July « 2006 « Sam's Thoughts

Bittorrent test for the debate

I am going to be recording and then posting audio and video of the Ypsilanti Mayoral debate tomorrow. In order maximize availability and conserve bandwidth (video is large especially when you are talking about a 90 minute debate) I’m going to make it available by as many channels as possible. This includes ourmedia.org, google and [...]

New local food blog

If you are into food, and who isn’t (unless of course you are some hotshot Hollywood starlet starving herself) you should check out Ypsi Bites. My lovely wife Julie has started a new food related blog. Go check it out!

Ypsi Mayoral Debate

You may have noticed the little banner in the top left corner, about the debate for the Ypsilanti Mayoral candidates this Thursday at McKenny Union at EMU. My friend Mark Maynard is the instigator. I will be recording and videotaping the event and putting it on line after the event. I am planning on putting [...]

Happy birthday

Twelve months and 300+ posts later this blog is one year old today. On this day one year ago I put up my first piece about Tim Burton and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’ve had fun doing this and actually been able to make contact with some interesting new people over the past year. [...]

The Mid-East

According to Webster’s Dictionary:

Main Entry: Sem·ite Pronunciation: ‘se-”mIt, especially British ‘sE-”mIt Function: noun Etymology: French sémite, from Semitic Shem, from Late Latin, from Greek SEm, from Hebrew ShEm 1 a : a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs b : a [...]

Open source and free software in ypsi

If anyone in the Ypsi area is interested in learning about some of the free and open source software applications that are available let me know. There are a lot of great free tools available that I think most non-geeks are probably not aware of. If there is enough interest I’ll look into maybe getting [...]

comment system change

I made a change in the comment system the other day. I found a wordpress plug-in that does those captcha images for authentication. That’s where it the system does a a stylized text string as a graphical image that can’t generally be read be comment spam bot. So now you don’t have to register and [...]

Podsafe music

If you aren’t familiar with the term Podsafe Music refers to music that the artists have given permission for podcasters to use free of charge. For the most part podsafe music does not include anything from the major record labels that has sold in any significant numbers. So far the record labels have steadfastly refused [...]

Brain Age

I recently got a Nintendo DS Lite for fathers day. I also got the game Brain Age. Let me first say that I have not traditionally been a big video game player. I have played various games over the years and not found most of them to be particularly compelling. There are certain exceptions, like [...]

The downward spiral continues

First we have complete debacle that is the “Operation Enduring Freedom” or whatever the hell they are calling it this week. That is the ongoing war in Iraq, now 3 1/2 years in. Today at least 59 people were killed in a bombing in Kufa, Iraq. That is in addition to the 40+ killed yesterday [...]