Al's Blog-o-Sphere

An actual Facebook post. Names disguised to protect the embarrassed. No further comment necessary…

Nik Wallenda (no relation to Nikola Tesla, right) has been practicing the past two weeks for his soon-to-be-attempted wirewalk across the Horseshoe Falls on June 15th. His last scheduled practice run is scheduled to be tomorrow, Tuesday May 22nd. I went to watch today.

My choice for getting there was to drive to the little LaSalle Park near the Grand Island bridge and ride in the bike path on my Trike. I’d ridden there before, but this is the first time I parked there.

The park was kind of small and not much to see when I was there last year, but a nice location and not a bad place for a picnic by the river, maybe combined with a little fishing. There always seemed to be a few people there enjoying it. When I pulled in this time, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. I thought, at first, I had pulled into a parking lot for some apartment complex next door. But no, they’ve redone the whole parking lot and it’s first-class now. Continue Reading…

This next Saturday, January 8th, 2011, will be the Kickoff for the 2011 season of the FIRST Robotics Competition.

In case you’re not familiar with this program, you can learn a lot about it at the official website of FIRST or you can watch the kickoff ceremonies Saturday. I’d urge you to do both, if you’re curious about it. Continue Reading…

Just the other night, my wife and I went out to hear some live music. We went to the Sportsmen’s Tavern for Robot Holiday, which is a loosely-formed group of local musicians who put out Christmas songs every year and give them away for free on their website. Jonathan Hughes has been doing this for ten years and each year, the list of contributors gets bigger. For the first time this year, they got together for a live show. It was great.

As we left, someone at the door was passing out sample CDs from Scott Celani, The Corrections and The Filter Kings. It was an EP and a couple of the songs on it were Christmas songs. I remembered that those groups had a show at the Tralf recently and said so to my wife. She said, “Is the Tralf still around? I haven’t heard much about it lately.” Of course it is, but I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the shows there of late. Continue Reading…