Nine Gadgets

MSNBC.com contributor Winda Benedetti did a feature HERE about

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31800716/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

We, too, possess the heart of an early adopter but the wallet and wary sensibility of a cautious consumer.

Winda Benedetti, contributor msnbc.com

iPhone 3G S

Flip UltraHD

GeForce 3D Vision Kit

Squeezebox Boom

Kindle 2

Roomba 562 Pet

Dream Cat Venus

Transport bed

Touch Watch Phone

Death by Chocolate

A man who worked in a chocolate factory that makes raw chocolate to be used by other candy companies, died when he fell into a vat of melting chocolate. This story out of Camden, New Jersey. Twenty-nine-year-old Vincent Smith had only worked at the factory for a few weeks. Story HERE.

The City of Brotherly Hate

Let me check my calendar...okay it says 2009. So why do some folks in Philadelphia think it is 1959? I might have expected a story like this fifty years ago, but not now. A day camp for kids paid The Valley Swim Club $1900 to allow their campers to swim there. The club is private, but advertises open membership. When the kids arrived, pandemonium broke out. What was the issue? The kids from the camp were mostly African-American.

One of the campers quoted a woman at the club:

"I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child,'" said camper Dymire Baylor.

Reports are that when the black children got in the pool, all the Caucasian kids immediately left. Horace Gibson, a parent of one of the day camp kids said:

"The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

The day after this happened, the camp was told their money would be refunded and they could not come back. The Valley Swim Club's president, John Duesler, said that the concern is that the kids would "change the complexion...and the atmosphere of the club".

Yes blatant racism is alive and well in America, and it is not only in the South. And what a sad thing for these children to have experienced. For the full story as reported by Philly's NBC 10, CLICK HERE.

Google OS

Will Google have the muscle to do what OS/2 and BeOS failed to accomplish? The search giant has announced it will soon be releasing a new operating system based on the company's Chrome browser.

Personally, I would love to see more widespread choice. Although Google is touting the new OS as a Windows alternative for netbooks, can its wider deployment be far behind? Now if Apple can be persuaded to release OSX into the wild, we could see some real competitive choices. Windows, OSX, Google OS, Linux, wow! Let the OS wars begin!

King of the Wild Frontier

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that when I was a small kid, I loved cowboy hats and my Davy Crockett faux-coonskin cap. In the old photos my sis has scanned was this one of me wearing that very cap. Needless to say, I was a big fan of Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.

In my 1950s childhood mind, I probably had quite a few adventures emulating the bravery of Davy as portrayed by Fess Parker in living black & white on our television screen. Of course I was not alone. Davy was a pop phenomenon in those days. After all, he "kilt him a bar when he was only three".

One of my toys from those days is still in my possession. It was a plastic squeak toy of a child dressed out as Davy. This may be the only toy I still have from my childhood, and frankly I am surprised it is still around. The second picture is it, and you can also see the chewed up end of Davy's rifle. I recall that it was a really pleasant feeling to chew that thing, not thinking about the damage it was doing to the toy. Maybe I was like a dog with a squeak toy, chewing and squeaking it as much as I could.

So there we have it. A story of a boy, a toy, and a frontier hero who died at the Alamo.

Heard of Jackson Hole? Here's Jackson Tree

It isn't uncommon to read stories about the Virgin Mary appearing in water stains under a freeway or on a grilled cheese sandwich. Or perhaps a cheese puff that someone thinks looks like Jesus. Now with the recent death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson has begun making appearances.

A family in Stockton, California says that Jacko has appeared on a stump where their birch tree had a branch removed. As Skeptic magazine publisher and author Michael Shermer has pointed out, we are pattern seeking animals. This is why we see shapes in clouds and constellations in our night sky. Despite that, I am sure there are people who worship MJ to the point that they will hang on to this as a sign of some sort. I just wonder...when they pruned the tree, did they remove Jackson's nose?

Yep...I'm bad.

It's Independence Day!

Happy 233rd birthday, USA!!

1939 Pontiac

I found out that my sister has scanned some old family photos that I never knew even existed, some of which I am very glad to discover. Here is one of them.

This photo was taken in 1955, and is my mother and I with our old 1939 Pontiac. I am sure of the year, as Mom is obviously pregnant with my oldest sister. This car is one of my very earliest memories. I vividly recall sitting in the back seat. I loved peering out of the second backseat window, the one in the very back that is smaller than the others. Another thing interesting about this car is that the back doors are hinged in the rear and open in the opposite direction from the front doors.

In this picture, I am wearing one of my two favorite types of head gear during those times...a cowboy hat. The other was my Davy Crockett faux-coonskin cap.

I am not exactly sure of the locale of this picture, and I will need to ask my parents, but I suspect this was at the married student housing at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where my dad was completing his Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Below is an ad for this car when it was first offered to the public by General Motors. Wouldn't it be nice to have one of these now?

A July Thundershower

We have been in a very unusual weather pattern for Colorado, where we have had beautiful mornings and early afternoons, followed by severe weather in the late afternoon. This has gone on for about three weeks, and has even included tornadoes, as indicated in an earlier post here. We also had about $13,000 in damage to the house, including the roof, all from hail. We are working to get that repaired, but it is a long process.

This afternoon's storm was a nice thunderstorm, not so severe, but gave us a good downpour and a lot of rolling thunder. I grabbed the trusty Olympus LS-10, and picked up a few seconds of sound. Below is some of it, and you can hear the rainfall, the thunder, and a neighbor's windchime. Enjoy!



Edited to add: This is the first audio file I have placed on this blog using a different host. I had been using podbean.com for hosting audio files and creating an embedded player. This one is using the Internet Archive at www.archive.com. They can host text, audio, video, and many other types of multimedia files. Their embedded player you see above has a volume control which is lacking on PodBean's. The Internet Archive also creates not only an embeddable player, but it allows you to choose a license for your files. The original file I uploaded was MP3 format, but they also create other versions automatically. My file resulted in not only the MP3, but also Ogg Vorbis, ZIP, M3U, and metadata files. It is totally free, and I highly recommend it. There is nothing wrong with PodBean, but I am liking the Internet Archive a lot!

The Wright Stuff

Tuesday, I posted about the Air New Zealand in flight safety video featuring crew members in nothing but a smile and body paint. (Well, the captain did also have a hat). Well, now we have another "naked on the airplane" story in the news.

Fifty-year-old Keith Wright, a man from the Bronx who is apparently bipolar, decided to strip naked on a US Airways flight from Charlotte to Los Angeles. He refused to keep a blanket on that was put on him by a flight attendant. Ultimately, two Los Angeles law enforcement personnel on the flight wrestled him down and the flight was diverted to Albuquerque, where Wright will likely be given a psychiatric evaluation.