I was recently watching one of my favorite movies "Wilder Napalm", and while the movie was a box office flop (under 85K), it had a great music score. A soundtrack cd was never released for the movie but you can get some of the songs from the group "The Mighty Echoes". They sing A Cappella Doo Wop and were featured in the film as the singing firemen. You can buy directly from their site and they have great customer service.
We recently joined the Wii craze and my daughters are having a great time with the system. Unfortunately I can't use the WiiFit, at least until I drop a few lbs. It seems I'm over the weight limit. I'm just glad the Wii didn't scream when I stepped on it.
I found a local producer for organic non-GMO soybeans. I drove out to Malta, IL to get a 50 lb. bag from Plapp Family Organics. The price was reasonable and definitely a savings when compared to buying in smaller quantities from someone like Whole Foods. A bag will fill two 5 Gal. buckets with a little over. I don't anticipate any storage problems since I intend to use up the supply rather than keep it for long term storage.
I made my first batch of Tofu from the beans the other day and I'm quite happy with the result. Nice flavor and form and my daughter Erin loved it. She likes cubed slightly warmed Tofu as a night time snack before bed.
Charlton Heston died Saturday at 84. While "Ben Hur" was considered his best role and being known for his portrayal of historical figures, I remember him most for his Sci-Fi roles in "Planet of the Apes", "Omega Man", and "Soylent Green".
What was your favorite Charlton Heston role?
Is it just me or does Eliot Spitzer's "Kristen" have a striking resemblance to Stiffler's Mom (Jennifer Collidge)
What's happening in this video just replaced my "Standing next to a live lava flow" on my Bucket List.
An old post (almost 2 years now) by Ray Camden on Expert Exchange continues to receive comments. While there is a solution to removing expert exchange using creative search term formatting or by using FireFox/GreaseMonkey, I only wish that Google would provide a blacklist feature, something akin to a [Remove This Site from your future searches] link. Would I trade a bit of personal privacy for this feature as they tracked my google search habits? Absolutely!
I wanted to use some of the free space on my Zune as an external hard drive. There are a couple of articles that discuss how to set your registry entries to mount your Zune on the desktop. The Zune in my case would not let me drag files to it and is reporting permission errors. One of the articles I read mentions that by starting a large sync process and then killing the process you can fool the Zune and leave it in an unlocked condition. I'm not to fond of killing a process that has anything to do with writing files, so I started to think a little outside the box.
Steganography to the rescue, or in my case, a variation of it. Steganography is a method where a file is secretly embeded into an image or other type of "Vault" file, usually encrypted and distributed throughout the content so as to be undetectable through casual observation. The trick is to store the data in the Zune in a format it understands, namely, one of supported media types. Since I wasn't concerned with encryption, I decided to zip up the file content and append it to the end of a jpg file using an old school hacker technique. There's a nice little write up on how to do this on lifeHacker. Essentially you zip up your content and then append it to the end of your jpg file using the command line.
c:\\copy /B myPic.jpg+myZip.zip myVault.jpg
Initially I tried Winzip, but that had problems with the final result. 7-zip had no such problems. Just drag and drop the combination jpg/zip file over to the sync window in the Zune app and sync. I was able to use files just over 2 gig without any problems. I did try an 11 gig file, which caused an error.
Wouldn't you know it, Just this month I started reading (or rather listening to) the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney Jr.), and he dies of a rare blood disease a couple of days ago. Since the announcement, I've been reading other fan postings and news articles around the world, pondering the fact that the series I just started may never be finished. He was working on the 12th and hopefully final book of the series when he died.
There is hope that the notes he left behind will be enough for another writer to complete the work, but even that will be a shadow. I can't but think that anyone who has read the past 11 books of the series as well as the prequel will notice a distinct shift of author style due to posthumous editing and publishing of the final book.
I'm only on book two, enjoying the unabridged version on my drive to and from work each day. The books are narrated by the husband and wife team of Michael Kramer and Kate Reading and were approved by Robert Jordan. There are critics that have accused Robert Jordan of using filler, and some blame the publisher, but I have yet to experience anything of the sort. Robert wove a rich tapestry and reading the series is truly an immersive experience.
Before anyone snickers and considers that listening to a book is not the same as reading, let me assure you that while a narrator adds a small bit of their personality to the outcome, the result is still the same minus the tired eyes from not being able to put a book down. Too often I've picked up a book and not put it down until the last page, not even noticing the sun go down and come up again. Listening to a book is actually more enjoyable and forces me to slow down and enjoy it a bit more.
The wheel weaves as the wheel turns
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