I've been thinking about getting a more hobbyist level digital camera (as opposed to the tourist level point and shoot). After finding a good Digital Camera website, dpreview.com from Dallas' blog, I did some looking for a sub $400 camera that had the best ratings and good macro capability. I found the Olympus C-7070, and has a really good price for the features. Around 340 shipped.
I've been reorganizing and renaming all my music (almost 20 GB), and I'm having trouble finding a program that will organize them into folders based on Genre\Artist\Album. I had a program a long time ago that did this, but I don't remember the name. I've been using Music Match Jukebox to fix all the tagging, and add album art, but it just organizes playlists. I have Moodlogic, but it's organizing is limited to creating folders for artist name only.
In other news, I've bought 400lbs of topsoil for $12, 1lb of Winterizer for $13, 1lb of insecticide for $10, and 1lb of pre-emergent crabgrass killer for $13. I'm also waiting on packets of Bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrushes, and Indian blankets to plant in the mailbox area. I've also finally found and planted 2 Natchez Crape Myrtles. They have a larger yellow leaf and white blossoms.
There are no pictures yet, I actually worked from about 11 to sunset today, getting all the plants in the ground. I spent about an hour digging up a big bunch of day lillys, and some other flower that's rhizome looks like ginger, and has a fan shaped cluster of bluish green grass blades. While doing that, a hawk landed on the ground about 20 feet from me, with a bird in its claws. It stayed there for awhile, I guess waiting for its lunch to stop flopping around. When it flew off with its meal, it left a big circle of downy feathers on the ground.
The weather was really nice today, and I got quite a bit accomplished, without much sweating. Now, all that is needed is pinestraw, a couple of white crape myrtles, and I'm also thinking about adding a Yoshino Cherry (pictured below) next to the tilting dogwood.
I've gotten all the weed control fabric laid wherever there was bare soil. Tomorrow, I plant!!!
Azeleas, they are actually more red than this.
Azeleas in the ground
bed cleared and covered
Indian Hawthorn in the ground.
Bed covered with newpaper and dirt
Camoflaging the ugly utility box.
I rented a Sod Cutter, and have almost completely obliviated the turf that was growing in the designated flowerbed zone, henceforth to be referred to as the green zone. The green zone is not green, but brown. It will eventually be red from pinestraw, but this should not be confused with the red zone, which is were the grass is. Its all quite complicated, but try to keep up.
Pics will be posted tomorrow.
Montgomery, Al., October 11 2005 -- Today Charles and Brandi announce a new joint venture, code-named Buzz.
Buzz beta
Buzz, short for Busby, is targeted as a companion product for the already successfull Sophie, formerly code-named Texanna. It's features and capabilities will be similar, but slightly different than Sophie. Expected release to market date for the yet-to-be-named project Buzz will be around March 3, 2006.
Action shots from Buzz's most recent build.
Click for high-res version link 1. (36 MB)
Click for high-res version link 2.
You might need DIVX to view this video.
About Presley Joint Venture
Buzz is the latest in a series of successful collaborations between Charles and Brandi. Charles provides the seed capital, and management, while Brandi provides the manufacturing and operations aspects.
For more information:
Charles Presley charles.presley ( at ) gmail com
Following a suggestion from Thomas I thought I'd check out last.fm. I got turned on to a swedish group called Koop and their kind of retro jazz-electronica, and in searching for them, found a result on last.fm, with a good rating from the out-foxed plug-in, which I've written about previously. I've previously used netstreams from Heavy.com and LiquidGeneration.com for cool music, and I've tried to use Moodlogic to organize and recommend playlists from my local collection, but I'm really enamored with Last.fm's setup. If I just lived in a world where I had free and unrestricted access to their music, like my own MP3's, then there would be a true killer app.
DRM is a way to keep the old, analog ways of the world around, even in the face of the new digital paradigm of unlimitled flawless reproduction that can satisfy the economic problem of unlimited wants vs. limited resources. This all is propogated by the greed of a cartel of suits that are only interested in continued uninterupted funding of their lavish LA lifestyles.
In my searchings for a Landscape CAD program, I ran across several lame ones, and another, that is more of a 3d Sketching software that is capable of producing Cell shaded renderings. I'm currently learning it to create a 3d version of the new landscaping. Its called SketchUp, and it is written in Ruby uses Ruby scripting for animations. I only mention that because my cousin's boyfriend Thomas has talked about an interest in Ruby on Rails. I think just the name sounds cool as hell, like some kind of Bose - Einstein condensate laser cooled mag-lev or something, but what do I know.
Landscape Schematic with Electricity marked in Red, and Gas in Yellow. After trying several different freeware/shareware Landscape CAD programs, I finally settled for my old Standby, Microsoft Excel. By setting the Column and Row widths x heights to small squares, and mentally assigning them a scale of 1'^2, I was able to use the drawing tools and cell borders to do a rather good job, with no learning curve.
