Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

...But then I saw this on my Google+ feed and thought about my old friend, The Whited Sepulchre, who loves weiner dogs. After watching it, I decided the world would be a better place if we all talked less about politics and did this instead. Enjoy...there's time enough for arguing later...

Call me an old curmudgeon, but I find a lot of what passes for new music boring in the extreme: manufactured pop, pseudo-country, and studio produced crap. There are a few things interesting that I've chanced upon - most of it stuff my offspring have turned me on to - but not a lot. Lately I've been supplementing my (ahem) legally purchased music from Amazon (yes - as awful as they are , I still patronize them) with a new source - Archive.org . Archive.org , in case you've never been there, bills itself rather cumbersomely as "Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music and Wayback Machine." While accurate, it's a bit of a mouthful. I could write several posts on this amazing site and barely scratch the surface. If you've never visited it, just do it. Just. Do. It. You won't be sorry. Some basics about me: I love music - especially old music. The funkier the better. Growing up, my dad had numerous Spike Jones 78's, which we listened to endle...

Well, I certainly can't fault him for preparing this in the first place. Leaving it where someone can use it to ridicule and generally add insult to injury - now that's a different matter. I am, of course, referring to the premature (by several lifetimes) launch of Team Romney's Transition Website, screen-captured in all its glory by Taegan Goddard and shared on his Political Wire website. See more pages on Political Wire , including a jobs page (you too can join Team Romney!), and Mitt's plans for his inauguration. Taegan Goddard says, "The site was quickly taken down but I saved screenshots ."   I can't thank Taegan enough, no to mention the low level web tech who forgot to take down the site right after Mitt conceded. As a web pro, I don't fault him for creating a site - things like this don't happen overnight. What I do object to is the pompous, arrogant tone, which screams, "You people have had your fun - the grownups are here...

If (as they say) a picture is worth a thousand words, I'll leave it to you to do the math at the Iconic Photos blog. The tag line for the site is "Famous, Infamous and Iconic Photos. The format is simple: presentation of a photo or photos, along with some background information to provide a little context. I spent about ten minutes just flipping through pages and saw any number of images I recognized or recalled: the balcony in Memphis the moments after Martin Luther King's assassination , the young JFK, jr, solemnly saluting his father's coffin , and the moments before the second aircraft slammed into the World Trade center on September 11, 2001 . One of my favorites is Nelson Rockefeller flipping the bird to a heckler . The look of utter glee is too good to be missed. They don't make Republicans like him any more - or at least they don't nominate them. Hit the " Random Post " link on the right sidebar for something you didn't expect. Be...

I admit it: I think the Isaiah Mustafa commercials for Old Spice are really funny and clever (can't escape those years in advertising). Wired had a link to a Sesame Street Parody that's pretty funny -- see below. Just in case you've been living under a rock for the last year, the original is here:

Not to yet again brand myself as an ancient, but when I got my first computer (a Tandy Color Computer) the connected world was a much simpler place. I had a 300 baud modem and a CompuServe account which cost me an arm and a leg. This was around 1981. I soon discovered BBS's and saved a bunch of money. This thing called the internet ran on leased 56K phone lines and one had to be at a research or defense facility or employed by the government or military to gain access to it. The "world wide web" wouldn't appear for another 10 years. If you knew someone, you might have access to something a bit more connected than just a BBS. Around the time my oldest was born I had a sibling who worked at a local university and he gave me the dial in number for the library computer. With a little judicious poking around all sorts of interesting things could be found. Telehack.com has put together a blast from the past - a javascript based emulator for that yesteryear of comput...

We are defined by our habits and god knows I'm a creature of habit. There are certain websites I go to almost daily, for information and entertainment. In no particular order, here's my daily reading list. This will go a long way to explaining why I hold the peculiar opinions that I do. Slashdot.org   "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," is their tagline. Where else can you read about programming, intellectual property law, the latest video game or the politics of anti-terrorism?  The stories are good, but the reader comments are where the real fun is. Geek cred at Slashdot can in part be determined by how low your user ID is (indicating how long you've had an account): mine is in the low 70,000's; account numbers are now in the millions range. Comics Curmudgeon Every few days Josh Fruhlinger waxes eloquently about ... oh hell, he waxes snarkily , about the daily funny pages. He spares no one. His favorites are the "soap opera" strips like Mar...

It's a sad thing to see stuff you remember as cutting edge now relegated to nostalgia. But better there than forgotten altogether. PCMag.com posted an amusing slideshow / feature entitled 12 Forgotten Online Games a couple of days ago. The kicker was these were all pre-internet "What?" you say. "There was online before the internet?" Indeed. Dial up services and games abounded, not to mention the grandfather of all community access, the BBS. I had, at various times, an AOL account (using the pre-Windows client), Delphi and CompuServe. And tons of BBS accounts. I was never a huge gamer but I recalled several of the games mentioned in the PCMag story, primarily the BBS "door" games; I had an ongoing friendly rivalry with the SYSOP of the Cat's Eye BBS on his Tradewar 2000 game. I also wasted time on LORD (Lord of Red Dragon) and Planets. My eldest son had a demo account (several, really) on The Realm, which he and one of his friends used t...

I suspect a lot of you did not get up at the crack of dawn to see the demolition of Texas Stadium. Here's the video (selected after pains-taking reviewing of numerous candidates ). One of the fascinating things about this sort of thing is the surgical precision in which the operation is carried out. This is a controlled implosion, not an explosion. Timing, as they say, is everything. ...By the way, Arlington Taxpayers, you'll be hosting a similar event before you know it.

Actually this happened a couple of weeks ago, right before I took the young scholar off to George Mason University. Looking back, most of my cellphone decisions have been driven by the whim of my offspring. We got cellphones in the first place at the urging of our oldest, who foolishly thought it would make his mother easier to get hold of. Now we've switched to AT&T because the youngest wanted an iPhone. Since we regularly found ourselves standing on the sidewalk to make calls due to T-Mobile's crappy coverage, I was game for a change. And I get a modest discount from AT&T's mobile price thanks to my employer. Not to drag this out, but in the end we all ended up with iPhones -- youngest and me with 32GB 3Gs models, mom with the 8GB 3G. Mom (who shows slight Luddite tendencies) was the straggler. But after a weekend session of showing her what mine would do, she decided she liked the idea of having a cool phone. Thank you, Steven Jobs. Overall I'm fin...

I'm a late convert to the Firefox plug-in StumbleOn, but now I'm a believer. Without it, I would have never discovered " The Sneeze ." Last week the author issued the How To Tell If Your State Sucks challenge to a friend, which - to paraphrase - says, if there's a picture of hot air balloons within ONE CLICK of the state tourism website home page, YOUR STATE SUCKS! He offers up numerous examples, including New Jersey, California, Delaware and New Hampshire. Being the overbearing blowhard most Texans are, I thought, surely Texas wouldn't fall into that trap. Then I went to the Texas Tourism website and started clicking. NOOOOOO! Don't believe me? Go to the Travel Tex home page and click the " Activities and Events " link on the left navbar. Thanks to Stephen at The Sneeze for this bit of humiliation (now blogrolled). While you're there, be sure to check out his series, " Steve, Don't Eat It! "

I regularly go off on how great I think Google's application suite is. The centerpiece of all this goodness is Gmail . PCMag.com has a good great article on getting the most out of this first class (and free) service, from managing your mail most effectively, to using the many options and add-ons. Enjoy.

Gmail is now five years old. This has to be one of the longest and most stable "betas" around. I remember when you had to get an invitation to get a Gmail account. If you wanted an account, you had to badger all your geek friends until one of them agreed to send you one of their invites. One only had a limited number of these chits and they were jealously guarded. Matt T (thanks, TDawg!) generously shared one of his with me. My "welcome" email from the GMail team is dated 10/21/04. Gmail was actually announced on March 31, 2004 with an unheard of 1 GB of storage. At the time, Yahoo mail gave users with free accounts a measly 30 MB. The amount of storage was seen as so large, many people assumed it was yet another of Google's April Fool jokes. Early concerns over privacy, based on the fact that advertising keyed off words in the body of the current message, were eventually forgotten. Features were constantly being added; some cool, some (in the opinion of some) r...

Presenting a performance on ukulele of Jobim's One Note Samba by Canadian James Hill , in honor of my good friend, the Whited Sepulchre , who lately has been singing one note on the subject of stimulating the economy . Enjoy! (Watch the whole thing -- it's pretty amazing!) Seriously, I stumbled across this while looking for guitar tabs for One Note Samba. First I encountered a cover by DominatorUke , who is no slouch himself , who pointed me over to James Hill. I love the internet, don't you?