1937-2008
RIP

This silly little script will pop up a dialog asking for a line of text and if you have Text to Speech installed on XP/Vista, your computer will speak the line in the default voice.

speakme.zip

Just for fun.   Amaze children and annoy spouses.

According to Cubestat, my blog is worth around $348. Any takers?

Well I am thoroughly worn out.  Half dead is maybe a better term.  Despite a fever, general exhaustion, raging sinus blockage and common sense, I drove 100 miles to Memphis tonight to meet the guy behind my favorite guitars, Mr. Paul Reed Smith himself.

He was genial and funny and great to talk to.  I got 3 of my guitars autographed and had a little secret dropped on me during the conversation that I’m really excited about.  Lets just say it has to do with the mystery amp head that Derek Trucks and Eric Johnson have been playing with on tour the past couple of months.  Supposedly, the rest of the world will know in January…

For some reason, the mp3 and Youtube player plugins on this site are no longer behaving properly.  So everywhere you’d expect video, you’ll get nothing.  Audio player has been replaced by another one.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Watch.

Compelling testimony from a lawyer and a police officer as to why you should never agree to speak to the police.  Even if you’re innocent, have nothing to hide or have no association with the incident in question.  Plead the 5th and shut your mouth.  It’s not an umbrella for wrongdoers.  It’s designed to protect the innocent. There are too many ways an officer can use your statements against you and NO way that it can help you.  Anything positive you say on your behalf is inadmissable in court because it’s hearsay.  But they can nail you with a single misspoken word.

Just back from a long weekend vacation at Sandestin Beach.  Had a great time, got a great sunburn.

We were actually down there to receive awards at the SPRF conference - two of my projects received Certificates of Merit.  Not bad, not bad.

R.I.P.

Evidently not enough talent among the three to play “Tom Sawyer”…

Honestly, I don’t know why the kids willing to invest time into learning how to play a fake guitar don’t just take up the real thing.

Codex Sinaiticus, probably the oldest existing copy of the New Testament (some say Vaticanus is older) has been floating around in sections for years, as it’s joined owned by a number of institutions. The Codex Sinaiticus Project has digitized the entire volume and is supposedly putting it up for anyone’s review on the web for free. I can’t tell you what a major thrill that is for me and anyone else with an interest in the ancient Codices…

I say “supposedly”, because I can’t see it yet… Unfortunately, it appears they built the site on ASP.NET and it’s crashing with too many concurrent connections. I haven’t been able to get to it all day.

Eventually I’m assuming the furor will ease off, or they’ll up the server capacity. We can hope, anyway.

And I can’t wait…

We saw “The Dark Knight” today, and I’ve got to admit I’m torn.

It goes without saying that this is Heath Ledger’s finest hour.  His intensity was absolutely amazing and the erratic nature of the delivery just screamed realism.  I don’t know that I’ve ever been so glued to the screen. He completely eclipsed the entire cast.

But I didn’t enjoy the movie.  I would see it again in a heartbeat, but I didn’t enjoy it.  It was extremely unsettling to me to see the depth of psychosis in the Joker character and Harvey Dent’s fall from grace was just agonizing.  Maybe it’s one of the burdens of parenting, or just the degree of human depravity and hopelessness I’ve become aware of recently from other studies and discussions, but the movie pained me.  I didn’t think I’d ever say it, but this movie may have brought too much realism to the story for me.

It wasn’t so much the obvious stuff - the violence, the gore.  It was looking into Ledger’s Joker and seeing someone who was so exact, so calculating, so thoroughly thought-through and so extremely antisocial.  It was like watching a Pol Pot, a Congo rapist and a David Berkowitz rolled out in one character.  This was a guy who had thought his image through as well as… well, as well as Bale’s Bruce Wayne in the previous film.  Just a face of evil.

Going to have to watch a lot of Seinfeld to get that out of my head.

GiveawayoftheDay is the neatest site.

Similar to Woot, they feature one product a day.  The difference is, it’s free.  Every day they offer one and only one fully licensed commercial software product to download and keep.  Full versions, proper licensing, no demos.

90% of the time I’m not interested because there’s an open-source alternative that does it better and is updated more frequently.  But occasionally, there’s a really unique product that’s a real gem.

And all you have to do is check it every day or subscribe to their RSS feed to see if there’s something you want.

Yes, these are the boys.  Luke is the amicable one mugging for the camera.  Rex is having his way with a tennis ball.

About a year ago, Parker, Emma and I put together a little Powerpoint based movie - ran across it again today while purging the server. It’s quite cute.  The Powerpoint to Flash conversion is a little messy, so some of the animations don’t behave correctly, but you get the gist of it.

Looking through some old emails (with old sigs) and found a site I didn’t know I still had…

Back when I was still really active with Deviantart, I had a CafePress site to hawk T-shirts and such with my artwork printed on it.  It didn’t last long, as I just didn’t take the time to maintain it with new artwork.  I never intended to make money with it - all the costs were set at baseline.  But amazingly it’s still there, unmaintained after 5 or 10 years.

I’ll never know if anything’s been bought from there or not, as I discontinued the Email address it was registered under…

They don’t make games like they used to.

Wow, wish I’d found this earlier.

Because they’ve been known to demolish CDs, I rip all of my kids’ music to MP3 and let them play it on a computer or MP3 player.  Parker has one in his room to listen to while going to bed, Emma’s just about there in terms of readiness.  But they do get bored of the same songs over and over.

Kiddie Records Weekly was an effort to rip all those old kid’s story records from the 60s and 70s and they’ve posted their entire 3 year catalog online for free.  It’s kind of a pain to download individual tracks and their torrent files never seed, so it takes a bit of human effort to get everything.  But what a treasure to hold onto.

I’m hoping to start the kids on a few of them this week.  TV/DVD is great and all, but it doesn’t compare to what your imagination can generate listening to a well told tale.

Since I haven’t posted lately, a few random goodies I ran across:

I submitted this to The Fail Blog after seeing someone else make the comment. If you’re a Color Me Badd fan, you can get their entire discography for a fraction of the cost of the Greatest Hits album…

The Force rocks…

And courtesy of some newspaper blog, some retro cereal box covers that I used to devour heavily in my youth…