Swans Necking
I am blogging from www.flickr.com. My flickr page is:
http://www.flickr.com/kpgraham
This is very cool.
http://www.flickr.com/kpgraham
This is very cool.

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29 April 2005
Microphone going crazy on eBay I created a microphone with a tone control in addition to a volume control. The eBay bidding is getting crazy.
![]() Check the auction on ebay -- |
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25 April 2005
Microphones news I put up one of my frankenmics made out of a Harley-Davidson tail light on eBay last night. It already has two bids on it.
Here's an interesting story about Johnny Carson's tonight show microphone. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/johnny_s_microphone |
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22 April 2005
South Park Keith There's a site that lets you create your own South Park Character. I have only watched a few South Park episodes. I can't really take it in large doses.
http://www.planearium2.de/flash/sp-studio-e.html ![]() South Park Keith - |
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21 April 2005
Cover art for Astounding Tales "best-of" I spent an hour today producing sort-of-art by running images through the Paint Shop Pro filters. The link goes to some hefty images, some over a meg, so don't bother or be real patient if you have a dial up.
http://www.astoundingtales.com/bestof Arthur might use one for the cover. I am also going to ask the artist who did the cover of Issue 4 if I can use one of his images, but I wanted Arthur to check these first. - |
StrangeTales.net fixed up When there was the unpleasantness with AstondingStories.com, I registered StrangeTales.net along with AstoundingTales.com as alternatives. We went with AstoundingTales.com and I've been using strangetales as a place to put some odd pieces of thought and code.
When I started redoing the AudioCD.com interface (previous post), I decided to redo the StrangeTales.net interface and use it to feature a few programming projects. I made a new piece of pseudo-art for the background and added a links. I am quite proud of it. http://www.StrangeTales.net |
Testing a new interface I have a very pretty home page template for the new AudioCD.com. This is just a home page for the time being. It works on FireFox and IE6, but I don't know about primitive browsers. If you have an old browser (IE5, Netscape, or older AOL) please let me know how it works.
http://www.strangetales.net/acd/index.html The background should stretch if you resize the screen and the test messages should appear and then fade away and a new message appear. Note that none of the links work. I am testing the template, not the code. |
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18 April 2005
Doing Panoramas Erica is kicking around the idea of making some money off of her fancy camera by doing some real estate shots, especially panoramas. We've been looking into it and it seems like something that we can do, leveraged by my own techno-dweeb background.
I created a little javascript program to display panoramas. This code is simple - about twenty lines of code - and works better than the stuff that you pay for. It will work on most browsers that support cascading style sheets, which is about 99%. I went into the back yard and took 10 overlapping pictures. I then loaded them into a progam called iVista Panorama. It took about 15 minutes, but the progam did a nice job. I resized the image (it is still about 400k) and put it in a web page. You can see the watermark running along the center of the image left by the free version of the software. You can see it at my www.paperthetown.com domain. It still has a loading problem and sometimes you have to press refresh to see the who image. I have to fix that. |
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15 April 2005
Cat NightsSpace.com had a nice article about Cat Nights and feline constellations. Their lead off paragraph, however is a great idea for a short story.
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Garden Gnome story idea I've often thought that there has to be a good story in ceramic garden gnomes. The story would be a variation on a fairy tale, told in modern times with garden gnomes coming to life and doing good or evil.
So now - truth is stranger than fiction - the real story is written for us. Read CNN gnome story Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, southwest England. "I grabbed the first thing that came to hand -- one of my garden gnomes -- and hurled it at him, and hit him," she recalled. I love it! I also like the use of the word woken. Coming from the Hudson Valley and being descended from the Dutch settlers, germanic variations on some common English words are part of my vocabulary, but I have to careful not to use get or got in the perfect tenses or verb forms ending in en or on because they sound strange to people outside the region. |
Geek Alert! Geekspeak follows I’ve written a links page in PHP and MySQL. www.harplinks.com. I did this in three days, although I have been tweaking for a few days since it went live.
The page is entirely generated from a couple of thousand harmonica links that I’ve snatched off of the internet at various times. It is better than a search engine because you can rate links and report dead links and it keeps track of the most popular links. I’ve also made the code generic in that I can configure it for new web pages. I am looking to make an aviation links page and a pain-relief links page. T Well, I think it’s cool, even if no one else does. |
Audio Review - Legends by the Masters of Fantasy (volume 1) This is another bargain book on tape from BookCloseouts.com. It cost me $8.99, but the list price was $25.This tape is two novelettes of about 90 minutes each. The first is The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King and the second is The Seventh Shrine by Robert Silverberg, who is also the Legends of the Masters series editor. The title of the series is Legends by the Masters, but it makes no claim that any of these are actually good stories. The Stephen King story is from his Dark Tower stories. There is a preface by Stephen King claiming that the story stands alone, which it does. The Little Sisters of Aluria drops the reader down in the middle of a journey with the enigmatic gunslinger. It progresses through a series of events and concludes with the gunslinger continuing on his way without ever doing much of anything. Each event appears to be as much a surprise to the author as to the reader. King is a master at stringing together events to create a story, but I am sure that he wrote this story one day without any idea where it would end, other than the hero walking on to his next adventure. Each event is encountered without reason or foreshadowing. King strings these events into a story by force of personality. The little sisters command some kind of medical bugs, but by the end, it seems, they may be constructed of the bugs - it is not quite clear. There is a dog with a cross on his chest in the first scene, which appears in a later scene and kills a sister, but it is not clear why. There is a gold medallion that the sisters are afraid of, but the reason is not explored. The sisters drink blood, but they are not vampires, they just like it. The story is just a bunch of King-ian horror elements, stirred well and presented in the context of the Dark Tower narrative. Robert Silverberg had a big hit with Lord Valentine's Castle. It was a Novel where Weltschöpfung (World Creation) is an important part of the book. (I love to use those academic sounding German words.) The world that Silverberg created was called Majipoor. Lord Valentine's Castle was the engaging story of a street juggler who is really a usurped emperor of Majipoor. He must regain his memory, and fight a war where dreams are the weapons. It was good stuff. Less good, were the books Valentine Pontifex and The Majipoor Chronicles. I've read them both and they held my interest because the first book was so powerful. The Seventh Shrine is a story from one of the later books. It is full of explanations of who Valentine is, the politics of Majipoor, and the plots inherited from the previous books. This slows the story down. The Seventh Shrine is basically a murder mystery where all the red herrings come from the long exposition of old history. Even though I did not remember who the murderer was, I found my mind wondering and twice I had to rewind the tape a few minutes because I was not listening. The production was well done. The readers were competent, if not memorable. For some reason, the book production editors think that synthesized music is just what audio book buyers want. Always hate any music that is not performed by real musicians, please! Despite the poor quality of the stories, I will move on and try another in this series. There are two more volumes at BookCloseouts.com and I think there are a total of five in the series. Perhaps the next set of tapes will be better. |
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01 April 2005
Cat and Mouse Gracie and Ollie each caught a mouse today. The lack of a heating system has upset the balance of nature. Either the cold house or the heat of the wood stove has forced the mice that have been surreptitiously living in the walls and under the fridge to show themselves.
Jed Hartman wrote extensively about finding a humane mousetrap, and being afraid to touch the mouse (see Jed's blog lorem ipsum). I, on the other hand, have vicious little cats who torture the mice before they die. I feel for the mice, but I know enough not to try and rescue them. I don’t really worry about the mice and the cats get so much pleasure out of it. |