Squeezebox Duet

There are a few electronic things, that when unveiled, you say to yourself "that would be perfect for the batcave is a must have."

Sonos could never bring their excessively expensive richboy toy down to my level so I bought the Squeezebox Duet instead. Since I've foregone the requisite HDTV and don't have cable, I am now using Hulu and Netflix instant downloads for my entertainment and had hoped for Squeezebox to fill in the gaps.

I couldn't be more happy. It's a love affair now.

Things I love about it:

I've got 15 podcasts in it, ready to play whenever I feel like it: KEXP song of the day, NPR's numerous excellent podcasts, The Instance (for the WoW nerd in me), Writer's Almanac, Writers on Writing (for my wife really), several fly fishing podcasts, and several How Stuff Works podcasts including "What you missed in history class"

Pandora, built in. I have extremely random music moods and pandora suits me - from Dwight Yoakam radio to Thievery Corporation, it's all there and easy to use.

ALL my music, now available at a whim. 30GBs and growing...

Highly recommend this to anyone, and plus it comes with fun mp3s to harass your dog with, like a rooster crowing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCrXflpPIhE

resoution #1

Write more. In any form, on any format.

Our route

Here's where the wagon trains are heading starting Saturday Nov 14, 2008 morning:


View Larger Map

Plane ride east, wagons west

Tomorrow I'm finally heading back to Raleigh and seeing Sarah again. It's been WAY too long. Painfully long. 6 weeks.

Southern Oregon is beautiful. No debating that.

It's also a new world for me in terms of demographics - VERY white and strange. Strange in a way I don't yet understand enough to explain sufficiently. Best way I can is by listing things I've noticed:

1. mansions next to trailers
2. house trailers for sale for $17,000 on the same street as $400,000 homes - wtF?
3. trashy places - from gross(!) grocery stores to houses that I'm surprised can be loaned on
4. not suburbia in the southern sense. I'd gotten used to new places, shiny stores, starbucks, and construction, but not so much here. Most places were built 10 or more years ago and show it
5. VERY Haves and REALLY don't have-nots. Metros and Bugatis sharing the road. It's as if upper middle class does not exist - only lower middle/lower income and upper class
6. a latent "green" spirit - people here from every socio-econommic level care about the enironment and can talk about it. that's incredibly different from east coast
7. love of wine - the layman here knows more about wine than most any southerner
8. lots of outdoorsy people
9. lots of guys with strange beards. Is it the mountains that makes you want to look like you're into building bombs in a shed?
10. Chains! I had not thought of putting chains on tires since I was @8. Here its a way of winter life.
11. hilariously boring news - no surprise, welcome to a small town
12. LOTS AND LOTS of organic food at the grocery, and lots of bulk food items

Anyways, thats enough for now. Will be posting images this week of the drive which starts tomorrow.

sad. too sad to speak much of.

I stopped eating pork almost 2 years ago.

I LOVED German sausage and sausage in foods like wedding soup. My friends in Florida actually used to give me a hard time about how much I loved summer sausage.

That was until I moved to North Carolina.

This land of God-fearing, religious people in the Bible Belt has piglet trucks that track back and forth across the state from breeders to slaughterhouses.

These are 18 wheelers stuffed with baby piglets (like Babe) who are crammed in so tight that their legs, tails, and noses stick out the side of the trailers. I started crying one day when I looked over at the truck which was passing me and saw all the cute piglets stuffed therein.

I won't be a part of it. I won't pretend I don't know it happens. In seeing those piglets I knew I could not in good faith eat pork again.

CNN has a story up about another factory farm and abuse. Why can't American's face the truth about the meat on their tables and being served them in restaurants?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/09/16/abused.pigs.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Several excerpts:

At one point on the video, an employee shouts to an investigator, "Hurt 'em! There's nobody works for PETA out here. You know who PETA is?"
...
"I hate them. These [expletives] deserve to be hurt. Hurt, I say!," the employee yells as he hits a sow with a metal rod. "Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! ... Take out your frustrations on 'em." He encourages the investigator to pretend that one of the pigs scared off a voluptuous and willing 17- or 18-year-old girl, and then beat the pig for it.

"At one point in the video, workers are shown slamming piglets on the ground, a practice designed to instantly kill those baby pigs that aren't healthy enough. But on the video, the piglets are not killed instantly, and in a bloodied pile, some piglets can be seen wiggling vainly. The video also shows piglets being castrated, and having their tails cut off, without anesthesia."