Mostly True Tales

Today, Americans honor our Veterans. I hope everyone reading this will reflect on the sacrifices our Veterans have made for all of us.

It’s easy to take for granted the things that have never been taken from you, things like freedom.

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live in a country like China? How about Russia, or Iraq, or Iran? Maybe North Korea?

Citizens of these countries lead very different lives than the average American.

We as American citizens owe our many freedoms to the countless brave veterans of our country’s history. Free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of choice, an entire Bill of Rights, try to imagine your life without them.

It’s hard, because we have never had to live without them, but don’t be overcome by complacency, that is where the danger lies. These freedoms have, and will continue, to come at great cost.

Look around you today and think about how good you have it. Find a Veteran, thank a Veteran.

You are free. What will you do with your freedom?

I’ve been searching for a nice way to integrate my home movies with the blog. I ran across a fairly new video hosting site called Vimeo.

Vimeo is a pretty nice site that, at least so far, is not filled up with a bunch of crap like YouTube. They allow 500MB of uploading per week, which is more than enough for me. As usual, Vimeo, converts your videos to flash for streaming, but it seems to me that the end result is cleaner and faster than other video sites. Vimeo also embeds quite nicely into Wordpress.

So, I am experimenting by going back to the master of my movies and exporting them in a higher quality than I had online before, once uploaded, Vimeo provides the code to embed the video. The end result is pretty nice.

It’s a slow process though, as the export from dv takes a while, then the larger file has to be uploaded. It will be a while before I have all the movies online, but look for a movie page from the main menu soon, and drop me line telling me what you think.

The other day Sarah came to me and said,

“Hey Dad, we won our game and I’m the only one that scored.”

“Wow, congratulations Honey, what was the score?”

“Five to Zero”

What more can I say?

Meet Marina, a 26 year old philologist (the study of linguistics and etymology) and the creator of the Hot for Words Podcast.

Hot for Words, is an incredibly interesting, fun, and educational video Podcast presented in Marina’s sexy, but tasteful style. Watch it once, and you’ll be hooked. After discovering this Podcast, I found it so interesting, I downloaded all the previous shows.

Armed with her Oxford English dictionary, Marina takes suggestions from her viewers and explains the history and true meaning of the word. Often the featured word pertains to the time, for instance, she just finished a series on Halloween.

The Podcast is more than just another case of, sex sells, it presents useful and interesting information that could or should be valuable to anyone. I wish I had a teacher like her when I was in school!

You can subscribe to Hot for Words via iTunes with this URL,

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=265783864

or you can watch her online here,

http://www.youtube.com/hotforwords

After 15 years of Halloween as a parent, it’s over. No Halloween for the Amazing Brian this year. That’s the trouble with having kids, they grow up.

Bonnie and her friends have decided they are too old and did NOTHING! Sarah, went to a friends, to trick or treat in a different neighborhood.

Marcia asked me weeks ago if I would mind if Sarah wasn’t with us this year. I never answered her. It really didn’t matter if I minded.

So, it was kind of a sad day around casa de Amazing yesterday. What was once Marcia’s favorite holiday, with our house elaborately decorated, guests coming and going all night, with lots and lots of kids, has been reduced to nothing, nadda, zip.

Do I mind? Hell yeah I mind! But, it doesn’t make any difference.