Weekend update and some pix

My "new" smartphone doesn't have a great camera, but I've been trying to take some decent pictures with it anyway.  Here's a close-up I got of some Heavenly Blue morning glories that I think turned out pretty well.  Somewhere on one of my routes last week.

We were in Floresville all afternoon today for a big Girl Scouts bridging ceremony for all the Girls Scouts in Wilson County.  I found this relatively new marker at the community center.

And just beyond it, the grave site.

And my daughter, who "bridged over" to Senior Girl Scout.

And finally:  H.E.B. now has Whataburger's spicy ketchup.  I will never eat regular ketchup again.

So I took a CPR class

One of my requirements at work is to take at least three classes this year--all of which are furnished by my employer--as some sort of self-improvement gimmick or something.  One of them will be learning how to handle the new handheld device whenever it comes in, so that leaves two more.  I've been looking for classes that seem interesting and useful.  There are a lot of classes that would basically be just blow-off classes for me, like how to use Excel and Word, or the Computer Basics class.  I might take on one Powerpoint or Access just for kicks.

Anyhow, this past Tuesday I took a day-long class on basic first aid and CPR.  I think it was a great class, and I gave the instructor high marks all the way around on my class critique (something we have to do for every class we take, even the ones that are only an hour long).  This class was the American Red Cross version, so if you've had one of their classes you've probably been through all the same stuff.

I've been wanting to get CPR certification for a good while now, so when I found out it was one of the classes we could take, I signed up right away.  Since this was at work, I didn't have to pay for it myself (and of course, I was on the clock the whole time, so you could say I was actually paid to take it).

It had plenty of hands-on stuff, but honestly I think I would like to take a more intensive first aid course that covers more stuff.  I remember my dad, who worked for the highway department, had to take a week-long course every couple of years.  When I was a kid I'd read all the books he brought home from the class, so I've had a basic knowledge of first aid since I was quite young.  I remember once when my sister and I were at home alone after school and she somehow cut her hand pretty badly and started panicking (blood squirted everywhere).  I applied a pressure bandage just like I'd read in my dad's book and got her calmed down.  I was her hero after that.  My mom had to boast to everyone about it.  I was probably around 8 years old at the time, which would have made her 4.

I remember another time when I worked at the pizza place, I walked in for my night shift and found one of the day crew workers with her finger stuck in a cup of what appeared to be Big Red--but we didn't serve Big Red.  "What's that?" I asked.  "I cut my finger," she said,  "it won't stop bleeding."  "What the **** do you have it stuck in a cup of water for?" I said, a little testily.  "Isn't that what you're supposed to do?" she said.  "Holy ****," I said, "NO."  So I had to patch her up, too.

Last year, my employer put at least one AED (automated external defibrillator) in every building they have.  There's one in our building near the front.  During a break, I asked our teacher if he would be covering how to use it, and he said yes.  The ones we use can be seen here.  They are pretty slick.  This model turns itself on as soon as you pull that part that says, "PULL."  It has voice instruction that tells you everything to do and when to do it.  It also has clear diagrams showing you exactly where to place the pads.  The only thing you need to know is how to do chest compressions and it takes care of everything else.  For our class, we used training models that behave just like the real thing except they don't actually deliver a shock.  They also beep at the correct rhythm during the time that you do chest compressions so you don't have to sing "Another One Bites the Dust" to yourself.  That carrying case it comes in is a little smaller than a standard kids' lunchbox.

We also had hands-on training on how to roll someone over, how to apply a pressure bandage, how to make a makeshift arm splint, for which we used our instruction manuals, and how to recognize and treat shock and heat stress.  The heat stress thing is a big problem in our work.  Also burns.  Getting burned is a problem in some other departments, but it probably won't happen in mine, except for sunburns.  But mostly the class was focused on CPR.  I should be getting my card in a couple of weeks.

We were also given a face shield in a little pouch that can attach to your keychain.  To see it, click here and scroll down to the American CPR Mini CPR Keychain.  I think I might go ahead and order one of their packs that looks like a mini-backpack and has a face shield, gloves and antiseptic wipes.  They only cost $3.50 for one.

I'm glad I took this class.  I just hope that if the occasion ever arises, I'm still able to do what I was taught without freaking out.

Weekend update

Well, how about an update of sorts.

My daughter has been "borrowing" my ukulele.  She keeps bugging me to buy another one so she can just keep it in her room and play with it all the time.  I'm still planning on buying another one--a tenor next time--but not until next year's tax return because I'm planning on spending around $200 on it.

I haven't been working regularly with it, but I'm still making progress.  Certain chords, such as B♭major and B major & minor don't scare me so much anymore, but I still have a ways to go before I can play them smoothly.  E major is still throwing me.  So far I've been avoiding it, but if I want to play anything in A I'm going to have to learn it (E7 isn't giving me any trouble at all).

I've been grabbing chord & lyric sheets for a lot of songs from various websites and putting them all into a 3-ring binder.  Some of the songs that I originally wanted to try and learn have fallen by the wayside because I found I didn't have all that much interest in them.  Others I suddenly realized I wanted to try although I hadn't thought much about them before.  So since I don't have much else to talk about, here's a list.  You may feel free to stop reading at this point if you're not interested.  These are in no particular order except how I stuck them into the book.

Flowers on the Wall  - The famous song by the Statler Brothers.  I really like the lyrics to this song, they are very bleak and belie the happy sound of the music.  I might work on an alt version of the music just for kicks.

That's How I Got to Memphis - One of my favorite Tom T. Hall songs.

Streets of Laredo - An old cowboy song which I know from the CD of Don Edwards that I borrowed from my dad.  In a couple of places I changed a C major chord to an A minor to give it a sadder sound.

Walking the Floor Over You - Ernest Tubb.  Old country songs tend to be quite easy to play and sing, and although I don't listen to this music all the time these days, this is where I came from.

Paradise - John Prine.  Some people mistakenly call this one "Muhlenburg County."

Some Days are Diamonds - The John Denver song.  I have always really liked this song.  The chord sheet I found for it had one minor mistake, according to my ears, which I easily corrected.  The person who uploaded it had a C major in the chorus which should have been a Cmaj7.

Corpus Christi Bay - Robert Earl Keen.  A very simple three-chord song.  The hardest part about this one is keeping up the driving energy throughout the whole song.

Rank Stranger - An old folk/gospel song, recorded by numerous bluegrass artists.  The only version I found was in C, which sounds too low for my voice although I can hit all the notes.  Every version I've ever heard was recorded in F.  I can hit the high notes in F no problem, but this is one that was giving me trouble because in F I have a IV chord of B♭, so I've been practicing it in D.  Once I get that B♭down I'll be doing it in F so it will have more of that "high lonesome sound."

When I Reach That City - I stumbled across an album of old country gospel songs that I was able to download and this song was on it.  The family who recorded it (at Sun Records) way back when performed it with only two chords (I and V or V7).  I changed the chorus a little and added a IV and a vi chord in the right places to give it a little more flavor.

Angel Band - Another old folk/gospel song in three chords.  I recently came across a version recorded by The Monkees(!) with Michael Nesmith singing lead.  It's always been a favorite of mine, but I really like the Monkees version.

Waltz Across Texas - Another Ernest Tubb song.

Shot Full of Love - I haven't been practicing this one all that much but I've always liked it.  The first version I ever heard was by Juice Newton, from her album Juice.  It was also recorded by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  It was written by Texan songwriter Bob McDill.

Cool Water - I've learned that Sons of the Pioneers songs are deceptively difficult.

The Last Cowboy Song - Ed Bruce.  So far this is the only song that I've practiced doing something other than just straight strumming.  I pick the root note of the chord first, then strum the full chord for the two following beats of each measure (it's in 3/4).

Faded Love - I haven't practiced this one much because I don't have the melody firmly fixed in my head.  I need to listen to it several more times.

Orphan Girl - A more modern country/gospel song.

Morning Dew - Another Tom T. Hall song.  I've had this song memorized since I was a little kid.

Maria - Brian Setzer.  This one probably doesn't translate too well to the uke, but it has a fairly easy chord progression.

Lodi - John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival).  A fairly easy 5-chord song (I, ii, IV, vi, V).

The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore - Originally by Jean Ritchie.  The first version I ever remember hearing was by Michelle Shocked.  June Carter Cash also did it, and probably lots of others since it's an old country/folk song.  I've been mostly listening to the version by Annie Patterson.

Knockin' On Heaven's Door - Because why not.  I have to have at least one Dylan song, right?

King of the Road - Heh.

It's Hard to be Humble - Mac Davis.  I did this one as a joke for my wife one night and she liked it, so it stuck.

Is Anybody Going to San Antone - There are going to be a lot of old country songs on this list.

In the Pines - The version I know best is by the Louvin Brothers.  There's no way I can hit the high notes in this one, when they aren't singing words but just going "ooooh, ooooh, oooh" etc.  So I whistle that part.

I Can Still Make Cheyenne - Another one that I tried for kicks and my wife got starry-eyed, so it stays.

Hollywood Waltz - By the Eagles.  I've also been practicing "Seven Bridges Road" but I haven't bothered to print it out because I know it so well.

Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen.  Everyone knows this one, so I should too, I guess.  I like it a lot, anyway.

Fraulein - One of my dad's favorites, for some reason.

Do What You Do Do Well - Two chords:  D and A7.

Dark as a Dungeon - Recorded by numerous country artists and even by Wall of Voodoo.  I've been mostly focusing on the version by Tennessee Ernie Ford.  This is part of my trilogy of coal mining songs, along with "L&N" and "Paradise" previously mentioned.

Angel From Montgomery - Another John Prine song, but more famously recorded by Bonnie Raitt.

Amarillo By Morning - Another favorite of my wife.

All My Tears - Another country/gospel song which I first heard by Emmylou Harris but written by Julie Miller, and it's Miller's version I've mostly been listening to lately.

After the Glitter Fades - Because I wanted at least one Stevie Nicks song and this one fits in with the country-ish theme of the whole collection.  Also it's pretty easy.

Boat on the River - An old Styx song from their Cornerstone album, written by Tommy Shaw, who has in the past few years become my favorite Stygian.  I need to practice this one a lot more, but it has a few chords that are still difficult for me.

Black Muddy River - From the Grateful Dead's In the Dark album.  I don't remember it getting any radio play, but it's my favorite song from that album.  This is another one that will be easier once I get the B minor down.

Before the Next Teardrop Falls - I've been practicing singing that one part in Spanish.

Evil Love - A goofy little song from the Phineas & Ferb TV show.  I'm still working on playing syncopated rhythms so it will sound right.

Goodnight Irene - Another standard.

Downbound Train - Probably my favorite Springsteen song.

Don't Stop Believing - The way I sing it, it has a wistful, almost ironic sound.  Probably not for most folks.

Della and the Dealer - This song is really hard because of the vocal range required.  Hoyt Axton had such an excellent low range.  I just can't come close to it.

The Traveler (Days are Numbers) - Alan Parsons Project.  Easy chords, but doesn't sound all that great strumming.  I think this song will eventually drive me to actually finger-pick.  I also want to learn their "Old and Wise" but it has some chords that are really difficult for me.

Closing Time - By Lyle Lovett.  I can do the chords, but I'm having trouble getting the melody fixed in my head.

Mountain of Love - I'm most familiar with the version by Charlie Pride, but lately I've been listening more to the version by Johnny Rivers.

The Weight - A favorite by The Band.  I just started working on this one tonight, and am happy to report good progress.  I have it in G, which means I have to play a B minor, which is one of the chords that has been giving me problems.  But I can tell that eventually I'll be able to do it.

Gorilla You're a Desperado - Which I've been plowing through just for fun but it doesn't sound very good yet.  I'd really like to to Zevon's "Desperado Under the Eaves" but it's a lot harder.

Video Killed the Radio Star - Yeah.  I worked on this one for a few hours non-stop one night until my hands were tired and cramped.  It's fun.

Books About UFOs - By Husker Du.  Quite easy.  Just requires a lot of energy.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow - Trying to play something similar to the version by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.

Landslide - Written by Stevie Nicks, recorded by Fleetwood Mac.  I hadn't thought at all about this one until I saw Jake Shimabukuro do it.  Of course, I'll never play it like he does, but I still like it.

Wish You Were There - The last song from the Hi Infidelity album by REO Speedwagon.  Another obscure song that is nevertheless one of my favorites.

I Miss a Lot of Trains - I really like this song.  By Tom T. Hall, but lately I've really been digging the version by Iris Dement.

Pancho and Lefty - This is another one that I've been working on a lot.  I've been listening more to the orignal Townes Van Zandt version than the one by Willie & Waylon.

Dead Flowers - By the Rolling Stones.  But I pattern mine more after the version by Townes Van Zandt.

Seven Spanish Angels - Famously by Willie, but recorded by many others.  I've mostly been listening to an old version by Daniel O'Donnell.

Tia Maria - Ronnie Fauss.  I posted the chords & lyrics for this one a while back.

Love Songs in Spanish - Another easy one which I posted chords & lyrics for previously.

Dust in the Wind - Another one I'd never thought about until I saw Ukulele Mike do it on YouTube.  This one I do just for my own personal amusement.

Give Me Forty Acres - My favorite truck driving song.

He Stopped Loving Her Today - When George Jones passed away recently, I suddenly remembered this song.

I'll Be Coming Home - A bluegrass-y piece by Tommy Shaw from his Great Divide bluegrass album.  I think I added a vi chord in there that isn't in the original just to keep it from sounding too monotonous when I do it.

Northwest Passage - Stan Rogers.  Another one I do just for myself.

Over the Waterfall - I have a few songs by Michelle Shocked which don't sound all that great just strumming.  They sound much better with a real guitar player and a fiddle to fill them out.  But as with most of these, I do it for myself.

Prodigal Daughter - Michelle Shocked, see above.  I haven't practiced this one much because singing the melody is giving me fits.

Silent Ways - Also Michelle Shocked, but I think one works a lot better and I've been practicing it more.

The Secret to a Long Life - Michelle Shocked again.  Another one that doesn't work that well for me, but I play with it anyway.

You Never Even Call Me By My Name - I intend to annoy the **** out of somebody with this one someday.

Praying Mantis - By Don Dixon.  Simple chords, but requires a lot of energy and syncopation.

Rose Colored Glasses - John Conlee.  Another old favorite.  That reminds me I also want to look up his "Backside of Thirty."

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain - I used to play around with a harmonica, and this was one of the few songs I taught myself to play on it.

Gentle On My Mind - Most famously covered by Glen Campbell, but written by John Hartford, and it's his version I've been listening to.  There's a video of him on YouTube performing it with nothing but his own banjo for accompaniment.  This one stumped me at first because of the relatively unusual seventh chords in it.  But then I tried it and was elated to discover how simple it is to make the changes on a uke.  This one would sound much better if I could finger pick.

Wild Horses - Another one that I'll be able to do better when I get that B♭down.

My Darling Clementine - I ran across the full lyrics for this one the other day and decided to write my own music for it.  So the version I've been practicing is actually totally original as far as the music goes.

A Horse Called Music - I came across this one by Willie Nelson on a sampler I had downloaded.  I still have to listen to it a lot more to get the melody down in my head.

Whoopi Ti Yi Yo - An old cowboy song recorded by Don Edwards.

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry - This is another one I've thrown a minor vi chord into just because I like the way it sounds better in certain places than the original major I chord.

Juggle this

Just had to share this, via the Ear-Trumpet.

Some 19th-century dude juggling rifles with fixed bayonets.  Probably violating a few of the Rules in the process.

Yeah, but...

The only thing I could think was, that ukulele has a broken string.

Chet Atkins - I Still Write Your Name in the Snow

I just heard this song for the first time and it cracked me up.

A screen shot related to the previous post

That little green blip is a "cheat" that is part of the ZDoom program.  It's like a sight.  I don't think I would use it much, because most of my combat was so close-range that trying to sight with it would have only slowed me down.

By the way, although I don't really do gun-blogging here anymore, I think I can go ahead and mention last week's range activities.  It had been quite a long time since the last time I went out shooting.  My dad was on vacation so I had to go to his house last Saturday to put out some range cubes for his cattle, and my son and I set up some coke cans around his tank, using the dam as a backstop, and we did some shooting.

My son is 12 years old.  He had previously done a lot of BB gun shooting and a little .22 rifle shooting when he was in Boy Scouts.  I took four guns this time:  a Single Six (.22 revolver), my grandpa's old Winchester slide-action .22 rifle, a single-shot .410, and a Model 28 S&W .357 magnum revolver (6-inch barrel model).

He performed quite well with the .22 rifle, fairly well with the Single Six since he hadn't reallly shot a handgun before, and I let him blaze away with several rounds in the .410 just for kicks.  When I was gathering up my ammo for this excursion, I grabbed a box of gun show reloads which had a bunch of ammo loose in the box as well as a plastic bag of cartridges.  I thought that the loose ammo was .38 Special and the bagged ammo was .357.  I was planning on having him shoot the .38 stuff first, and then if he handled it fairly well, go ahead and let him step up to the .357.

Well, I didn't look at the ammo closely enough and it turned out that it was all .357.  But, it was stuff that had been reloaded just for target practice and wasn't particularly powerful for .357 ammo.  However, it was most definitely still at .357 level and far above .38.

So I went over all the stuff about how he should hold it and all that stuff to help him minimize and control the recoil.  The first couple of shots he took a few steps backward because the recoil startled him a little.  So I asked him if he wanted to go back to the .22 and he said, "No!  I want to keep shooting this.  I like the way it kicks."  So I ended up letting him run 4 or 5 cylinders worth through it.  When he finally decided it was making his hand hurt too much, we went back to the .22s and sat on the tank dam shooting turtles for a while.

I have had people tell me that they won't shoot a .357 because it kicks too much.  I have always considered this to be nonsense.  If my skinny 12-year-old can handle one, then I think anyone should be able to unless they have some kind of actual physical disability.

It was all great fun.  Today after I hunted down my cleaning kit, I ran him through cleaning both the handguns.  I decided to leave the long guns for another day.  They'll keep.

I don't know if this should make me proud or not

My son is a Doomer.  I think it's kinda cool that kids can still be fascinated by a game as old as Doom, but then it was and is one of the greatest games of all time.  I had installed Doom 2 for him to play, but I had misplaced my Doom (original) CD.

The other day I found it, when I was looking for something else, of course.

So I installed it for him, and also handed him a CD that I bought many years ago that has lots of pwads* on it.  He fired one up and I immediately noticed that he wasn't going to get any armor.  I warned him about that.  "I know," he said, as if this were obvious, "it's called Blood Red, Daddy."

He proceeded to blast his way through on HMP (Hurt Me Plenty, or the third level of difficulty) and finished with 147% health.  Good grief.  I don't think I could have ever done that well.

P.S.  If you ever want to fire Doom up on a modern computer, download a tool called ZDoom.  It will make the game run as smoothly as if you were on a fast old DOS machine.



*In Doom parlance, a pwad is a wad** that was created by a player, not by ID Games.

**A wad is a file that contains all the information for a certain level or levels.

Javelinas in San Antonio.

I didn't take the picture below.  This was from a co-worker/friend of mine who is a Field Service Representative, which is a fancy euphemistic way of saying he's one of the guys who turns off people's water when they don't pay their bill, and then turns it back on again when they do.  He was on Yucca Valley just south of Medina Base Road when, down in the brush behind Aspen Valley he saw "a half dozen or so" javelinas.  Here's a still photo he took of one of them with his phone.

He also took some video but his ISP wouldn't let him email it because it was over 25 MB and when he tried to upload it to his Picasa web album it got stuck in some sort of weird Picasa limbo where he--and only he--can view it but he can't share it or do anything else with it.  So, no video unless he figures something out.

Anyway, I know javelina are very common south of here but this is the first time I've ever heard of any being actually inside San Antonio (inside Loop 410).  So don't be too quick to blame your neighbor's dog or the coyotes on rummaging through your garbage.  It might be javelinas.

Checkered garter snake

This is a checkered garter snake.  This was a snake I had never seen until I started this job; they just don't live out here in the sandhills where I grew up, although I have on rare occasions seen the Texas garter snake out here.

This one was unusual in that it had just begun the shedding process.  It had only its head clear and the rest of its body was still covered by the old skin.  I tried to get a good shot of its head, but it didn't cooperate with me.  So its coloration is usually more vivid than this.  It's so dull looking because that's all the old skin that it was about to get rid of.

I've seen dozens of these things hiding in meter boxes.  I'm not one of those people who is irrationally afraid of snakes, but I must say that I used the digital zoom on this one because he was really peeved at my uncovering him.  He zeroed in on me and kept pivoting around so that he could face me instead of just trying to get away like they usually do, and when I did finally flip the lid back on the box, it struck at my hook, which is a first for my encounters with this kind of snake.

The picture below was taken by accident because I touched the "take a picture" button before I meant to.  But it did get a good shot of my Roadrunner, one glove and hook.  I have to take off the glove to use my new phone because touch screens don't work with gloves.  The Roadrunner is soon to be gone; we are going to be getting new devices within the next few weeks.  They haven't told us which one yet, but I'm hoping for a model made by Itron.  It looks like this.

Found a movie I've been looking for

When I was a kid, my family went to the movies every now and then--I never go now, although my kids have gone a few times with friends or the church youth group.  This was back when Disney was still making innocent, fun, kid-friendly movies under the Buena Vista banner, like Hot Lead and Cold Feet,  The Apple Dumpling Gang, Where the Red Fern Grows, Escape to Witch Moutain, The Biscuit Eater, etc.

Once my mom even took my sister and I--or possibly both my sisters, I don't remember if the youngest was born yet--to the theater in Nixon to see a double feature of Old Yeller followed by Mary Poppins.  That was back when Nixon still had a theater.

Anyway, there was this one movie we saw that was most definitely not a Disney nor a Buena Vista movie.  It was a movie about Bigfoot.  Now, I (of course) just loved this movie.  I was fascinated by mysterious creatures from birth, probably.  What makes me wonder now why we ever went to see this movie is because my dad empatically doesn't believe in any of that nonsense.  But he took us all to see it anyway.  Years went by and I tried to track this movie down so I could watch it again, but it was not until just last year that I spent some time combing through Wikipedia and imdb.com until I finally weeded out all the chaff and figured out which movie it was.  It's called Sasquatch:  The Legend of Bigfoot.

I don't know if it can legitimately be called a "documentary," but I think it's fair to say it is documentary style.  It had a lot of parts that were still scary to me as a 13-year-old in 1977, and scared the snot out of both of my sisters (who were 5 and 9 at the time).  I think it might possibly be the scariest G-rated movie I ever saw.  I bring this up now because I was just catching up on posts at Cryptomundo and found that they have posted an interview with the director of this movie.

I think that any exposure I had to the Bigfoot phenomenon before this movie was probably limited to an episode of In Search Of and maybe a book or two from the junior high library.  I remember that after we got back home that night, I sneaked up outside of my sisters' bedroom and mimicked the sound that the Bigfoot made in the movie, which started them screaming.  I was sternly reprimanded by my dad, but I could tell he was holding back laughter the whole time and I didn't really get in trouble for it.

I am happy to report that Netflix has this movie on DVD, packaged in a 3-for-1 with two other movies that look to be just B-grade "horror" flicks.  So I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

They also have The Biscuit Eater on DVD.  This one was from 1972, when I was only 8, and man I just loved that movie.  I'm sure if there had been VCRs back then I would have begged my parents for a tape of that movie just so I could watch it over and over again.  In fact, they have quite a few of these Buena Vista releases from the olden days.  I don't think I'll ever need to see Hot Lead and Cold Feet again, though.

11-4165

Since I have mentioned/complained about it so many times, here is my cycle 11 route, 4165.  It clocks in at 4.13 miles--about 50 that are not in alleys and about 400 that are.  Also there are 5 or 6 more meters that I drive to.  This is my worst foot route.  The start/end dots are covered up by the 3 mile marker.

A work picture

For people from San Antonio, this needs no explanation.  For the rest of you, there used to be this horrific intersection of state highway 281 with Loop 1604.  It was two major highways that came together with just a plain old stoplight intersection--a holdover from the days when people were still getting used to horseless carriages.  A while back they began construction to turn this into an actual interstate highway-style interchange, and have been progressing remarkably fast (the usual S.A. rule of travel is:  the shortest distance between two points is under construction).  People drive through here now just for the sheer exhilaration of not having to sit in line at a stoplight for 35 minutes.  I took this photo through my work truck's window from the very top of the interchange today.  Just don't tell anyone I was taking pictures while driving.

That long highway fading into the distance is 281, facing south.

Argh

Not a good day today.  This is my usual cycle 8, which normally is a pretty good route.  Smooth terrain, all fronts, no dogs.  This route is officially sequenced so that it begins and ends right at Rhapsody and what on this map is inexplicably called "River Path."  There are no such signs on this street.  Pretty weird, but not unusual for Google Maps.  All signs call it San Pedro.  Anyway, I quit doing this route by the official sequence a long time ago, because I didn't like having to park in someone's parking lot on Rhapsody.  So I have been parking at Stardream and "River Path."  Since, like almost all foot routes, this route is circular (it ends where it begins), you can start anywhere and eventually get back to your starting point.

I realized last summer that I could park at the community swimming pool--the intersection of Fantasia and Reverie--and this would make me come back to my truck halfway through the route and then again when I finished, because you cross that intersection twice coming from two different directions.  I did this during the summer so that I could take a Gatorade break at the halfway point.  Since summer is coming up again, I thought I'd do it this way again just to make sure I knew what I was doing, because I might eventually completely resequence it so that it "officially" begins and ends here.  Also, I figured if it cooled off by the time I got back to my truck the first time, I would be able to grab my jacket.

But it started raining.  Only a 20% chance of rain, but I should have known this meant I was going to get absolutely hammered.  I stopped and took shelter several times going down Fantasia toward "River Path," and as I was heading back down Stardream, the norther hit.  So, I was wet, and now I had frigid 30 mph winds hitting me.  I started running from meter to meter, but pretty soon I realized this wasn't going to help.

When I got to Rhapsody and Rendezvous I diverted from the route and skipped all of the West Rhapsody stuff and actually ran from where that 1 mile mark is all the way back to my truck.  Man, that was unpleasant.  I can walk quickly for hours and hours, but running kills me, partly because both of my ankles are messed up, probably from repetitive stress (the Achilles tendons are the problem).

When I got back to my truck, I fired it up and turned on the heater, put on my jacket and finished the rest of my coffee, which was still hot because I have a totally awesome Thermos travel mug that keeps coffee hot for hours.  Mine is black, and I got it at Wal-Mart, and if you think $20 is too much to pay for a travel mug, you probably have never had one that is actually leak-proof and keeps hot drinks hot.


So when the rain slacked off a little, I had to backtrack and do everything that was left, which was quite a lot.  It still rained and I got totally soaked, but eventually it stopped and by the time I finished I was mostly dry.  But I was still chilled and, as usual, working in a cold rain makes me really tired.  Also my legs are hurting (especially my right ankle) from running up that hill back to my truck.  When I finished all this, I went and got the stuff on W. Rhapsody that I had skipped earlier, which I didn't bother to track.  I still had to do my partial route, which I also didn't track because I decided--screw it, I'm just going to drive the whole thing.

Not a pleasant day.

Let's face it: neither of these guys is going to sing out of tune

I recently "liked" a FB page called "Marillion - The Fish Years."  Fish (a.k.a. Derek Dick) was the previous lead singer of the group who went solo in the late 80s.  Since "liking" this page I've seen some links that were interesting for a Marillion fan.

Here's one that may be of interest to my legions of readers who are fans of other bands as well.  In 1987 a Marillion concert was "crashed" by Bruce Dickinson, Nicko McBrain and Janick Gers of Iron Maiden; and Jimmy Bain of Dio and Rainbow.

One of the items resulting from this impromtu visit was this Joe Cocker style version of "A Little Help From My Friends," featuring a duet between Bruce Dickinson and Fish.

Early Roles of Famous Actors

I took a couple of days vacation just for kicks--I go back to work tomorrow--so I'm home having an early morning pipe and doing some recreational internet reading.  I thought this was an interesting list for movie/tv buffs:  32 Mind-Blowing Early Roles of Famous Actors at Cracked.

A few of these surprised me.  I knew several of them already.  I did not know that Denzel Washington was an unnamed thug killed by Paul Kersey in the original Death Wish.  But there are two others they could have included from that same movie.  Jeff Goldblum was one of the original trio who raped Kersey's daughter and murdered his wife.  Christopher Guest was a police officer who had a couple of significant lines right at the end of the movie.  Additional trivia, according to imdb.com:  Guest's first credited role was also as a police officer, in the movie The Hot Rock, which I've never heard of.

Influences

Is it my imagination, or does Willie seem to be channeling Snoopy?

Cycle 4

I don't plan on doing this map thing forever.  I just want to get maps of my routes and get a good record of how far I walk on each one.  This is my regular cycle 4, which is a rough route.  By rough I mean the terrain is actually rough, uneven, so forth--and it's also very long.  Not many sidewalks, and where there are sidewalks they are broken and hazardous to walk on--and the meters are all over the place--you can't count on them being lined up.  Maybe one is right down by the street, maybe the next is way up in the yard close to the house.  It's a mess.

This one is done in two parts.  It's sequenced so that you park at Sabinas & Cincinnati and do that part that I drew in blue first, then you drive down and park at Cincinnati & Zarzamora and do all the red stuff.  Today I decided to do the worst part first, so I did the stuff in red, which is 6 miles long.  Then I did the other, smaller part, but the app didn't work right and for some reason it couldn't save or upload the map, so I didn't get a record of it and I'll have to do that part again, but I think it was around 1.5 miles.

This map might look a little strange because I had to stitch on that blue part.

It's sometimes an interesting area, and sometimes I see things that I think are...er...interesting.  Today I saw two ducks fighting.  At first I thought maybe they were attempting to "mate" but after a minute or so I decided that no, they were definitely fighting.

There are also lots of college students around here--there's at least one sorority house on this route, so there's sometimes some pleasant "scenery."  One time, that sorority house was holding some kind of barbecue fund raiser, and they had four different barbecues going all at once.  I could smell that stuff all over the place that day.  Having to smell food cooking when you're working is just torture.  It's almost impossible to do this route and not smell someone, somewhere, cooking frijoles.  One time the manager of a Mexican restaurant on this route gave me a free breakfast taco when she saw me outside.

This is one of the routes that I was put on when I was first hired, and have done it regularly since (regularly meaning almost every month, but not every month).  So when I first started, there were these two meters with a Cincinnati address, numbered A and B at the same address, and I couldn't find them.  Whoever had been doing that route before me had sequenced them where it appeared they should have belonged according to their address.  But I couldn't find them.  Since they were still fairly new meters, there was no location information available for them.  According to the address, they should have been somewhere on the north side of Cincinnati between Elmendorf and Alexander.  I walked all over that place and couldn't find them.  So eventually the guy who was our lead meter reader back then (he retired since then, and his replacements are worthless) went out and somehow found both of them.

It turned out that neither of them were anywhere near where it seemed they were supposed to be.  One of them is near the intersection of Vollum and Josephine Tobin, about 3-4 steps off into the grass toward the lake.  The only thing it services, as far as I can tell, is a water fountain.  The other one is somewhere on the other side of the lake.  So it wasn't even on the right route.  The other side of the lake, and yet it has the same address as the other one--neither of which are even close to Cincinnati Avenue.

Another thing that makes this route bad is the number of loose vicious and semi-vicious dogs on it.  There was one that kept jumping his fence and coming after me.  He's still there, but one time I threw a beer bottle at him and luckily whacked him right in the face with it.  Since then he never has jumped the fence.

Ronnie Fauss - Tia Maria (lyrics and chords)

Here's another song that I've been wanting to get the lyrics and chords for, for quite a long time, but it is also ungoogleable.  So I've been a little busy today.

This song is by Ronnie Fauss and was on his EP Mulligan.  I got it when it was a free promotional download from his website and have since bought two more of his (full length) albums.  It is no longer available free (not legally, anyway), but it is available on CD from Amazon.

Unfortunately, there's no version of this on YouTube, so I don't have a video link.  Since it's still a fairly new song that is still available commercially, I'm not going to upload it myself.

The chord progressions simply repeat themselves throughout the song, alternating between four-verse and five-verse stanzas.  P.S.  The five-verse stanzas are limericks!

Note that in the line "Tia Maria, she got a great idea..." the word "idea" is sung with three syllables, like "eye-dee-ah" so it fits the meter of the line.



G                        C         G
Tia Maria, she makes the best sopapillas
G                     D
She sings in a Tejano band
G                   C           G
Tio Leo, he's got a job down in Rio
G                 D       G
And he visits whenever he can


C                     G
Maria she lies in bed night after night
C            G                   D
Wishing that Leo was holding her tight
C                     D
And she cries for her mate
    G             Em
But alas she just waits
           C              D             G
'Til she's wakened by the cruel morning light

Tia Maria, she's got a daughter named Leah
Who don't know why her daddy's not home
Tio Leo, he bought Leah a Geo
His love comes in silver and chrome

Leah, she drives that thing all over town
With the music turned up and the windows rolled down
And she screams at the sky
And she goes and gets high
And she drinks 'til her sorrows are drowned

Tia Maria, she likes quesadillas
She eats them a pound at a time
Tio Leo, he's got a girlfriend named Cleo
Who's just about to enter her prime

Leo makes love like he's eighteen years old
While Maria feels as used as the laundry she folds
And she watches her soaps
And she smokes Leo's dope
'Cause she don't got nobody to hold

Tia Maria, she got a great idea
And hopped on that Rio-bound plane
Tio Leo put on a record by Dio
And crawled in the bed where his mistress lay

Maria walked in and she saw them in bed
That teenage Lolita and the man that she wed
So she grabbed Leo's gun
And she told him that he'd won
And she shot herself right through the head

Tia Maria, she made the best sopapillas
And she sang in a Tejano band
A Tejano band

W.C. Jameson - Love Songs in Spanish (lyrics and chords)

This is a song that's included on the Americapolitan Outlaw Sampler which is available free (legally) from Noisetrade.  I liked this song immediately and wanted to add it to my book of songs to practice strumming on the ukulele, but it was ungoogleable (Google has taken legal action to prevent this word from appearing in a dictionary, so I'm going to use it as often as possible).  That is, it doesn't look like anyone has ever posted a simple chord chart--or even lyrics--to any of the numerous websites where you can find such things.

So...the song actually is in C.  I didn't just put it that way to make it simple.




Love Songs in Spanish - W.C. Jameson

1.
C                  F              C
She had a voice as sweet as Texas honey
      Am       F                G
And a touch as soft as a summer breeze
C             F           C           F
Her dark eyes shined like diamonds
              C             G          C
When she sang love songs in Spanish to me

2. (repeat chords as in 1)
I met her in a tiny village by the Rio Grande
Felt the magic of her smile and could not leave
Barefoot in the sand, she played the mandolin
And she sang love songs in Spanish to me

(chorus)
G                                    C
Like the river that flows out to the sea
G                                        C
Like the song birds in winter she had to leave
F                          C     F
I'm left here with my memory
              C             G          C
When she sang love songs in Spanish to me


(instrumental break)

3.  (repeat chords as in 1 and 2)
I recall those nights with her alone
Moonlight bright, soft wind in the trees
We lay together down by the river
And she sang love songs in Spanish to me

(repeat chorus)

...when she sang love songs in Spanish to me

Never woulda guessed it

Just saw this photo over at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.  Okay, I recognized James Coburn and Bruce Lee.  The guy on the left I haven't ever heard of, named Mike Stone.  But who is that fresh-faced young fellow second from right?

Chuck Norris?!

More computer history

Another blast from the past.  This one is about laptops in the late 80s.  I bought my first computer in 1990, and it was a laptop similar to some of these, with a supertwist screen but it also supported a CGA monitor, and I almost never used anything but the CGA monitor (which I had to buy separately).  I think this video was from 1987, and the cheapest computer they list here sold for $1,995.  Three years later, when I bought mine, I got it for only $800 because it was already behind the curve.

I don't remember the brand, but I bought it mail-order from DAK Technologies.  It was a regular 8MHz 8088 with 640K of RAM and had two 3.5" DD (720K) floppy drives.  DAK packaged it with a bunch of software.  The one I used most was Wordstar, which was able to run on a single floppy--the other floppy was used to save your documents.  This was also the computer that I played Ultima V on.  I remember when you switched from above ground to a dungeon setting, it took so long to load the dungeon that I would go to the bathroom or refill my tea while I was waiting for it.

Oh yeah, it also came with a mouse!  But the mouse worked only for specific software, and any program it worked for had its own mouse driver which you had to load before you started the program.  I never really used the mouse because it was just easier and faster for me to type everything.  I've always been a pretty fast typist.  One of the other programs that was packed with it was a typing tutor program, and I timed myself on it several times.  I often broke 90 wpm in speed drills.

The second computer I had, which I bought in 1993 I think, was a Leading Edge 486SX25 (25 MHz) with 4 MB of RAM and a 120 MB hard drive, and was the first computer I had that ran Windows (3.1).  That was the computer that I later installed a 2400 baud modem in, then later bought a combination upgrade package that added a sound card, a CD-ROM drive and a 14400 baud modem.  I also upgraded the RAM to 20 MB.  This was the computer that I had when I first began accessing BBSes and the internet (via NovaLink).

The third computer was in 1995, I think, and was a 60MHz Pentium which came with its own modem and sound card/CD-ROM.  I've forgotten what kind of RAM and hard drive it had, but this was my main Doom computer.  I had tried playing it with the older 486, but it just couldn't handle it very well.

Playing with the runtastic app

Here is me playing with the runtastic.com smartphone app.   Our first map is from Tuesday.  I had never done this one before.  I added the blue line in because it didn't start tracking me right away--I think it took a few minutes for the GPS to lock in.  Anyway, the green and red dots should have been right on top of each other because this route starts and ends in the same place.  This was my longest single route of the week at slightly over 4 miles, and with the partial that I also did, made it the longest day of the week--as far as distance goes.  I tried using a different app to map the partial, but it didn't post to FB like it was supposed to, so I didn't get a map.

Wednesday's full route.  The words "Five Palms" will cause all meter readers to shudder in horror.  This is the worst part of town to work in because of the kind of lids that are used on the meter boxes there.  Five Palms isn't visible on this map but it's in the area.  The lids here are what we call "oval lids" because they are oval instead of round.  There are numerous different kinds of oval lids, ranging from a major pain in the a** to a hellish, nightmare-inducing pain in the a**.  The worst kind were obviously invented by a sadistic psychopath.

Wednesday's partial, in a different part of town where the work is much easier because all the lids are round here.

Thursday's full route.  This is another rough one, mostly just because the terrain is so uneven.  I've been doing it for so long that it doesn't bother me as much anymore, but I still admit it's a hard route.  The green part is to show the part that I drive through instead of walking.  There are only 75 meters in all that big area where the green is, and it takes an hour to walk it.  In the rest of the route I can average around 140-150 meters per hour.  After I started driving that green part, it took 30 minutes off my total time.  P.S.  One of my rules of routes is:  If it incorporates or even touches Broadview, it's gonna be messed up.  The same rule is also true if one replaces "Broadview" with "Vandiver."

Thursday' partial.  Someone at some time in the past sequenced this one so that you're supposed to go down Poplar street, then climb a dangerously rusty and dilapidated 5-foot chain-link fence to get into the church property, walk all the way across it to McMullen, then climb a 6-foot chain link fence to get back out and read that one meter where I put that green dot.    Well, that's not how I do it.  After I finish everything else, I just drive over there and get that last meter.

Alamo Heights full route.  This one's pretty rough, too, and it has some major hills that are just murder in hot weather.  I drive that part that I drew on there in green.  During the worst part of summer, I drive out those little dead-ends on the bottom section, too.  That's where all the worst hills are.

Alamo Heights partial.  On the other side of Broadway.  This one is mostly alleys, which you can see because the red lines aren't going down the streets.  But in this part of Alamo Heights the alleys are all paved, so it's not bad.  I drive the green part.

On that lower left rectangle, you can see a little "blip" where the line isn't quite as straight.  That was where I went into somebody's back yard so I could run some water and check if their meter was still working.  That's some pretty good detail, I think.

Back in the olden days of 1995

I just had to share this video.  It's all about using the internet in 1995, with a focus on CompuServe.  It's a real blast of nostalgia, and made me laugh several times because I remember it all.

I first started using computer networks, of a sort, in late 1993, dialing up "phone BBSes" (bulletin boards).  By 1994 I was trying out various online services, and CompuServe was the first one I tried, but I canceled it as soon as my free trial period ran out.  In 1994, CompuServe did not yet provide internet access--it was strictly an in-house online service.  The first actual internet access I had was a company called NovaLink, and I got 5 hours of access for $10 a month.  By the way, at that time I was using a 2400 baud modem.  So I wasn't able to do a whole lot, but I did go through all the stuff of installing Win32S so I could use NCSA Mosaic.  At that time, Mosaic was the only web browser, and was the precursor to Netscape.  Later on, I used Netscape.  I had to buy it.  It came on 2 or 3 1.5" floppies.  The only thing I specifically remember about NovaLink is that one day I went to a web page where some guy had posted gifs of all the Rush album covers (at that time).  It took a while to load, even though they were only small thumbnails.  Oh yeah, back then Mosaic could display in-line gifs, but not in-line jpgs, so if someone wanted to show a jpg, they just had to link to it, and when you clicked on the link it would open an associated jpg viewer on your computer to view it.  I used a program for jpg viewing that was called LView.

In 1995 I joined Netcom, which was unlimited access for $20 per month.  By that time I had upgraded to a 14400 modem, and pretty soon after joining Netcom I upgraded again to 28800.  The Netcom service came with its own software called Netcruiser, which incorporated all the stuff you'd need into one program (web browser, email, ftp, gopher, archie, usenet, etc.).  Netcruiser also functioned as a Winsock so you could minimize it and run some other browser if you wanted, like Netscape.

I used an html editor called HotDog.  I had to quit using it when I switched my screen resolution up to 800x600, because it wouldn't run under anything but 640x480.  At that time I started using some freeware editor that I don't remember the name of anymore.  Of course, back then all you had to know was basic html to create a website.  When things got so complicated that you also had to learn CSS and all sorts of other stuff, I gave up on creating my own sites and just went for a while with some very simple sites on Tripod until Blogger came along.

I kind of miss the old days when every ISP also provided Usenet access.  I was a big Usenet user back then.  After I quit Netcom and started using other ISPs that didn't provide you with software (mainly just because I was trying to find something cheaper and ever cheaper)*, I used Agent for email and usenet.  I loved Agent.  It was one of my favorite programs ever.

Of course, I also used AOL on at least three different occasions.  This video is from before the big AOL explosion.  I also had Juno email for a while.  Anyone remember Juno?

The thing about screen resolution was kind of funny to me, too.  I remember going to the local Whataburger for the morning gathering of ham radio operators shooting the bull and drinking coffee**, and I announced, "Well, I changed my screen resolution up to 800x600."  Back then this was a Big Thing.  "So, how do you like it?" Everyone asked.  Crazy.

*I actually used some free internet services for about a year.  One was from KMart, and I don't remember the other one.  When you first started the software, it would feed you a brief ad from the store, then dial you in.

**Back then Whataburger had this special deal where if you bought one of their plastic coffee mugs, you could get it refilled for a nickel.  After a year or so they changed it to refills for a quarter.  I wish I still had that mug, just because it was a good mug and it would be another bit of pleasant nostalgia to drink from it.  I don't know what happened to it.

Runtastic

My sister has been using an app called Runtastic so I though I'd give it a try.  It works a lot better than MapMyWalk--mainly because so far it isn't as crash-prone and it actually shares to FB.  The only problem with it today it that I actually started it at the red dot but it didn't start tracking me until there where that green dot is--both dots should be right on top of each other.

So this was a little over 4 miles.  My partial was 2.3 miles.  I tried MapMyWalk on it again today just for kicks, but as before, it won't post to FB so I can't get a map off of it.

Another cool thing about this app is the map.  The map that it posts is just a basic map, but the one you get to see on your phone has a color-coded route instead of just solid red.  It ranges from red for the fastest parts down through orange and yellow to green for the slowest.  So I can look back and see which parts of the route had the most troublesome meters.

This one has a voice thing too, which is kind of annoying.  A British woman's voice announces every time you hit a new mile mark and says some other things.  I didn't have it turned up loud enough to hear it that clearly today, but the first time she announced the mile I jumped and spun around with a "WTF?!"  I hope no one saw me.

The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West (1973, "movie")

I don't remember why anymore, but some time ago I added a DVD to my Netflix queue called "Great Wacky Western Comedies." It includes three movies plus some bonus features. So today I watched the first movie.

1973. Gilligan's Island has already become legend. Sherwood Schwartz is at the peak of his Bradiness. He can't go wrong.  So what did he do?  He created a movie that should have more accurately been called Gilligan's Wagon Train.  Their theme song isn't nearly as catchy as the Gilligan's Island song, which I'm sure most of us can still sing from memory, but here are some of the lyrics to get you going.

A stage and a wagon headin' west
Part of a wagon train lost from the rest
Dusty's the reason for their plight
Thanks to Dusty nothin's right
Only the wagonmaster's hands
Keeps 'em a-rollin' to the promised land

So...you've got this stagecoach and this single wagon that have somehow become separated and lost from the rest of the wagon train--marooned, as it were.

So we have Gilligan...

The Skipper, too.

The millionaire and his wife.

The prostitute, the professor and Mary Ann.

Stuff happens, most of it in a very disconnected manner.  More stuff happens that didn't have anything to do with the first stuff that happened.  Then more stuff happened but I slept through it and woke up right at the end to see Dusty somehow win a gunfight because he got lucky and did some fancy twirl with a gentleman's cane and the bad guys thought he was Bat Masterson so they surrendered without firing a shot.  I don't know how they got from being lost in the wilderness to fighting bad guys in a town with Gilligan/Dusty posing as Bat Masterson because I was a asleep, but I'm not going back.  If you want to know what happened, look it up on YouTube.  Somebody uploaded the whole movie for some reason.  If you watch it and figure out how it all happened, keep it to yourself, because I don't want to know.

Apparently they made a sitcom out of this, too.  I don't remember it.  Thank God.

Explaining the past

Buzzfeed has "the 14 most irritating questions people born in the 2000s ask."  Well, technically my daughter was born in 99, so she's still pretty close.  I don't know why most of these would be "irritating."  My son especially likes to ask me questions about my past, and it's one of the few things he'll sit still for and listen without interrupting with another question.  And I like answering him.  Isn't that what dad's are supposed to do?

Anyway:

1.  My kids--aged 14 and 12--have used floppy disks.

2.  My kids know the difference between a cell phone and a "land line."

3.  Never came up.  For the record, I never liked that show, either.

4.  Also never came up, but I would be happy to explain it to them, if it did.  Of course, they would easily understand the concept, as anyone should who has used a portable mp3 player.

5.  My kids have used cassette tapes.

6.  My kids have used dial-up.  I hope they never forget it, so they always remember how fortunate they are to have a wireless service now.  They have never used AOL, however, I have told them about it, and how there was a time when you couldn't pick up a magazine without an AOL CD falling out.

7.  Never came up.

8.  See #7.

9.  I used to work at a beeper repair shop.  Although my job there ended when my son was only about a year old, I still had beepers lying around.  They played with them and know exactly what they were and how they worked.  By the way, that beeper pictured was a total piece of c***.  It was modeled after a Panasonic model that was also a total piece of c***.  The best beeper Motorola ever made was the Bravo Plus.

10.  I don't even know who he/she was.

11.  My kids have played Carmen Sandiego games.  Vintage games on a vintage computer.

12.  I never heard of these, either.

13.  My kids have used/watched VHS tapes.

14.  Never came up, but I have a ready answer if it does.

And all this is leading up to the real point of this post.  The other day my son was listening to one of those "country" songs, the one that's called "1980 Something," or something like that, which mentions a space shuttle exploding.  He asked me about it, so I had to somberly tell him about the Challenger.  In the process, I also had to explain to him what an o-ring is and how it works.  "So," he said, "one little part made the whole thing explode?"  "Yep."  It was strange, yet gratifying, to see him sobered by something that happened 15 years before he was born.

New toy

Big news, which you already know if you're one of my FB "friends": I got a smart phone. It is a refurbished model, which means it's already obsolete by tech junkie standards, but as someone who has always explored the cutting edge with older equipment, I am having lots of fun with it.

I've been exploring lots of apps to see what I can find useful or just plain fun. I just recently discovered Google Sky Maps and almost thought it was technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

But many of the apps that I am keeping on the phone are quite simple but, to me, brilliant.  One is a pitch pipe app.  It just shows you a picture of a standard C to C pitch pipe and you touch the note you want to hear.  I've already used it for a chorus practice at our church when I had forgotten my real pitch pipe.  Another music-related app is a digital tuner that shows you the note being played/sung as well as the frequencly in Hertz with a small bar graph at the bottom to give you a better visual image of how far sharp or flat the note is.  I've used it to tune my daughter's guitar and my ukulele, although the uke is pretty good at staying in tune now that the strings are broken in.  It tends to go about 1/4 step flat after a couple of days--equally across all strings, which is pretty weird.  This app is called DaTuner Lite.

I also finally managed to find a play-against-the-computer "Scrabble" game, by which I mean the rules are exactly the same, the board is exactly the same, the points are exactly the same, but it's called Classic Words Free.

Of course it already had a Facebook app as a standard feature.  I also found an RSS reader app called FeedMe which is working pretty well for quick updates.  Just for kicks, I put the Netflix app on it but I haven't really used it yet except to try it out for a minute and make sure it works.

I also put a Bible app on it called MySword for Android.  It's donationware, which means the free version is still pretty cool and is probably all I'll ever want, but for a small donation they'll send you a registration code to unlock all the features, and I think I'm going to do it because it's a great app.

I put the Winamp app on it because it makes it super easy to shoot mp3s into the phone from my computer over WiFi--no more USB cable!  At a friend/co-worker's recommendation I installed an app called RainAlarm OSM that reads your location and then sends you an alert if rain is detected within a certain area (radius selectable in the preferences).  I guess you can understand that, as someone who works outside all the time, rain is something I try to keep track of fairly closely.

Oh yeah, I also thought putting the IMDB.com app on it would be a good idea, because my wife is one of those people who, when she sees someone familiar in a TV show or movie, sits there and agonizes over where she's seen them before, and she won't be quiet about it until she's remembered.  I thought this app would be a good way to keep that kind of stuff to a minimum.

Today, for the first time, I tried out an app called MapMyWalk.  When you finish your walking workout, you can save it and you have the option of sharing it via FB or Twitter.  Since this was the first time, and I wanted to see how it all worked, I didn't send it to FB but only saved it for myself locally.  Unfortunately, once you do that, you can't go back and decide to share it after all, so I couldn't get a good picture of the map (my phone is so old it doesn't have the capability of taking screen shots).  In the future, I think I will send it to FB just so I can get a pretty picture of the map.  But I made a quick & dirty graphic here by taking photos of the screen and stitching them together so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

This is how my route today looked.  I had what's called my "birthday route" today, which means they let me pick an nice, easy route and not get assigned an additional 1/4 to 1/2 route extra like we usually do.  So I finished this morning by about 10:00, which was a nice birthday present.  The app said this route was 5.56 miles long.  I like it that the detail is good enough that I can see where I was and was not criss-crossing streets.  It started there at the green square, then it goes straight up the west side of General McMullen.  Then when I started back south you can see that the line gets all squiggly; that's where I began reading both sides of the street, which is what we refer to as criss-crossing.  All the way back to Castroville Road, then up one side of that short stretch of Cortez, then criss-crossing again until I got to Jewett, then "looping" part of S. San Bernardo (that is, up one side and back down the other), then criss-crossing another section of S. San Bernardo with a small loop at the end where it dead ends, then back over to Cortez where I went down the other side of it from where I'd been before.  Then that tail at the bottom is where I have to read several meters along Castroville Road.  Then I walked back to my truck and turned it off about where that red square is, almost exactly where I was when I had first turned it on.

I've done this before with my GPS unit, but unfortunately I can't do anything with it once I'm finished except look at it myself because it doesn't have any kind of networking capability like the phone does, and it doesn't use Google Maps so the map it shows is very, very bare-bones.

It will be interesting to me to map out all my routes like this so I can get a bird's-eye view of them.

This was certainly strange

It's not unusual for me to see vacant houses with numerous newspaper lying in the yard--the resident apparently having neglected to cancel his subscription when he moved out.  Or died, maybe?  Anyway, I came across this one this morning.

Unfortunately, since as usual I don't want to be looking like I'm up to something in case someone is watching me (people tend to call in complaints if they see one of us pausing for a breath or taking a break), I didn't dig into it to see what the issue date was.

But it was quite strange to find this seemingly fresh copy of the San Antonio Light lying in someone's yard, looking like it had just been delivered that morning, when the Light was shut down 20 years ago.

Photo taken this morning on the east side, in the general area of where Houston and Commerce intersect.

Weird.

An interesting night

Earlier tonight I heard a presentation by an Iraqi, formerly a Muslim, about how he came to know and convert to Christianity.  It was very interesting.  Afterward, he had a question & answer session, and many of the questions put to him had to do with the reality of being in Iraq versus what we were told here in the U.S.

He told us how, like all other Iraqi men, he had had to serve a mandatory term in the army (this was under Saddam Hussein).  He was addressing the topic of Hussein's Iraq actually being a threat to the U.S. or not.  He said, "When I was in the army, I fired only 7 bullets.  Only one of them hit the target, and it wasn't even my target."  Then he added, "By the way, I was in the Republican Guard."

Yeah.  That was the supposedly "elite" troops that we constantly heard about in the news.

But like I said, his story was fascinating.  It began when, as a teenager, he had a 4-year-old sister who died suddenly of an unknown illness.  His mother, grief stricken, asked their local religious leaders for something from the Koran to comfort her, and no one could give her anything.  It angered him so much that he temporarily became an atheist, because he refused to believe in a God that couldn't offer a few words of comfort to his grieving mother.  Later, he read some popular books that contained some Biblical quotes and it began his interest in investigating the Bible.  One of the books he pointed out was Peter Benchley's The Island.  He managed to find a copy of the Gospel of John and mistakenly thought that it was the whole Bible.  Since none of the quotes he had read were from John, he thought that they were all false.  But then later he happened across a copy of the New Testament and saw that John was only a part of it.  Then he realized that because several people from the New Testament often said, "As it is written..." there must be even more to it, and eventually he got hold of a full Bible with both Old and New Testaments.  He had to borrow money from a cousin who had a steady job as a barber to buy it.

He had many valuable insights into living in the Muslim world, and I wish many more Americans could hear what he has to say.  He admitted that he will probably never see any of his family again, and that it will likely not be safe for someone like him to return to the Middle East during his lifetime.

The history of music in 9 minutes

Very cool.

Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwoʻole - Facing Future

I just downloaded this one today. I feel I must say something about it.

Israel "Iz" Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole (click for the Wikipedia link if you want to see how to pronounce his last name) was a Hawaiian musician:  singer and ukulele player.  Follow the link again to read all the details of his life.

Although he was already well-known in Hawaii, this album got him worldwide exposure and his medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" has been used in numerous movies and commercials.  I remember coming across a link to the "Rainbow" part of that medley on YouTube several months ago and was stunned by how hauntingly beautiful it was.  It was also haunting because I realized I had heard it somewhere before, although I couldn't remember where, and at the time I was thinking, "how could I have forgotten I ever heard this?"  And honestly, I don't even want to hear "traditional" versions of that song anymore.

This whole album is just awesome, and the whole thing will be going on my big favorites list.  He sings mostly in Hawaiian, but there are a couple of songs in English, namely the medley I've already mentioned and his own special version of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" that he re-wrote specifically for Hawaii.

His has a mellow tenor voice that sounds like streams of liquid gold floating across blue, sun-dappled waters.  And although my clumsy strumming will never match his playing ability, and my own reedy tenor will never compare with his golden voice, I've already begun practicing the "Rainbow" part of the medley.

He died in 1997 at the young age of 38 from various complications brought on by his severe obesity.  This was the second of four albums he made before his death.  Four more have been released since then.  In my opinion, anyone who even half-assedly wants to play the ukulele should have this album, and listen to it often.

This just in: redshirts were safer

Someone crunched the numbers to discover that wearing red on ST:TOS was actually safer than wearing gold (per capita).