Kids, moms and dads can be healthy in Tuesday's Autumn Chase Run

Kids, moms and dads can be healthy in Tuesday's Autumn Chase Run: "

On Tuesday, Huntsville Hospital is hosting an event where adults can practice what they preach to their kids - to be healthy.

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This Week's Sky at a Glance

This is for you sky watchers out there...

This Week's Sky at a Glance

Congressional Record Latest Daily Digest for Friday, September 24, 2010

Nothing earth-shattering in the daily legislation and debate yesterday, but the Congressional Record can definitely be an interesting read at times...

Congressional Record Latest Daily Digest for Friday, September 24, 2010: "Latest update was Friday, September 24, 2010"

NASA | Dust Simulations Paint Alien's View of the Solar System

Happy Birthday John Coltrane! (via In The Muse blog from loc.gov)

Happy Birthday John Coltrane!: "

John Coltrane House, 1511 North Thirty-third Street, Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA. Prints and Photographs Division.

One of the great tenor (and soprano) saxophone voices, composer John Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926. The Music Division has a number of lead sheets that Coltrane submitted to copyright for compositions such as “Blue Train” and “Moment’s Notice.” The Library is also home to a set of tapes recorded at a performance by Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall in 1957. The tapes were discovered in the collection by Reference Specialist Larry Appelbaum, who at the time was a Recording Engineer in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. In a documentary about the discovery and release of the tapes, Larry spoke of the moment he realized the magnitude of his discovery: “I thought, well, it’s possible this is a rare unpublished recording by Monk. And then when we went to digitize the tape, I heard the tenor saxophonist in the quartet – and I knew it was John Coltrane. My heart started to race! ”

On this first full day of autumn, remember Trane with the 1960 recording of “Equinox” on the album Coltrane’s Sound . Or just listen to him all day, starting with his contribution to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (named to the National Recording Registry in 2002), classic Atlantic recordings like “Giant Steps” (named to the National Recording Registry in 2004), and the exploratory masterpiece A Love Supreme.

For more autumnal music, see the Historic Sheet Music Collection, 1800-1922 in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia for titles like “Al Trahern’s “Harvest Moon,” (not to be confused with Nora Bayes’ more famous “Shine on Harvest Moon” version, also recorded by Tiny Tim).

"

-via In The Muse blog

Recall - Abbott Voluntarily Recalls Certain Similac® Brand Powder Infant Formulas That Did Not Meet Its Quality Standards

Recalls, Market Withdrawals, & Safety Alerts Abbott Voluntarily Recalls Certain Similac® Brand Powder Infant Formulas That Did Not Meet Its Quality Standards

Congressional Record Latest Daily Digest for Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Congressional Record Latest Daily Digest for Tuesday, September 21, 2010: "Latest update was Tuesday, September 21, 2010"

For your handy dandy reading pleasure...

I've gathered all the RSS feeds from http://www.loc.gov/rss/ into one convenient list.

Things To Do In Huntsville (via about.com)

Things To Do In Huntsville: "Here's some things you might want to check out in Huntsville & North Alabama over the next week: Scarecrow Trail at Botanical Garden, Harmony Park Safari, Flying Monkey's Artist ...

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I've already posted this at Facebook, but ...

Ever thought about incorporating the statuses of your FB friends as a feed that you can use in your favorite RSS reader (makes for much quicker reading)? It used to be a bit easier, but here's what you can do:

Go to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?friends

Copy the subscribe link (left hand side of the page) and change friends_notes to friends_status

For example, http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_notes.php?id=xxxxxxxx&key=xxxxxxxxxx&format=rss20 becomes http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=xxxxxxxx&key=xxxxxxxxxx&format=rss20

Obviously, your id and key will be different (I've taken the liberty of replacing mine with Xs).

You can do the same thing for links that your friends post to their wall. For that, just change friends_notes to share_friends_posts

Voila! You now have an RSS feed URL for your friends' statuses or links. Hope this might be useful...

Update from 1/14/12 - I looked at this again and instead of saying subscribe or RSS, the "Friends' Notes" is now just a hyperlink on the left hand side that says Friends' Notes. When your mouse is over it, the link will say rss or rss20 at some point...

Never forget!!!!!

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/lcwa/html/sept11/sept11-overview.html

http://news.yahoo.com/topics/september-11-attacks

http://september11.archive.org/

http://911digitalarchive.org/index.php

http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Terrorism/Incidents/September_11,_2001/

http://search.usa.gov/search?query=9%2F11&USA.gov+Search.x=22&USA.gov+Search.y=7

http://twitter.com/sept11memorial

http://www.facebook.com/911memorial

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/sept_11_2001/index.html

Libertarians release top 10 disasters of 2009 Obama administration and the top 10 of the previous administration...

There's NOT a great deal of difference.

Libertarians release top 10 disasters of 2009 Obama administration

Though it's doubtful that Mark Twain actually said this...

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

-Often likely misattributed to Mark Twain

I'll continue the tradition right here. This is really only of much interest for those of you in North Alabama. For those who had any doubt, August really was hot. See? FWIW, while you're at it, check out the Fall edition of Rocket City Weather...

Although it appears to now be a moot point...

since Terry Jones has called off this weekend's libricide, the whole uproar that has accompanied this set of events brings many interesting issues to light...

What are the limits of free speech?

Would the government be able to abridge a freedom of speech issue concerning the free exercise of a group's religious beliefs?

Do folks around the world (and I mainly mean Muslims in other countries) really understand how our government often has its hands tied when it comes to controlling the forms of self-expression that Americans can choose to engage in?

Why do many of the folks who were protesting the planned event chanting "Death to America" or "Death to the Christians"? The folks who were going to burn the Koran are an insanely small group of people compared to Americans and/or Christians.

Had violent retribution taken place, could it be attributed in part to Jones or only to the perpetrators?

As I've said before, although I totally thought the action would have been foolish, I fully supported the rights of Jones and his supporters to do what they were going to do. I'm just happy that he came up with an excuse to end the furor. I support those who would burn any book or flag or effigy even though such actions are pointless and silly. I have my own (partial at least) answers to the above questions. What do you think?

Islamophobes я Us....

Someone I know recently received an e-mail that discussed a "boycott" of "the new Muslim Eid stamp". I'm sure that all of the folks who continue to propagate these BS chain e-mails love their country and "their religion", but there are so many holes in this e-mail that it needs to quickly sink to a watery grave. Besides, this stamp has been around since 2001.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/stamps/eidstamp.asp
https://supplies.usps.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10052&productId=10006182&langId=-1

To borrow a favorite line from a twisted book...

Don't Panic!!!

In closing, with religiophobic myths like this continuing and idiots like the Dove World Outreach Center and their little event planned for 9/11/10 (I think these folks are so idiotic that I won't even link to them), we are entirely too close to a point where the 9/11 attackers have achieved what I believe was their true goal: fomenting that "war between the civilizations"...

I was just browsing around here....

and I stumbled across this document. Very interesting reading! I'm sure there's much more interesting stuff on the MERLN site, but the section on the left side of the page titled "Quick Links to U.S. Policy Statements - MiPALs" is a good start.

So there I was...

I had a few PDFs on-hand that I wanted to back up but save on my local machine as text files. There are a number of ways to do this, but the easiest (and cheapest) way was to get Xpdf from here. One utility program included with Xpdf is pdftotext. I then had to figure out a way to use pdftotext to convert my files in one big batch. Here's what I did. First, I dragged all 575 of the desired files to the directory where pdftotext.exe was located. Next, I used the command prompt (under Vista, Start->Run->cmd) dir to make a list of all the PDF files in the directory (dir *.pdf /b > list). As for batching the file conversion, I then used the FOR command included with the cmd program. Here's the applicable syntax:

for /F %i in (list) DO pdftotext %i

Worked like a champ! The files I converted were mostly text, so they were fairly conducive to conversion. Besides, this freed up about 60 MB on my hard drive. Not a lot by today's standards, but I can keep a few more pictures or MP3s now...

Seasonal produce tips from Kraft for ya...

Last Tuesday run of the summer....

http://www.huntsvilletrackclub.org/HTC_Races/SUMMER%20CROSS%20COUNTRY%20RUNS%202010.pdf

in reference to: Huntsville Track Club Events (view on Google Sidewiki)

How to See the Best Meteor Showers of the Year: Tools, Tips and 'Save the Dates' - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

How to See the Best Meteor Showers of the Year: Tools, Tips and 'Save the Dates' - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory