Barely a Yankee

This was fun.

Knitting Class

For Heather:

No disrespect intended to the 12 year old girls in the audience.

From a Q&A by comedian Will Durst about Gen. Petraeus’ Congressional Testimony.

Q. What happened to the Democrats holding the general’s feet to the fire?
A. Everyone except Moveon.org scampered away like 12-year-old girls running from a big hairy spider.

Today's Bike Ride Soundtrack

iPod set to shuffle:

• Poor Man : Old Crow Medicine Show


• Drowned Dog, Black Night : Richard Thompson


• Come Dance With Me : Frank Sinatra


• Rainy Day Woman : Tom Petty (at BobFest)


• Cry Cry Cry : Steve Miller Band


• Oh! Darling : The! Beatles


• Prelude : George Winston (this is how you know I didn't edit the list to remove embarrassing entries)


• Stars Fell on Alabama : Ella and Louis. Ella's voice. Yikes. Smooth as silk.


• Mary's Place : Bruuuuuce


• Sioux City Sue : Willie Nelson

Ouch!

From Chris Prillo

If your friends are “happy” with Windows, they’re either masochists, complacent, or grossly underinformed.

I agree, of course. But I try to be less nasty.

And while we're taking cheap shots at Microsoft, we have this bit of tech arcane. Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format.

Chalk It Up 2007

Artists take over a block of Sacramento each year during the Labor Day weekend. This year I took a few pictures. These scenes were all created with chalk, on a sidewalk, in blistering heat.

Chalkitup2007

A Toot and A Snore

The last recordings of Paul and John playing together.

Consumer's Report

If you have a TiVo and you rent movies, you ought to check out Amazon's Unboxed. You register your TiVo with the service and then you can go to the Amazon web site and pick a movie and then an hour or so later, it's on your TiVo. The default price is $4 (which I haven't paid yet), but they have regular specials for $1, which I still haven't paid, because they give you a $3 credit for signing up. (or at least they did, I don't know if that was a limited offer.) Last night the drill was:

• Lee and Molly pick a movie.
• Lee and Molly do dinner.
• Lee and Molly watch an old Simpsons because the movie wasn't finished downloading yet.
• Lee and Molly watch Hot Fuzz. (which was hilarious. Slow starter, but it picks up. Rated R for language and cartoon violence.)

The downsides are,

• You can't start watching until it's all downloaded, i.e., there's a wait.
• The movie disappears from your TiVo 24 hours after you first start watching.
• There aren't any extras, etc. It's just the movie.