a crank’s progress

The Pledge of Allegiance - A Short History

[The] original Pledge read as follows: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to*) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ He considered placing the word, ‘equality,’ in his Pledge, but knew that the state superintendents of education on his [...]

You are Kermit!Though you’re technically the star, you’re pretty mellow and don’t mind letting others share the spotlight. You are also something of a dreamer.

Take the What Muppet Are You? Quiz!

University of Washington Home Page
I’ll be taking a course through the UW on software design and C++ this summer. I took it last fall but was doing so badly at the end, I withdrew. This time I am taking it as a distance learning class: this means I don’t to try and stay awake during [...]

Oregon State Parks and Recreation: Ecola State Park
Heading down to Cannon Beach. This park is just up the coast. I see a picnic waiting to happen.

From Saturday’s videotaping extravaganza (oh, how much I have to learn about videography) to this afternoon, I have been able to create a CD with a video on it, suitable for sharing.
I did end up with a couple of coasters as I experimented with mkisofs(8) and it’s options. It was easy to create a [...]

The most succinct result I can give is: horsepower helps. It’s amazingly simple to do stuff like titles, music tracks, transitions, but boy, is it CPU-intensive. I am doing all this on a 500 MHz iMac DV, and I have run into multi-hour render and export jobs. Rendering titles is very well-done: the renderer takes [...]

We were just thinking of bringing the kids in for dinner when the neighbor popped her head in the back door to say the police were on the street looking a man with a gas mask and a large knife.
Sure enough, there were two cruisers two houses down, and a deputation of neighbors giving [...]

The Seattle Times: Northwest Life: Shipshape: From tip to stern, this boat’s got family written all over it
It floated, rowed straight and turned like a happy beach ball. And like every proud family with a new baby, we could boast she was ours.
How can you beat the idea of a well-made wooden sailboat, made with [...]

When I went to rent the video camera yesterday, I couldn’t find my driver’s license. It turns out I have been without it for a a few weeks.
Two things I learned from that:

Hans Eric, who rented me the camera, is a trusting soul to let me walk off with a $2000 video camera on [...]

I solved my problems with sound by installing the xmms-arts plugin for xmms: this allows xmms to use the KDE sound subsystem instead of talking to the sound device itself. Of course, I lost one of my favorite stations today, so this is less valuable than it was.
And I can suspend and resume the [...]