My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on March 8, 2009

Although her life was full and death was peaceful, it is difficult for me to say an earthly goodbye to my wonderful Aunt Lois. She was my closest aunt (my mother’s only sister) and growing up we were always together with her and her family. My brother and I were practically best friends with her two children spending every holiday and special occasion together. Aunt Lois was always the one to remember a special occasion with a thoughtful card, a short note and often a few dollars … even to my kids.  She was a close and loving big sister to my mom and I know she will be deeply missed. (Toledo Blade Obituary)

I am grateful she passed away comfortably and offer my sympathy to her two children, my cousins Diane and Bob — and their families.

Lois R. Lois R. Sevrence, 85, of Toledo, passed away peacefully, surrounded by her family, Saturday, March 7, 2009 at the Hospice of Northwest Ohio, Perrysburg. Lois was born on July 27, 1923, to Richard and Ruth Bluhm, in Sandusky, Ohio. She was a 1941 Graduate of Libbey High School. Lois worked for Toledo Scale Company and also worked as a secretary for Bunting Brass and Bronze, where she met her husband, Robert. Robert preceded her in death in 1988. Lois was an active member of Bethel Lutheran Church. She enjoyed playing cards, bowling, fishing and her many travels to Panama City Beach and Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Her most favorite moments were those spent with her family and friends at holidays and special occasions. Lois is survived by her daughter, Diane (Bert) Mears; son, Bob Sevrence; grandchildren, Kari (Chris) Young, Corey Mears and Laney Rodgers; great-grand-son, Austin Young and sister, Jeanine (Bud) Corbett. Friends may call at the Walter Funeral Home, 4653 Glendale Ave. on Tuesday, March 10th from 2 to 8 p.m. Funeral services will be held at the funeral home on Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. Interment will follow in Ottawa Hills Memorial Park. Memorials may be given to Hospice of Northwest Ohio or Bethel Lutheran Church, 1853 South Ave. Toledo, Ohio 43609. Lois’s family would like to thank the staff of Hospice of Northwest Ohio for their tender care and compassion. www.walterfuneralhome.com

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Category: Obituary, Personal | No Comments »
Tags: aunt, family, lois severence, obit, Obituary

Posted By RichC on March 6, 2009

Since I haven’t been traveling this week, I’ve had a few minutes to do a full database backup and reinstall on a new server. One of the primary reason I’ve been anxious to do was because of some significant slowing in access. Thankfully the upgrade was painless and looks to have corrected my primary speed problems. If you read this online and notice the improvement, you now know why.

Category: Misc | 4 Comments »
Tags: blog, database, update

Posted By RichC on March 6, 2009

TopGear.com American is working on their “triple 7”  — $7000, 70mpg, 0-60mpg in under 7 seconds. They have purchase a VW Rabbit diesel in New York and are transplanting a TDI engine in  Regina, Saskatchewan and have labeled the project the “Sipster.”

The current video shows the engine transplant (below) although the  project was announcmed in February. As a  VW diesel fan I’m anxious to see if this old a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel with a 2003 VW TDI engine will be able to succeed in their goal.

Topgear embedded video no longer supported

Category: Automotive, Video, Volkswagen | No Comments »
Tags: diesel, Rabbit, tdi, topgear, volkswagen, vw

Posted By RichC on March 5, 2009

Powerenz.com makes a very portable set of solar panels that looks to provide a great way to charge or power low wattage electrical devices while away from conventional power sources. The flexible panels can be easily toted in a bag or backpack and will provide up to 180 watts of power. They can also be linked together to provide up to 300 continuous watts, with the downside being the cost — $3000.

Category: Technology, Video | No Comments »
Tags: backpacking, cell, panel, portable, power, solar

Posted By RichC on March 4, 2009

YourFonts.com makes it easy to create a personalized font based on your own handwriting. I created one in about 15 minutes, including the scanning and uploading — very cool.

After printing out the PDF template , I used a fine tip ‘Sharpie‘ to scribble in the letters and numbers as the very easy instructions describe. I didn’t bother to do the ‘included’ second page, but those who need accented letters and special characters might want to take the time to do that.

I then scanned the form at 300dpi using the scanner on my multi-purpose fax machine and uploaded it to the YourFonts site. (make sure the scanned page is no less than 1000 px — lousy quality — or no more than 5000 px — better quality.) The next step is to  upload the scan, preview the font on their site and finally download the .TTF file to be placed in your font folder on your Mac or PC. It couldn’t be simpler.

Below is an image of a full page (8.5×11) word document using the font I created, click for the larger version.

It is easy to selecting your font in any program on your computers and is ideal for personalized letters and envelopes you type have a personal flare.  This might be a great way to address Christmas cards or to use for some special invitations, but one need to know that if you email a document, they will need to have your font ‘unless’ you embed a copy into the doc. (don’t use it for emails since the end user will most likely not have your personal font installed)

I’m looking forward to showing this to my daughter knowing she will love creating her own decorative fonts for free!

Category: Computer, How-To | No Comments »
Tags: Computer, font, How-To, printing

Posted By RichC on March 3, 2009

I’ll keep this post short since my mood is the same; the markets tried to find a reason to bounce after loosing 299 point on the DJIA yesterday, but traders and investors would have none of it. The averages did cross yesterday’s ‘ugly’ close a couple time throughout trading on Tuesday, but in the end few were comfortable holding onto positions. Today’s loss was a little over a 1/2% seeing the DJIA down 37.27 to 6726.02 making it the lowest in 13 years.

I promise to post something positive tomorrow!

Category: Financial | No Comments »
Tags: djia, economy, investing, trading, wall street

Posted By RichC on March 3, 2009

Testing new Twitter polling tool by twtpoll.com. (thanks for the link @stoweboyd)

Category: Computer, Financial, Technology | No Comments »
Tags: Poll, Social Networking, twtpoll

Posted By RichC on March 2, 2009

WSJ Online

Here’s a bright thought:  if, scratch that, when …  the economy rebounds, it most likely will rise quickly from the shocking lows we are currently seeing. The dark side is that this selloff doesn’t seem to be finding a bottom and there aren’t many confident traders ready buy stocks again.
Today’s news from AIG that they lost $61.66 Billion in the last quarter not only put them in the history booksas the company with the largest quarterly loss ever, but also drove investors to sell their already pummled stocks. So much so as to drive the Dow Jones Industrial average well beneath the 7000 market to 6763 at the close of trading.

Category: Financial | 6 Comments »
Tags: djia, Financial, markets, wallstreet

Posted By RichC on March 2, 2009

In my circle of diesel loving friends I have rarely heard that people have difficulty in deciding between the well equipped 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI or 2009 Toyota Prius, but that isn’t always the case for those listening to all the media hype praising hybrid cars.  In case you are one of the few looking to buy a new car (hmm?), do yourself a favor and drive a new ‘clean diesel’ vehicle before believing your only options are traditional gas powered cars or hybrids.

Edmunds.com has an interesting video comparison between the 2009 VW Jetta TDI and Toyota Prius and is well worth seeing. My advice is that if you want to ‘go green’or just  squeeze a few more miles out of a gallon of fuel,  give the new clean diesel vehicles a good look and drive — it will be time well spent. BTW, the Volkswagen TDI Cup racing series will be running biodiesel for the entire 2009 season! (CinciTDI link)

(I’m using this post to test embed a higher quality YouTube video clip — notes below)

How-To hint:

I’ve posted previously on how to add the “&fmt=18” code behind the YouTube URL in the address bar, but unfortunately that will not work when embedding a video to a blog post. But, there is a way to add  and append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the end of video clip’s URL specified in “param value” and “embed src” offer by YouTube’s embed feature. It seems to work well and definitely improves the quality of content used in posts.

I also like changing the normal 425 px wide default embed size to a 480 or 485 px in order to go full column wide. Remember that the “normal” lower quality YouTube video comes from a 320 px wide original clip and is “blown up to a” 480px embed which certainly doesn’t enhance the image quality. By sing the HQ clip code you’l already be using the  480 px wide version of the video and so why would you want to embed it at anything smaller than 480 px? Give it a try.

Category: Automotive, Biodiesel, Computer, How-To, Video | 2 Comments »
Tags: clean, diesel, edumnds.com, How-To, jetta, prius, tdi, toyota, volkswagen

Posted By RichC on March 1, 2009

I had a Skype conversation with Cali Lewis (aka: Geekbeat.TV) and her business experts on Saturday for a pilot for a new podcast called WealthNation, I think?  She invited me to ask a couple business questions pertaining to liability protection utilizing a corporation or LLC and a follow up on product patent protection. Unfortunately I’m not sure I’m any farther ahead in the new PrepForSun.com (prep4sun.com) venture, but they gave me another opinion.

I’m still somewhat uncomfortable with the expense and risk:

1. ability to market the product successfully
2. liability protection both product and patent
3. negotiating product manufacturing and distribution.

I’ll be sure to update when the new WealthNation podcast is introduced, but for now here is the CaliLive.TV pre-broadcast.

Category: Business, Computer, Personal | 2 Comments »
Tags: Business, cali lewis, podcast, WeathNation