Every visit back to Iowa, the numbers of craft beers and spirits being made in the state never fails to impress.
Millstream still makes my favorite IPA, a wonderful play on the name but not on my affinity for hoppy beer. A visit to their brewery in Amana introduced me to their pilsner and stout, but it’s the Iowa Pale Ale that keeps me coming back. A wonderful play on the name for my favorite style of beer from my home state.
I used to spend a lot of time around these parts. 8 years in Iowa City, and this is the place that everyone always wanted to hang out. I took this picture yesterday, looking down there at a lot of fond memories.
One 4th of July during Jazz Fest, I was here helping with a full KSUI broadcast from the center of the Ped Mall when the clouds rolled in. I tend to remember saying to someone that “this doesn’t look good,” and suddenly the skies started pouring down. As the winds roared in, someone jumped on the microphone to say a hasty signoff and that we were ending the multi-hour broadcast rather early and quite abruptly.
We moved fast. Everything was piled into a four-door sedan, we crammed in, and were gone within 15 minutes. Not a piece of equipment was left behind or damaged.
Good times.
Sometimes when you wake up in the morning, you have to be late getting into work so you can capture a moment like this.
Without a doubt, this has been the coldest morning of the New Year that I can remember. I do recall days of going to elementary school and being held inside for recess because the weather was unsafe due to the subzero windchills outside, mainly because there was always some kid who would lose his stocking hat on the bus ride in from the country or not bring gloves that day, but you never really grasp how frigid, cold weather can cause damaging effects that can last a lifetime.
Last night, as 2018 struck in the central time zone, windchills dipped to -34F, which is nearly at the point where subzero temperatures between Celsius and Fahrenheit are the same. Once -40 is reached, reference or calculation is no longer needed.
Today will certainly be quiet.
Covered a lot of ground today and made some good Christmas memories.
I’m not sure what YouTube rabbit hole I stumbled down that made me come across this, but this is an early sixties group that I want to say I’ve heard before but without every really knowing this was them. Continue reading “Have I The Right by The Honeycombs”
I was looking through the photos on my phone and found this shot from this past August. It was a really memorable experience seeing the core of the Canadian government and learning a lot more about the country I’ve called home for just over 12 years now.
If you ever get a chance to visit Ottawa, do it. Your country or not, you’ll be guaranteed to broaden what you know about the world.
I’ve been seeing reminders popping up from previous Pemberton Music Festivals, which was sad due to the cancellation of this year’s. It made me think about some of the shots that I took from last year, and this one always gets me. It appears that Noel does not like photographers.
I wrote this post almost a week after the 2016 presidential election polls closed and saved it as a draft until publishing it today, as is.
As we prepare for the coming Trump administration taking office on January 20th, 2017, there is one thing I keeping coming back to pondering. When it comes down to it, it’s the first amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (Source: billofrightsinstitute.org)
Some time ago, general political discussions in college concluded the key to that amendment is that it does not grant you the right to free speech as much as it says that congress cannot pass any law prohibits it. There still lies some legal ambiguity that could allow them to shorten, or abridge, your ability to freely do so, essentially having the ability to take away some but not all of your freedom of speech.
I spent time in college with some very intellectual law students who loved to spout off about, after a few drinks, what they were learning and passionate about. These were conversations they were having in the classrooms and never had any real black and white resolutions to them because the government is supposed to be comprised of mechanisms that prevent these freedoms from ever being infringed.
But the way this new presidential office is looking, and there is still a ways to go before it’s put together, it makes me ponder a few possibilities that we could see in the future. These are my red book predictions for the near future.
Podcasting Gear by DaveO on Flickr
To narrow that down, I would think this would be directed at the media at the start but have the fiery potential to expand towards anyone who says or distributes anything electronically. Any tweet, status update, video, or even this blog post could be considered for some sort of slander that is “not fair”.
A wealthy, successful businessman, who this new president certainly is, doesn’t seem like he would be one to care what anyone would say or write about him, but that’s not true. Do a simple Google search of “donald trump sues” and you will find a variety of lawsuits that range from defamation to a number of issues related to his numerous business matters.
From the Republican side of this race, the media was consistently attacked in the final months of the campaign for lying and rigging the election in terms of what was being fed through various outlets. Whether that was correct or wrong, the fact is that the results of the elections reinforce that notion because it was only the pundits who correctly predicted the final outcome while a majority of other outlets mostly said otherwise.
While I think it’s more important to be making people have a license to operate drones, the Trump administration will make an effort to regulate media outlets, more so not acknowledging a media outlet as a authentic or trustworthy unless you are registered and approved.
Who this will be done by remains to be seen. The FCC is there to mostly enforce the transmission methods and would probably be bypassed by the administration’s special council that they will setup and regulate.
Want to have a blog and not always be labeled as “fake”? Get yourself a license.
Want to have a podcast? You’ll need a license for that.
You’ll still be able to have or maintain whatever type of outlet that you want, but unless you have that seal of approval, your outlet will not count in the eyes of this administration.
Or, this could simply revert back to the era of the Nixon enemies list or McCarthyism era blacklists, where we’ll never really know who is or isn’t respected in the eyes of the administration.
People have said it many times. When you had a cellphone about 10 to 15 years ago, the battery lasted for days. Now, you can barely go a few hours before you find yourself needing to juice up your smartphone.
Granted that technology has progressed from just making phone calls and sending text messages, it’s that small supercomputer in your pocket that kills that juice.
But I was looking at my phone the other day and had the realization that there is this undying need to make a device thinner almost feels like an obsession.
What would happen if you added 5 to 10 millimeters of thickness to the latest iPhone? What else could you fit in there? What could you enhance?
A slightly larger battery would certainly be a bonus. Right now, I can usually get through one whole day on a single charge, depending on how heavy I’m using my iPhone at work. But if I don’t charge it when I go to bed at night, it’s game over by the morning.
And that’s just the start.
Storage. I feel like storage in iPhones is still in those phases of when USB thumbdrives first starting popping up. I got a 1GB drive for my birthday once and thought that was the most amazing thing. Now I scoff at anything that is less than 8GB and only use 32GB on a day to day basis.
In this modern day, why should any smartphone be limited to 16 or 32 gigabytes of storage? With a slightly thicker smartphone, you could start everyone out at 128GB of space. Argue all of the price point bull crap you want because you and I both know that’s just some forced limitation designed by a boardroom trying to maximize its profits.
And then what about digital broadcast transmissions like DTV and HD Radio? Suddenly you have a little more space for those processors so you can process the one and zeros already flowing through the air, not biting into your data limits.
Certainly we need to make battery technology better, but the first company that takes a step in the direction of making their phones thicker for the sake of enhanced technology will get my attention. It’s just a matter of someone having the guts to do it.
