Chris.Weekly.org - A Web Space

For those who might not know this about me, I spent much of my childhood and early adolescence hoping and even preparing, via flight lessons and study, to make a career of military aviation. This was simply for the chance to fly the world’s most amazing machines, rather than out of a desire for military life — far from it (more on that in a bit). But late in high school I was bitterly disappointed when my eyesight started to deteriorate, immediately precluding me from flight school and sending me on a completely different trajectory. In retrospect, I’m very, very glad that’s not the direction my life took — my passion for independent thought and action, and anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-dogma outlook on life has only deepened with age and there is no way I could serve in any capacity in a Bush/Cheney military under any circumstances other than literal direct home defense… but my love of flight has never waned, and this kind of video will always resonate. To someone who hasn’t spent their formative years dreaming of piloting a supersonic aircraft this video may come across as merely cheesy propoganda… but for me, especially when coupled w/ the old-school poetry, it brought me way, way back. Thanks to Boing Boing and Dailymotion.com for stirring all those old emotions.

I am a long-time supporter of Amnesty International and am posting this to support their campaign to ensure one Troy Davis is not executed without further review of his case. There is no hard evidence against him, and 7 out of 9 witnesses in his case have recanted or changed their story since his trial — there are even indications that one of the remaining two witnesses may in fact be the guilty one. Whatever your feelings on capital punishment, I think we can all agree that no government has the right to execute a citizen without a fair trial, and in this case there is serious doubt about his guilt.

Please join me in taking action and send this link to your politically conscious friends.

The Amnesty USA site has more details and instructions for taking action.

Thanks.

http://www.soundunwound.com/ is Amazon’s new wiki for music. Looks pretty good already, check it out.

Yes, yes, yes. This is a very good thing. Can’t wait for the beta to open later today…

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Last weekend my very good old friend Jason and his lovely wife Sarah and their adorable daughter Claire came to visit. Jason has a high-end DSLR and took some photos I really like down by the Plymouth waterfront. This one in particular came out just right. Abi’s the kid equivalent of about 20 feet in the air, and in typical Abi fashion is delighted by it. This is the first pic of the four of us (me, Shawna, Abi and Harper), too bad Layla couldn’t join us this time but I’m glad to have this one. Thanks again Jason for the company and the photos (and the phenomenal single-malt scotch which won’t last much longer).

"Abi's Flying!" she said as we tugged her back to earth once more...

This is an older video but I just got my NAS set up (finally) and now that I have a real media server, I’m starting to collect the videos and other digital artifacts spread over my network’s drives and put them in one place. I may actually serve them from there later but for now I put this up on youtube:

I know I’m biased but I think she’s pretty rhythmic for an 8 month old.