Archive for the ‘You're Nuts’ Category

Internet Detective.. on the trail of Black Oak Arkansas

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Back in the 70’s I went to a concert in Rockingham, North Carolina at an old stock car track and saw, among others, Black Oak Arkansas. My army buddies and I took a liking to the sound and bought a few of their albums and grooved on them for awhile. (Those were the days.) But I new relatively little about them then, and now, years later, I know more about them than I really need to. This is all due to the invention of our age, the internet.
BlackOakAlbum
I can consume facts about things I’m interested in and there seems no end in sight. I now know that the date of that concert was August 18th, 1972, which is also the weekend I got nailed by the army for not coming back home on time. 2 weeks extra duty and 2 weeks forfeiture of pay. But it was worth it. Scored huge gobs of mescaline and saw noteworthy acts like the James Gang, and others like 3 Dog Night and Fleetwood Mac, but I don’t remember them. But I do remember Jim Dandy’s voice. Sounded like a frog on steroids and he was on fire.

Black Oak Arkansas also has a MySpace page. You can listen to some of their music there and find out info on their new upcoming album. (Yes, old rock and rollers don’t go away) Look for it soon, titled “Memphis mean tymes”. And the internet is helping the band in huge ways, keeping them in touch with their fans and even using the fans to complete their discography. It seems they didn’t remember what they did in the 70’s. Go figure.

From Wikipedia you find out they stole a PA system from a local high school when they formed their band and got 26 years in the pen in absentia (later dropped). Jim “Dandy” Mangrum fronted the band then and now. He was reportedly the inspiration for David Lee Roth’s act. You can even see his picture from high school on this site. The picture is from the 1964 Buffalo Trail, Monette High School’s yearbook, which is 5 miles north of Black Oak, Arkansas.. From PopCultureSignatures, you can get the 1st BOA album signed by Jim Dandy and several other band members for $369.

And if you still want to see them, they’ll be headlining the Real Ozfest IV at Circleville Auditorium in Circleville Kansas on September 6th, 2009. Although they may have lost their youth, they are still rockin!
BlackOakToday

greg

Posted in Greg's Stuff, You're Nuts | 2 Comments »

Switched to LINUX

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

About two years ago, I switched to UBUNTU LINUX on my work machine at home. I also loaded the server version onto a couple boxes in the basement. I switched because I wanted to try something new, and I saw the programmers that I worked with use LINUX for everything. I was also paying about $400 bucks a year for a Microsoft Action Pack subscription to get copies of the latest and greatest software, that I used less and less.

So how has it been? Fairly smooth, with some caveats. One less than smooth spot early on, was the Nvidia driver chase every time the kernel and headers were updated. Usually I had to go through a short but irritating reinstall of the correct driver, to get my high resolution back. Lately this problem has disappeared. Now, I am running two monitors off the same card, using twinview, and it rocks.

I have a couple programs that I haven’t swapped for LINUX equivalents. For that, I have a dual boot option in GRUB, the boot loader, so I can also boot into a WINDOWS XP system if needed. This was another rough spot. Searching discussion forums to find the correct combination of parameters to boot the windows drive was lengthy. The windows drive was IDE, and the LINUX drive was SATA, which was also tricky initially. I also found my motherboard wouldn’t support SATA and IDE together, even though the documentation said it would. I had to install an additional SATA controller card to fix this.

The latest rough spot was when they last pushed out a kernel and header update. My machine failed to find the boot drive. Once again, after searching discussion forums, I found the correct delay parameter to put into GRUB. Now it boots reliably.

I seem now to have experienced all the big problems with a LINUX UBUNTU system. Bear in mind, I have relatively old hardware, such as the Athlon XP 3200 processor. Installs on newer hardware have all gone perfect, and so have all the updates. I have even installed Simply Mepis and Damn Small Linux on systems, and they are working flawlessly. I can place DreamLinux on a thumb drive, and take it with me anywhere.

I use OpenOffice applications for general business, and it integrates well with MS Office. For the one windows program I haven’t migrated to this point, I use VMWARE to load a copy of windows XP, and run the program in there, rather than booting to the old Windows Drive.

Now I just have to put up with my coworkers telling me ‘I told you so”. I’ll pay that price.

Billrad

Posted in Computers, You're Nuts | 1 Comment »

The newest discovery

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Prior to this latest discovery, we have been enthralled with the notion that there is matter we cannot yet see. Dark matter. Most of the universe (that we know of) is comprised of dark matter. Vast unimaginable cosmic distances of nothingness, colossal voids, or rather, dark matter…

Just as I am getting my astrophysical metaphysical brain around this wholly unimaginable concept of dark matter, a new stunning discovery makes its debut in all the cutting edge star magazines, and I develop a headache.

There is apparently a newer type of recently discovered matter in the universe, that seems to dwarf the vast nothingness of dark matter. I am of course, talking about: “Doesn’t Matter”.

We would die one thousand times before we reached the nearest habitable planet. And surrounding us all on our improbable journey would be “Doesn’t Matter”.

Doesn’t Matter is visible – in the county vehicle registration office. It’s all over in there, trust me. And, it is pouring out of the local Sheriff’s cruiser, when your are explaining your accident. On debate night for the presidential candidates, the building is literally constructed out of “Doesn’t Matter”

Parents are literally covered in it, when they are adjudicating a fight between brother and sister. Doesn’t Matter is spraying all over the place.

So, look around. Take a good look. You may get a glimpse of “Doesn’t Matter”.

Posted in Rubber Chicken, What's New, You're Nuts | 1 Comment »

Alternative Energy

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

With all the talk about the oil crisis, I am always on the lookout for alternatives to use in the country. We drive an explorer that runs on biofuel but it takes 2x as much so it isn’t really saving us any money and it upsets me that my drive to walmart is causing a Somalian to starve. So after much research – I thought a car running on methane from pig shit was the perfect solution but I really couldn’t stand the smell and I don’t do animals so it would never make it through the week . Since we live in the middle of the mennonites – I have discovered the perfect vehicle -
Nik
Pedal John pedal!

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TV show ideas

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Lately, I have been thinking of a way to generate a winfall of cash. if RonCo can do it with the Popiel “Pocket Fisherman”, so can I.

After a few bourbons, this is my idea: Celebrity Ass Whoopin’. An audience text messages their selection from a list of newsmakers during week one.

Then they select a WWF wrestler, same sex, to do the whoopin’. Then you send the Whooper out with a film crew, to catch the celebrity when they least expect it.  Get it all on film. Week two, you show the film, and pick next weeks whoopee. If you do multiple whoops in the same week, you could have a runoff vote. And, if the celebrity continues to make the news, they are eligible for another round.

I figure, we will never run out of contestants, and the audience will become hooked.

Barbaric you say? I say “let the coffers be opened: let them fill with gold…”

br

Posted in Fun, You're Nuts | No Comments »

Things I’ve learned.

Friday, April 20th, 2007

tim_robinson.jpgI am not the brightest candle in the church. Still, I have learned some things, and I’ll pass them on to the community in the hope that someone will be saved from commiting the same error.

From my life as a contractor:
If a client says “all we really want is…” you can be sure that what they want will test the limits of science and knowlege.
If a client says “I’ll know it when I see it” you can bet they will never see it, and you will toil forever.

From my life as a dog owner:
Whatever you are told to use to discourage your dog’s particular behavior, your dog will be the one in a million that will love it.
If the dog is as big as you are, that’s just no good.
Before I owned a dog, if I saw one in the road, I’d swerve to miss it. Now, I’ll probably just close my eyes and hit the gass. I’ll do it for the owner.

From my time in the Army:
When they tell you how much ammo you’ll need, just go ahead and triple it.
When you hear how much chow you will get, imagine about half, and be happy.

From being a parent:
Kids’ brains don’t work like yours, and neither do their bank accounts. They are both usually empty.
When they get real quiet, something of yours is missing, or broken.

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Good days, bad days, ugly days

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Flying model airplanes isn’t for everyone. It can go really well…
dscf0477.AVI

Or, not well at all  :)
dscf0475.AVI

br

Posted in Fun, You're Nuts | 1 Comment »

Pumpkin in flight…

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

pumkin-chuckers-tammy019.avi

Here is a video of Tammy R. launching a pumpkin on Holloween. The pumpkin travels out of sight and into the woods, on a high curving arc. There’s about 400 lbs. of total counterweight in the descending boxes.

The Trebuchet has since been relocated to our new home, which we should move into in about 2-3 weeks. Anything we don’t want to keep after the move, is going airborne into the neighbor’s field. This may include pets. 

br

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Trebuchet adventures

Friday, February 16th, 2007

the-great-pumpkin-chucker-001.jpgShortly before October 31st of 2006, some of us RC types attended a birthday celebration for the son of a club member. His wife challenges the men to build something to throw small pumpkins, and bring it to the Holloween Party. She said the rule was that is had to be made only of materials available in the early 1800s.

Well, we have never been too big on following rules. We ended up building a Trebuchet, actually a modernized floating arm trebuchet. WIth 500 lbs of counterweight, it heaves a reasonably sized pumpkin a good long ways. it is built on a 5 X 10 trailer. If you ever get down to our place, bring something to heave. Maybe it will even show up at a family reunion. You never know.

Posted in Fun, You're Nuts | 3 Comments »