A Poem to a love of my life…
(or… Carl has an extremely random moment)
Oh Braunschweiger, Braunschweiger.
The very thought of that which makes up you
Repulses me.
Even so I find myself
Strangely attracted to you.
You, with your smokey essence
Of the unthinkable
Still brings completion
To my brown bag lunch
Week 6 and I finally got my first Fantasy Football win.
I play “Fantasy” football almost as poorly as I play “Real” football.
I got excited to see this headline on CNN’s site this morning:
Political Blog: Where is Fred Thompson
It was an article about his position in the presidential race.
I was bummed that it didn’t say something like “Still in Bed” or “Having a breakfast of Toast and Bananas”.
Now THAT would have been Web2.0!
Temps in our area nearly hit 90 on Saturday. I spent the day taking the big tree out of my yard.
Yesterday topped out at 55, but that was at 1am. Things just dropped from there with the evening in the crisp 40s.
We had the furnace kick in yesterday. I love that smell you get around the house when the furnace kicks in early in the season. All the dust that has settled in the system during the summer heats up. I can’t call it a “good” smell, but it is certainly a “cozy” smell.
Of course when the weather gets cold, the comfort food warms up.
Meatloaf + Potatoes + Steamed Veggies + Apple Crisp + a couple logs in the fireplace=a nice night!
I have really gotten into the new Ken Burns documentary “The War”. I have heard one line between episodes that always seems to get my funnybone…
“Corporate funding for “The War” provided by…”
I met the guys at our favorite “Monday Night Football Viewing” establishment last night. It was refreshing to have the place “Smoke Free!”
I ordered a Lemonade to go with the many piles of wings we had procured (ahhh…$0.25 wings during happy hour!).
The waitress brought me a great big mug of Pink lemonade!
You know? It’s really hard to feel like one of “the guys” when you are watching the game while sipping on a pink lemonade.
Looking ahead to the week, The “pretty one” leaves town for a conference tomorrow, and I get to play lumberjack in my yard on Friday while taking down my favorite tree.
I will post some tree pictures later this week (of either the cutting process, or my hospital visit…)
At many concerts these days, there comes a time when everyone opens their cell phones to shed some light. I am always amazed when I see that. It wasn’t that long ago that the mobile phone was a rare novelty, now it is an accessory that has pretty much crossed every socio-economic position in life.
When passing a stranded motorist, I (for better or worse) feel less compelled to stop. In the “old days”, it would be nice to stop and see if you could, at least, get them to a phone so they could call a family member, or friend.
Now, it is pretty safe to assume that they have placed that call and are simply waiting for help to arrive. I don’t want to get into what one should do when a stranded motorist is seen, but I do find it interesting how normal the cell phone has become.
That thought has often let me to wonder who uses pay-phones anymore. Perhaps I don’t want to know the answer, but it has seemed counter intuitive that they raise their rates as demand decreases.
With that thought in mind, I appreciated coming across this list of 10 businesses facing extinction in 10 years.
I will have to do some thinking of other things that seem to be going away. I will add them to these posts as future edits. If you have any to add, leave them here as a comment!
(Others I thought of)
So I am wearing a shirt today with broad horizontal stripes. They alternate between a dark color and a light color.
I am also on my 4th cup of coffee.
I spilled a little on my shirt.
The stain HAD to fall on one of the light colored areas.
Normally that wouldn’t bother me… but again, I am on my 4th cup of coffee.
One of the biggest battles I fight, on the sites I manage, is educating those who contribute content on “image use rights”.
More than once, I have had to talk to someone who has used an image they found on Google Images.
The simple reminder is this:
Just because an image is on the Web, does not mean it is in the public domain.
Many of these sites are fairly high profile, so it is possible that we could get caught.
I must admit that I have done that on my personal blog, and that type of use is somewhat sketchy. I try to avoid it, but the Creative Commons license provides some great opportunities. Here is a blog post that goes into detail on using images on your blog:(excerpt)
Use Flickr’s Creative Commons search to find photos. You can then include these photos in your blog, and mention the Creative Commons license as well as the original photographer to give proper credit. (If you have a Creative Commons license for your blog as well, you can additionally use photos with a share-alike license, so it’s a good idea to add CC to your blog.) Wikipedia lists some other free-to-share images resources.
However, I have (way too often) seen this done for corporate promotion purposes.
Websites like istockphoto.com provide a fairly wide array of images for only $1 – $2 for web ready versions.
If an image isn’t worth shelling out a couple bucks for, it probably isn’t worth placing on your website.
Worse than that was when I have seen content on our sites that has done a direct image link to an image stored on someone else’s server. Not only does that “steal” bandwidth and images from someone else, but it also gives someone control over your content.
More than once I have seen someone place an image on their site with a direct link, only to be caught by the image owner and have it replaced by an anti-theft message, or something obscene.
All that said, if $2 is too much for you to shell out for your web site’s stock images, here is a collection of free stock image collections (all legal)
