Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I recently ordered an item online. I do that every once in a while and have become pretty comfortable doing so. Usually, I get an email to confirm the order and they are usually pretty dry. This one, though, was great, so I thought I’d share it with you.

The merchandise I ordered was pretty mundane, but the place that I found with what I needed, at the best price, was one of those knife places that sell everything from tasers to nunchucks, to pepper spray, as well as knives. I was only ordering some replacement rubber bands for my wrist-rocket slingshot, which I use to put lines up into trees to hold up antennas. The slingshot has a fishing reel mounted on it and you shoot the sinker over a branch to pull up a rope.

Reading their site, I found out that my wrist-rocket slingshot is considered in New York State to be a dangerous weapon and is a misdemeanor to own! Well, I hope with the fishing reel attached, it is clearly a tool, not a weapon and I don’t intend to let that stop me.

Here’s the order confirmation I received. It’s a hoot. Sensitive information has been changed, but otherwise it is untouched. Continue Reading…

We’re tired. It’s pouring rain, and it’s a long walk to the parking lot from the building we just left, but we couldn’t be happier.

Eleven hours earlier, we had arrived, a bit late, but still in time to hear the National Anthems for the United States and Canada sung at opening ceremonies. It was the third and last day of the FIRST Robotics Fingerlakes Regional Robotics Competition at RIT in Rochester NY.

I had ridden there the previous two days in a school bus, getting up at 6:00 am to meet it. We left one night about 7:30 pm and felt good to get out early on Friday by 5… The extra hour or so of sleep on Saturday felt good, but it wasn’t enough.

It’s hard keeping up with these kids. I’m 55 and my mind says it wants to do the things they do, but my body is always vetoing that idea. My feet are sore, my back aches and my joints complain whenever I work in an awkward position. But I wouldn’t miss it. These kids keep me feeling a little younger than I might if I just stayed home and vegetated. Continue Reading…

I’ve made a couple posts recently about free software that I’ve found useful. One of the most used pieces of software on any of my computers (and I have too many) is a media player.

First of all, media player covers a lot of ground. I divide that into two camps: ones I use to listen to audio and ones I use to view video. Most of them try to do both and often it is this Swiss-Army-Knife approach that limits them and annoys me.

As I mentioned in one other post, my long-time favorite music player, Winamp, will play movies, but I’d only use it as a last resort. Actually, my favorite video player, one I use all the time for watching both downloaded video and DVD discs, is the lean and simple VLC player. In full-screen mode, there are no annoying player buttons that pop up if you bump the mouse, but everything you need is found in a popup right-click menu. It has screen format options that none of the fancy DVD player programs have.

But, I don’t want to rehash all those programs. Instead, I want to mention a new audio player that I just found out about. It’s called Songbird and is another project that comes out of the Mozilla program. I don’t know when it came out, but it’s now in version 1.0, which is the initial public release. Continue Reading…

I began to touch on this in a previous post Cheap Computer Set Up, so I thought it was worth a post of it’s own.

I’ve got a sort-of standard set of plug-ins, or as Firefox calls them, add-ons, that I like to use. The basic Firefox is by todays standards a plain browser. Maybe that’s because it’s set the standard we all expect, by comparison to older browsers, say IE 5, it’s pretty fancy on it’s own. But adding these extensions to the basic interface can make it a program that does everything you need. Continue Reading…