Moral Question Of The Day

My wife started checking childrens movies out from the library. Great thing about this, is they are FREE and we can keep them for much longer than the usual couple of days you would get from Blockbuster or Netflix.

Thanks to our friends Gary and Carley who suggested it.

So I check out a movie from the library, and I return it. Neither the library nor the movie industry makes a penny off of it.

So, here is the moral question:
If I check a movie out from the library, and I copy it for my own use, then return the movie, have I stolen anything????

Nobody loses revenue, and the library actually now has that movie available for more people to check out. Hmmmmm.....

Scanning Some Old Memories

I borrowed my friend Eddy's scanner to try scanning my old Operation Raleigh Expedition 11f slides from the Torres Strait to see how it worked.  The slides are in pretty bad shape as they all drowned in the flood of 97 in Reno.  Here is one I pulled at random to test.  I think thats Dr. Neil on the left, next to Claire from the UK.  The next one is killing me, because I cannot remember her name.  I do remember she was a vegetarian from Seattle if memory serves.  The dork on the right in the Short Shorts is me.  We were all pretty dirty after a days work.  The tank behind us is a water collection tank.

I plan on purchasing the scanner and scanning the rest of my photos.  I also spent some time tonight looking for those on the expedition with me.  I found Mark Walsingham online.  Recognized his face immediately, even after all these years. Looks like he has become quite the fisherman.  I was kinda sad because I couldn't find his contact info.  I owe him another apology for splitting his forehead underwater with a rock.  Another story for another day. 

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Celebrity Morph by MyHeritage

MyHeritage: Celebrity Morph - Dynasty - Family sites

Reminisce

I was purging my garage and found these old t-shirts from the days I worked at the UNR Sagebrush student newspaper.  There are some funny quotes on the backs which are also documented in the pics. 

Susanne (my beautiful wife) suggested I photograph them, then I could get rid of them.  Which is an even cooler idea than I originally thought because I can share them here and on flickr, picasa etc to a much larger audience than just myself.

Click the pic to see the detail photos.

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Composting Research

Ok, for the last few weeks I have been doing a lot of reading on composters.  The soil here sucks and I watch how much food I throw in the trash with 2 kids.  My wife is a good liberal ;) and wants to save the earth, so I figure what the hell, lets compost.


Wow, who thought it could be so complicated.  Open compost piles are prone to attracting animals and mice and must be manually "turned".

Initially, I looked at barrel type tumblers, and instructions and videos on how to create them from salvaged barrels and such.  The problem with these type of composters is that once they are half full, they are very heavy to flip over as all the weight is at the bottom and must be almost completely inverted before the compost tumbles and shifts the weight.

Since I want two batches of compost going, a dual unit appeals to me.  I found this one really and thought it was the bomb till I realized two things.  It's huge AND because its metal, it has to be emptied every winter in freezing climates.

So, then I started looking at plastic models that do not have to be emptied (and do not have rust issues which can happen in metal versions). So I called the local garden shop and we went down to Moana nursery to look at this model.


It seemed a bit pricey when I realized that to really do composting right, you need two batches (so we would either need two, or I would need to put in a partition).  One that you are allowing to fully compost, and another location you can keep throwing your stuff in.  Some people put it in a deep freezer or other composting bin.  I figure, just put it in another tumbler.

We finally settled on the Envirocycle model shown here:


This is a smaller unit, and will allow us to put two of them in a small space as well as being (supposedly) easy to turn.

The best price that I can find is $139 at outdoordecor.com.  They have the best pricing on shipping as well.  So, we are going to get a couple of these and we will let you know how it goes from there.

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Animoto and blogging

Ok, vera cool. From animoto I can post the vids right to my blog. The post below was pushed right from animotos site.

Fishing Day

Ok, my friend Eddy sent me a link to this really cool music video website. The short of it is, you upload your pictures (and they can be ported from flickr, facebook, picasa, smugmug and photobucket) and then select music from their library (or upload your own). The app then analyzes your images, creates a music video. A 30 second video is free or you can pay $3 each, or $30 a year for unlimited videos. They say that no two videos are ever the same. I have not tested that out, but do I really care, because the videos are really fun.

You can see a quick one I threw together.
Fishing Day

Really slick. I think I will convince my wife we need the annual subscription.