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"You Can't Fight Evil With A Macaroni Duck!"

General musings and observations of the world. Commentaries and thoughts on various subjects. Links to interesting sites and programs. Site's name comes from the TV cartoon "The Tick". [Scott aka Alefifer]

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Location: somewhere on the eastern shore, Maryland, United States

Originally from Rhode Island and now living in Maryland. Happily married to my best friend and have two wonderful daughters. I have a sense of humor that sometimes takes over when I should be restraining it.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Great Cellphone Application

For those out there with cellphones with internet access you may want to check this link out. You can download a free application from Google that displays maps on your phone. It's a great application. It can display satellite images, traffic conditions, map a route, businesses and more.

Point your phone's browser to www.google.com/gmm and download it. You'll like it.

It does NOT yet have GPS support and I don't know if they plan on it, but it's still very, very nice.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

It's The End Of The World as we know it...

AlterNet: The End of the World As We Know It?

Very interesting thoughts and commentaries on the mess that's been made. Worth a read for sure.

But now I've got that song stuck in my head.

dang.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Photoshop Tutorial - Lichentenstein Popart

This is very good tutorial on some intense photo manipulation to turn your photos into popart cartoons in the style of Roy Lichtenstein. It truly amazes me what some people can accomplish with Photoshop. I may try this out myself if I can with my lame-oh free version of Photoshop essentials...that is if all the functions I need are there. Worth a look at if you're into photography and photo editing, even if you haven't put out the big bucks for Photoshop.


Pop Art Inspired by Lichtenstein - Online Tutorial at Melissa Clifton page 1

HT to Red Ferret

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Rhode Islanders Are So Smart

Rhode Islanders give Bush the lowest approval rating: 23%.

Yeah RI!!

HT to Konagod

North Korea Nuclear Bomb - A Little History Lesson

James Prather has written a very illuminating article on the North Korean nuclear issue. You can read it over at Asia Times Online. Click here.

Dr. Prather states that it was through the current administrations actions that caused the North Korea to withdraw from the Non Proliferation Treaty and the Agreed Framework that President Clinton had worked out so that N. Korea's plutonium could be under international controls. Basically...Bush wanted his axis of evil and scurried about looking for data that would lead credence to North Korea working on an Uranium enrichment program. When said "intelligence" was found we stopped providing them with the agreed upon oil to help pull them through until their energy-making facilities could be fully online....and sort of forced their hand...so they put their plutonium program back online.

Piss-poor diplomacy does not make for a safer world.

Opera Browser For Your Phone

Okay I'm late getting on the ball with this one. I'm probably the last person in the U.S. that put this on their phone.

But just in case I'm not...

Do you have a cellphone capable of "surfing" the internet? Well if you do and are not happy with the browser that came loaded in your phone, try Opera. There are many different versions. I use the least powerful "mini" version and it's still much better than the browser that came with my phone. It will NOT replace your current browser but will be downloaded as a seperate application. You can still use your old one if you want. It is free. Look here for your phone. If it's not listed there go for the mini browser like I did.

very nice

No more fresh veggies till next year



I picked up my last bunch of fresh vegetables from the CSA farm that I belong to yesterday. I *was* thinking of bicycling there to make the final pickup, since I live fairly close to where I pick them up, but it was pouring rain and I never have devised a good method of securing my big box of veggies on my mountain bike.

Yesterday's haul included lettuces, spinach, carrots, radishes, turnips, peppers, potatoes, bok choi, fresh herbs, freshly cut wildflowers and some other greens I can't think of. It's been 22 weeks of great food. I can hardly wait for next year. And next year I'm planning on working on the farm for all or part of my share if possible.

I'm putting up a link in my side bar here for Local Harvest, which is a good site for locating farms that have Community Supported Agriculture plans. You can click here if you want to go look for one near you now.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Handy Tool for YouTube video

Right now I'm downloading a video from YouTube. I rarely do this as I have a dial-up internet connection and it's basically a waste of time usually to click play on a YouTube video and watch and listen to it splutter tiny bits over a long period of time. But tonight there's a video I want to see because it's of The Ramones and they're one of my all-time favorite bands so I'm downloading it. No, I didn't click on it. I'm using a program called ITube. You enter the url of the YouTube video into ITube, then it downloads the file and saves it as an mp4 file that you can play on your video Ipod, or if you don't have one of those you can watch it with Quicktime. Easy breasy. Let the program download the file and you can watch it later. Here are the links for some more info.

The page that had the YouTube video of The Ramones (thanks C&L)

ITube info at Snapfiles

Updated link

American Agenda, a link I had on the side bar American Agenda has been updated. Please now visit Declarations instead. Sorry it took me so long to catch this Gary!

I'll try to go through more of my links over the next couple of days and make corrections if needed.

I haven't been updating my blog here as much as I should be. I'll try to be more bloggy in the future.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Cool Opera Widget





I don't know how many of you use the Opera browser. I like it and switch off between it and Firefox.

With Opera you can download widgets (yeah...similar to Yahoo widgets) to run alongside the browser. One I've recently downloaded and is lots of fun is the Aquarium widget which can be found here.

Others I like are Touch The Sky, Simple Clock, and National Geographic Picture of the Day, which you can find off the main widget area if you decide to explore it.