Categories
Digital Culture

Grapevine Cave

Today I took my first caving trip with the Sewanee Outing Program, to Grapevine Cave. It’s just off a part of the Domain called Lost Cove…not a huge cave (no one seemed to know a length, but I’d guess maybe a mile…probably less). Very nice though for a first trip. I’d call it an intermediate level trip, with LOTS of crawls, but very few squeezes. Very active, but not a lot of drip formations. Not sure if that’s due to a sandstone cap or if the cave is just young. Throughout the entire length, I probably only saw a dozen or so speleothems.

The interesting thing to me was that I was able to keep up with the 18 year olds IN the cave without issue. The climb out (several hundred feet of elevation in very little horizontal distance) was nasty, though. I felt pretty good, seeing as how I’m now almost double their age.

Categories
Digital Culture

Politics

I’ve avoided political discussions on my blog, if only because they have a tendency to become vitriolic under certain circumstances.

But this is just unbelievable.

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” – Dick Cheney

For the Vice-President to equate voting for the republican party with preventing terrorism is just vile. Lewis Black said it best when he said “Dick Cheney? I met Dick Cheney. I’ve never stood so close to evil.”

Categories
Digital Culture

Gmail? ha!

First we had the GmailFS, a hack which allows a Linux sytem to use Gmail space as its file system.

Now we’ve got Gallina, a Gmail based blogging system.

Google can’t possibly like this…it’s incredibly clever, but supplying free server space AND bandwidth just seems sub-optimal for them.

Categories
Personal

Newness Abounds

First, the new car.

Then, the new furniture (a couch and a chaise).

Now, a new job.

Yep, you read it here first (or second if you were on AIM yesterday and I bugged you). I’m a newly employed member of the staff of Middle Tennessee State University. It’s not a library job, which is what I was hoping for, but is a very sweet Web Design job, working with the MTSU homepage and helping faculty do web-based things with research and teaching. Overall, I’m very pleased.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Categories
Digital Culture

A post in which we buy a vehicle

So we went car shopping last weekend, planning on hitting a few dealerships and seeing what kind of deal we could find.

The first stop was the Honda dealership in Chattanooga, where we were shown lines and lines of Honda CRV’s (the car that I had been sold on from the start…great reviews, good resale, last forever). After I asked for the “best price” they’d give me, I was shown a price a couple thousand below the MSRP on the car. Pretty good, I thought…except I’d done my homework. Thanks to Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book, I knew the invoice on the car, and that they desperately wanted rid of the 2004’s.

I countered with a price a couple hundred above invoice, and they agreed….so we are the proud owners of a new Honda CRV.
Honda CRV
This is our first ever new car, so it’s a pretty cool thing for us.

Categories
Digital Culture Media

I give you…

…the Ten Worst Black Metal Photos of All Time.

My personal fav:

Fenriz

Categories
Sewanee

Third day of work

Well, this is the third day of my filling in temporarily for someone who’s out in the Computing and Network Services department here on campus. Getting to meet TONS of faculty and staff, which is good. Also good is being on campus, and getting to have lunch with Bets everyday. 🙂

Categories
Digital Culture

BoingBoing likes GenCon

Or at least Xeni does! I’m currently in Indy, enjoying the late night nearly asleep part of GenCon, posting from a random computer in the convention center.

Check the BoingBoing story for interesting links.

Categories
Sewanee

With a little help from your friends…

With a little assistance from Justin, I’ve put together a search plugin for Mozilla Firefox for the Library Catalog for Sewanee: The University of the South. I’ll be interested to see how widespread it gets, since I’m still under the impression that technology isn’t always embraced readily on campus.

Check it out if you are interested. Just unzip into your Firefox/search plugins directory, and it should work fine.

Categories
Personal

More archives

So pleased with WordPress right now…I just got the Blogger import to work, so that my original blog posts from early 2003 are now happily ensconced in my current blog. Yay! Now all I’m missing is my 4 month dalliance with Radio…since my registration with them has expired, and my laptop was my server for publishing, I think that those are probably just gone. But I’m excited that most of my old entries are still around!