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Friday, April 29, 2005

Top Ten Cool Things About Being The New Pope 


There is new Top Ten List for your enjoyment today. My old repository for previous Top Ten Lists was getting to look a little long in the tooth, so I've made a stylish new blog just for Top Ten Lists called, what else, "Larry's Top Tens".

Here is the inaugural Top Ten List. I should make you click on the new link, but I'll be kind and just post the new entry. As is the case with most of Larry's Top Tens this comes from a David Letterman Top Ten Contest Topic, but is all original Larry humor -- or attempt thereat.

Top Ten Cool Things About Being The New Pope
  1. Newly acquired infallibility makes playing EverQuest a breeze!
  2. 1.086 billion followers make for an awesome game of Simon Says
  3. Get to pick a new name... leaving old credit history behind
  4. Get to answer "YES!" whenever anyone asks, "who do you think you are -- the Pope?"
  5. 10% Pontiff discount at Pottery Barn
  6. Can now finalize plans for reviving that Spanish Inquisition thing
  7. After a night-out on a bender can pretend to be sanctifying the ground by kissing it
  8. Can finally order a change to the clown costumes the Swiss Guard wear
  9. Can inspire cries of "It's a miracle" by pointing at any old smudge anywhere and claiming it's an image of The Virgin Mary. Oh, wait, anyone can do that.
  10. Not only can you say your mother is a Saint -- you can make it true!

Top Ten Extras

Thursday, April 28, 2005

News, Updates, and Upcoming 


I don’t have any "Upcoming Events" exactly, but I liked the look of this GIF -- close enough to use anyway.

Two new essays in DumbSwede's Journal
Response to KJ's "Death To A Traitor"
Childhood's End

From the all-good-things-come-to-an-end department, the heavy traffic from being listed accidentally on snapsearch.com as a Sponsored Link for "Bare Naked" seems to have died off.

I am pleased to announce BNL is now listed on BlogStreet.com -- a semi-elite listing of blogs. I had petitioned for entry over two months ago and just got accepted yesterday. I shouldn't care about being listed of course. All I can say for those that have applied and not been listed -- Nah Nah Ne Nah Nah.

Coming soon: new ideas for MEME Watch. Ideas evolved out of (stolen from) suggestions by my friend A.C. who also has unique ideas about grabbing images in a semi intelligent fashion automatically from the web for various interactive uses.

Coming Soon Also: a hobby project of sorts. I am being purposely vague about the details, but hopefully it will make for an interesting series of picture posts. I plan on stretching it out and seeing if anyone can guess what I'm up to based on the pictures as they are posted.


Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Death and Taxes --or-- Give them the Raspberry 

I heard Neil Cavuto on Fox News the other day explaining why the Death Tax is wrong. This seems to be a constant drum beat with the Fox crowd. I have always been FOR the Estate Tax, but Neil almost had me for a second -- only a second.

Neil's logic was as follows, take two men making the same income, one saves wisely until his death and expects to pass it on to his heirs. The other spends all his money as he acquires it. At the end of their lives they have both been taxed the same amount on their identical incomes, but the frugal man will be taxed again upon his death.

Of course you're not really taxing the dead man, your taxing gift income to someone that is only deserving of wealth in so much as they share some common DNA with a dead person and this windfall death lottery income tax only kicks in at very high levels leaving behind, well, very high levels of money.

I have never been one to champion reparations, but with the wealth concentration that can occur from generation to generation without an Estate Tax, those that come from family lines that have been deprived in the past can certain point to those at the top and ask why they should enjoy the advantages handed to them by their forefathers in perpetuity and not make amends for disadvantages their forefathers may have caused in acquiring their elevated status in life.

Another argument against Neil's reasoning would be that people with identical incomes rarely pay identical taxes. You make choices in how you invest, purchase, give to charities, have children, and these choices affect your final tax burden. You could gift yearly to your heirs or set up trust funds of some sort that mitigate the Estate Tax sting. I have always found it unseemly how at the end of life many peoples' heirs exhibit a sort of mine-mine-mine temper tantrum in their attempt to grab assets. For many that have passed away with large fortunes I suspect they wouldn't have given a rat's ass where the money goes, it having been acquired for the sake of acquiring it, and would look with loathing and disgust as selfish offspring maneuver to grab what they can, having done nothing to contribute to its obtainment.

Take it all and give the spoiled offspring the raspberry I say!

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

A Spike in Popularity 

I'd like to say I don't care how much traffic comes through BNL, but I’d be lying. So I put in a daily tracker to count visits and today the traffic spiked up by about 300-400%. I don’t expect this newfound popularity to last however. I did a vanity search on Google.com to see if Bare Naked Larry had acquired some higher profile listing. There was only one new listing, a very curious one of www.snapsearch.com/keywords/bare-naked.aspx. I clicked on this link, but NO Bare Naked Larry showed. I clicked on the Google.com cache copy however and low and behold Bare Naked Larry was on the right side of the page under Sponsored Links.

It seems incredible, but perhaps some ad agency put Bare Naked Larry’s link in place of Bare Naked Ladies by accident for a short time. On the other hand if this were the explanation I might have expected thousands of hits. How ever it happened, I'm pretty sure the spike up in webpage hits has something to do with being listed as a sponsored link, if nowhere else at least on snapsearch.com. We'll just have to wait and see if my numbers stay high or if anomolous sponsored link listings pop up anywhere else.

My apologies to anyone that has come here in search of a certain modern rock band or --more likely-- pictures of people without clothes on. I'm not saying for sure I would take my clothes off for enough web hits, but if it would keep my traffic numbers up…


Blah Blah Blah -- Techie Details 

The formatting of my post last night looked quite good with FireFox from home last night, but when I check with Explorer at work this morning it looked terrible. I had known for some time that underlines were not always rendering correctly in Explorer, but I failed to explore this. Changing font size on the same line turned out to be a disaster.

I had grabbed a line-height:1.3 in my CSS from someone else’s template example. Which looked good with some special formatting of the Title at the top of the page, but now that I am using a .jpg I whipped up in gimp, well I just don’t need to fudge the regular fonts anymore. Which browser was rendering the CSS entry correctly is up for debate, but it is generally accepted that FireFox more closely adheres to CSS1 and CSS2 standards, though they don’t quite get CSS2 completely implemented. Translation: FireFox is better.

I see FGL has visited. I had known there was a weakness in MEME Watch and both FGL’s and my own vanity searches show the Achilles Heel of MEME Watch (a shortcoming I will address this weekend). MEME Watch needs to be able to exclude a list of root URLs. My vanity search for “Bare Naked Lady” should not include items under jaytv.com, FGL’s should exclude flying-green-leprachaun.blogspot.com. I had realized this might be an issue, but figured I would put up what I have so far. The modification will be pretty trivial, but I really need to work on work-work most of this week.

Monday, April 25, 2005

More about Memes and a link to Political Ramblings 

A shout-out to FGL of http://flying-green-leprachaun.blogspot.com -- I still don’t know your real name. FGL has left a couple of comments, so I suspect he will stumble through sometime soon. FGL gave me a little scare by mentioning the link http://www.memestreams.net. I had thought they’d beaten me to the punch on my MEME Watch tool (see last post). It may have some similar elements, but I haven’t found the direct analog yet with casual browsing to MEME Watch. Memestreams appears to be a social networking tool centered on common interests/ideas/memes. Of course something like MEME Watch may well have been implemented elsewhere and implemented better, but this one is my own and thus gives a certain pride of accomplishment in the making of.

It has only been up a little over a day, but no one seems to have tried it even experimentally. I will write a separate info page for MEME Watch in the near future, but let me impart a few additional facts about its use and purpose. Each user can track up to 9 memes. If you use reuse a meme number you will overwrite the old meme search and its history, so be careful. On the other hand if you make typos or change your mind you can overwrite an existing search. Please play nice, there aren’t a lot of defenses built into this implementation, it is not intended to be a commercial distribution. I make no guarantee that memes will be left in place for the extreme long haul, childish, trivial, or profane entries will be deleted by me without explanation or apology. This is not a commercial venture and I could loose my server privileges tomorrow. Use and hopefully enjoy, but do not depend on.

How Meme Watch works: every time there is a visit to BNL the wrapper CGI updates one meme listing by making a call to yahoo.com and getting a count of web references to the phrase being checked. If the number of references has changed it adds the new number of references and date to an on going file for the meme. If no change, it marks the day of the last check. Only one check to be performed per meme per day max. Currently visits far outnumber memes, so all memes should be keep up to date in good order. The reason for choosing Yahoo.com over Google.com is that Google.com detects that it is a non-browser query and returns no info (the automated query by the CGI is not performed by a browser, the CGI is a program running behind the scenes on the server). I may in the future join a Google.com developer program, but that would limit BNL to 1000 queries per day. Granted I am currently only performing three automated queries per day with my own entries of interest, and it is unlikely BNL would ever need more than 1000 queries per day, but it seems like a lot of effort to join and then have your resource use limited. Generally I like Google.com, but in this case I’m liking Yahoo.com’s less restrictive practices. Then again Yahoo.com could change to being closed to non-browser use at any time, and I would be forced to go the developer registration route with someone.

OK enough Tech-Talk, onto politics. If I haven’t bored people to death, maybe I can turn them off with my political views. I find I am keeping Excellent Karma on Slashdot.org, but I am much more often getting the trollish responses or unfair knee-jerk negative moderations than normal. In those few cases I almost always get modded back up, but it never use to happen. I even have one self avowed enemy or “Freak” on Slashdot, so maybe it’s just a sign that I have arrived and am getting noticed more. I’m probably still boring most with techie details so here is the link to my most recent political editorial entry to Slashdot.org “Sometimes even I don’t Listen to Me”. It may sound like some introspective musing, but is really a rambling political expository just barely avoiding becoming a diatribe. I really couldn’t think of a better tittle, I usually think I am quite clever in naming my posts, maybe this is a sign it is utter bullshit.

For those that are interested in Larry’s love life, it is non-existent for now. I should have forced myself to go out at least once last weekend, but I huddled over the keyboard and indulged my geek side instead. This coming weekend I will find something to do that satisfies the voyeuristic set of you that may be out there in the retelling. For people more interested in blogs of a more interpersonal nature and less eclectic you could always jump over to my other less frequently updated, but much longer and emotionally honest postings in Larry’s Life -- an ongoing autobiography of my dating life.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

MEME Watch 

MEME Watch is ON-THE-AIR

This thing could use some better instructions, and to be honest it is not well tested yet. Proceed at your own risk. Hopefully it will work well straight out of the box. If not, well you get what you pay for. I spent most of my Sunday debugging this thing, and now I’m off to the gym. I’m not just a dumb geek, I’m a healthy geek.

In the future after we have some users for MEME Watch I will include graphs that show more than just the beginning and ending numbers. The data for this is being stored just not yet displayed.

You will find MEME Watch at the bottom of the left sidebar.
Enjoy

Friday, April 22, 2005

Mirror Mirror 

After two weeks of above average temperatures here in Champaign, Illinois, the weather is back to its seasonable cool, damp, overcast, and rainy norm for April. I have not had a very effective week at work. I’ve not posted much in my blog. After having gone to the gym practically every day for the last two months, I’ve pretty much taken this week off. Tonight I could have gone out, but I decided just to do a little TV watching and lounging around. Hopefully my motivation to get things done will return tomorrow.

On the update front, I almost have "MEME Watch" finished (so I haven’t been a complete schlub). I had expected this to be a much bigger project than it is turning out to be, but I am cheating by using a PEARL Module called bget-1.2 that can download a webpage outside of a browser. For years I have been writing pretty much all my PEARL code from scratch, but a friend has recently turned me onto www.cpan.org which has hundreds of good PERL utilities and modules.

Zen Image Of The Day will also get a few minor enhancements soon.

I am watching “Real Time with Bill Maher” right now. I don’t agree with Bill on everything, but what is weirding me out a little tonight is Bill’s talk with Jane Fonda. Jane is in her late 60s and dresses like someone in their 20s or 30s. Her blue blouse is open in front and the line of exposed skin goes off screen. It’s not the Jane is ugly, and I hope I don’t offend any women reading this entry, but she has obviously had work done, that while it probably kept her looks intact well into her fifties, the modifications are now giving her a strange unevenly aged look. I’m guessing she is not letting go of her perception of herself as a sex image easily. Perhaps I am overly sensitive to this issue, having noticed the crow's-feet at the edges of my own eyes are much more pronounced than I had realized. Hopefully as a male I will be considered “distinguished looking.”

Not to obsess on the issue of aging, but I don’t think the mirror always reflects your true age. The reason I say this and why I am fixating on my crow's-feet is that some recent pictures showed them standing out quite visibly, while when I look in the mirror they are hardly there at all. I suspect the flash of a camera or the bright light of direct sunlight creates shadows that accentuate them. While looking straight on into a mirror with soft ambient indoor lighting they tend to look smooth. The phrase “The Mirror Doesn’t Lie” may not really be true.

BTW the picture is me last weekend leaning out of my Sebring with the top down. Damn last weekend was nice.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Zen Image of The Day 

As promised on Saturday there is a new interactive feature for BNL (see top of page). What makes this slightly different than a normal Photo Blog is that the image will change daily automatically whether I post or not. The comments should also appear immediately alongside the picture and not require clicking away from the page to see them as is the normal way comments work with Blogger.com.

For those of you that use Zen Image of The Day you may notice it remembers the nickname you choose. I don’t intend to get too fancy with this or require passwords, but I will be adding my own new-visitors, returning-visitors, vistors-for-today counters soon related to this. In the near future I will probably add features that allow you to set defaults for how you use and view BNL. My friend A.C. has suggested adding a sort of weak A.I. that scans a new posts and then links to Google webpages and images related to the post. This will take quite a bit of research to pull off, but is an example of the kind of added fun and features I am going to be trying to bring to BNL.

Another project near and dear to my heart is Meme-Watch. I can’t give a timetable on when Meme-Watch will premier, but I expect it will be of great interest to those of you that consider yourselves trendsetters. Meme-Watch will allow you to submit short phrases or mems and then track how frequent and popular they become in time over the web.


ADDENDUM
My apologies to any who tried to use "Zen Image of The Day" earlier, it was not working. It had worked on my server at work and I just blindly assumed it would work when I ported it to jaytv.com. I won't bore with the exact details. The ability to remember nicknames also may not be currently working, though I will debug that more thoroughly when I get home. Please have patience. This stuff isn't professional software, just some Perl scripts I whipped up with out a lot of beating on.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Hat Trick 

Call it a Hat Trick -- I had 3 posts moderated a full 5 Insightful on Slashdot.org today.

Langa assumes IE is the Standard
Collateral Damage
Put the line in, but with the right amount

For real sparks checkout my DumbSwede posts and replies to Stargoat's Journal entry Lipstick Feminism

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Blog Tired 

[Hey my yawning man JPEG went away! That's what I get for deep linking]

Where is this all going? My blog has been a bit of an obsession the last couple of weeks, I revamped its look quite a bit and I have been posting daily. But my poll numbers are down and my hit rate has stayed a fairly flat 10-20 hits per day. I doubt many are return visitors, but just passers through with the Next Blog link that Blogger.com provides.

Maybe what I have to say just isn’t interesting. Not to get all weepy on you but I still have a plan for elevating BNL above the rest of the blog crowd and that is to stay with the plan. The plan being to continue to write with truth and conviction on a variety of issues, both personal and social, and to create objects unique to this site. It is largely invisible, but this site is now served up from a CGI (common gateway interface) wrapper script I have written. Currently it just keeps the counter from clicking up as I preview my postings. The main thing this engine will enable is dynamic content that will allow me to add new and hopefully interesting features. The first enhancement is just about ready to go with an unveiling planned for Monday or Tuesday. Don’t expect your jaw to drop, but it will be unique to BNL. Sort of a test bed for things to come.

I suspect BNL’s rather eclectic mix of items is a turn off for some, but the nature of the postings will likely stay about the same. Hopefully for those disappointed by my musings, they will still find value in the interactive elements that will be added on as time goes by.

Admittedly my motives are suspect in trying to get more eyeball on my humble little blog. Just ego and vanity really, but should it start to take off it will hopefully provide the motivation to get on with a number of other writing projects that have been on the shelf for years.


Friday, April 15, 2005

Cyrano Redux 


Ammie called last night. It seems she didn’t make it to Indiana and school on Tuesday having been in a car accident on Monday. No injury, no other cars involved, but Ammie doesn’t have a drivers license, so you can now imagine the fix she is in. We had gone out the last weekend with a blow up of sorts on Sunday, with me saying for about the tenth time whatever we had wasn’t working for me.

So she calls me and tells me she needs me to cheer her up and to build her self-esteem. She had seemed to be in an OK mood when she called and I dutifully said things to make her feel better. She unexpectedly starts to sniffle and cry, I assume it is about the car, but no the car is not the problem, or only problem, or the major problem -- she’s been in love with someone else for over a year. They’d had a breakup a few weeks before and she needs my help in figuring out how to get him back, oh and can I take her out to cheer her up this weekend after all her woes.

I tell her I don’t much care to play Cyrano de Bergerac to her Roxanne then proceed to go ahead and do exactly that. I’m not really playing Cyrano because I know Ammie is not right for me. I demure on the weekend get together, but don’t rule out diner maybe on Sunday. I’m trying not to be a total heel, I like Ammie, but she drives me crazy and is one of the most immature people I know. Trouble is, Ammie is about the only one paying attention to me these days, and when a dateless weekend looms it’s hard to resist the company of a young beautiful lady, immature as she may be. Of course seeing as she has been basically stringing me along for the better part of the last year, I suspect her siren's call will be a little easier to resist.


Thursday, April 14, 2005

Super Hypocri-Size Me 

While strolling through some blogs the other day I came across an entry about the documentary "Super Size Me". This was a bit of a coincidence as I had the very same movie on TV at the time, so I mentioned it to them in their comment section. Well that person wrote back asking me what I thought of the movie. So here is my response to them which I will share with you -- though I am going to make you click on my DumbSwede's Slashdot Journal entry to get to it.

Super Hypocri-Size Me

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Global Warming -- Does it Matter? 


This was going to be a very short post just to indicate I had added a DumbSwede Slashdot Journal entry on Global Warming. I then decided to spice up the post with a properly chosen graphic. As I clicked through images related to Global-Warming, it occurred to me how much more persuasive an argument looks when accompanied by graphs and charts and scary pictures. I will let my editorial “Global Warming – Does it Matter?” speak for itself. But here is a pretty picture to catch the your eye.

This classic picture from an Apollo Moon mission is suitable neutral, while still suggesting the preciousness and fragility of the world we live in.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

SETI Calculator 


BNL Now has two toys to offer
  

  


The Graffiti Board has been posted before, but so far only two people have tried it.

The SETI Calculator is a very flexible implementation of the Classic Drake Equation. Not only can you calculate the Number of Extraterrestrial Civilizations in the galaxy, you can solve for any of the terms independently.

In addition to the classic Drake solver is a secondary equation solver, which is based on the outcome of the Drake result. By inputting various allowed communication distances, it not only calculates number of Civilizations, but Civilizations within communication distance.

Based on the defaults assigned, the SETI Calculator arrives at 37.5 E.T. Civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, but if a communication distance of 100 hundred light years is assumed shows only a 35 out of 100000 or 0.035% chance of detecting one of them. This 100 light year distance was arrived at by the approximate distance we could detect a signal from a radio dish like the one at Arecibo if it were aimed at us and transmitting. Solving the other way (assuming the other numbers are reasonable) for one civilization to be detectable we would have to be able to hear/see/detect them from 1417 light years away. New technology or other methods (laser SETI for instance) probably will someday bring an ET civilization within our viewing range if they exist. And of course it isn’t just our ability to detect, but the strength of the signals sent our way -- if they are strong enough signals, then ET may already be within our viewing horizon.

I wrote this Perl based web CGI and posted it to the SETI discussion forum at Space.com about three or four years ago. It is a shame that crop circle believers and UFO abduction conspiracy kooks dominate that discussion group. I gave up any hope of rational discussion there.

Monday, April 11, 2005

2 Top Tens Today 


Two new Lists to post today

This Week’s List:
Top Ten Signs You're At A Bad Circus

Last Week’s: (posted late)
Top Ten Rejected Slogans For Major League Baseball

Two Weeks Ago: (Letterman winners appended)
Top Ten Signs You Work in a Bad Office

And I still haven’t won myself a Late Show T-Shirt!!!

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Ammie's Back 


Had a date last night and she’s still here today -- an ex that is leaving for Indiana to go to school on Tuesday and wanted to see me one last time before going. I had a pretty good time last night, but the timing is weird for reasons I’ll go into in a later post.

It has been a very odd weekend so far. Friday I went out carousing with my friend A.C., and we ran into J.P. from work who was getting shit-faced over a recent breakup. Just before I left to meet A.C. at the bar Ammie had called about getting together on Saturday.

I’m way too old for Ammie, but she still wants to build some kind of life together. I was feeling very old on Friday night, and now this 22-year old is making another play for me. Sometimes I think Ammie and I will end up together just because she keeps coming back.

Ammie’s back, gotta go.


Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Missing Pages 


I miss you. I miss you and you’ll never know. Maybe if I’d made a few different decisions in my life we’d still be together. Maybe you were my one and only true love. It has literally been a lifetime since I've known unquestioning love. Years and years and years have gone by and I’ve stayed out of your life. Not because I wanted to, but because it is what you asked for. What is your life like now? Are you better off having left me, having called off our engagement? I can’t blame you for backing out, you were young, I was young. Do you ever wonder how I ended up, who I ended up with, if anyone? Of course I wonder about you. Why has so much time gone by and I still haven’t met someone, anyone that has made me feel the way you did.

Of course if I hadn’t lost you maybe I wouldn’t deserve you. I was self absorbed and overly conceited in those days. I cared more for where I was going than where we were going together. I tried to win you back with guilt and when that didn’t work I made your life a living hell with my please-please-please take me back routine.

I told you you would never find anyone that would love you as much as I did. Wow what a self-pitying and concieted way to express my grief at loosing you. It would only have been a small difference, but I wish I had said I didn’t think I would ever find someone I could love as much as I loved you. You would have assured me I was mistaken – but so far you would have been wrong.

Maybe you were just out of my league. Our two years together brought about by the isolation of the small town you grew up in. But then I joined the Marines and you went off to college. You discovered the world was a much bigger place than your hometown of 250 people. Maybe you discovered your earlier infatuation with me was just a teenage crush on a Roller Rink DJ.

My life feels like an unfinished book without you. A tattered book you go to read, but then find the last chapter is missing.

Will I ever find the missing pages?

................

Sorry for the sappy downer of a post tonight folks -- it won’t happen again, at least not for a decade or two.
I really should hit the delete button.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Crappy PC Research – or – Let Me Do A Study 


Man I hate research that attempts to validate some (preconceived) PC assumption, but whose results rely on so many confounding variables as to make the study useless.

Here is one such study reported in CNN.com
“Study links TV viewing and bullying”
or from the article headline:
"Study: Kids who watch TV more likely to bully"

To quote the article:
“…At the same time, children whose parents read to them, take them on outings and just generally pay attention to them are less likely to become bullies, said the report from the University of Washington.”

This is typical confusion of cause and effect. How do people get money for these studies??? I’m not saying excessive TV watching is good, but this study clearly implies that watching TV is directly correlated with Bullying and is the causative factor. How about: “Are neglected kids more likely to watch TV?” Could I get grant money to study this question?

What makes this all the more infuriating is the implied: “something must be done or else…” Again, I’m not saying excessive TV watching is good, but this isn’t research, it’s advocacy. These people clearly had an agenda then went out to gather statistics that would induce action, or at a minimum garner more funds for further research into the “crisis”.

If your kid is a bully lets place the fault with poor upbringing, poor environment, and possibly random genetic factors. Good parents can sometimes have bad kids -- bad parents more often will -- growing up in a bad environment just about cinches the deal. TV is a minor contributor compared to afore mentioned factors. Of course this is just my opinion, maybe someone will fund me to do a study.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

On The Roll – Part I 


I was at a stop light earlier today, rolling down the windows to take in some nice fresh-air on the first really nice day of the year here in Champaign, Illinois when I saw a convertible with the top down. To be honest it had been such a long dreary fall and winter I’d forgotten I could put my own top down until I saw the other convertible –- so I put the top down in kind and rolled along on some errands. It then further occurred to me that maybe I should be doing something more active to take advantage of the nice weather.

I had downloaded Picasa just yesterday and had planned on spicing up my blog with more photos, so the weather offered the perfect opportunity for gathering them. I returned home, strapped on my skates, left my apartment and roller-skated up 1st street toward the University clicking photos all the way, going into overdrive on the University Quad clicking away at the sea of people. By the time I was back home I had about 200 photos. Many of them were ruined by motion blur, so I pared them down, and it came out to 99 photos.

I may post a longer description of the journey later in Larry’s Life, but for now I have uploaded the Picasa created album to my server and am putting a link to it here -- “On The Roll – Part I”



I was out about an hour, skated about a 5 mile circuit from South First, crossed over on Armory Road to the University Quad, exited pass the Alma Mater statue, across Wright, back down Green Street in Campus Town, back to 1st and back home past the Stadium and Assembly Hall to my Windsor and 1st located apartment at Ashton Woods.

So if you have any friends in Champaign that might have been out April 3, 2005 you might see them in the album. This could be considered a Where’s Waldo of sorts. Should anyone see anyone they know I hope you will post a comment with their name and the picture number they are in.

Since the album of photos takes about 10 Meg, I’m not sure how many albums I should post on JayTV.com. I’m sure Ian won’t mind this one, but it may not be up forever if I post more albums (which is the plan). This one will be up at least a month or two in any event, so enjoy.