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New gallery – HoundogRadio.com party
Not my best work, but some of them turned out well. I only got shots of the A-Sides and the Luxury Kings. -
Random thoughts
It’s time for the MySpace fad to be replaced by something else.
Real college professors get fooled by fake reality show. I’ve seen one episode of the show and it doesn’t seem that good.
Another Video Blog. I like them better than podcasts.
The most vapid article on CNN.com in quite a while is Tattoo nation — the U.S. is getting inked.
The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that’s almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S. adults had a tattoo.
“Really, nowadays, the people who don’t have them are becoming the unique ones,” said Chris Keaton, a tattoo artist and president of the Baltimore Tattoo Museum.
They quote contradictory surveys; then assure us that 24% is close to 25%. Later they have the stats on the survey, which is
The telephone survey on tattoos included 253 women and 247 men and was conducted in 2004. It has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.
Which seems to make it a weak basis for drawing strong conclusions.
The photos from last night will be up soon.
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Where the sidewalk didn’t end
Today, for no particular reason I decide to set a new cycling record. I decided to ride to the end of the paved area of the Silver Comet, which their website assured me existed. It gives the impression that the end is in the 37 mile area. My previous record was 60 miles.Much to my surprise, the paved area did not end at 37 miles, which is a little beyond Rockmart. It keeps on going in fine order, I assume to the Alabama border, which will be a ride for another day. I make it out to the 40 mile mark before I realize how late it’s getting.
I prefer using the die in place method of setting distance records; it’s going out a long way in one direction and then back.
I wound up going a little over 80 miles, averaging 15.2 miles an hour, with an average heart rate of 151, which is surprisingly high for a ride that lasted over five hours. I have the heart rate monitor set to mute, but if you go far enough over into your maximum, which I did when I came across a sharp hill at mile 38, it beeps at you.
I spent the last 20 minutes or so in darkness as I underestimated the daylight. The forest canopy does a good job of eliminating ambient sunlight.
On the whole, it was a pleasant and scenic ride. The one exception was when I ran out of water for a 20 mile period and that brought all of the symptoms of fatigue very quickly. Once I got some more (at around mile 11 on the way back) I felt much better.
Below are some photos I took with the camera phone on the ride.
A very large factory that seems to make concrete forms. It’s somewhere around mile 12.
More of the above.
I have no idea what road this is.
A very long and chilly tunnel. I need to take some more fiddler photos here.
This one wasn’t on the ride, but I did see it yesterday and found it funny.
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Friday round up
- Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
- The physics and biology of Superman’s possible reproduction
- Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
- Why women have fat thighs.
- Amazing RC Plane Demo
- Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
- Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer- The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
- We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
- It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
- Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
- There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.
- To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
- An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
- Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
- Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
- I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
- It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
- Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
- The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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Cooking for Engineers
Info is found, not surprisingly, at CookingforEngineers.com. It’s how to cook for those of us technically minded folks. They have wonderful “Recipe Cards” that make much more sense than the unorganized (to me) mish mash found in cookbooks. Some of this might actually be worth trying.
HT: LifeHacker
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Blogger is finally recovered.
Or so it seems. The Blogger site has been out all day.
The big news of the day is that happy occasion of al-Zarquawi’s demise. CNN actually has video.
John Robb has an interesting post about the event, and the meaning of Zarquawi in general. Short version – Zarquawi was more venture capitalist than general or cult leader. RTWT. It provides a lot of perspective about the nature of the conflict.
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Last night’s open mic
It went very well. I didn’t win, but everything was well received, and the playing and singing were good. For some reason the bass drops out in the monitors, but other than that, it was good fun. I did Magnolia Wind, Left Alone, Waitin’ Round to Die, Red Clay Halo and Walkin’ Cane.
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In tall buildings
I just got back from my first meeting at the new Green Media Works world headquarters. It’s in the Flatiron building downtown, and manages to be two corner offices in one. A very cool space. It had sort of New York in the 20s vibe, very similar to the headquarters of Doc Savage or the Shadow (as told in the comic books). It was our initial meeting on our current plan for untold wealth and world domination. More on that as things develop.The photo was taken from one of the windows.
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Random thoughts and links
Things I found interesting today
- What is childhood but a series of injustices that we spend the rest of our lives avenging?
Colin Quinn - An interesting collection of photos from New Orleans. It’s still a wasteland.
- Voluntary kidney donor Virginia Postrel delivers the smackdown to the National Kidney Foundation.
- GreenPeace is funny, but not on purpose, from one of their “fact sheets”
“In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”
Via The Agitator
- AllOfMP3.com finally gets some attention, thought not in a good way.
- What is childhood but a series of injustices that we spend the rest of our lives avenging?
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First ride on the new bike
So, I’m not feeling sore or congested anymore, so I take the new Fuji out for a spin. It felt good. For anyone curious, I went 33.5 miles at 14 miles an hour, with an average heart rate of 140. The handlebars are going to take some getting used to, as is the braking, but on the whole, the road bike is a pleasant change from the hybrid.