A Handy Utility...

FLV to MP3 Online Converter.

Convert your FLV files (YouTube's videos) to MP3 fast. It's 100% free.

This is not a bad little site. It really works...



What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

Peter Murphy - A Strange Kind of Love ( Trent Reznor, Jeordie White)

His voice is still as good as it ever was. This track brings chills to me...

Peter Murphy - Strange Kind of Love

This is a good version of this track. He looks like he has been in the deep desert mining Spice...Blue Eyes are a sure sign of Fremen. This is from the "Deep" album as well.

Peter Murphy - Cuts You Up

1991. What a great album this came from "Deep" Was the title. Great quality for this vid as well. He is the Godfather of Goth...

Warm Leatherette - Trent Reznor, Jeordie White, Peter Murphy

What a great version of this track!!! I always loved the original version when i went to Starz.

Northwest Con Trail...

Half-circle
From RMStringer

[Flickr] Schmap Richmond Fourth Edition: Photo Inclusion

My Photo was chosen for the Guide!!! 

--
Subject: [Flickr] Schmap Richmond Fourth Edition: Photo Inclusion



You've been sent a Flickr Mail from Emma J. Williams:

------------------------------------------------------------

:: Schmap Richmond Fourth Edition: Photo Inclusion


Hi Robert,

I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo
has been selected for inclusion in the newly released
fourth edition of our Schmap Richmond Guide:

Tobacco Company Club
http://www.schmap.com/richmond/nightlife_nightclubs/p=265136/i=265136.jpg

If you like the guide and have a website, blog or personal
page, then please also check out the customizable
widgetized versions of our Schmap Richmond Guide, complete
with your published photo:

http://www.schmap.com/guidewidgets/p=73048694N00/c=SF20622622

Thanks so much for letting us include your photo - please
enjoy the guide!

Best regards,

Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

------------------------------------------------------------


The Flickr Team

www.flickr.com

--
RMSTringer
+++++++++++++++

Thought for today...

We live our lives in relation to what Thomas Keating calls 'the false self,' the self created and conferred by culture. pg116 'The Heart of Christianity' 2003 Marcus J. Borg Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Congress's Business?

Roger Clemens? Gas? War?  Steroids?  What the hell are we electing our Congressmen for?  Who really gives a big rat’s ass about him using or not using “enhancement drugs” while playing baseball. I mean come the hell on!!  We are at WAR for God’s sake and they are worrying about steroid use.  Gas is spiraling out of control with the big gas companies turning the biggest profits with analysts predicting $4 a gallon this summer ever and Congress is worried about baseball? How will we ever get to the game?  Why are they so concerned? They are a bunch of crooks and liars themselves yet we re-elect them every 4 years.  Clemens is a professional athlete and he gave a good show for the fans. They paid him millions of dollars to do it.  Just because someone got pissed and “blew the whistle” on the practice that has gone on for numerous years, doesn't facilitate the need for Congress to get involved. If the Baseball Commissioner, Bud Selig, cant police his men how do we expect Congress to?  Get a new commissioner that can do the job. What a huge pile of shit if you ask me.

 

 Let the congressmen and women get back to things that really matter and get the hell out of baseball.  This nation has so lost its way in the governmental department it is just amazing.  Baseball? For all of the waste of public money this had cost the public; what good can come out of it. People go to watch a live game for the thrill and to root for their team and see a good show! What is next? Congress regulating how loud Rock Concerts should be and how long they can play? IT just amazes me about how misguided The USA has become. “Playing tonight, The National Congressional Baseball Team, Steroid Free as House Bill BR549 Mandates.”

 

What a monumental waste of my money…

 

RMStringer

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You have no conscience and it seems you never will - Cyberaktif

 

Turning Ten - Billy Collins

If you are like me, you can relate to this poem. I saw it in a book by Marcus Borg "The Heart of Christianity"

Here it is:

 

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

--
RMSTringer
+++++++++++++++

Weekend Bike Ride...

Yesterday we rode Lakeview 1&2 again and ended up with 12.45 miles total. After the ride, my legs were destroyed!  My calf muscles and quads are sore as well as my knees.  It was the perfect temp for a ride as it was about 45 degrees.

Have a good evening…

 

RMStringer

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You have no conscience and it seems you never will - Cyberaktif

 

Humans – Chock Full of Vitamins and Other Essential Nutrients

Thanks to Mac for letting me post this!

Humans – Chock Full of Vitamins and Other Essential Nutrients

In Hawaii a tiger took a walk on the mild side last week, escaping its catdominium and strolling around the human parts of the zoo, checking out the sights, maybe taking a few snapshots, and looking for a snack.

This follows another escape by a tiger in a San Francisco zoo on Christmas Day, a back-to-nature event in which one man was killed near a snack bar. One imagines the survivors running and screaming in fear while text-messaging on their cell 'phones and chugging bottled water.

And then the souvenirs: "I Survived the San Francisco Tiger Massacre" and "My Parents Watched a Guy Get Eaten by a Tiger and All I Got Was This Lousy tee-shirt."

Many people question how big cats can escape their enclosure, but the real question should be why cats bother to do so. In the zoo tigers spend their days lying around in the sun while being given free medical care, free housing, and free food according to their dietary wants and needs, and occasionally eating some of their benefactors. Give them a holy book they can't even read and their lives would be pretty much complete. The reader may now deconstruct the metaphor for himself.

Hundreds of television viewers hundred of miles from any zoo are probably filing disability claims, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome involving nightcats, and thus unable to work. O Lord, send Thy grief counselors among us.

What, exactly, is a grief counselor? Is that what we used to call a busy-body?

The smart tiger will lurk at the updated watering hole, the bottled-water machine, waiting for its thirsty prey.

Unfortunately, PETA members are out of their cages too, terribly concerned lest Fluffy suffer from a human femur caught in his throat.

A house-cat is a tiger writ small, insolent and carnivorous, lounging on the windowsill and dreaming of killing mice and birds, and through its heavy-lidded eyes perhaps measuring its human companion and pondering the nutritive possibilities. To a pussycat the living room is the African veldt, and the cat's pet human little more than a large, munchable monkey with opposable thumbs.

Sure your kitty purrs when you stroke his chin; he's fantasizing about eating you.

Human – it's what's for dinner.

Even harmless-looking animals on the loose are dangerous; an innocent zoo visitor could be trampled to death by sheep stampeding to some presidential candidate's rally.

And then the snakes – they might escape to become editors at The New York Times, swallowing whole the few remaining specimens of another endangered species, real reporters.

-30-

Let's see -- our electoral choices are:

1. Mrs. Macbeth and her geezer-thug-lecher baggage.
2. The Messiah-Fuhrer and his Fuhrer-ess.
3. Another middle-aged guy from Hope, Arkansas who waves a big ol' Bible around, thinks he's a musician, and eats squirrels.
4. The war hero who in his old age is one medication error away from screaming obscenities at the furniture, said furniture including his embalmed wife.

Um...no.

---

Delicious ideas to please the pickiest eaters. Watch the video on AOL Living.

A Good Blog: Fauni Gena

If you are a lover of Ambient Music like I am, this is a good Blog to go and read reviews about different artists that are in that genre. 

With artist like Vidna Obmana & Asmus Tietchens, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, just to name a few!  Go and look at the Blog.

 

 

RMStringer

+++++++++++++++++++++++

"We are all geniuses when we dream"

- E.M. Cioran

 

Metallica - Fade to Black

It is my favorite track from them and perhaps one of the best songs that Metallica ever wrote. It shoes what diverse musicians and how skillfully they are. They were good on this track.

Time - Pink Floyd

This came from the Delicate Sound Of Thunder album. It was a live 2 disc set that came after A Momentary Lapse Of Reason album.

Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb (The Wall)

Just am incredible song to be seen live! I saw them preform it in 1994 at Houston Texas, Rice University. I used to watch The Wall all the time at college.

[Flickr] Schmap: Richmond Photo Short-list

One of my pics from Christmas was chosen as a finalist pic for the Schmap Richmond Guide. I hope that they use it!!  Wish me luck!!

You've been sent a Flickr Mail from Emma J. Williams:

------------------------------------------------------------

:: Schmap: Richmond Photo Short-list


Hi Robert,

I am writing to let you know that one of your photos has
been short-listed for inclusion in the fourth edition of
our Schmap Richmond Guide, to be published at the end of
this month.

--
RMSTringer
+++++++++++++++

Don't Let Congress Ruin the Internet

Dear Friend,

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 (HR 5353). This important, bipartisan legislation protects the free-flowing Internet from blocking, censorship and discrimination by powerful phone and cable companies.

Big phone and cable companies are trying to get rid of Net Neutrality, the fundamental principle that prevents them from discriminating against your favorite Web sites and services.

Unless we speak out to our members of Congress, they could move to allow large telephone and cable companies to control what you do, where you go and what you watch online.

Visit the URL below to learn more about what's at stake and send a loud message directly to Congress:

https://secure2.convio.net/free/site/Advocacy?id=241
To take action on this issue, click on the link below:
https://secure2.convio.net/free/site/Advocacy?s_oo=NmNaeAcP-ZOpkKpP_YlcKQ..&id=241
If the text above does not appear as a link or it wraps across multiple lines, then copy and paste it into the address area of your browser.

A recap of the last few weeks...

It has been a long week here for us. Wife has been away for business and i have been minding the house. Chel and I have gone to the gym several time and have had a good time. We are now eagerly awaiting her return. We were worried that she would not be able to fly home tonight due to the bad weather but she had no problems!

I have taken a part-time job at the place where i work. I am doing data cabling for a company called Archura. The do most of the fiber and Cat6 at the server farm. They have been great in working with my schedule.

It has been really nasty weather here the last few days and Chel hoped for a 2-hour delay in school but did not get it. We just have not been hit with an great amount of snow or ice this year. The weather man said that we will be in a very cold pattern till the end of the month, perhaps there is still time for a Winter Storm!

I have been reading lots of book this year. I finished a book called Blackwater and then i started a book called Blasphemy which i finished it Wednesday. Several years ago, i read a book by an author named John Twelve Hawks. The book was called The Traveler. I was in my "library" the other night and i saw the book and wondered if he had a new novel. I looked it up and found his newest one which i went and purchased yesterday. It is called The Dark River, the second of three novels in the Fourth Realm Trilogy I have not started it yet and perhaps i will read it next week.

I am going to ride sometime this weekend, just not sure when it will happen...

What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

Thought for today...

Faith is what you turn to when knowledge runs out. Even more strongly, faith is what you need when beliefs and knowledge conflict.
pg29 'The Heart of Christianity' 2003 Marcus J. Borg

Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

The Heads feat. Johnette Napolitano - Damage Ive Done

The lead singer of Concret Blond with the talking heads without David Byrne back in 1996.

Talking Heads - Burning Down the House

One of my favorite old skool videos. I remember watching this on TBS Night Tracks way back in the 1980s...

Tom Tom Club - Suboceana

Talking Heads Without the mouth. I always thought that this song was talking about a Micronaut Comicbook. There was a world called Oceania in that comic. The lyrics remind me of their search for the 3 keys...

Jasper High School Band 1991

This was my high school. I graduated in 1989 so i am not in this video, but you get the gist of it. I played drums, bass drum to be exact.

FLIR Fart - FLIR GasFindIR camera

Please be careful when you expel gas. You never know who or what is watching you when you do it.

Total Lunar Eclipse

As reported by NASA:

The Sun goes down. The Moon comes up. You go out and look at the sky. Observing the eclipse is that easy. Maximum eclipse, and maximum beauty, occurs at 10:26 pm EST (7:26 pm PST).

Above: A preview of the Feb. 20th lunar eclipse created by graphic artist Larry Koehn. Click on the links to view labels for other time zones: GMT, AST, EST, CST, MST, PST, Alaska, Hawaii.

A lunar eclipse happens when the Moon passes through the shadow of Earth. You might expect the Moon to grow even more ashen than usual, but in fact it transforms into an orb of vivid red.

What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD

We all knew knew that this was going to happen and Sony won the format war. Toshiba threw in the towel and took HD-DVD off the market today as reported by most major news.

The format war, often compared to the Betamax-VHS battle in the 1980s and then Sony's venture into the Mini-Disc products. I found them to be excellent but the support for them did not happen when the MP3 revolution took the public by storm.

Hollywood studios had initially split their alliances between the two camps, meaning only certain films would play on any one DVD machine and that hurt both of the companies in the beginning.

In addition to Wal-Mart, consumer electronics chain Best Buy and online video rental company Netflix Inc also recently signed up to the Blu-ray camp.


What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

My new book!

I started it today... Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

Thought for the day...

'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true science' Albert Einstein Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

House, Nursing Assistant!

Thanks to Mac for letting me publish this article. 

House, Nursing Assistant

 

House is a reasonably intelligent television show featuring the eponymous lead as a Byronic hero who is never sacked despite his drug abuse, ill manners, television watching, and video gaming, all on the job, because he develops brilliant solutions to apparently impossible medical problems. 

 

Where House breaks down is its unreality, which is not a criticism because this is a television show.  In House the few nurses do things on computer screens and are never seen giving patient care.  Patients suffer seizures or coronary occlusions only when a team of physicians happens to be in the room.  The hospital in which House works has no admissions staff, nursing assistants, cleaner-uppers, security guards, or bulletin boards.  Each fictional doctor enjoys a spacious, glass-walled office which any real-life physician can only envy, and when said physician needs a crash cart, a suture tray, or a specific medicine it is immediately available.

 

What if House were more like a real hospital?

 

House, Nursing Assistant.  House is fired for having a drug problem, even though he saves lives.

 

House, Pharmacist.  House is fired for being rude, although he saves lives.

 

House, Cleaning Staff.  House is fired for pausing thirty seconds to watch a bit of soap opera on a patient's television while tidying his fiftieth or so room of his shift, even though skilled and science-based hygiene and maintenance save lives.

 

House, Hospital Security.  House, after wrestling with drunks most of his shift, is fired for playing a video game on his watch at four in the morning although his presence in a creepy world saves lives.

 

House, R.N.  House, after helping deliver a baby in E.R., giving resuscitation to a heart-attack victim, getting coughed on by 'flu patients, barfed on by someone with food poisoning, and supervising the care of dozens of other patients, all without lunch or even a potty break, is fired for telling an career FEMA recipient complaining about the formaldehyde in his free trailer that he doesn't even know what formaldehyde is and why doesn't he just open the windows if he doesn't like the new-car smell?

 

House, Admissions Clerk.  House, after years of loyal service to the same hospital doing his part to help save lives, is fired for not learning Spanish rapidly enough.

 

Short season, huh?  And now, back to Flipping Homezillas Off the Island.

 

-30-

 

Religous Choices...

We went to a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday and it was interesting. The ceremony and tradition in the service was just amazing and rightly so after over 2000+ years to perfect it. I have never been a Jewish Temple nor have I seen any of the accouterments that it has. The service was about 2.5 hours long with many of the prayers sang and spoken in Hebrew. I was very impressed by the Scripture leader and how fluently he spoke from the Torah. This stirred some questions in me.

It got me to thinking that I, being a Christian, believe that in order for em to go to Heaven, i have to believe in Jesus and accept him as my personal savior, thus enabling me to go to Heaven when i die. The Jewish people do not believe that Jesus was the embodiment of God and thus from a Christian point of view, will not go to Heaven even though one was started from the other.

Christians worship Jesus and pray to Him of God. Jews pray to God only. Now this thought may go against Christianity, but we both worship the same deity God, only in a different aspect. So they do not believe in Jesus, that is not their religion. The believe in God and that is their way to Heaven. Ok. No Problem for me. I just wonder if me believing in Jesus and them believing in God; do we not all go to the same Heaven? Is their religion any better than Christianity. Or is it worse. If that is what they believe and that is their faith, then is it not correct? Our Faith is correct for our belief. Why are we so judgmental of their religion if it initially spawned ours? Was Jesus not a Jew? I guess that it all goes back to the Christian Bible, not the Torah.

I hope that someone out will enter into my discussion on this. I am very interested in their subject and welcome all comments from Christian and Jew alike. It just all made me wonder about the differentiation on this subject and why it is the way it is.

What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

This is for a good cause...

Many years ago i participated in SETI@Home. I just found out about a project called Folding@Home. Here is a description from their website:

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

What have we done so far?

We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, on our Awards page, or go directly to our Results page.

Want to learn more?

Click on the links on the left for downloads or more information. You can also download our Executive Summary, which is a PDF suitable for distribution. Also, you can learn more by watching recent seminars (Stanford BMI ; Xerox PARC). One can also help by donating funds to the project, via Stanford University.

What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

Little Ice Age Part 2?

Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age

A typical sunspot compared to the size of the earth. Sunspots have all but vanished in recent years.

Henrik Svensmark explains the SKY experimen

Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages.

But will it happen again?

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to "stock up on fur coats." Sorokhtin, who calls man's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond.

Observational data seems to support the claims -- or doesn't contradict it, at least. According to data from Britain's Met Office, the earth has cooled very slightly since 1998. The Met Office says global warming "will pick up again shortly." Others aren't so sure.

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes. According to Patterson. we shouldn't be surprised by a solar link. "The sun [is] the ultimate source of energy on this planet," he says.

Such research dates back to 1991, when the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that world temperatures over the past several centuries correlated very closely with solar cycles. A 2004 study by the Max Planck Institute found a similar correlation, but concluded the timing was only coincidental, as the solar variance seemed too small to explain temperature changes.

However, researchers at DMI continued to work, eventually discovering what they believe to be the link. The key factor isn't changes in solar output, but rather changes in the sun's magnetosphere A stronger field shields the earth more from cosmic rays, which act as "seeds" for cloud formation. The result is less cloud cover, and a warming planet. When the field weakens, clouds increases, reflecting more light back to space, and the earth cools off.

Recently, lead researcher Henrik Svensmark was able to experimentally verify the link between cosmic rays and cloud formation, in a cloud chamber experiment called "SKY" at the Danish National Space Center. CERN plans a similar experiment this year.

Even NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies -- long the nation's most ardent champion of anthropogenic global warming -- is getting in on the act. Drew Shindell, a researcher at GISS, says there are some "interesting relationships we don't fully understand" between solar activity and climate.

From Daily Tech Science Blog.


What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

Thought for today...

You must not depend upon the world, and not upon men, and not upon yourself, but only and alone upon God: for a human being can of himself do nothing. !Postscript! Soren Kierkegaard 1846 Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Postscript - a summation

God does not think, He Creates; God does not exist, He is eternal.
Man thinks and exists, and existence separates thought and being,
holding them apart from one another in succession...

Subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is reality.

Soren Kierkegaard 1846 "Postscript: The Subjective Thinker"

What is your opinion?
Blogroll Me!

Monaco - What do you want from me (UK version)

This is the video version that i remember the most.