Crossroads-2009 International Quartet Champions

Just thought I’d share some great accapella music with you. Real Barbershop talent.

Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun
Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 12:15

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

The 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sophomore, who joined the Army Reserve a year ago, said he was walking home from work early Tuesday morning when four masked men forced him into an alley at gunpoint.

After ordering him to the ground, the reservist said the men took his wallet, keys, cell phone, and even an energy bar wrapper from his pants pockets.

But when one of the robbers started going through the wallet, the reservist said the hostilities immediately ceased.

“They found my military ID which stopped them dead in their tracks,” the student, who asked not to be identified, told WTMJ-TV. “What I presume to be the leader said, ‘We can’t do this. We’ve got to give him his stuff back.’”

I happened to use Google Translate recently and realized they have changed its face since my last visit. If you don’t know about this service visit the link. When you visit a website in a language you can’t read just visit this site and put the link in the form.

If you have Google Toolbar installed it can have a button or right click link to automatically open the translated page.

I don’t use it often, but each time I am reminded how limited I am knowing only one language well. I am grateful for my family’s effort to have tried to teach me French as a child and for my father’s teaching me to understand etimology listings in Webster’s Dictionary for each definition. We red necks don’t consider how much of our American ‘English’ is based on other languages.

This is the most common view here in Oregon and I like it. But it’s causing some friction with my sun loving wife and friends who are ready for the California style spring. So we wait and watch things turn green and grow long and hope sometime we’ll be dry enough to go mow the lawn.

Splashup is a pretty obvious adaptation of the popular open source program, GIMP, as a WebWare application. I’m am very impressed by how well it has been done too.

Let me add here that GIMP offers much more capability than Splashup does, Scriptfu addons and filters that make it an open source competitor of the commercial Photoshop program. (Though not fully, if you have the cash, Photoshop and Fireworks are still worth the cash.)

Still, this webware has some features that make it a great addition to your image editing abilities from any computer web browser with flash.

To begin with it will load files from your local hard disk or a number of online repositories, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook. In addition if you are needing to edit over several sessions of use you can save it to a splashup format which keeps all the layers, etc. that you have used during editing.

In short, give it a go. I think you’ll be pleased.

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Those who know me know I consider most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a waste of time. There is no substitute for real content on your website or blog to get you up in the rankings of the search engines.

Period.

But once you have some information or posts on your site there are things you can do to increase the odds you will be well placed or noticed at all by search engines and the linked post here spells them out very well in my opinion.

To all my hosted and serviced clients I recommend reading this linked post.

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Street View Gallery > Top
If you haven’t looked at Google Streetview yet you likely at least have heard of it. Google is now using web cameras to display 360 degree views of streets and has them displayed for a number of major cities already. Yes it is likely coming to your home too soon.

But what happens when you cruise around with a camera capable of viewing all around as you go? You find nude sunbathers, accidents, folks entering porn shops who may not really want a picture on the web. But here it is, 500 curiosities from Streetview…

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When I was young directory assistance was free, a human, and very good. I used it a lot and maybe folks like me are why Ma Bell dumped it.

But there is a good reason to keep information flow free and apparently Google agrees with me. What they have done now is created a robotic voice 411 service for businesses and it is free, call 1-800-GOOG-411

I’ve only begun to try it but it looks like a keeper to me.

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What an idea!

I *HATE* cell phone companies. The whole Reagan revolution meant the downfall of customer service and cell phones debut in the same period led the way in customer NO-service.

A major part of the NO-service was the inclusion of terrible contracts for long time periods with exorbitantly high cancellation fees. So along comes this site, CellSwapper, which tries to mate folks trying to leave a contract with others looking to get into one.

There are many reasons to change services, poor coverage, poor sound, etc. can mean you want to change but if you are stuck, this just may be the way to go.

Have a look. Here’s hoping you don’t find it necessary, but most likely… well, good luck.

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