A visit from Ute

A visit from Ute...

On Saturday we were visited by Ute and her family. Ute has been a friend of Christine since they went to college together. Her husband, Axel, is a major in the German Air Force. Axel was stationed around Norwich, England for a few years and now he is stationed around Maastricht in the Netherlands on a N.A.T.O. assignment.

Interesting...

Tour de France

Alberto Contador from the Discovery Channel Team won the 2007 Tour de France on July 29th. The 24 year old joins another famous Spaniard, Miguel Indurain, who won the Tour from 1991-1995. Alberto was expected by many tour followers after Michael Rasmussen was ousted from the Tour 5 days before the end of the race. I just wonder if people will forget all the talk about doping in this year's race. Will the grand race ever be able to get beyond all the doping. Only the future knows.

YouTube

I'm sure that most of you have heard of Youtube or even have been at their site by now. I have posted several videos and slide shows at the dcheronfamily channel. Pachelbel Rant is from comedian Rob Paravonian, who does a funny bit about how this one piece of music seems to haunt him throughout his life. If you're a fan of Monty Python and Star Wars, you might enjoy this one. If you're a fan of 24, you might enjoy this clip of catch phrases. Here are some Simpsons 24 parodies one of the show, Previously on the Simpsons, and Simpsons promo 24 style. I heard Bertone play a clip of Bush speaking a version of Imagine, a famous John Lennon song. The clip that I linked to here isn't what he played, but you can find many different clips if you search "George W Bush and Imagine" at YouTube. Here is a clip from the Bush blopper reals and one from more humorous sound bites.

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Sarah the Bride

Sarah the Bride

After seeing the Anna as a bride, Sarah wanted to dress up as well. Again I wasn't there but Christine told me of how geeked up she was and I can only imagine the scene.

Last week the girls spent a couple days in the forest with their kindergarten during their forest days. The day after Christine found a tick on Sarah. At the doctor’s office Sarah was talking to an older man (probably a grandfather) in the waiting room. She talked up a storm with the man telling her name and the whole story about the tick. When Sarah left planning to return, she told the man to watch after her spot. The man of course agreed to do so.

Interesting...

Tour de France

I first became interested in the Tour de France (wikipedia entry) back when Greg LeMond was the first American to win the grandest race of the cycling world. You can visit his website here. He won the race in 1986, 1989, and 1990. Since 1975 the race has had a big finish on the Champs-Élysées. I’ve always enjoyed the camera shots of the bicycles riding along one of the most famous streets of Paris and of some of the famous buildings and monuments. I followed the Lance Armstrong era, winning the race every year from 1999-2005. His website is here.

Last year Floyd Landis, another American won the race, but because of dopping tests that were taken there is still a battle going on to if that title will be stripped from him or not. It is most unfortunate that the use of steroids and dopping and has made such an impact on the sporting world, from the use of steroid in Major League baseball and the speculation of all the doping in the cycling world. Jan Ulrich won the Tour in 1997, he was banned from professional cycling for doping in 2006 and was barred from the race. Here is an article on doping at the tour. Erik Zabel of the German Telecom Team held a press conference on May 24, 2007, where he admitted to doping. From what I have heard, team doctors were pushing it on the cyclists apparently with the knowledge of the coaches and sponsor, I’m sure that the Telecom team usage is probably far from over. It is a little hard to follow the all the talk of doping on this year’s Tour. German television drops coverage of the tour. After positive test results for German Cyclist Patrick Sinkewitz. I do hope that Tour de France and the sporting world will somehow be able to move away from all the focus on drug usage.

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Anna the bride and Podcasts

Little girls like to pretend that they're getting married. Here a few pictures where Anna is dressed up as the bride. The other day the girls were visiting their friend Lena. Lena had recently been a flower girl at a wedding. Christine was able to take these nice pictures of the girls with Lena. As the father of two little girls, I do hope that the "real" wedding days for the two of them are several years away!

Interesting...

I decided to add a section to the blog where I write about various things of interest. While I have done some of this lately, I thought that I would add this to the blog.

Podcasts

A few months ago I discovered podcasts. While podcasts orgininated from their use of ipods (digital music players produced from Apple). Since I didn't have an ipod, I had thought that their would be a problem playing the files on my mp3 player. I found Podcast Alley and realized that most podcasts are in in mp3 format, so they can be played on your computer, mp3 player, or in your car (if your radio is so equiped). Podcasts are webcasts where some kind of content (music or otherwise) is stored and available for download. Some of the more common file formats are mp3, acc , wma, ogg.

How do you find podcasts? You can search online for podcasts but you might want to start with a podcast directory site (such as Podcast Alley). You could also search at Del.icio.us and see what other people have bookmarked for podcasts. At Podcast Alley they have categories including music, history, education, travel, family & kids, technology, and several others. On their homepage you'll see their top ten podcasts for the month. These are the podcasts that have the highest vote count for the current month. If you "Pick a Podcast Genre:" or "Search for a Podcast:" (both are found in the upper left-hand corner of the homepage) you'll then find a listing of podcasts that meet your selection criteria. These are then ranked by popularity. If you click on one of the listings it will expand and you'll see a description of the podcast. If you then click on details it will bring you to where they keep that particular show within their site. From here you'll see all the shows that they have on their servers that are available to for download. Also closer to the top of this page you'll have the ability to go to the webpage of the podcaster that posted the podcast.

It is the content that is the interesting part. As I'm sure many of you have heard, content is king. At Podcast Alley I found shows on the Beatles, history, politics, celtic music, science fiction, vintage radio shows, and a whole host of other topics. Bertone Beatle Bonanza is a show done by a dj in Florida on the Beatles. His podcasts are kept here and you can find his blog here. I started listening to Dan Carlin and his Hardcore History and Common Sense. Hardcore History is done about once a month and he discusses people and events in history, it is different than you remember history in high school. Common Sense is Dan Carlin's show on American politics, he is politically independent and presents things differently then you might expect to hear from the right and the left. I've been very impressed with Celtic Folk Podcast. I had thought that the show wasn't being made any longer only to discover that they just hadn't been updating their shows on Podcast Alley. This show is done by a Scotsman living in Kentucky. He does a show about celtic music, so you hear variations of the fiddle, bagpipes and so on. In the science fiction area I have found shows about Star Trek and Star Wars. From the Trek area I enjoy Look At His Butt, Make It So, and the Jefferies Tube. Look at his butt is done by two female fans from San Francisco with some occassional adult themes that might not be appropriate for young listeners they're often funny and infomative. Make It So is done by some guys in the UK, they do some of the discussions that you would expect from a group of Trekkers. The Jefferies Tube is also an interessting Trek podcast. Before television grew in popularity, there used to be radio dramas that the whole family would listen to. Some of the programs that were broadcast included Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, the Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, the Adventures of Superman, Fiber McGee and Molly, just to name a few. Botar's Old Time Radio has several podcasts of these vintage programs. Harry Potter has several podcasts dedicated to all things Potter. Christine has been listening to Harry Potter Prognostications (their blog is here) in anticipation of latest movie and the last book.

Through aggregators or by subscribing it is possible to be notified when there is a new episode of one of your favorite podcasts. I have dabbled a little bit in this but haven't mastered it yet. So I hope that you have a look into the work of podcasts. Who knows maybe you might even find that you'd like to try to make one yourself!

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Numbers of July 2007

July 2007 is an interesting month if you're interested in numbers. First there is was July 7th, or if you delete the zeros, 7.7.7, 777 (without dots, commas, or slashes). I have to wonder how many people won in Las Vegas (and other places) on this day. Because of differences in number format the next date can look a couple of ways. In American the date is written month/day/year, much of Europe writes it day/month/year, sometimes to avoid confusion year/month/date. So bearing this in mind, the next date is July 11th, 7/11/7 or 11/7/7. If you look at only part of the date, 711, and put a dash between it, 7-11 is a convience store chain well known in the US and I have even heard that some of the 7-11s have been convereted to qwiki marts to promote the Simpons movie (here are some pictures of one of the Qwik-E-Mart from Photobucket, when I looked the user had exceeded his bandwidth, but maybe you'll be lucky enough to see them!) Taking 7 for the month, 7 for the year, and 11 for the date of the month, again this is a combination of lucky numbers. The last date of interest is Friday the 13th. While there are usually a few Friday the 13ths within a year, the 7 appearing in the month and year making things interesting.


Here are some more interesting sites about numbers...

• Zoo of Numbers This one talks about some special numbers
• NumberSpirial This one does some interesting spirials with numbers
• Physorg.com This one talks about the surprising law of digits
• the number 6174
• the secret lives of numbers This describes the results of the relative popularity of every integer between 1 and 1 million. How often does each number show up compared to the other numbers in phone numbers, tax forms, famous dates, and so on.

Here are a couple of pictures of the girls in the kiddie pool in our yard and some taken recently at a Kiddie fest in a nearby village. There was all kind of neat activities, (like skiing without snow).








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Del.icio.us

Here are some more pictures from when grandpa and Aunt Betty were here. The picture of grandpa and Aunt Betty is from the garden of Versailles. The picture of grandpa and Darryl was taken at the Eiffel Tower.












I recently discovered a social bookmarking site called "del.icio.us". I have noticed for some time that my favorites (bookmarks) were out of control and it isn't always easy to find a site that I don't go to that often. With del.icio.us you can tag sites that you would normally add to your favorites or bookmarks. You can add buttons to your web browser which will allow you to save pages with "tags". When you use the button to save it to "del.icio.us" a new window will open up and then you can add a description of the web page you want to save. In this page there will be a section where for tags. If the web page has been saved by other "del.icio.us" users you'll see some tags that have been used and you can use them. After you have saved some bookmarks to "del.icio.us" it will make recommendations based on tags that you have used.













Because this is "social bookmarking" you can see what other users have tagged. If you find a site that has been tagged by a lot of users, you can see all the users that have tagged it and you can see what other sites any of them have tagged by selecting individual users. You can also search words or tags. A search return will show what you have tagged in addition to what has been tagged by other users. By incorporating the "social bookmarking" aspect of "del.icio.us" you now have another search alternative. By searching on tags of interest you can see sites that have been saved by several users. This is different from traditional web searches because this means that "del.icio.us" users have thought that these sites were worth saving, compared to a lot of people viewing a web site and leaving that site after a minute or two.










"Del.icio.us" can be used between different web browsers and machines. If you're logged in on one machine you can see your tags. If you use more than one web browser you can use your tags between the different web browsers. You can also make some of your bookmarks private so that some that they aren't visable to anyone else but you. There is a lot more to "del.icio.us" then I have described so I would suggest looking through the help section for more information about "del.icio.us"




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Happy Forth of July

Being an American living overseas, I often think about the holidays, even when they aren't celebrated locally (or at least differently). A person that wasn't thinking too clearly once said "do they have the Forth of July over there?" So the smartalic answer is of course, the Forth of July is a calendar day and there is a calendar in most parts of the world! As the Forth of July is also referred to as "Independence Day", it is the American Independence Day that isn't really celebrated locally. One thing that I should point out is that the holiday is celebrated on the U.S. military installations throughout the world.

Being an American living overseas, I often think about the holidays, even when they aren't celebrated locally (or at least differently). A person that wasn't thinking too clearly once said "do they have the Forth of July over there?" So the smartalic answer is of course, the Forth of July is a calendar day and there is a calendar in most parts of the world! As the Forth of July is also referred to as "Independence Day", it is the American Independence Day that isn't really celebrated locally. One thing that I should point out is that the holiday is celebrated on the U.S. military installations throughout the world.

Here are a couple of pictures of Anna taken are our apartment in Geinsheim, notice the little flag. The other two pictures were taken recenlty at a local kinderfest. Anna had her face painted and Sarah is play a drum.

Heather sent me this link to a quiz on American history that allegedily is part of the U.S. citizenship test. It seems that most Americans don't get a passing score. Maybe you can see how you do.