Imagine turning an entire theme park into a haunted house and spooky show! Virginia’s King’s Dominion is having their Halloween Haunt every weekend, September 26 through November 1. There are special ticket prices and hours for the haunt. The website’s flash presentation is worth looking at, even if you can’t go to the show. Make sure you scroll through the links at the bottom to get the full effect – it’s fun!
Harvest time in Virginia means lots of local festivals! From seafood to apples and wine, come savor Virginia’s peak-of-freshness picks and enjoy music, crafts, exhibitions and games.
~ Fall Food Festivals
~ Wine Festivals
~ Fall Festivals
~ Farmers’ Markets
From a news release today about the upcoming Americana Music Festival and Conference:
Americana Music Festival Explores Blogosphere with Showcase and Panel Sponsored by My Old Kentucky Blog,
Aquarium Drunkard & Thirty Tigers
Showcase Features Jason Isbell, O’Death, Those Darlins, Blair and Le Switch
NASHVILLE, August 19, 2008 – The Americana Music Festival and Conference will play host to an exploration and celebration of the blogosphere Friday, September 19. The epitome of the anarchic world of contemporary tastemaking, blogs break bands, amplifying traditional grassroots campaigns and word-of-mouth buzz. Innovative industry outfit Thirty Tigers will partner with bloggers My Old Kentucky Blog and Aquarium Drunkard to present a two-pronged AMA event: A daytime panel featuring My Old Kentucky Blog’s Craig “Dodge” Lile, Aquarium Drunkard’s Justin Gage, Amanda Petrusich (New York Times, Pitchfork, Paste) and Janet Timmons of Nashville’s Out the Other will take a multifaceted look at blogs: who’s reading them? Who is writing them? How do Americana bands reach them? Friday evening, an eclectic Americana lineup of blogger darlin’s featuring Jason Isbell, O’Death, Those Darlins, Blair and Le Switch will take the stage at the Basement.
“The blog’s key role in promoting Americana music just underscores our genre’s natural fit with progressive culture,” says AMA Executive Director Jed Hilly. “The benefits of taking a closer look at the Americana and blogosphere relationship seem obvious: Our foundations and demographics are invariably intertwined.”
Arrrgh! My g-mail was down today! That has never happened before!
Evidently there was a Google blackout all over the world today. Of course, I didn’t know anything about it until after I couldn’t access my account for over an hour. It was very disconcerting. The service was down for almost everyone for an hour and a half.
For a free service, we’ve all come to depend heavily on Google and Yahoo for their email services. I hope this was a one time technical problem and not a taste of things to come. It has also raised my awareness today that I need to have a backup of all my important stuff and that I can’t trust Google or Yahoo to keep all my emails for me, on demand 24/7.
Interesting article in today’s New York Times about ways to save energy when using PCs and peripherals. According to the article, most people leave their desktop computers on throughout the day and even through the night, without setting their computers to go into a sleep mode, which saves electricity. Using the “deep sleep” mode powers down the hard drive and the PC uses only 5 percent of its normal energy consumption. Depending on local power costs and the kind of PCs in use, your household electricity bills could be reduced by $20 to $95 a year for each PC using new tools to manage your PC’s power consumption and more use of settings to put PCs into deep sleep after a few minutes of not making any keystrokes.
Free software tools for calculating and managing your computer’s power consumption include:
There has always been a magical quality to stained glass for me, and there is no doubt that Tiffany was the master in that craft. There is a nice collection of email postcards showing a collection of the Tiffany windows on the Dover cards website that you can send for free over the internet to friends or family.
Here is one that I really love, the “River of Life,” which was finished in 1921.
