Well, I finally got out of the house today and picked up some slide cleaning fluid and cleaning pads. I picked out a particularly grimy one on which to test it. Click on each image below:

Dirty

Clean
As you can see, a pretty significant difference. The problem is that I had to take the slide out of the cardboard mount to effectively sweep the detritus off the edge of the film – otherwise it just collected at the edge of the image. As you can imagine, that takes a bit of time and care. But hey, I’ve got the rest of my life, right? The color is a bit different, but that’s due to the scanner software being reinstalled and not calibrated properly yet.

This is sort of interesting – a map of the locations of the last hundred or so visits to randyphillips.net. I get quite a few hits for searches for “randy phillips’, but I suspect they’re looking for info regarding the RP who’s a member of Phillips, Craig & Dean, the Christian trio (I’ve never heard their music, but Mom is a fan).

Almost time for ho-ho-ho! As I mentioned last summer, I ripped all my CDs for listening on my iPods, and among those CDs was my massive collection of Christmas CDs. It has really changed the way I listen to all that wonderful music. Instead of playing a CD from start to finish, I can now put the iPod into shuffle mode and hear the music all mixed up – and it’s been great! It’s like listening to a radio station on which every song they play is a favorite of mine. I can even narrow it down to just play Renaissance Christmas music, or piano Christmas music, and I get just what I want. For the first time I’ve got to sample just about everything in the past month, and I’ll be ready to put it away after this weekend until next year.

I fine-tuned the video handling – instead of having to automatically download the videos everytime the page loads, I replaced them with a still image that you can click on. When you do, a new window will open, and automatically play the video.

I posted a link to this same site last year, and it’s so good, I have to do it again!

Nothing says Happy Holidays like a photo of sweet little toddlers screaming at Santa.

A couple of months ago I mentioned that there was a swarm of bees here at my apartment complex. Here now, for the first time ever, is on-the-scene video of that incident.

This is video I shot last year from the observation floor at Macy’s at Union Square in San Francisco. Please, PLEASE tell me that this video starts playing immediately when the page loads.

I’ve done some testing, and it seems to be working in some cases, sort of working in others. If it’s not working, please click here and install (or reinstall) Quicktime.

The murder of John Lennon has taken on the same importance to my generation as JFK’s assasination had to the previous one. Do you remember where you were when you heard the news?

I was working for the Yosemite Park & Curry Company in the Village Grocery that winter. I was sitting with a group of friends in front of a roaring fire in one of the huge fireplaces in the Great Lounge at the Ahwanee hotel in Yosemite Valley when someone ran in to tell us that John Lennon had been killed in New York. We all sat in sort of a stunned silence – for some reason no one questioned the validity of the news.

Lennon hadn’t been too active in the years preceding his death; he had just recorded a new album and was involved in publicity activities earlier in the day. Most of us remember him, of course, as the Beatle on the right. The Beatle had changed everything, and symbolically, they were dead.

Where were you when you heard the news?

Forgot to mention that Carol and I saw King Kong over the weekend – two days before the New York premiere, even! It’s long (a bit over three hours) and once the special effects started it seemed like it was hard for them to stop (the digital effects are so amazing, maybe they were showboating a bit), but it’s a magnificent movie. Set in the Depression, the tale is essentially the same as the original from 1933….’it was Beauty that killed the Beast.’

We also saw Brokeback Mountain, which is the controversial new film about two cowboys who fall in love (with each other, that is) on the range in the early ’60s. It was better than I thought it would be; Heath Ledger and Jake Gyldenhall were courageous in the lead roles.

My Mac is ready to bring home today. Turned out to be the sound card I added a few months ago; for some reason the machine will not boot when it is installed. It was working fine before the operating system reinstall that I did just before it quit. In any case, I can live without that for now.

One of my childhood icons, Webster Webfoot, was supposed to be in the Merced Christmas Parade over the weekend, but he and his master Jimmy Weldon were no-shows. I saw him in person during a parking lot appearance at a local grocery store when I was probably 8 years old.

All those little kids (who had no idea who he is/was), so disappointed.

Bastard.