This made me cry: many of the folks in it are gone now and they’re incredible dancers.

[via Kottke.org]

It’s also all about the sound of his voice: he gets calls from people interested in his resume but his dysarthria scares them away. That’s his (and my) theory anyway. No way to prove it but it makes sense. It would have scared me before I knew David.

But, for doing back end web development work and problem solving, voice is less critical than it might be in a sales or support position. It’s interesting that few people can easily get over the voice issue to see his skills as separate from his voice.

My good friend Joy Brown is in China and just finished and installed three of her bronzes in a city park in Shanghai. These are the first of a number of bronzes she’s working on for this and other parks.

Bullied is a documentary film that chronicles one student’s ordeal at the hands of anti-gay bullies and offers an inspiring message of hope to those fighting harassment today. It can become a cornerstone of anti-bullying efforts in middle and high schools.

Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case That Made History

As one who was bullied this documentary is very meaningful to me.

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can’t decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
- Rita Rudner

America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
- Arnold Toynbee

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
- Robert Benchley

Outside of a dog, a book is probably man’s best friend, and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx

Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you.
- Mary Bly

Whoever said you can’t buy happiness forgot about little puppies.
- Gene Hill

In dog years I’m dead.
- Unknown

Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.
- Dave Barry

I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees us peeing in his water bowl.
- Penny Ward Moser

The dog’s kennel is not the place to keep a sausage.
- Danish Proverb

The scientific name for an animal that doesn’t either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.
- Michael Friedman

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
- Aldous Huxley

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how dogs spend their lives.
- Sue Murphy

Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac who stays up all night wondering if there really is a Dog?
- Unknown

I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers.
- Unknown

I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.
- August Strindberg

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
- Fran Lebowitz

Ever consider what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul – chicken, pork, half cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!
- Anne Tyler

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
- Rita Rudner

My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That’s almost $7.00 in dog money.
- Joe Weinstein

Some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the hydrant.
- Unknown

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
- James Thurber

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
- Nora Ephron

Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
- Ann Landers

Women and cats will do as they please and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
- Robert A. Heinlein

In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.
- Dereke Bruce

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
- Ben Williams

When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
- Edward Abbey

Cat’s Motto: No matter what you’ve done wrong, always try to make it look like the dog did it.
- Unknown

Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won’t buy the wag of his tail..
- Unknown

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
- Christopher Morley

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
- Josh Billings

Man is a dog’s idea of what God should be.
- Holbrook Jackson

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
- Andrew A. Rooney

Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun!
- Groucho Marx

He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion
- Unknown

Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
- Mark Twain

I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
- Abraham Lincoln

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No, four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
- Abraham Lincoln

Dog, n. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship.
- Ambrose Bierce

Physician, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
- Ambrose Bierce

Reverence, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.
- Ambrose Bierce

He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.
- Benjamin Franklin

Giving a man space is like giving a dog a computer: The chances are he will not use it wisely.
- Bette-Jane Raphael

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
- Camille Paglia

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.
- Christopher Hampton

Breaks balance out. The sun don’t shine on the same ol’ dog’s ass every day.
- Darrell Royal

Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.
- Elizabeth Taylor

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.
- Jack London

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
- Jeff Valdez

Life is like a dog sled team. If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
- Lewis Grizzard

The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.
- Madame de Stael

I have never married because I have three pets at home that answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
- Marie Corelli

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
- Mark Twain

It takes me a long time to lose my temper, but once lost I could not find it with a dog.
- Mark Twain

When a man’s dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama.
- Mark Twain

Don’t make the mistake of treating your dogs like humans, or they’ll treat you like dogs.
- Martha Scott

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
- Ogden Nash

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.
- Robert Benchley

The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.
- Samuel Butler

Fantastic collection of images from 1864-1950.

The national parks’ history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures.

But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers — July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone — rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.

People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.

I used to subscribe to and read Accidents in North American Mountaineering which in places was just as humorous as this article. Add technology to the mix and you have even more brazen people going into the wilderness thinking cell service is everywhere and that they can call for a ranger for any reason.

This story overlaps with kids (escorted by adults) climbing Mt. Everest or sailing around the world (unescorted).

I have no problem with people going off into the wilderness and doing challenging things; I have serious problems with a small number of those people who are unprepared and assume they can be rescued if they get into trouble. It costs thousands of dollars an hour to fly a helicopter with a rescue team to a remote area to do a rescue and in this country few hikers, climbers, or sailors pay for this. They should, or, if they’re 14 their parents should.

We need insurance companies to offer policies that will pay for expensive rescues and then, in order to climb Grand Teton a group needs to have such a policy and sign a waver saying they will not ask for a rescue if one of them gets a blister. Insurance will help pay for rescues but unfortunately it might also give people a false sense of protection.

We all have to start somewhere and the first time I went camping I took a space blanket and a few candy bars. After one uncomfortable night in Lassen Park we walked out and took the bus home with our tails between our legs. Had cell phones been around then I doubt we’d have used one to call for help.

When I go out on a 7 mile day hike in summer (like two days ago) I carry enough gear to spend the night in the woods if I have to: flashlight/headlamp, extra clothing and a raincoat, extra food and water and a first aid kit. Yes, I do carry an iPhone although coverage is spotty in the places we hike. My candy bars (Clif bars) are better too.

This morning a CD that I’d left in the truck’s stereo wouldn’t play and wouldn’t eject. In other words it was stuck and the stereo was showing an error code (03) on its LCD.

After messing with it for a while I called the local Toyota dealer who told me that they’d have to remove the stereo from the truck and send it out and it could cost a minimum of $200. I also called two car stereo dealerships who gave me high quotes although not that much.

A bit of searching on the web and I found a few obscure notes in forums saying that in some cases, disconnecting the car/truck battery and then reconnecting it will eject the CD. The theory here is that if you disconnect the battery and then reconnect it everything electrical in the vehicle will revert to its default state on power up.

I wasn’t hopeful this would work but I figured I’d try it.

Opened the hood, un-bolted the red, positive terminal from the battery, left it off for a few seconds, bolted it back, got in the truck and put key in, turned it one click to get power to stereo and amazingly the CD popped out without me even hitting the eject button.

I wonder if the Toyota dealer would have done this and still charged me the $200? They certainly could have told me to try it if they had any sense of customer service.

I can’t guarantee that this will work in all cases but it sure doesn’t hurt to try it no matter what kind of car or truck you have.

Flickr member Jason Travis has photographed a variety of people in and around Atlanta, Georgia and an inventory of what they carry and created a great collection of these diptychs: Persona.

Here’s Jason’s Persona self-portrait:

Great stuff, beautifully executed.

As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them.

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains – in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected – is important science.

As one who hikes regularly and enjoys the quiet, I think there’s something to this and if the only way to make it happen for some is to force it by descending into Glen Canyon so be it.

I do carry an iPhone when I hike and try to remember to turn the ringer off as I pack it. I do like to use its camera and if I have service I like sending pictures to people but I never type a message and rarely call anyone on a trip.

More on this here: The Unplugged Challenge: Readers Respond.