Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I’ve been taking a walk every day for exercise. Not terribly long, but enough to get some fresh air and get the blood flowing again. I used to see a blog where a guy in Buffalo would walk from his home to his business every Sunday and take a different route each time. He took along a camera and would post a few interesting things he’d see on his walks.

I thought that’d be a great idea for me. It might give me some incentive to extend my walking and get more exercise. Plus, it might be fun to have some fun with the pictures. So here we are.

A whimsical statue greets visitors to this Lockport business that apparently is always freshly painted. Do you know where it is? Click on the photo for a clue.

I’ll add more of these on a regular basis, maybe even daily. Read the next walkabout post to see if you knew what this was.

That used to be the motto of many police departments. Today it’s more like To prosecute and serve warrants.

Suppose you were talking on the phone to your Little Old Granny who lives across the country from you. Then she stops talking. You become worried about her and call the police. It happens all the time. It’s called a welfare check.

Now suppose that the police arrive and find Granny snoozing. She fell asleep while on the phone. Hey, that happens too. The police arrest Granny and charge her for “second-degree aggravated harassment and third-degree falsely reporting an incident.” Continue Reading…

Yesterday, I was listening to our local radio stations’ call-in talk show. The main topic seemed to be the latest lawsuit trying to block the Wal-Mart Supercenter proposed for the Lockport Mall location.

A lot of the people seemed to want to know who exactly was behind the Lockport Smart Growth, or as Scott Leffler, the show host referred to as “Citizens for No Growth.” There was speculation that there was ties to both the owners of the local Tops store and Lockport Developer David Ulrich. No one seems to know at all who are ‘members’ of the group, but the idea to “follow the money” seemed to be the idea. But it might be hard to do.

What if Wal-Mart itself, were a secret contributor to the Smart Growth group? I’m not saying it is, but my evil side wonders. It wouldn’t be hard to funnel some money their way through some intermediary. Wal-Mart seems to be benefitting from their efforts as much as Smart Growth thinks they are hurting them. Continue Reading…

Life went on and things changed. I moved out on my own, eventually got married and Ham Radio went along. It wasn’t always a top priority, but kept coming back when time allowed.

Ham Radio was changing too. Incentive licensing came along and now that I had my General Class license, there was more to do. Now there were Advanced and Extra classes. The new licenses added more frequencies – privileges – frequencies that used to belong to the General class. It actually happened before I got my license, but now that I had upgraded, there was more to do. The Advanced license gave some more frequencies for voice work, but no big changes on CW. It was a lot of theory and probably the toughest test of them all. I think I took two tries, but eventually I got it. Continue Reading…