It’s been over a week since I last posted. Since then I’ve been out of town, been busy at work and busy outside of work. And I’ll be out of town again Friday-Sunday for a Men’s Retreat our Church is putting on. Hopefully next week will settle down. At least enough so that I can go see The Passion.

This site is great: 70′s Live Action Kid Vid. A tribute to all those 70′s TV shows we enjoyed as kids. The shows, in retrospect, were basically low B-rate fare, but talk about nostalgia. Woot! or should I say, Shazam!

OK, this is a little strange. Roku Labs has a product (a pair of products, actually), that are remarkably similar to Slim Devices‘s SqueezeBox (and more directly, the predecessor, the sliMP3 player). In fact, Roku makes reference to the server-side software, Slim Server, as the back-end to the Roku player. But I can’t find any reference on either server to the other’s company.

I wonder if there’s some kind of back-room licensing deal here?

Got to admit, though, the industrial design on the Roku player is nice.

It was a bit of a surprise that it actually happened, but this morning we woke up to a beautiful white Valentine’s day. The kids had spent the night at the grandparents last night, but they came home early so we had time to play in the snow, build a snowman or two, and generally make a fun mess. Click the picture to the left to see some snaps of the time we had. I took some video as well, but haven’t had a chance to assemble it into anything viewable. Maybe I’ll get a chance to do that tomorrow; I will post it once I have.

The neat thing was that the conditions were just right to create that soft, perfect to make things kind of snow. You know the kind–you start a small snowball rolling and it picks up the snow completely, leaving a clean trail of grass behind you. Pretty soon it’s as big as a pumpkin. The first ball we rolled for our big snowman was easily 4 feet in diameter. No slush or anything.

Unfortunately, the temperature quickly rose to above freezing, so shortly after lunch the snow began a rapid melt. Our big snowman made it until about 1:30, then took a tumble. I expect there’ll be a little remaining in the morning, but it will probably melt off completely by mid-afternoon. It was fun while it lasted.

Getting closer: PhotoVu is a step closer to the right way to approach digital photography presentation in the home.

19″ LCD display mounted in a nice picture frame, suitable for hanging, connected to the network via 802.11b wireless. Their site is very cagy about revealing details such as the resolution of the display and the speed of the processor controlling it, but they do brag about running Linux.

I’m curious about picture quality, especially in high ambient light. It would be nice if the display was as brilliant as a 17″ Studio Display, but that might make the unit a little thick.

Hopefully they’ve given some thought about transitions and such. It’d be a shame to present photos so nicely and then ruin the experience with a bone-jarring cut between photos when switching. A nice, slow, cross dissolve is so much more pleasing.

Tight integration with iPhoto would be especially nice, allowing you to schedule different photo albums at different times, and so on. I’m curious about how to control/configure the unit. A remote control would be cool, with the ability to pull up iPhoto albums, change parameters/settings, etc.

Of course, the other thing is the $1,549 price tag. There’s no technical reason this product should cost that much. $799, sure. $999, maybe. But a G and a half? No critical mass there.

Ugh. Sick. Headache, sore throat, runny nose. I look like a cold medicine commercial.

This is just getting out of hand.

Public praise doesn’t come so easily anymore in some Nashville schools.

Parents must sign a permission slip before students can receive academic awards in front of their peers.

At Cumberland Elementary School in Nashville, principal Renita Perkins had to get parental permission to have the names and photos posted of all the students honored for good behavior, reading skills and artwork.

The school district adopted the policy after the parent of an honor student complained that posting the names of award recipients was an invasion of privacy.

Common sense has, once again, left the planet.

Another example of someone with just a bit too much free time on their hands. Everything you ever wanted (or didn’t want) to know about tying shoe laces.

OK, this guy has spent a little too much time comparing the original text of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the movie versions.

Once again, I find myself in San Antonio for the week, recording voiceover and video for a Training project we’re doing for the US Courts. I drove in last night (missing the superbowl and the controversy during the half-time show), but it was a nice drive down.

I’ll be here until Thursday, back in Dallas overnight, then Cynthia and I are going for a weekend in Jefferson.