Kids books

Kids books
Originally uploaded by artifishall.

thanks to thrift stores our kid book collection just grew

-21 Degrees

Driving down the highway on a cold night, the temperature, -21 degrees Fahrenheit. All of a sudden my radio cuts out. "Did I fuck up my iPhone during that last jailbreak?" I check my phone, it is running fine. The stereo on the other hand, not so much. "Great, now I need a new stereo."

A few miles down the road, I begin to notice the dashboard going a little haywire. The light with a stick figure resting its head on an airbag keeps flashing, "Is my airbag about to deploy?" I begin to look for an exit, for an ill feeling had been resting in the pit of my stomach ever since I left work and if I have learned anything in this crazy life of mine it is to trust your gut. My luck, there are no exits in sight. I am not even half way through my 30 minute drive home from work.

Snow is flying across the road, visibility is low, and I begin to notice that my headlights are fading. The interior lights are fading, the headlights keep getting dimmer and dimmer, and the car is beginning to make funny sounds. The alternator has failed to do its job, my battery is dead, and now I find myself coasting to the side of the road.

Time to bust out the speed dial, I call a few and my landlord Rick is the first to pick up. He immediately jumps in his truck and makes his way to find me. The cold begins to creep in, I pull out my wool blanket from the back of my car and wrap myself. Yesterday I left home in just a fleece thinking that the weather was on an upturn. I normally sleep in Appleton after band practice on Mondays so I was not ready for the weather to make this turn for the worse. I try to keep my mind off things by taking my 365 self portrait, powncing, and looking for a tow truck on my iPhone. That doesn't stop the cold.

About 40 minutes go by and finally my ride shows, grabbing my bag with laptop and my bass guitar I jump in a start to thaw. Rick calls the cops in New London to find out what I should do. They tell us to call the Outagaime County Sherriff's department, who transfers me to Winnebago county, in which I lose due to a drop call halfway through the call. I call back and get transfered to Waupaca County (which was my misunderstanding). So I get back to Outagaime, transfered back to Winnebago, to find out that my car is being towed to Menasha, near where I work. Now that I have everything figured out I found myself at the nearest bar for a well deserved cocktail.

New Years Resolutions

I'm one to hold off to the last minute and by chance a few ideas came to mind when I read what others are doing (on pownce). Somehow I am usually good at keeping them so I'm about to give myself a bunch of work to do.

so here it goes 1. Blog more 2. Start a Video Podcast (need some actors) 3. Get back into Yoga 4. Get back into rock climbing (ever since my sis moved to Seattle I've been slacking) 5. record an album with my band

New Site Design

So I finally redesigned my site. Still have some work to do, but was tired of the old design. The navigation is better and I finally unified all the deferent sections so the podcast, blog, and homepage are all the same (and yes I know I need to record a new podcast - it is coming very soon). I stripped out all of my social web presence, though it will be back at a later time, I just want to make it fit in a little better.

I now have a site that I'm not ashamed of, being that the sites I create for other people are looking better that my personal site. This also leaves me in the position to finally leave my old blogspot blog behind. I might keep posting there since I'm using flock and it would be easy to repost but if I drop of the face of the internet you might want to check my site or add the new rss feed.

Flock - The Social Web Browser

So I am witting this new post from the comfort of a new browser called Flock. If you are used to Firefox or Mozilla you will be right at home for it is built on top of the same source code though it is a bit more forward thinking. The development team over at flock has built in some nice features into this browser including many social networking tools.

For instance if you login to your Flickr, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, or Twitter account it will ask you if you want to integrate that account into the browser. For the photo and video sharing sites (i.e. flickr, Facebook, & YouTube) the browser has a media bar built in to navigate through the pictures and videos. There is also a person sidebar built in that will display your friend's updates to twitter, facebook, flickr, and YouTube.  de.licio.us bookmarking is also built into the browser so that you can save your bookmarks to the browser and to the de.licio.us web site at the same time.

If you are a blogger then you can take advantage of the blogging feature which brings up a window with an editor similar to what most blogging sites use. You can type in text in the editor section (basic WYSIWYG), fix up your html in the source section, and see what it will look like in the preview section. It also allows editing previous posts making for a quicker experience in getting your job done.

And if you are worried about leaving your favorite Firefox extensions behind you are in luck because most of them will work in Flock.

Overall it is a great browser and I can see there is potential for it to grow. I have switched over fairly successfully in the past few days. It imported all of my cookies, bookmarks, and passwords that I had saved in Firefox though I don't think that the people sidebar it quite up to snuff when it comes to twitter, as It had a hard time keeping up with tweetr.

Blogged with Flock

Web 2.Ode (the song via seesmic)

So I posted a poem I had written the other day. Today I decided to turn it into a song and use it as my first seesmic video. Now To teach it to my band :-)

Now if you are wondering what seesmic is, it is the video version of twitter. People post short videos (5 min limit) and others respond creating an online conversation. You can also hook seesmic up to twitter so when you post a new video your twitter followers will know. Currently it is in its alpha release so an invite is hard to come by, keep your eyes out for one.

Blogged with Flock

Web 2.Ode

Strings of characters go flying by

A count of 141 they’ll always shy

Seesmic utterz flickrd on a twittergram

Blogposts podcasts and talk of no spam

mySpace and facebook bring home the bacn

thez cheezburgers are de.licio.us if I’m not mistaken

c’mon digg me up my voice must be heard

Screaming at the end of my fingers to the sound of a bird

I’m here I’m there and everywhere else too

Socializing, my tongue I do not talk through

From a phone to the im or in a feed

We communicate at light speed

while I’m pownceing you that must have file

iPhone, PS3, and Xbox lines stretch a mile

I’m flipping through Joost, Netflix, and youTube

Stopping by the Tikibar to drink with the crew

Then to the winelibrary to find a good red

While the Ninja promises I’ll be dead

Hanging around in me.dium with ½ a duo

Logging into root using sudo

I’m checkin on my stats with authority

And googling my ego, brave I must be

All of this to stimulate my mind

Or maybe just to see what I’ll find

Zach Chisholm