Something definitely non-tech for your Sunday. How about a 360 ° tour of five National Parks? Google is offering this in celebration of the 100 year Anniversary of the National Parks Service. The parks include: The Kenjai Fjords of Alaska (with climbing and rappelling – stunning beauty!), Hawai'i Volcanoes (a drone over the craters), Carlsbad Caverns, Bryce Canyon and the Dry Tortugas (diving a shipwreck and Fort Jefferson). It's accessible right fro...
Happy Sunday, all and sundry. I saw this and of course (get it?) signed up and thought about all you guys and girls sitting around with really old photos having great sentimental value, which might be damaged and needing repair. Sooo…I decided to put this post up. Ben Willmore is a great teacher. He’s a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame who has taught over 100,000 Photoshop users on five continents…tons of books, and tutorials. He’s probably the best around with “"t...
Just stopped by to see what was happening here. Haven't posted here in a while. Seems like everything in either games, tech stuff, or music reviews...and one tribute to BB King (which I guess falls into the music category)...did I miss one on Bennie King or was he just not up to the level of tributizing? Didn't see any stories, no journalizing, no political, and no religion. Not at all like the old days. Well, just looking for old familiar folks but fo...
I woke up today with my twitter feed full of angry, hateful people. Ok, so what are they mad about this time? I click on a few tweets and see back where they came from. Zoe Quinn accusing me of having "offered a job" to someone because he had drawn "revenge porn" of her. None of this true of course but her gullible followers, always ready to demonstrate their virtue, started filling my feed with hateful tweets. So what was the truth? An artist had posted that he would love to draw...
Okay light is constant currently 300000 kilometers per second. Anything that is matter is slower. It doesn't matter what kind of light it is but it runs at the same speed and matter is slower. All the universe came from one particle. The bigger the particle the slower it goes through space. We are seeing the original light. The light that would have outrun us a long time ago. Even if light used to go faster even smaller pieces of matter would have run slower. There is no way we could be see...
Once upon a time the Army had more boats than the Navy and more airplanes than the Air Force. It's true...and a huge fleet of locomotives operating all over the world. Somewhere in the sixties when I wasn't looking, someone in the puzzle palace decided it wasn't kosher that the largest navy in the United States was the Army...and the Air Force masters said, "Yeah!" So the decision was made to take away almost all of the watercraft jobs in the Army and reclassify...
I found this fairly dry looking site that goes over all kinds of interesting financial stats: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com It’s non-partisan (it’s non political, it’s a glorified spread sheet). But it’s interesting to look at snap shots of what the federal government spents its money on. Starting in 1800.. Pretty boring still… .. and next… The 16th...
In 1972, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen got on the pop charts with a re-make of an old Charlie Ryan song called "Hot Rod Lincoln". Johnny Bond had a hit with the same song in 1960. But Charlie Ryan's recording, about 1955, was the original. What a lot of folks don't know is that Hot Rod Lincoln was an "answer" song to one called "The Hot Rod Race" from 1950 by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys. Both songs take place on a stretch of road ...
As far back as there have been hot rods, some guys have been more interested in performance than appearance. Instead of dropping a fortune on chrome, reversed wheels or multi-layered paint jobs with flames or scallops or pinstripes or chopped tops and channelled bodies or rake jobs or slam jobs, they plopped down their hard-earned cash on cams and multi-carburetors or fuel injection and headers and glass-packs. Of course, the ultimate goal would be to have both performance...
Kathy thought she could fly. She couldn't. She was apparently very happy to be going to college at the prestigious Bay Area school. She hadn't been exceptionally popular in high school but she wasn't an outcast, either. Not a raving California Blonde bombshell, but not a mousy wallflower. Just a nice girl who happened to date my best friend for a while. That happened after I was off to keep the world safe for democracy (in the Army in Ger...
MamaCharlie told me the other night, "You haven't written anything about your guitars and music". I agreed, I haven't. Other than an aside now and then. So I thought I would. Here goes: One day a few years ago, Toothache's wife asked to borrow all of our home videos. She wanted to copy them or something. I said "Sure!" and never gave it another thought. A few months later we stopped at Humbordt's (my number two son) house...
Looking at the map today, the distance was about three miles following the roads, but at the time it seemed like five miles. It was the distance from El Capitan High School in Lakeside, CA, to my aunt's house on Marilla Drive. I had to walk it a bunch of times. Marilla Drive was the dividing line for bus service to the high school. If you lived on the east side of Marilla you walked, if you lived across the street, you could ride the bus. We had co...
All my life I have had dreams that I can't explain. Some of them are very detailed and precise. And at the time that I have them, they usually don't make any sense to me. But sometimes I will find myself in a situation and it will dawn on me that this is something that I had dreamed about at some time before. Usually they are not significant to anything (although one time I think I may have avoided a serious accident by going a different direction, but sin...
BFD and I have 13 grandchildren and they are all pretty wonderful. (I have outside confirmation on this, lest you think I am baised!) The oldest is nearly twenty-six now, married though not yet a mother; but that could change at any time. The youngest is almost four. There are nine girls and four boys and they're all intelligent and loving. I can hardly stay up late enough to do justice to all of them tonight, or even one of them if I had forever. &...
Not too long ago BFD and I stopped by to see our Number Two Son who was anticipating some minor surgery in the near future (he has since had the surgery, and he's fine). His wife was at work but it was a school holiday so their boy, Jacob, was at home with dad. The first word that comes to mind when I think of Jacob is "thoughtful". That seems a strange word even to me because Jacob is also athletic, intelligent, and affectionate. He loves school and "he...