security letters (for 2006) and Section 215 of the Patriot Act (heavily redacted and also for 2006) were put online recently.

Well, y'all have fun now! I'm out of here.....

T-6 minutes and counting......

Ahhhhhhh, the Huntsville Boatnical Garden...

The annual Galaxy of Lights is widely known for fun times between Thanksgiving and New Years every year. Coming soon (Saturday to be exact):

Dinosaur Uproar (March 15 - July 15)
Southeastern Raptor Center Demonstration (Friday March 21, 2008)
Bunny Bonanza (Saturday March 22, 2008)
American Heart Association Heart Walk (Saturday March 29, 2008, 8 a.m.-1 p.m.)
Spring Festival of Flowers (March 29-April 30, 2008)

I don't remember what reminded me the other day, but....

Another project funded by your tax dollars is the Voice of America news service. There's some interesting content put out for foreign audiences. I was a little surprised to note that VoA didn't have anything for Arabic audiences.....

However, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has that realm of broadcasting covered....

English:

Alhurra - commercial-free Arabic language satellite television network for the Middle East
Radio Sawa - American radio for Arabic speakers

عَرَب

الحرة


Oh, by the way, check out this web-controlled camera. It's kind of fun to play with. If you choose to accept this mission, check out the parent site while you're there.

Wonderful new show on Comedy Central.......

The following link provides some excellent examples

of why Ron Paul is my kind of politician......

Rats!

I almost forgot.....

New episodes are coming out for two great shows from Comedy Central. I'd embed the videos here, but I'll leave it to the reader to decide on the fateful click since these shows often push the envelope....

South Park - new episode 03/12/08
Lil' Bush - new episode 03/13/08

Check out my blog feed.....

via Google Earth. Yes, you must have Google Earth to view the appropriate .kmz file.......

In keeping with one of my standards.....

if the government is going to spend my dough, folks might as well be made aware of the services/info that they are getting for their ca$$$$$h.

To that end (and right up my alley as well), check out these two spots at the EPA:

The EPA's Radiation Protection News Room (I think they need an RSS feed)

RadTown USA - somewhat of a more youth-oriented look into how radioactive material is used in many segments of society

Check out AIRNow from the feds. From the site's "About AIRNow" page:

"The U.S. EPA, NOAA, NPS, tribal, state, and local agencies developed the AIRNow Web site to provide the public with easy access to national air quality information. The Web site offers daily AQI forecasts as well as real-time AQI conditions for over 300 cities across the US, and provides links to more detailed State and local air quality Web sites."

I've seen how air quality affects folks who are susceptible to respiratory problems and that's why I find this site useful....

For folks in my neck of the woods, here's a link that gathers info from Google News about Browns Ferry.

I was watching something like South Park the other night and there was an ad about "Elections '08 On Demand" from Charter. I checked it out (locally, it's buried in the "i Want More On Demand" section of the On Demand channels) for a little while. I think I'd rather check out the candidate web sites/MySpace profiles/YouTube channels and the plethora of other political sites for more current information. Decent idea but not currently the best implementation......

OK.....

Immediate first impression of IE8? It crashes almost constantly under my setup. It has consistently reported the cause of the crash as being the Google Toolbar. When I first installed IE, I had an older version of the Google Toolbar. I disabled it and updated to a new beta version of the Google Toolbar. IE8 worked for a couple of starts and then BAM!, it started to crash again. This has something to do with it...

Changing the home page without opening the browser is easy enough, but if you're set up to use iGoogle (vice the classic Google home page), going to Google will crash the browser. *%$#!@#$%^&**)(

Have you ever thought......

"Hey, it would be pretty cool to utilize an RSS feed from, say, a place like Yahoo! movies to display on your site/blog/MySpace profile"....


Here are Yahoo!'s "Movies RSS Feeds". You can then click on the RSS button to be taken to the appropriate XML feed page. For a TOTALLY easy way to do this, you can then take that URL and enter it in the URL field at RSS-to-JavaScript.com. Select the appropriate options of how you want your feed to look and then click "Preview" or "Generate JavaScript". Here's how the "Movies Opening This Week" feed looks:






In the words of old Borat, "Very nice!"


More often than not, I use Firefox. I just like it better than the offering from that behemoth corporation. Plus, it seems like there are more cool plug-ins for Firefox (take DownThemAll! as an example). I did see the other day that that other browser has its newest Beta available for download. Heck, maybe I'll give it a look! However, I'll probably end up sticking with something like that which follows:



OK, this kinda sucks! As of five minutes ago, there were little balls of ice falling from the sky....


More later perhaps. Peace, y'all!

Over the upcoming politically charged months....

Here are some sites that I find useful (in addition to perennial faves like Project Vote Smart and OnTheIssues.org):

http://maplight.org/
http://www.opencongress.org/
Insanely useful sites from Sunlight Foundation

For those of you less politically inclined, here's a totally sweet spot for news from the world of science....

Unless it's music, I rarely post things about entertainment news here because I'm not generally that interested. But the wife unit (1 ea.) mentioned the news that Patrick Swayze was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That just sucks! I remember when Michael Landon lost his battle with pancreatic cancer (not sure if it's the same type that Swayze's been diagnosed with) in 1991. Hopefully the outcome will be better for Patrick.....

While doing a bit of looking around at Swayze information (I enjoyed several of the 80s flicks Swayze was in), I found something cool. We all (well, many of the connected do) know about the Internet Movie Database (ranks 52 at Quantcast). Well, how about the Internet Broadway Database (ranks slightly below IMDB at Quantcast)? Very slick!

Speaking of music...

Check out some of the excellent material from Metropolis Records! And by all means, if you have any kind of taste for the Lords of Acid and other late 80s/90s dance/club/electro music, check out the Technomancer Series. Wicked, I tell you!

Well folks, it's been a long day, so y'all be merry!