As you can see I'm changing the layout of my blog. I'm in the process of playing with the html tag attributes so if things look funky just remember that I'm working on it.

Merry Christmas from Walker Talker and Bronco610

Image from Crazy Frankenstein

Hey but it's an Infiniti...

And actual ad on Craig's List of a car for sale, where at least they're disclosing all info. Sounds like a few vehicles we've owned.

My mental image of Scrooge...

Everyone has their own favorite versions of A Christmas Carol. For many of us it's the movie or TV version that we grew up with. I remember the first one I watched, which I found while perusing the limited number of shows on TV one Saturday afternoon when I was a kid (I didn't have cable where I grew up out in the country.) The movie I came across was the 1970 version Scrooge, starring Albert Finney. To me, Finney is the epitome of Scrooge, the meanest, nastiest, ugliest man to ever play the role.

I'm not typically a fan of theatrical musicals, but this is one of those movies that I'll watch every year if I can find it. This year it'll be shown on TCM on Saturday, Dec 20 at 6pm. I've already had Hubby set the TiVo.

The only downside is that for weeks afterward I won't be able to get the songs out of my head.

Finally, grades are officially in the system.

Design- A
Drawing- A
Chemistry- A
Beverages- A
Art History- B

Damn Art History, it was more like "Architecture History" as we covered very little art but instead covered floorplans of religious buildings. For instance of Islamic mosques we were taught about the walls and structural components- Qibla wall, mostaba, minarets, and iwans... yeah that will come in handy to know in case I ever change my religion. Oh well. I got a 97 on my final exam but it wasn't enough to raise my overall grade in the class.

A friend of mine who is an alumni told me grades don't matter. However, I received a scholarship last month and to keep receiving it in the future I have to keep my grades up. Luckily my 3.8 is good enough.

Hubby did well too in his first term, receiving all As and Bs also. I'm proud of him.

Looking forward now to next term, my classes I've scheduled are:

Painting II (my course from TCC didn't transfer so I'm taking it again)
Intermediate Figure Drawing
College Algebra
Archeological Sciences
Health Emergencies

Archeology because I have always thought it would be interesting, in an alternate life I can see myself enjoying working at an excavation site. Sitting for hours in the sun with a little brush in my hand searching for tidbits in the ground, believe it or not that sounds like fun to me. Okay I'm weird I know. But I enjoy searching for things and love looking at ancient artifacts.

Health Emergencies because Hubby is taking it as an elective, so I'll be sitting around on campus waiting on him to take the class anyway, and it might come in handy to know what to do if something happens. Although hopefully it's knowledge I'll never have to take action on.

Anyway, classes start again January 20. A much needed break until then.

For that special someone on your list...

You too can own a replica of the famed leg lamp from A Christmas Story. It can be purchased from a gift shop operated in the original home shown in the movie. And after all, who wouldn't want a leg lamp? "It's a major award!!"

Phone tales...

Kids, always erase the info saved in your cellphone before returning it to the cell provider.

Example #1- McCain campaign garage sale story

Example #2- Since most of you are my horse racing friends I gotta tell you this story, but never had the occasion to bring it up before.

In 2005 I was working for a company that refurbishes cellular devices for Verizon wireless. At one point my job was to check the phones being returned. It was a warehouse setting, and our department unpacked the shipments coming directly from the consumers and stores, and then ran the phones through a series of tests to diagnose problems to be fixed.

Because we were the first step in the process of inbound phones, the devices had not been "flashed" yet. To flash is an industry term to remove old software from the cellphone and put new software on it void of any previous customer's personal information. So what I'm trying to say is as employees we saw ALL of people's personal information on their phones. Their call lists, family photos, nude photos, bank account numbers and credit card numbers and passwords that they saved, everything you can imagine.

So anyway, when I picked up one phone I saw that the wallpaper had a race horse on it. I thought, "Hey that horse looks familiar." Turns out it was a close-up headshot of Afleet Alex as he won the Belmont Stakes. When I checked the photo gallery, sure enough it was full of photos taken by someone who was at least close to the winning team. There were photos of Jeremy Rose in the jocks room, barn shots of Alex, the banners in the owner's suite and several people in that party, and even some shots of Rose and a friend as they hung out around town riding Sedgways and goofing off while in Lexington for the Derby. No it wasn't my job to check every single photo, lol. But it was fun. Not to mention reading all the names in the contact list, phone numbers of the top jockeys, trainers, and farms on the East coast.

(this photo credit to the NYTimes)

What I had to wonder about was the odds of me seeing that particular phone. We received on average 60,000 phones per day, there were about 240 people in my department besides me on 3 different shifts, and the pallet next to my workstation had about 500 cardboard boxes of phones on it to be checked as did the other 80 workstations. Not to mention, I'd say somewhere around 30% of the phones can't be checked because of broken screens, software problems, etc. So what are the odds that I myself, a horseracing fan who once worked at the track, happened to see that phone. Irony or fate? Maybe. Or maybe a fluke of chance.

Anyway, moral of the story is to always erase your private information off your cellphones! Other eyes may see it.

We can stop crossing our legs now...

Whew, Hubby got the sewer block cleared, but only after calling the City out (on a Saturday) for them to check their main line. But, Hubby got it clear with the snake where our line connects to the main. Thank goodness. And all this is probably more than you folks want to know.

Good news, bad news...

Good news- My Mom had surgery yesterday to have the defibrillator/pacemaker inserted, and she's recovering well.

She had been nervous about the surgery (who wouldn't be), but talking last week to someone else with a pacemaker eased her mind a little I think. But one surprising thing, the person said his pacemaker was on recall! So when Mom asked if he was going to have it replaced he nonchalantly replied, "Why? It seems to be working fine so far!"

Alrighty then.

Bad news- We're having a problem with our sewer line in our backyard. We've had a sneaking suspicion for a few years that it may be broken or clogged, which may account for how well certain areas of my garden grew compared to others. Well yesterday the line clogged completely, so poor Hubby is digging up the backyard today if snaking it doesn't fix it. Nasty job. And we're not running any water in the meantime. Ugh, ain't home ownership wonderful.

Death by bacon...

If I Die A Bacon-Related Death, I'd Like It To Be Because Of This

(warning, the text is a bit crude)

I can hear my arteries clogging already, but I have to admit it looks pretty damn good.

We might have to try it sometime.

The lights are out and the door is locked...

Yes, as of about an hour ago the Sports-Talkers website seems to be down. Damn it I was just in the middle of typing a post too, and it gave me a message about the site being suspended.

Here is the addy for our backup site, for in case anyone didn't have it bookmarked. Thanks to SonOWar for having the forethought of creating a backup for us to regroup at.

http://hottalkerstwo.freeforums.org/portal.php

Warlock is on top of things, he said he's emailing Matt.

Oh well, my artwork website is down too, I'll probably have it back up and running in January.

School out...

Took my last exam this morning for this term, YAY! Final grades come in next week.

At the beginning of each semester I can't wait for classes to begin, but at the end I can't wait for it to be over! Just like when I was in elementary school, lol.

And I will say, for the record, yes classes are more intensive at a university than at community college. Yeah I know, big surprise, right? But I'm glad to see the difference between the two now, as before this term I didn't know what I'd be up against. It wasn't that bad really. The university classes certainly had more busy work and were more time consuming but they weren't necessarily more difficult intellectually.

But I survived and just have a couple more years to survive.

Sick of banner ads?...

Cool, I just learned a new trick and had to share. I'm sick and tired of those damn animated banner ads. At first it was mostly the dancing silhouettes beckoning us to lower our mortgage rates (as if I'm going to trust my home to a website who can't even hire live spokesmodels and is possibly based in a country God-knows-where like Nigeria?) But now it seems every retail company on the planet has jumped on the rotating banner ad bandwagon. It's aggrevating how long I have to wait, since the ad has to load before I can navigate the rest of the web page. I can't even write an email anymore without an ad for Black & Decker drills slowing down my PC to the point of hair-pulling.

So I'd had enough, and Googled how to stop the animated banner ads. What I found was that Mozilla Firefox has an internal setting built in to the browser to adjust the playing of animated ads.

Here's the directions in case y'all are tired of the ads too, taken from the mozillaZine website:

(FYI- I set my browser to play the ads "once", so that I don't accidently block something else on the page that I might need access to like on the college website. And so far it works to stop the ads from playing over and over.)

**************************************

The image.animation_mode preference determines how multi-frame GIF images are animated. This preference settings affects GIFs in every kind of displayed content, including web pages, messages and RSS feeds.

You can change this preference setting using any of the usual methods for editing configuration, specifically:

[edit]

Using about:config

In Mozilla Suite and Firefox:

1. In the Location Bar type about:config and hit Enter
2. Type "anim" in the Filter field (to quickly find the needed preference) *One note, I had to type "image" to find it)
   
3. Double-click the image.animation_mode line and edit it to one of the following:

none — will prevent image animation

once — will let the image animate once

normal (default) — will allow it to play over and over

Video project...

As a final project for my Design II class I had to create a video. I am posting it here as a "Plan B" option for in case it doesn't open off of my thumb drive when I get to class tomorrow. I'm always paranoid about files not opening for instructors when a large project is due, so I tend to save multiple file types in different locations... I'm sure at least ONE will open!

Anyway, to explain this project: We had to make a video incorporating an object made in one of our previous exercises, and the object has to move in the video.

Well in one exercise we had to sew fabric together to make hackysacks. So for this video I used a hackysack that I made with a monochromatic color scheme, hence the title of this "movie".

Hope this works, I've never uploaded one of my own videos to the Blogger.

One last drawing (til next term)...

Here's my final project for the Drawing class. We were given free rein on this one, so I decided to incorporate our pets into the drawing. I started with Athena in colored pencil:



And then for something fun I camouflaged the 6 cats into the yard with watercolor and a Sharpie marker. This is the final drawing:

Athena's World
(aka "Where's those cats?")

With the watercolor I first put down a wash of color, then did the linear work with the Sharpie, and then went back in some areas with more saturated hues of watercolor to create the value variations. Here's a close-up of Sassy:


And Crook in the tree:


My "experiments" with artwork don't usually end up coming out very well (not in my opinion anyway), but for a homework project I'll say I'm decently happy with this one, or at least I can say my experiment of watercolor with colored pencil didn't go horribly wrong.

One last note on this- For 20-some years I've drawn with colored pencils, but ever since I went back to school all of my art professors have told me, "Throw away your colored pencils!!! It's not REAL art!" They preferred to push the old masters' mediums of pastels and oil paint.

And then there is my current drawing instructor who for this project told me, "DO IT IN COLORED PENCIL! It would look SO COOL!!!"

Geez, make up y'alls minds.