Skip to main content

Piglet is a Star

1 min read

Piglet is a star. OK well, maybe not a star, but she is featured on CatsinBoxes.com. CatsInBoxes is a website that is hosted on TextDrive (our new webhost). The day I signed up for their hosting I was exploring to see what other sites were being hosted. I found CatsInBoxes and chuckled but moved on. Then, that night, as soon as I got home what did I see? Piglet lying in a box. I felt compelled to take a photo and send it in and today I was notified the image was accepted and is now on display. Let's here it for Piglet and her moment in the limelight.

Juggling

2 min read

When I was about 13 I used to get in trouble all the time for not doing the dishes to my stepmothers (or anyone elses) satisfaction. My typical punishment was to be sent to my room. Typically, that sucked. We lived in a cool place with tons of fun stuff to do outside. However, one time I made the most out of a bad situation and decided to learn to juggle. I practiced with two baseballs for quite a while before moving onto three. Alot of the times I missed a ball (or two) and they would bang on the floor (which resulted in me getting in trouble again). However, I did learn to juggle three balls. It has been 20 years since that fateful summer day and I can still only juggle 3 balls.

I can do some tricks and change-ups of the patterns in the juggling - but nothing like this guy. He is pretty amazing. According to the video caption his name is Chris Bliss. I don't know if his juggling is any more amazing than any other professional jugglers - but he is the first one I have seen do some of his moves so they impressed me. I am going to have to work on some of them, particularly when he throws two balls up from the same hand.. I thought that one produced a cool effect.

Spongeback Mountain

1 min read

You may have heard of the movie "Brokeback Mountain" but you probably haven't seen the moving drama that is "Spongeback Mountain".

One Serious Dress Code

1 min read

While I am not a slob I am glad I don't work for this guy: Donald Burleson. He is an Oracle consultant with a very low opinion of nose hair and ear hair - so be careful if you ever meet him and you haven't trimmed your uni-brow.

Grandma Knows

2 min read

Lawyers should never ask a Southern grandma a question if they aren't prepared for the answer. In a trial, a Southern small-town prosecuting attorney called his first witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand.

He approached her and asked, "Mrs. Jones, do you know me?"

She responded, "Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a young boy, and frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you never will amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you."

The lawyer was stunned! Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, "Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?"

She again replied, "Why, yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a youngster! , too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone and his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him."

The defense attorney almost died. The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench, and in a very quiet voice, said, "If either of you ask her if she knows me, I'll throw you both in jail

feedList Gifts

2 min read

I wrote a plugin for my blog that I share with the community at large. It's a pretty standard practice. Anyway my plugin lets you aggregate information from many sources and display that aggregation on your website. Tons of people use it which I think is really cool. My site logs show users from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, Australia, and North America. All six continents that I could have hoped for. Pretty amazing really. A cool side effect of this is that some people have been super cool and sent me Amazon Gift Certificates (or cash) as a way of saying "thanks for the plugin". The purpose of this post is to help me keep track of what I buy with these gifts.

Griffin iTrip LCD FM Transmitter for iPod
It's the one with the LCD screen and a knob for tuning. Much better than the old one.
RCA RC930 Caller-ID-Compatible Wireless Modem Jack
This is really cool. It lets us add a new phone outlet wherever we have an electrical plug. It basically sends our phone signal over our powerlines.
Pulp Fiction (Collector's Edition)
One of my favorite movies. Heck, it might even be my favorite.
Reservoir Dogs
People have told me I will like this since I like Pulp fiction so much. Now I'll find out.
Smallville - The Complete First Season
I really like this show and have had this item on my wishlist for years. I was given this becuase I added the custom randomFeedList functionality to the plugin recently (10 Mar 2006).
$12 US
from a user in China. 20 March 2007; I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet.



To all the people who have given me a gift certificate or cash thank you very much!

Invisi-bill

1 min read

Invisi-bill and Lisa

I came across a neat tutorial today titled Invisibilia so in an effort to see if I could do it I took this photo and made myself invisible. What do you think of the end result? I think it is kind of neat. You can see some more Invisiblia in the Invisiblia Gallery.

I did make a small error though. While doing the tracing I changed the opacity of the actual photo to about 42%. But when I was done I forgot to set it back to 100. That is why Lisa and the sky seem kind of washed out.

Bengal Bandwagon

1 min read

My friend, Ryan Parker, is a pretty good singer/songwriter who is also a huge Bengals fan. He has been a fan of the Bengals for pretty much his entire life and has followed them through all the crappy years upto this point where he has a moment of glory. However, he is distrubed that he is forced to share the moment with so many fair-weather fans who suddenly love his team. In honor of the wannabe's he recorded a new song - Bengal Bandwagon. It's a great track and well worth a listen even if you aren't a Bengals fan because you can laugh at the bad years the Bengals had as well as appreciate what they have accomplished recently.

The link to the song is a mirror of the file that I am hosting becuase his website RyanParkerSongs.com is hosted on a very small machine and may not be able to handle all the traffic he will/is getting due to the songs popularity with football fans. If the link above stops working then please try this alternate location.

Amazing Christmas Lights

1 min read

Carson Williams of Mason Ohio put together a fabulous Christmas Light display but had to turn it off after two spectators crashed their cars into each other. He used over 20,000 lights and synchronized their movement to three songs; Jingle Bells, God Bless America, and Wizards of Winter (by the TransSiberian Orchestra).

Here are some links of interest regarding the light show:

If you have trouble viewing any of the video footage in firefox try it in IE as well; its worth the extra load!

Minor Update: I just saw the house footage used in a Miller Lite beer commerical. I hope Mr. Williams was paid well!

Discover Great Music

2 min read

Lately I have been using a neat little application called the "Last.fm player" which is available from the website last.fm. You enter in a band or artists name and then it creates a streaming radio station for you with bands similar to that which you selected. Pretty neat overall.

Today I was turned on to an even cooler site that does the same thing, but so far, it does it better. It's pandora. So far I like it better because it runs in my browser (no new app to install) AND it seems to give me music that better fits style of the group I entered. For instance when I entered "Pink Floyd" it gave me some really cool music by The Smiths and Scott Walker which both have a similar feel to different periods in Pink Floyd's musical history. The Scott Walker song is kind of like real early Pink Floyd and thus a little wierder. The Smiths are more refined sounding and are closer to the "Division Bell" Floyd that appealed to a wider range of music fans than the real early stuff did.

The one thing both do well is they let you skip over any song you don't like. Most streaming radio you listen to forces you to listen to the entire stream so you're stuck listening to the crap along with the gems. That isn't the case with last.fm and pandora. Hear crap? just hit skip and bam you are on a new song. Very cool