Featured Photos


Baseball Hall of Fame - 8/23/11

Featured Video


Avery's QuEST Project - It's Healthy!

House Construction


The Completed Home Renovation


Home Renovation - Complete!


Our House Construction Photoblog

RSS Feed

Random Acts of Blogging

« Previous Entries                     Next Entries »

Accidental Geo-Maps

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

This is very cool (from Newscientist via Speculist):

Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 3 Comments »

The Untold History of Earth Day

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Check this out:

Today is Earth Day, a holiday created to honor the planet and to raise the consciousness of man

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 4 Comments »

Page Not Found – Ver 1.0

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

This made me laugh:

I’m a geek.

(via)

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging, Tech Talk | Comments Off on Page Not Found – Ver 1.0

High School High

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Both Jason and Ilya have partaken in the “My So-Called High School Life” meme, and since high school was all about peer pressure, well – here goes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 8 Comments »

Free Ice Cream!

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but no one can argue with free ice cream:

As a way to thank our customers for their support and to celebrate 31 years of scooping the chunkiest, funkiest ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbet, Ben & Jerry

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | Comments Off on Free Ice Cream!

Another Mind-bending, Useless Statement about Time

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

We’ve all heard or seen statements like this, typically around New Year’s Eve, when the almighty “they” decide we need a leap second:

One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 4 Comments »

Geek Humor

Friday, March 13th, 2009

xkcd.com is always funny, but this one really made me laugh out loud:

(hat tip: Bill Napier)

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »

New Photo of Abraham Lincoln Found

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

I find this story fascinating:

[President Ulysses S.] Grant’s 38-year-old great-great-grandson, Ulysses S. Grant VI, had seen [an old photo of the White House] before, but didn’t examine it closely until late January. A tall figure in the distance caught his eye, although the man’s facial features are obscured.

He called Keya Morgan, a New York-based photography collector and Lincoln aficionado, who helped identify it as Lincoln.

Morgan talked Grant into taking the photo out of the album and examining it for clues, such as the identity of the photographer.

Grant carefully removed it and was shocked to see the handwritten inscription on the back: “Lincoln in front of the White House.” Grant believes his great-grandfather, Jesse Grant, the general’s youngest son, wrote the inscription. Also included was the date 1865, the seal of photographer Henry F. Warren, and a government tax stamp that was issued for such photos to help the Civil War effort between 1864 and 1866.

Morgan recalled the well-documented story of Warren’s trip to Washington to photograph Lincoln after his second inauguration in March 1865. Lincoln was killed in April, so the photo could be the last one taken of him.

Warren, a commercial photographer from Massachusetts, enticed Lincoln into his frame shortly after the inauguration by taking pictures of young Tad Lincoln and asking the boy to bring his father along for a pose, according to the book, “Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose,” by Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf. “This is the first act of paparazzi ever toward a president,” Morgan said. “Lincoln is not too happy at all.”

Here’s the photo:

I’ve highlighted Lincoln with a thin, red box. In the computer-enhanced, blown-up version, you can see his distinctive beard, as well as the fact that he towers over everyone else in the picture:

The Associated Press speculates that this may be not only the last photograph taken of Lincoln (he was shot and killed roughly a month later), but it also may be the first photograph ever taken of a U.S. President in front of the White House. Given how many photographs have been taken of Presidents in front of the White House since, I think this is quite the find.

It also brings to mind a conversation we’re having over at Jason Bennion’s Simple Tricks & Nonsense about the nostalgic value of physical media versus the more modern, digital media. In my home office, we have a wall-to-wall bookshelf of photo albums containing more than twenty years of photographs that my wife has taken over the years. Each and every one of them has a brief note written on the back, describing who is in the picture and where/why it was taken. About eighteen months ago, the volume of digital pictures we take and the dwindling number of places that will actually print photographs for you has led us to abandon this impressive collection, and instead rely on the (somewhat equally impressive) electronic collection on our hard drive. Finding a picture of a given person online involves typing their name into Vista’s search box, whereas finding one in the photo albums involves pulling several volumes off the shelf and leafing through the pages.

In the case of Grant and Lincoln, it’s fortuitous that Jesse Grant was like my wife in regards to his photo archiving skills. 130 years from now, though, almost every surviving picture of Barack Obama will likely be digitally tagged with his name, as well as the date, time, and location in the photograph, greatly reducing the possibility that an important photo would be lost in a photo album, or remain unidentified because no one ever bothered to remove it from it’s plastic sleeve.

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 6 Comments »

eBay Fails to Please

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

While I usually try to stay current on all things techie, I must admit that until the other day, I had never tried to buy anything on eBay. Now that I’ve been through it once, I don’t think I’ll ever try again.

I’ve gotten in the habit of watching DVDs on my commute to/from work. The trip is about an hour, so I’ve been watching TV episodes rather than movies (without commercials, I can comfortably watch two sitcom episodes or a single hour-long drama on one trip). One of my favorite series is The West Wing, so I set out to purchase the complete series, figuring 154 episodes could keep me busy for upwards of six months. The retail sites are asking roughly $200 for the set, which strikes me as a little steep, but then a Google search turned up an eBay auction with an $87 “BuyNow” option.

Now, I’m not one to dole out my credit card number to any random website, just because they claim to have a good deal going. But this is eBay. Plus, the seller (“rachel25671”) had a very high rating (I forget the number, but it was over 200, including a 99%+ satisfaction rating, and many positive reviews). Also, the auction claimed she had sold five sets, and still had five more in stock, suggesting that others had successfully purchased it from her in the past. So, I took the plunge.

The first thing I was hit with was a requirement to join PayPal. eBay uses PayPal to manage their credit card transactions. I’ve avoided PayPal in the past because I get so much spam claiming to be from them, and I didn’t want to be in a situation where I’d have to look at each one to see what was real and what wasn’t. I’m sure PayPal executives will hate to read that, but it’s true. Anyway, I had come this far, so I relented and joined PayPal. I gave them my credit card number, but

Categories: Random Acts of Blogging, Tech Talk | 5 Comments »

Blog Schwag

Friday, February 13th, 2009

In the mail today:

My complimentary copy of Drink, Play, F@#k, as promised by the book’s publicist, Martin Wilson, in the comments of one of my previous posts.

This marks the first time anyone’s ever sent me anything because of something I’ve written on my blog, so first of all – as the kids might say: W00T!

Secondly, my mission is now to uphold my part of the bargain, which includes reading the book and posting my review back here at I Should Be Sleeping.

Watch this space…

Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Random Acts of Blogging | 3 Comments »

« Previous Entries                     Next Entries »