DougFolkerts.com

Here come the Germany photos. I’ve decided to simply post them as as they occurred starting with a collection of shots spanning the entire vacation. Then, galleries will be added of the different locations. On the photo page the newest galleries will be presented at the top as they are created. Check back often, It’ll take a while to get them all built and posted. The individual galleries will also have a lot of short video clips. The more artsy pics, will appear on evrange.com after more time goes by. After you enter the Germany Gallery click on the “Map This” button to see the sights we visited on Google Maps. Select the gallery from the “Photos/Family” page.

Having a great time though internet access is very spotty. We’re staying with mostly older relatives who do not use the internet. Even people our age don’t use the internet much. Here at the inn where I’m writing from the internet is very slow. So sorry not many pictures for you to see.

The shots from my phone suck and there’s even less access for the iphone. Stay tuned.  Sooner or later I’ll upload a few shots before we get home.

I have finally attempted to integrate my smugmug photo site into this one. Theoretically I should be able to make the header of my Smugmug pages appear exactly as it does here. I came pretty close, and the functionality is there so I guess I’m happy.

For now all my pictures are now coming from Smugmug and you can click back to my other sites with ease. Now I should spend more time expressing myself here on the blog.

click on Photos/Family above to try it out.

I’ve decided I may have a problem. I love the idea of websites that host pictures. It seems i have photos scattered all over the place on the Web. For starters I have pictures hosted on a service called PBase.com. I liked Pbase (my account has expired, but the pictures are still there) because of it’s classy interface and also because it categorizes the equipment used to take a photo. for instance you can search for images taken with a certain lens. I also used Picasa, a free service of Google. The main draw here is it’s free and it integrates somewhat into my other Googles services such as Gmail. I also have pictures hosted here on my own site, see the photos link above. and also on my website EVRange.com. That’s my photoblob and that will probably run the way it is for some time.  But now I have signed up with another site called Smugmug.com. Why another service? Smugmug offers unlimited photo hosting and virtually unlimited bandwidth to display my pictures. They’ll automatically resize pictures and offer them in a variety of sizes and with a variety of themes in neatly organized galleries. I can also modify my Smugmug site to share the appearance and header/navigation banner of this site. Once that’s done it’ll integrate into this site and appear to be a part of it.

All I’ll have to do is upload my pics, add a few geo tags, and spend a wee bit of time making it all look slick. Sure I could continue to simply host picutes here using Minimal Gallery, (which I love BTW) But it’s getting cumbersome to manage.

So stay tuned, for a slick new integration of Smugmug into this site.

It’s Tuesday the 4th of September, 2007. Senator Craig resigned 3 days ago after it was revealed he’d been arrested in a men’s room in the Minneapolis airport. He plead guilty to disorderly conduct in lieu of charges of propositioning a homosexual encounter. He claims he needed to quit the Senate in order to defend himself in a closed, adjudicated case.

I’m not sure how he’s going to defend his actions in the restroom that day. Seems to me that all the defense has to do is bring on 3 or 4 “experts” to explain gay bathroom cruising etiquette, then have the arresting officer recount his observations and blammo case closed. But if that’s what he thinks he can do, best of luck to him.

Today the Washington Post is reporting that Craig is considering reversing his resignation decision. Amazing. Arrested, pleads guilty to a lesser charge (with the stated intention that he thought it would go away), resigns his Senate seat and now hopes for a complete “do over.”

In my twenties I worked for a private investigator as a plain clothes shoplifting agent. I would make 1-5 arrests a day. I listened to the recorded interview between Criag and the officer and came away with the clear impression of a panicked scared guilty man attempting to weasel out of a tight spot. I didn’t hear an innocent man trapped in a misunderstanding.

Sometimes an animal will naw off their own leg to escape a trap and survive. Sometimes a guilty person will believe their own lies to escape the unthinkable. Poor Senator Craig, he’s still thrashing wildly in his trap.

This is a hilarious new show from HBO. Two New Zealanders living in New York City attempting to hit the big time in the folk music world. Barley getting by their adventures will leave you in stitches. Check out the website to view the first show.

Quicksilver is an incredibly elegant, simple, and powerful utility used to start programs or perform certain tasks with your Mac.

This fellow has created an excellent tutorial on how to use it.    If you’re not using Quicksilver, do yourself a favor and start.

On the face of it, this is such a phenomenal act of criminal poor judgement. If this happened to my child, as a parent I hope I would have the strength to pursue justice until those responsible were severely punished.

from the AP

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

“The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

Some parents said they were upset by the staff’s poor judgment in light of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 students and professors dead, including the gunman.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on locked door.

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.

It’s called Justin.TV  His goal is to wear a helmet cam and broadcast his life live at all times. He says he’ll do it for the rest of his life, we’ll see.

Would someone please give George W. Bush a blow job, so we can impeach him.

I followed a link on boingboing.net to a fellow that created a tag cloud of ideas from president Bush’s recent state of the union address. In the comments on that page someone else mentions a site where you can go back through all the state of the union addresses though Jan 1776.

 Check it out.

First off, it’s called, “Cooking for Engineers” That appealed to me immediately. It’s full of pictures to help keep a guy on course as he prepares whatever. Someone else has to think this site is as useful as I do.

I saw this and had to share. This thing is so cool, I can’t believe it.

The cool video of this thing has gone missing from youtube. Basically it’s about the size of a large jar of mayonaise. It drips water about 6 or 8 inches through the beams of several LEDs that fire at the precise rate of the dripping water. The drips appear to hang susspended in air. You can change the rate of the LEDs and make the drops appear to float upwards.

Oh, I found the video again.

Build your own. Here’s a link to the fellow that built it.

I am not a religious person. That being said, I do have a fascination for the formation of religions. I’m amazed at the differences and similarities between different faiths. I also find the subject of man’s transition from a polytheistic faith structure to a monotheistic structure to be interesting as well.

Not being religious is of course no reason to deny anyone else their beliefs. I share the site mentioned below as a means of raising awareness of the many different religious possibilities out there. So many find comfort in their religion, most often learned as a result of their parents’ preferences. If I was born in another part of the world where different faiths were predominate, would I be of that faith? Or would I still be a non believer?

I do sometimes object if the religion itself raises the fears that it answers, thereby giving each participant the need for religion along with its rewards. What is it that draws some people towards religion, and what repels others?

The site below could be considered a clearing house of different religions. A place where different faiths can be compared and in some cases put into a nutshell for quick understandings of their differences. I find it interesting.

religionfacts.com

The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken

Watch this video for more understanding about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image. Check out the link to the image itself. The UDF (ultra deep field) image is of a very tiny portion of the night sky, something like what you would see looking through an 8-foot-long drinking straw.

We live in the Milky Way galaxy. There are an estimated 200 - 600 billion stars here. The Hubble image shows an estimated 10,000 galaxies in that tiny portion of the sky. Phenominal.

Here’s another excellent perspective on the image.

After you watch his video check out his site. deepastronomy.com

Here’s a link to the Ultra Deep Field Image on the Hubble telescope site.

Rumsfeld Gets Cute At The Podium

I never would have guessed I’d be laughing while watching Rumsfeld, but here it is.

This is very cool. Free lectures on an incredibly wide range of subjects from professors at universities like Purdue and UCLA. Oh boy, I can feel smart again.

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Many of my frinds are aware that I enjoy the challenge of opening a lock without its key. I’ve helped many of them retrieve the hopelessly locked contents of whatever they’ve lost the key to. Here is a very friendly explanation / guide to the principles and techniques of lockpicking.

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While making a purchase online, how many times have you seen the little box that asks you to enter a coupon code, and wished you had a code to possibly save yourself a few dollars?  I’ve even searched Google looking for a code to use on some sites. Now there is a site that lists codes for many ECommerce sites. It’s http://currentcodes.com

Albeit a bit rough at the edges, and definitely low budget, Alex Rose and his business partner Jay Adelson have started an online television network of sorts, sometimes called IPTV. Most of their programs appeal to geek culture and technology issues, but they’re cool. Check out revision3.com to see for yourself.