Daily Video #11 - Cheap Gas!!!

To the best of my recollection, this is the lowest price for gas locally since I moved here 4 years ago.

Daily Video #9 - All I Wanted Was the Hard Drive

Don't ever think you'll open up an iBook to pull out the hard drive and then put it back together. What an adventure! Thank goodness for the interwebs. I'd have never figured this out on my own. I thought it was just going to be "pop off the enclosure, pull out the HD, put it back together". Oh, no! This monkey is not going to be reassembled, at least not by this guy.

You'll find it on eBay being sold for parts. However, I did get a nice little USB external hard drive as originally planned. It was a learning experience.

Daily Video #8 - Nothing Like a Tightly Run Operation

This sign is in a sandwich shop/convenience store in Bellwood, PA. It's funny, but some businesses (not this one) are run this way.

You'll have to use Pause to read it all.

Daily Video #7 - BK Freezy

Waiting at the BK drive thru in freezing rain ...

This is my first video embed from a site I just discovered, MotionBox.

Daily Video #4 - Less than Two Bucks

This is a very short clip celebrating the price of gasoline dipping below $2 a gallon for the first time since who knows when!

This is at the GetGo in Logantowne Centre, Altoona, PA

Daily Video #3 - Muddy Waters

This is the third in a series of quick daily videos. My plan is to do a video each day for 15 days to help develop more of a "shoot anything" mindset.

This is a muddy flood behind my building, apparently from a water main break.

Pay It Backwards?

Driving home this afternoon, I heard a genuinely nice story on CNN Headline News. It seems that at a certain Colorado Starbucks, people are paying for the next person in line behind them. At a local grocery store, a man paid $20 toward the next person's bill.

This is beautiful! Maybe we're giving up on greed and selfishness. Could this be the dawn of a new era of community spirit, shared responsibility, and mutual respect in America? Wouldn't that be something!

I can't wait to do this myself. Who knows, maybe it'll catch on.

Good Morning Central Pennsylvania

In my tightly budgeted morning routine, I left no time for this frosty surprise ...

Great Interception by Steeler Troy Polamalu

Pittsburgh Steeler star Troy Polamalu makes one of the most amazing interceptions I've ever seen ...

Who'll Start the Rain?

I captured this short video this afternoon at the Bellwood Reservoir which is part of the Altoona City Authority water system. For the past 5 years, I have driven past this reservoir several times a week. I have never seen it as low as this. We really need to get some rain into here before it turns into real winter.

NetFlix Watch Instantly For Mac

I was delighted to see earlier in the week that after a very long wait, NetFlix instant movies had finally come to the Mac community. It does requires a download and install of Microsoft Silverlight before you can watch.

I grabbed a BBC import and started watching in less than a minute. No ads. Reasonably good full screen quality on a 17" iMac. There were two brief periods where the video was choppy and in the second half the audio and video got out of sync. But, it is a beta app with expectation for improvement.

There's no limit to how many instant movies you can view as part of your existing subscription. I haven't yet look at how many instantly viewable movies are currently available. It's not the entire NetFlix library.

All in all, it seems the wait may have been worth it.

Posted with LifeCast

America's New Beginning

On this morning as a new era begins in this country, I have never been prouder of the United States of America or happier to live here. But, the real change, the hard work is just beginning. Let's hope we can earn the new America that we have a chance to build.

Posted with LifeCast

The Verbosity of Joe Biden

This is fantastic! Go, Joe!

Track the Polls

As the campaign winds down and election day nears, here are some tools you can use to track opinion poll results ...

• USAToday Presidential Poll Tracker - good trendline representation
• ABC News Poll Tracker - shows poll results with demographic breakdowns you choose
• Pollster.com - numerous results for a variety of races
• TPM Election Central Poll Tracker - non-graphical presentation of results from numerous polls
• Electoral-vote.com - downloadable poll results