Man, this comic reminds me of my time working at Crossroads (Awful myspace page, they don’t have a real website)…no joke.

toothpastefordinner.com

Christina and I went to hear Richard Stallman speak to a packed crowd tonight. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to stay for the whole thing, but he had a lot of super interesting things to say.

He gave a brief summary of free software, the history of copyright, and then spoke mostly on and how it’s basically been perverted in the digital age. I was surprised that such an uber-geek was actually a rather good public speaker, but I guess he’s been doing it for a while.

Maybe I should just switch to GNU/Linux and screw this DRM-laden Windows crap.

A couple shots from a creepy house on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Man, Western Pennsylvanians are so weird. I can’t believe I made it out of there semi-normal.

For those of you who didn’t catch the Colbert Report last night, or for lovers of the original, you have to see this. Key: they’re singing about America. Classic.

I met a photographer last night while shooting a house show for 16 Blocks’ upcoming issue. His name was Geoff (didn’t give his last) and he was traveling with Emotron and Mose Giganticus. Geoff intrigued me because of the Leica M8 and Sunpak Panel Flashes he had, not a setup you see everyday (especially in Blacksburg). He also shot from the hip, not once looking through the view finder, flash in one hand, camera in the other.

I talked to him pretty briefly and he told me to check out his stuff here. Pretty cool, I’ve always really liked the feel of the Leica Rangefinder images.

So, the other day I was testing some search engine strings for Jeff’s new site to make sure that we had gotten rid of or redirected all the remaining bits of his old site. One of the strings was “wedding photographer homestead” (the Homestead is an uber-nice resort here in Virginia), and looking over the first page of results I checked out these two sites:

weddingphotographer.homestead.com
professionalphotographer.homestead.com

I had to do a double take. It turns out they’re both the same photographer, just different portal pages. Now, I’ve come across my fair share of websites that look like they are from 1995, but these were special. I never thought it was possible for a site to look like it was made BEFORE the internet was widely used, in say…1983. Here are a few highlights I’m sure you’ll notice:

Enraptured, like I was staring at some creature long-thought extinct, I explored a bit further checking out a few of the “reciprocal links”: Fort Laramie Trading Post, Fix All, and the Fort Laramie American Grill

Was this real? Had I died and gone to pre-AOL internet heaven?

Turns out all these businesses are in the same town, Fort Laramie, WY, and the sites (and there are more of them too) were all created by the same company, Affordable Advertising.

I couldn’t find dates on any of these pages to see if they are in fact “current”, but this snippet of code gives some insight, if not more confusion (don’t try and look and the rest of the source though, your head may asplode):

!doctype html public “-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN//2.0″
html
head
meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=windows-1252″
meta name=”Generator” content=”Microsoft Publisher 98″

Now, I’m not trying to be snarky at all by posting this stuff…I just feel that it’s almost like a museum; a now-rare slice of americana (and the internet) dying to be shared with those who can appreciate it.

Let me know what other gems you find.

As those of you from the area may have heard, legendary Pittsburgh Steelers sportscaster Myron Cope died last week. I haven’t seen much about it in national news but I was watching SNL on Saturday and at the end of Weekend Update Seth Myers pulled out a Terrible Towel and started waving it around.

If I ever find a video of it, I’ll post that as well.

Go Stillers! Cope, you will be missed.

P.S. I’ve been kinda really sick, so I haven’t been doing the blog thing the past few days. Blah.