Andrew Parks Life Blog Experiences & Interests

One of my dreams and goals for the future that I would like to achieve withing the next five years is as follows.
I have discussed this at length with my Wife and we agree on most points here of the goals.

1. Move away from the suburbs, urban sprawl, home owners associations, heavily populated areas, etc..
2. Purchase a small working farm / hobby farm on several acres of workable land.
3. Build and install my own energy generating methods by what ever means is available
The list here is not all inclusive, solar panels, wind turbine,geo-thermal solutions, passive solar,
grid tied system, battery backed system, emergency generator, solar hot water heater, high R value
Insulation, high R value double pane windows,utilize the latest technology in photovoltaics.
Hydro-electric power from a creek or river on my property.
The list could go on here in this area of alternative energy sources, and I will add to it here as
Technologies change.
4. Become less dependent on grocery stores and restaurants for my Family’s food supply.
5. Participate in a growers co-op, and community gardening.
6. Have our own water well.
7. Live a simpler life
8. Seek out a more organic diet for me and my Family.
9. Find a more spiritual side of my life.
10. This should have been step 1 – Secure the financial means to achieve steps 1-9.

These are not such lofty goals considering the government is offering tax breaks and incentives to individuals that install and use alternative energy sources, as well as the tax breaks that you get if you operate a farm.

I ordered a very thick book a few months ago called the solar energy source book. The company that publishes the book has been around since the mid-1970′s. It is packed with alternative energy ideas, and the actual sources where you can get everything you need for living a more self-sustaining lifestyle.
These people where probably called hippies then, but are considered innovators now.

I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

A wish list

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, favorite books, goals and dreams, home, projects

Surfin around on youtube today checking out what’s up with Keane these days, and low and behold I ran across Tim Rice Oxley doing a cover of “Jackson Browne’s” / Gregg Allman’s “These Days“, off of the Laid Back Album. Jackon Browne wrote the song and it was his orginal, although I have to say Allman’s version is the one I will always remember. These days was one of my favorite songs that seemed to capture of lot of feelings for me and when I was growing up listening to this Album daily. You know how some songs just give you certain feeling, this one did, and still does, it is timeless.

What I like about Tim’s version here is I can pick out all the words of the song without having to go look up the lyrics. Of course not taking away Gregg’s mastered version that is the best of all time.

It is strange how some music / artists you just feel a connection with through their music, well Gregg Allman was alway one for me, and Keane certainly.

If you get a chance go check out both on YouTube, lots of good stuff there.

Enjoy

Laid Back

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, Music, My Life, teenage memories

Today a friend of mine let me play around with his new Amazon kindle 2. Needless to say I am jealous, tech toy envy is not good. I was aware of the older legacy kindle, I think is was called the kindle 1, and it looks like the designers really packed this new puppy with features. If you don’t know what a kindle is, basically it is an electronic book reader. Here is the cool thing though, unlike reading a PDF or a word document on a laptop, which becomes very tiresome, the kindle uses something called electronic paper technology.

The technology behind electronic paper is that it does not have the same glare that you get when reading text from a laptop, or PC. If you have ever tried to read anything on a laptop on a sunny day, much less even a cloudy day forget it, the glare is too much to deal with.

Carlos gave me a quick tutorial on using it, I have to say it is an easy learning curve, even for the most technically challenged.If you have a hard time with small fonts, what I call mice type, kind of like what you may be reading now . The Kindle2 has a function where you can change the font size, and font type on the fly. The kindle really looks like something apple would have designed, because it is very thin like the new Iphone, itouch etc…

By the way Carlos also has an iphone, he downloaded the free app on the Apple app store, and we did  some comparisons, if you like constantly having to move the page around to read it, I guess it is close to reading any text on the iphone. Not sure if they have an app for itouch?

It weighs around 10 ounces but has a very sturdy feel just like apples products. He says the battery life is around 4 days, which I question that, but from what I have read about the new things they are doing with battery life technology I guess it is possible.

I have been very interested in ebook readers for sometime, I read articles about what was coming years ago when I got into reading e-books on my laptop. It looks like the technology has finally caught up with the predictions. So much is packed into this thing and the learning curve on it is dog simple.

You can bookmark pages and go back to where you left off reading. Also it has a feature where you can make notes / annotate sections on the sides of the pages just like you could in a real paper book.

I have always had an interest in finding ways to not use so much paper. I quit taking the newpaper years ago when I was able to get all my news, local and nationwide online. This little device has green written all over it’s face. I can only imagine the eco-friendly devices, and solutions to our wastefull habits that are in store for us in the future.

So my question is, how many of the books that I like to read are available on the kindle 2. Carlos says the info he read states right now there are around a quarter of a million books available for download.

I really go excited when I found out that free wireless connectivity is included in the price. You can browse Amazon’s kindle book store, and find your book and download it from any location where their wireless coverage is available. It seems that the wireless coverage should be pretty good, as Amazon’s whispernet they say is somehow linked in with Sprint’s 3G network. I know that sprint has really been beefing up their 3g network over the past few years, it, “publicly available wireless connectivity” is just one of the “big shifts” of the internet. So you know what this means for the kindle, and any other device using an available 3g network? No more looking for a wireless hotspot.

Previous owners of the original kindel can download all their previous purchases.
The big draw to me is if you are an avid reader like me you can save half on best sellers, you can get your subscriptions to your favorite magazines and news papers, and I looked out on Amazon and it says they are auto delivered to your Kindle 2. It had big name newspapers like the Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times. Can you imagine how much paper could be saved.

Last he showed me that it has free wireless access to wikipedia included, and free access to an online dictionary, I forgot the name of the dictionary site.

I think I covered all the feature that he ran through in about ten minutes.

Oh, almost forgot this one, when your eyes get tired of reading you can switch over to text to speech mode, and it will read to you. It sounds like the normal top of the line text to speech program, which I really don’t like that much, but nevertheless you can rest your eyes and finish off a chapter or two.

So I started searching for prices out there, I looked on ebay and found kindles being bid up beyond the new and used prices that are on Amazon, that does not make sense to me, unless you like wasting money.
I will be putting this on my wish list for Christmas. I usually don’t get expensive gifts for Christmas, although I would gladly forgo a Birthday gift to get my hands on one.

Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, Real-time, books, favorite books, gadgets

One of my best Halloween childhood (12 13 14 ish) memories was going down to Atlanta costume off of Monroe drive. My best friend stu’s Mom drove us down there in her Volkswagen beetle and let us browse the store for who knows how long. This was in the mid-seventies and at the time we where into the band Kiss which led to us messing around with theatrical makeup.

We ended up leaving with clown white makeup, a bunch of different colors of face makeup that looked like little cylinders wrapped in gold foil, some spirit gum and fake hair that we ended up eventually using to create some very lifelike beards for ourselves. We proceeded to visit the local Tenneco convenience store and played some pranks on the clerk, ahh Tenneco we lived at that place.

Wonder how many times I said to Mom “Mom we goin to Tenneco”

I really can’t remember what we ended up dressing as that year for Halloween , but a skeleton, almost getting ran over by a car, and having allot of fun comes to mind.

Atlanta Costume is still there, well sort of it always was owned or a distributor of norcostco’s products.

My Wife and I dropped by there a few years ago, it is still a great place, it is always good to go back and visit places that held your childhood memories.

In the spirit of Halloween here is a picture of what I would have looked like if I was a grown up in the seventies.

Polyester Sport Coats and Silk Shirts with Big Collars

Posted under Family, Hobbies, My Life, relationships

So I have an interesting story here about this video that John Mayer posted all the way back at the beginning of the year, it was January 13, 2008, and I was browsing through youtube, and checking out my favorite subscriptions, one of which is John Mayers handle mayermusic.

Well I noticed that he had just posted this video in what I would think was just minutes before as it only had 3 views, I checked it out and was mesmurized by the tonal quality of the guitar, and Mayer’s masterful way of playing a cover of Justin Timberlake’s I Think She Knows.
Well no words or not, this intrumental cover version of the song is really cool.

Now not just anybody has a five, six grand or more lying around to fork out to pickup a Collings I-35 electric, and the mix of gear he is using here… well I can only dream and save.

Uh Sorry, I digressed into equipment envy… anyway the next morning when I checked out the video again it had over 300,000 views in less than 24 hours, I still like to watch and listen to this video, to this day it is one of my favorites.

Since then this video has exceeded a million and a half views

Mayer’s Post on youtube Interesting use of Tags

From: mayermusic
Added: January 13, 2008

Heard this in the car today, wanted to try it out… Collings I-35 through a Roland Space Echo pedal, Cornish NG-2 Fuzz and Fender ’64 Vibroverb… Looped through a Boomerang pedal.
Category: Music

Tags: Justin Timberlake Lovestoned Kiss Gene Simmons Ace Frehley Peter Criss Paul Stanley Kiss Army Rock Roll Over

Where The Light Is: John Mayer Live In Los Angeles

Posted under Hobbies, Music

So this is what my Friday nights have come to.
You know you are a geek when you play with adobe photoshop on a Friday night.

I am just getting the hang of creating simple banners, headers logos, etc..

Here is an example of the header listed above

one header for my blog

So Basically each different part of the header is a new layer in photoshop.
I followed a simple tutorial I purchased to make this one, really makes me appreciate photoshop experts.

I will try to post a video soon outlining the steps to create a banner.

Adobe Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, projects, software