John Langberg and I played a metal version of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” (an old hymn) last Sunday. It went great, and the response of people was awesome. Even older folks were coming up to us and saying how much the enjoyed it!
You can download the movie of this here, embarrassing though it is. I had one horribly wrong note (BLEH). I recommend downloading the entire movie (Save Target As) rather than streaming it, as it’s a large file.
Yesssssss. I am officially in love with Pearl Hill State Park. All summer I have wanted to get some camping in but just couldn’t find a good spot. After some online hunting I discovered that Pearl Hill State Park is closeby (Townsend) and cheap ($12) and has a swimming pond 
Yipee! It was fantastic. The site was roomy and the pond was great. Yes, it has some floaty things and such, but the fact that it was quiet and had no crowd sold us. We went 3 times! So, now I want to go every weekend. Loved it.
I stopped by 445 Sugar Rd. this week only to see my mother in the driveway with a shovel and plastic grocery bag in hand. What’s this? Oh, nothing… just preparing to go scoop up a dead fisher cat baby from off the side of the road!! Go Mom! So, I went down with here and saw a fisher cat up close and personal. He was a cute little baby, but I know that it is only a matter of time until he tries to eat my cats. Maybe they’re related to ALF?
Fisher cats are funny. In junior high my Dad started talking about them, finding evidence of them in our nearby conservation land, and blaming them for Spooky’s death! Bless your soul Spooky. It was a bit like an urban legend. No one had ever heard of one… except my Dad! Good ol’ fisher cats. This spring I did see my first one crossing the road in Boxborough. But, this little dead baby was the first one I really got to check out.
I’ve been using Firefox lately instead of Safari. Both are great browsers. Safari seems to be a bit faster (but it’s honestly hard to tell on an 8-core processor). Firefox looks about the same, but is very customizable/extendable. There are tons of extensions, addons, and themes you can download for free to change the way things work.
Based on our last post about the evils of TV and advertising, you can tell I’m passionately against advertising. Yesterday I discovered Ad Blocker Plus, which blocks advertisements on most sites you go to. It has worked flawlessly so far, and if ads bug you as much as they bug me, you’ll find it invaluable. Here is a little tutorial on how to set it up:
I realize that many of you probably already knew about this kind of thing, but I was excited about it! Here’s a screenshot of accuweather.com with no ads (no top and no Google ads at the bottom):
Finally, here’s an interesting movie about how the addon is causing commotion throughout the online world:
Jill and I haven’t owned a TV for years now. I guess I’m kind of proud of not watching TV. Most of it stinks.
The news is a joke and consists of 30 second sound bites. Liberal or conservative? I don’t even know, I just know that watching it always seems biased – not that there’s enough time to even find out on a given story. It seems like things are so ratings-based that they have to use every second to pique our wandering interest. I am admittedly poorly informed as I don’t seek other, more dependable news sources online. But I know that better sources are out there.
Next we have TV shows. Most of it’s crap. When you do find the occasional show that’s worth watching, you have to watch one episode a week. Invariably (to keep your interest) these single episodes end with some kind of cliff hanger.
During the episode, you are interrupted every five minutes with annoying commercials trying (at high volume) to get you to buy things you don’t need. After not watching commercials for years, they bug the heck out of me when I see them. I simply can’t understand why people put up with them.
We also live in a small space. When you have a desk, couch, kitchen table, and music area in one room, things can get cramped even without a TV. And, being a minimalist, I sought a way to use my nice big computer screen rather than having two big screens in one room for different purposes.
Jill and I do watch a fair amount of movies and even the occasional TV show we like. We get the entire season for free from the local library (you can request just about anything and they’ll get it) or from a friend that bought the season. Then we’d just stick the DVD’s in the computer and watch on the “big” screen. With the advent of libraries that can get anything, Netflix, and iTunes, getting all your entertainment on the computer is quite possible.
With the library/friend method you have NO COMMERCIALS. How blessed. You can watch two episodes in a night if you want. It’s also free. The only downside is the stuff you’re watching isn’t current. This is only a problem if you’re the kind of person that watches TV all the time and wants to talk about the latest episode of x show every week.
Anyway, we used this method for years with a big computer screen, and it worked fine. But recently Jill got a new couch and wanted something so that we could watch movies without moving the couch every time. So we bought a projector. It hooks up to the computer and projects to the other side of the room from the couch. My friend Jeff let us borrow a nice screen that my brother-in-law Steve helped us mount to the wall. We still don’t have a TV, and we still feel like we’re in a private movie theater when we watch! It also takes up very little space.
