Zane was in a School Performance last night titled, “Everyone Smiles in the same language”.

It was very good, with the kids doing different songs or dances from different parts of the world.

When we were leaving, I reminded the kids to watch out for cars, because “Everyone gets hit by a car in the same language”.

Posted in Rambling, Random No Comments »

Shaftoe’s Haikus come

Plentiful in first pages

None after. Blame Morphine?

According to Wiki How, those lines don’t technically qualify, since they aren’t relating an abstract concept, nor it is about imagery or nature. If you haven’t read the book, then you probably won’t get it.

As I mentioned in my “Books I would like to Read” post, I’m working on Cryptonomicon right now. Great book so far! I really love Stepehnson’s writing. There are a  bunch of books that I am going to put at the top of the list that I have already read, but want to read again, and Snow Crash, also by Stephenson, is one of them.

The downfall of Cryptonimicon is that it is a lot of words. The book is over 900 pages, and it has to be one of the smallest fonts that I’ve seen in a book. Really, I’m not getting old, the writing is small. I’m about a third of the way through it, but it could be months before I finish.

One thing from the book that puzzled me, and I discussed it a really strange guy I know, is that the Japanese are referred to as Nipponese, and I guess it is accurate, at least for the time frame. Evidently the Japanese referred to their homeland as Nippon. Or at least they did in the World War II Era, I don’t know if that is still true. At the time, anything of Japanese origin was Nipponese.

That also explains the line from the Pink Floyd song “The Postwar Dream”. The song was on the album “The Final Cut”, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a historical reference. Great Album.

Seems like I’m getting a little random though, so I better stop here. I was re-reading yesterday’s post, and it seemed more like a jumble of random stuff, rather than just some interesting links. I had better stop while I’m still within 3 subjects of the title.

Posted in Rambling, Random, Books No Comments »

Whew, long time no type. I’m not sure if it’s winter, or the tape worm, but I just don’t seem to have any energy to do things. I usually wake up at 05:00, knock out some PT (Physical Training), and hit the ground running. Not lately.

I’ve been pulling myself out of bed at the crack of 6:30, then in the evenings, after the kids go to bed, I’m in a semi-comatose state.

Of course, I haven’t been keeping up with my news feeds, so I apologize to everyone who has been posting.

I figured the least I could do for you is share a couple of links that I’ve ran across lately. Here we go:

Big Think - This is a pretty neat idea. Site visitors ask questions, and Big Think asks various experts. The answers are shared in video. I can’t honestly say that I’ve spent a whole lot of time on the site, but it does look cool.

10 Ways to eat Quick, Healthy and Green Breakfasts - I am a huge fan of eating breakfast. Heck, I’m a big fan of eating.

Some of the suggestions on that list are pretty good, they even have a link to make your own Fruit and Granola Bars, if anyone makes them, you’ll have to let me know how they turn out.

Now, I said that I’m a huge fan of eating breakfast, I didn’t mean that I’m huge, and a fan

I find that if I want to lose weight, I have to really start eating a lot of good foods. Ask Art, I eat like 6 times a day. Granted, they are small meals. At first it’s a lot of work to get myself to eat like that, but if I keep it up, I notice that I start to really get hungry every couple of hours. Then, I have to make sure that I have enough food around to eat.

Popcorn Hour is a stand alone Video file player. You load it up with your AVI files, as well as a million other supported formats, and you can watch the files on your TV. Retails for about $179, without a hard drive. Of course, people are buying them up like, well, popcorn.

I hate watching videos on my computer, and I haven’t been able to afford a computer to put in my living room, this is a really nice alternative. It has Wi-Fi, and supports streaming video, like youtube, google video, etc.

Of course, if you convert the DVDs that you legally own to some open format, such as xvid, then Popcorn Hour will play them too. I’m going to keep an eye on them.

That’s all for now, let me know if any of you are playing with video files on your TV.

Posted in Random 3 Comments »

Well, Art has been going a little crazy with his blog, but it looks like he’s finally done. While he was gone on vacation, his router at home decided it was going on vacation too. Which made all of his web sites inaccessible.

What’s worse is that the web sites didn’t know this, and they just thought no one was visiting. Their anxiety over this caused many long term effects. Don’t worry, Art arranged therapy for them, went out and put a new theme on them, and everyone is feeling much better now. I think the final product is very nice indeed.

Unfortunately, I don’t see my beloved tag cloud.

Speaking of tag clouds, I noticed it when first launched, but Phil placed the new  Amazon “Product Cloud” over on Tech Fires. Amazon introduced a number of new widgets recently, and the product cloud is one of them. Of course, you have to be an affiliate, Amazon uses the term associate, to use them.

If you are an affiliate, you should check them out though, some of them look pretty neat. I joined Amazon just so I could recommend books when I write about them, but these new widgets are so snazzy that I may just have to put one up.

Of course, adding widgets isn’t the only thing that Phil has been doing, Scott from My Thermos has joined him in writing his “Rapid Fire Reviews of Hot Technology. Between the two of them, they did 23 posts just in the past 5 weekdays. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering they both have their own blogs, and hold down day jobs.

Hooray! It looks like Pearl is back to her regular posting habits over at Interesting Observations. I didn’t realize it, but it was the Smiley faces anniversary Monday. At least the emoticon smiley face.

Personally, I have been pretty busy this week, so I haven’t had that much time to read my RSS feeds, and less time to leave comments. To make matters worse, Scott sent me an invite to Jango, which is pretty cool. He also sent me an invite to Rescue Time, which has been pretty stable. Once I have more time to play with them, I’ll write something up.

Posted in Affiliate, Random, WebServices, widgets, WebSites, Add-Ons, LinkLove 38 Comments »