Things that make me happy

Happy April everybody!

The month is off to a good start, as Lyndsey and I had a very restful weekend and I'm pumped to get down to work today. Also, having completed a generally successful conference last week, I'm now ready to get down to some non-conference-related work including promoting the release of my company's new book project (more details to follow)... but for now I'll just say that pre-orders are possible on Amazon!

In other interesting news to start the month, I learned on Friday that I know the guy who created the Hillary 1984 ad. Okay, so if you're not a super-crazy political junkie who bounces around the political blogs a few times a week... you might not have caught the thing, but it has received over 3 million hits on You Tube, so I know some of you must have.

Phil, the creator, worked with me for a little while at KaBOOM!, and was technically on our kickball team (although, like a number of players on our kickball team, I don't think Phil actually played any kickball. At one point he claimed he was allergic to grass). I'll post both the video he created and an interview later today, but I was pretty psyched to hear about this. Mainly, I was psyched because the ad that caused such as stir struck me from the get-go as a smart and well done hack... nice to know that the guy behind it is a pretty down-to-earth, reasonable, smart dude.

Okay, that's all for now. I'm off to do that whole digging into work thing.

+ John

Couldn't resist posting the other one

Snow Ball 2
Originally uploaded by Chambo25.

He looks like a gremlin in this picture! Yay for action pics!!

Seattle Here I Come!

Snow Ball
Originally uploaded by Chambo25.

Dear Seattle,

I've never met you before, but on Saturday I'll be flying out. I'm pretty excited. I have heard good things about your coffee, your atmosphere, and your grunge music. Okay, so maybe the grunge music thing isn't as current as everything else. Anyway, I think it should be fun.

See ya soon,
John

So... yeah, that's right, I'm headed to Seattle on Saturday night for a conference that my company is putting on from Sunday through Tuesday night. My flight back leaves Wednesday mid-day so I'm hoping to do a tiny bit of exploring before I head east... we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, this past weekend I snapped a couple awesome pictures of Chester playing one of his all-time favorite games, "Snow Ball" There are a couple others up on Flickr if you click the link below the photo on this post. I'm hoping to edit and post some other fun things soon too.

I hope that everybody has a wonderful day as it continues to act more and more like spring here in New England. Funny, I believe today is officially the start of spring. I, for one, am pretty excited about that.

Signs of hope

News can get me excited sometimes. Especially when it's news about people who often seem crazy to me acting more sane/rational. As someone who grew up religious and still identifies as such, I'm continually disappointed by the strange and seemingly sick things that people do with organized religion. It's not a new phenomena, and it's not particularly American or Christian. Heck, all of what I'm saying is ridiculously basic.

Anyway, here's some reason for hope: Evangelical leaders are fighting over the fact that many many of them want to focus on some issues that fall more on God's agenda than the Republican Party's agenda. Such as preventing torture and the destruction of God's green earth. I guess I don't necessarily always look to the evangelical community for hope, and to be fair, I've never been part of their community so I am sure there's lots I don't understand. I know that many evangelicals are very service-oriented, which I find extremely admirable. Anyway, this story struck me as one about sensible people speaking up.

Amazing, right?

I thought it was pretty cool.

Climate Science Smears won't break-a my stride

So... today apparently the NYT ran a smear of Al Gore, and Grist (good stuff) did a pretty great rebuttal. Unfortunately the distribution of Grist doesn't really rival the NYT... so I thought I'd toss their piece up here. Feel free to check it out.

Meanwhile, in other news, it's a beautiful day in CT. I had my window open all morning, and then I realized that while it is beautiful outside, it's not quite warm enough for that yet. Still, it's a great day here, and I hope it's just as sunny and wonderful where ever you are.

It's world music day here. I've recently uploaded a bunch of stuff onto my ipod that I haven't listened to either in a long time or ever (some CDs I picked up while working at the college radio station and never gave much time too).

Happy new discoveries and rediscoveries include:

• Manu Chao
• Ephat Mujuru (who plays one of my all time favorite instruments the mbira (pronounced marimba)
• the Mahotella Queens
• Amadou Et Mariam
• Los de Abajo

Also on the list of things I've gotten back into listening to this week are the following (non world music) bands:

• Pretty Girls Make Graves
• Lucero
• the Magnetic Fields

and my favorite new I-don't-care-how-cheesy-it-is-to-like-ipod-commercial-music band, the Fratellis. I can't help it, Fathead is just too catchy. I can't resist.

Good stuff. Yay for good music on a nice day.

Who hates polar bears?

Well... if you guessed Bushie and Co., you're right. Hating polar bears!?!?! I mean, seriously how low can you go???

Money quote from the NYT article, "This sure sounds like a Soviet-style directive to me," Ms. Williams [Deborah Williams, environmental campaigner and former Interior Department official under Clinton] said.

What's that you say? You don't like my source for info. How about this one? Still too liberal media biased? Okay... maybe so. Still, what is the deal with this crap. I like polar bears. It made me sad to learn they're being found dead because they got exhaused swimming around trying to find some sort of ice mass to rest upon. The animated polar bear in Inconvenient Truth... he got me... right in the tear ducts. Okay, now I'm being rediculous, but it's a good escuse to track down a polar bear photo for this here blog...


hmm...

.... yup

okay, there we go:

Interesting

So... Nate thinks camera is tossing is lame... so is reading somewhat lengthy articles about trash, I suppose. Here's one, if you're feeling lame, as I almost always am:

Grist mulls landfills vs. incinerators.

Meanwhile, working from home is good fun. It's a constant ordeal to keep focused and on task, but then again I find that offices offer many distractions as well... so perhaps this is only a different shade of a familiar problem. The new job has ample work to make me suitably non-bored, so that helps with the focusing issue. I've got much more to post soon... but for now I have to, well, get back to work.

Another Interesting Toss

toss 1
Originally uploaded by Chambo25.

Okay, so I admitted from the start that camera tossing is a bad idea, but I thought I would throw up another of my favorites from my day of camera tossing last week. I like the streak along the bottom of this picture that was created by the blue light projecting out of my computer monitor. I think the stripey streak it creates is pretty great, and it difinitely didn't appear in my other tossing experiments.

Enjoy! This might be the first of a series of photo posts this evening. I'm feeling picture happy, and I just got my computer working again after three days of being kaput (I have concluded that my video card was just being annoying... but I may also just need to start thinking more seriously about the fact that my personal computer is old enough to go to kindergarden!).

Had to post it

Just got a nice smile added to my afternoon by a happy little post on Salon.com

Check it out.

Hope your Wednesday is going well. This evening sometime I'm going to post a picture or two.

+ John

TerraPass & The Oscars

So, I know I've mentioned TerraPass before and even made a post last year that was all but an ad for them, but I am on their mailing list and skim it when it hits my inbox. One neat thing I caught in it this week was that they gave out TerraPasses to all the presenters & performers. at the Oscars. This past year lots of hoopla and IRS involvement lead Oscar to dump their formerly crazy gift bags... and in its place came a cool little green gift from the academy. Read more here. Thought you would find this interesting. I sure did.

Bad Ideas

favorite from first tossing session
Originally uploaded by Chambo25.

So... I've joined this photo emailing list that's pretty fun. They send out something about once a week, and the content of the email varies greatly. Sometimes they've come across a nifty new photo doohickey that everybody should know about because it's so cool. A lot fo the time they email about DIY projects like how to adhere photos to wooden blocks to make fun personalized toys for kids... or how to apply the techniques used in the movie "A Scanner Darkly" to your own photos.

Recently they covered something called, "Camera Tossing" where you take your camera, set it up to take a long exposure, then toss it in the air to see what comes out. I delved a little into this, and found that basically everybody who writes about it starts their post by saying, "hey, listen, I think this is fun, but I take no responsibility for any injuries or damage you do to your camera if you should choose to imitate what I'm doing here." That's always a good sign, right?

Anyway, as it is a quiet Sunday, I thought I would give my camera a few trial tosses in the safe confines of my bedroom... over the bed... where even if it falls from my grip, it will likely be a-okay.

Above is by far my favorite image to come out of this experiment. Consider this the manifestation of my recent promise to start posting more photos... this is only the beginning... but I'm not sure how much of it will involve camera tossing. The whole thing is kinda fun, but also somewhat nervous-making.

Getting Reacquainted

I think I've discovered my favorite part of having a functional mp3 player.

All the music I own that I had buried. Earlier in the week it was the Four Tops and Van Morrison.

Yesterday night before bed I uploaded some Badly Drawn Boy, Beck's "Loser," along with "Soul Sucking Jerk" and a couple others from his album Mellow Gold, and a bunch of songs from Abbey Road and Sgt. Peppers.

Sure, I've given away the fact that I have missed huge chunks of the B section of my collection... and today I've moved on to Bjork. As I write, I'm listening to and uploading the album Homogenic... a CD I listened to dozens upon dozens of times about 5 years ago... and one that has not left my book in maybe a year.

It's nice to pull out some old friends and feel like the handly little shuffle option will keep them cycling through my life. Meanwhile, all this adventurous archeology has also inspired a similar journey of discovery into sounds not gaterhing dust on my shelf. Going through old CDs has reminded me to check out some acts I always meant to. This month has been a great foray into Guided by Voices, the New Pornographers, The Mountain Goats and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.

I'm really having a good time. I'm sure that this whole theme will re-emerge periodically over the next few weeks and months, and as I continue to use my ipod as the primary sound system for my car I'd like to keep occasionally posting playlist snippets from WJLC.

I guess there's nothing super novel to the joys of exploring the new and the old and the newly new, etc. but the lack of novelty doesn't make it any less fun. I'm sure it is a project that will also take a good amount of time.

Meanwhile I still need to get my photo project up and running again soon too.

All is well here in frosty Connecticut. Happy Friday... Happy Weekend...

+Happy Blogger John