Found on the net...

[Patricia]

I feel so lost. I don't know what ADSL or D90 means.

[Claudine]

ADSL is the internet connection I use Patticia, a router with a 384k line via my ISP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetr....

The D90 is a Nikon digital camera, a really nice one. My husband's newest digital toy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacquesvw/

[Andre Jute]

Here goes my street cred. Again.

What's a D90?

[Claudine]

Nikon camera Andre.

[Andre Jute]

Claudine wrote: "AThe D90 is a Nikon digital camera, a really nice one. My husband's newest digital toy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacquesvw/
"

Yesbutbutbut, he takes photographs as interesting with his phone...

I always used to be a Pentax/Hasselblad type (my son did Nikon for a while, as every young man should), until one day I decided the hell with lugging around all that weight and bought a small Olympus with a zoom lens and several built-in electronic programmes, still using film, and later a Canon Ixus 300 Digital, now already probably twenty years old, which I still use daily. The professional photographers I know barely manage not to sniff disdainfully...

Your husband will laugh at my latest toy, which is a Kodak movie camera fixed to my bike in case I have to go to court for beating up a motorist who endangered my life by careless driving. It's got almost no user-settable controls, just a near-worthless 2:1 zoom and a resolution selector, but it does have a rubber case and is water resistant, which is what I want -- and cheap, just in case it gets stolen from my bike, because I don't dismount the electronics when I park the bike, too much bother. Also, it uses standard rechargeable AA batteries, of which I carry spares on the bike for flashing lights and other equipment.

I love the manipulation programmes in the iPad. Set it to kaleidoscope, zoom in on your mouth, smile as you take a self-portrait, make a nightmarish picture of a hungry beast from outer space... It's a pity I don't do horror, or I'd have readymade covers.

Off to ride.

[Claudine]

Hasselblad is too damn expensive when you convert rands and dollars. The flickr link is his photos page. He's not professional but has a good eye, I think. I find the iPad 2 far too cumbersome to want to take a photo with or video. The photos are nice, but nowhere near as good as what we get with the D90.

My husband won't laugh at your contraption. His uncle, the semi professional, will however have hysterics! He has a Hasselblad that is around 15 or 20 years old. He also has a Canon somethingorother, a Nikon 3000 and another Nikon somethingorother. That's besides the point and shoot Sony and a handful of other dinosaurs that date to the film age.

I still have a film camera laying around somewhere that the kids use to mess around on. The staff at the Kodak stall in the local mall laugh themselves silly every time I bring them film to develop.

The D90 was just what we needed last year in the Kruger.

[Andre Jute]

Some people, like your husband, just have the eye. It doesn't matter what they work with, they'll always take good photographs. There's a woman in my library who got the Olympus film based point and shoot when I moved up to a Canon Ixus, and she takes wonderful photographs of the most commonplace subjects, probably a natural eye for composition and colour.

[Claudine]

My 8yo daughter is like that. She takes a much better and more steady photograph than my 10yo son. He, typically boy, doesn't have the patience to wait for the shot to find him.

[Andre Jute]

"Political correctness is tyranny with manners." ~Charlton Heston

[Andre Jute]

Nobody is rude to the horses, it doesn't pay. -- Ron Bales

[Andre Jute]

Why in the world would Scandinavians have their sauna if not for a deep primal longing to be Texans? -- Chalo Colina

[Andre Jute]

"My novella, Setting Boundaries, is still in the top 40 Free epic fantasy novels in the US Kindle store" -- Valerie Douglas

Only on Amazon is a novella "epic".

[Andre Jute]

Oh what a web we weave
When first we practice to deceive
-- William Shakksper of Avon

I was locked out of my FB account while in Canada, because I couldn't identify enough of the people on my friend list from their photos. Maybe I should get out into the real (non-virtual) world a bit more.
-- Michael Wallace

[Katie]

"Shakksper" - Ye olde English?

[Andre Jute]

Old Will de Shake spelt his name very casually, several different ways. Back in those days, people didn't have the same fetish with identification that the control freaks now practice.

[Margaret]

Neil Gaiman tweets on August 6, 2011:
Looking back over a lifetime, you see love was the answer to everything. Ray Bradbury

[Patricia]

For Ray, the answer was often found in a bottle.

[Andre Jute]

Cynic.

[Andre Jute]

"Phew! Writing's a Lot of Work"
-- "lvcabbie" on the Kindleboards

[Claudine]

Margie wrote: "Neil Gaiman tweets on August 6, 2011:
Looking back over a lifetime, you see love was the answer to everything. Ray Bradbury"

Two of my favourite authors...

[Andre Jute]

"The Ofmega spindles should be marked R-L (BSC) or
maybe D-S (ITA, which is fungibly similar for pedal threads)." -- Andrew Muzi, Yellow Jersey, Madison, Wisconsin

Fungibly means "mutually interchangeable". Andrew Muzi is one of my favorite bike mechanics, precisely because he knows words I have to look up.

[Margaret]

Andre Jute wrote: ""The Ofmega spindles should be marked R-L (BSC) or
maybe D-S (ITA, which is fungibly similar for pedal threads)." -- Andrew Muzi, Yellow Jersey, Madison, Wisconsin

Fungibly means "mutually interc..."

Hope I have a chance to use that word before I forget it. Not taking any chances pen to paper right now.

[Sharon]

The word does have a nice ring to it ...

Those two are so alike they are fungible.

Found on Twitter:

"Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still" Chinese Proverb
Good one to remember when ebook marketing...

[Sharon]

Found on the net today (both from Twitter):

@GetConnectedNow: 20 years ago today, the World Wide Web opened to the public http://tnw.co/pBNyNB

And a weird (to me) result of that historic event:

@KimAleksander: NASA And Tor-Forge Books Partner In Themed Science Fiction Works http://ow.ly/6dhww

[Andre Jute]

Weirder and weirder. But what do you expect from an agency which has let James Hansen run wild with climate alarmism since the 1970s (when Hansen, the "father of global warming", was one of the loudest prophets of the Big Freeze). Nobody else even tries to distinguish fact from fiction, so why should NASA?

[Claudine]

Makes for great book plots though.

Sharon, my first job I had to share a computer with 6 other people. We kept track of shipping around the coastline in a bunker underground for the Navy. It was a machine that used floppy disks, the big ones not the smaller ones, and the processor was a 286 if I remember correctly. This was circa 1989.

[Sharon]

Claudine wrote: "Makes for great book plots though.

Claudine, I so agree. Will be very interesting to see what comes out of this agreement.

Sharon, my first job I had to share a computer with 6 other people. We kept track of shipping around the coastline in a bunker underground for the Navy. It w..."

That too would make for a great story. I recently read a really good story from a fellow indie that had all kinds of 'insider' stuff in it (Navy as it turns out), but it was so in need of editing/copyediting I emailed the writer and told him I had planned to review it but could not in all good conscience recommend it so would not. He did not have the energy (and/or funds I would guess) to do anything about it. I had noted some of the glaring errors and forwarded at his request (don't know if he ever made any corrections). He still sells fairly well, though I doubt he's making any real money as he has forever been priced at the .99 KB model. The book has the predictable plethora of 5-star reviews that contribute to giving indies a bad name.

It was really too bad, because it could have been a great book, imho, and I felt for him if he simply could not afford to hire the professionals that could help make it so.

[Claudine]

I doubt my job back then would make a best seller or even a freebie book jump off the shelves! The two highlights I remember from my two years in was that I intercepted a signal marked secret one night which I should never have seen because the commanding officer on duty that night was passed out drunker than anything so it fell to me to let the command structure upstairs know all about it (some Russian frigates were coasting around in international waters off our coastline and the Cold War was still a real thing) and that one of the duty officers was the stuck up little snot son of an ex president of the country. Real spoilt brat little freak.

Not much there to add to a plot ;)

[K.A.]

...and that one of the duty officers was the stuck up little snot son of an ex president of the country. Real spoilt brat little freak.

That last part is ALL you need! People will be going crazy trying to figure out WHO he is!!!

"ENTITLED" the true story of my brush with the _____ family."

ZING! CHING!

[Andre Jute]

The Navy must have been using cast-off equipment from the Air Force...

[Sharon]

LOL, Kat. Plus the book I referred to in my earlier post had a very Russian theme (to do not with frigates but subs, but still...).

[Claudine]

Andre Jute wrote: "The Navy must have been using cast-off equipment from the Air Force..."

They didn't have a computer then. Ever been to Silvermine up againstthe mountain? PW's son served all of a few weeks ops room duties. Arrogant little shite then.

[Andre Jute]

I wasn't a professional soldier. I was a conscript who gave it up as soon as I could. After the Air Force decided I had too much initiative for its collective blood pressure, I served the rest of my time as a political officer, getting military service due credited against being youth advisor to the PM.

I imagine the pol's son you didn't like was serving his time in expectation of becoming a pol himself.

[Andre Jute]

Idiot, n.: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. --Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

[Andre Jute]

Bunch of engineers talking about a revered (obituaries as far away as The Times of London), dead, bike mechanic called Sheldon Brown:

On Aug 31, 2:58 pm, Tom Ace wrote:
> On Aug 31, 9:53 am, SMS wrote:
> > On 8/31/2011 8:56 AM, Dan O wrote:
> > > Yesterday I had a moment when I got to the bottom of one of those old
> > > posts, where google still provides a hyperlink labeled, "reply to
> > > author".  I got so verclempt I had to go take something for it.
>
> > It's verklempt. But there may be wi-fi up there.
>
> Sheldon Brown didn't believe in an afterlife.

Doesn't mean that he was right nor incapable of changing his mind if he should learn of credible contrary evidence.
D[irt]R[oadie]

***

Like turning up out of the great nothingness before the golden gates, and there's a guy with a beard rising from the ticket seller's table, stretching out his hand, and saying, "Just the guy we've been waiting for! BTW, I'm St Peter but you can call me Hey You if you can fix a bike. Oy vey, you've never seen so many broken bikes. Angels don't like walking!"

-- follow-ons to an original post by me at https://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...

[Andre Jute]

BTW, it is verklemmt, German for being emotionally choked up, absent p. Silly to try making it into fake Yinglish.

[Andre Jute]

THE LAND ROVER FAN CLUB

The problem is the badge says "Land Rover" and not "Land Cruiser". -- Tom Sherman

The oil that drips from under a Land Rover is useful to others who are tracking them when they fail to make it to their destination. -- James Steward

All the parts falling off a Land Rover are of the finest British quality. -- Tom Sherman

[Andre Jute]

Just started a blog and wrote about writer's block.
-- southerntype

Be the only entry then?

[Sharon]

ROFLMAO. Thanks for the chuckle, Andre...

[Sharon]

From @GetConnectedNow (I love these guys!) on Twitter:

Brain scans can now tell almost exactly what you're thinking http://ow.ly/6iYSP

Pretty sure I would break the machine...

[Andre Jute]

Coming soon is a titillating epexegesis on writing distracted. AKA "Turn down that techno before I have a seizure."
-- southernwriter

Holy sh*t, it's a word!

Epexegesis: n. add-on software delivered by the Fedex copycat EPEX for non-selfexplanatory bipedal code or other monkey-talk

[Sharon]

Andre, you'll love this one:

From @ctvbc on Twitter:

Drunk moose alert! http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/lo...

I could probably sometimes be accused of using unnecessary epexegesis :-)

[K.A.]

Andre Jute wrote: "Just started a blog and wrote about writer's block.
-- southerntype

Be the only entry then?"

LINKS! ANDRE - ALWAYS INCLUDE LINKS!

(headdesk)

[Andre Jute]

Sharon wrote: "Andre, you'll love this one:

From @ctvbc on Twitter:

Drunk moose alert! http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/lo..."

Claudine and I, who've seen elephants drunk on fermenting marula berries go on the rampage, wish to announce that a drunken moose is small change.

Ha! Not really. In Alaska I was lightly stomped by a mindlessly angry moose while trying to protect my dogs from him, and I hurt for a good eight weeks. Mind you, hurt as I was, I lay there laughing as the moose disappearing over the white horizon with two of the dogs I succeeded in unharnessing swinging from his testicles.

Yo, Kat, just for you, here's the link: it happened while I was researching my deeply touching, incredibly exciting adventure romance novel IDITAROD a novel of The Greatest Race on Earth.


***
Have y'all looked at that photo? How could the animal get there? When I stopped laughing I started wondering if someone was having us on. It's the sort of practical joke only an engineer can think up.

Magick, the Flying Moose!

[Andre Jute]

Has anyone tried saying "epexegesis" aloud? "Exegesis" is bad enough...

[Katie]

Andre Jute wrote: "Has anyone tried saying "epexegesis" aloud? "Exegesis" is bad enough..."

Er...Why would anyone want to say "exepegisis" out loud?

[Andre Jute]

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in thy philosophy, Katie.
-- William of Avon (and The Globe)

[Amos]

I can say 'philosophy' out loud if I practice.

[Andre Jute]

Try it in front of a mirror, and you'll soon be brought down to earth.

[Katie]

Haha, just noticed how I spelled it...that's a new word for getting off a horse!