A Bloy and his Blog

I just returned from a camping trip, where I stayed at Perrot State Park.

The park is located along the Mississippi River, about 15 miles northwest of La Crosse, Wisconsin.

read the rest of: Camping along the Mississippi

About two miles north of where I was camping last week, was the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge.

read the rest of: Trempealeau Wildlife Refuge

While I was camping last week, I took a day trip across the Mississippi River to Great River Bluffs State Park in Minnesota.

The above view of Queen’s Buff is your reward after about a mile hike through the woods. My jaw just dropped as I emerged from the forest and saw the spectacular scene.

read the rest of: Great River Bluffs

I got a kick out of this. Yes, you can show affection and still be secure in your masculinity.

How To Give A Great Man To Man Hug

Several months ago I started linking to sample MP3 files, when I write about music I’m listening to. Since then I’ve been looking for a simple way to add a Flash player to stream those files right from the page. Today I found a post by someone who discovered the Google player used in Gmail can be used on any website.

Update, July 13: It seems Google has changed the parameters of the player and it no longer works properly. The good news is I have found a decent player which I can install on this site.

read the rest of: Streaming MP3 files

Not long ago in a galaxy not far enough away…

The Emperor’s Phone Call

From the Robot Chicken Star Wars Special, which was the funniest thing I’ve seen on TV in a long time. Watch all the videos from the special at Robot Chicken Star Wars.

Be sure and see Jedi Butter Fingers and Not Fully Operational.

A day off for me, and a last minute idea sent Dad and I to Miller Park yesterday afternoon, where the Brewers beat the San Francisco Giants, 7 to 5. It was a fun game. Some of the highlights included:

• Bill Hall’s grand slam home run for the Brewers in the first inning. He ended the game with a career high of five runs batted in.
• After thinking the game would be a cake walk for Milwaukee, we got a little nervous when the Giants hit their own grand slam home run in the sixth inning.
• Barry Bonds being booed by the fans when he was put in as a pinch hitter (his only at-bat, he hit a double on a error by Rickie Weeks). I was disappointed he didn’t stay in the game, so we could heckle him some more.
• A great play at home plate by pitcher Brian Shouse (and apparently a Brewer fan) to prevent the Giants from tying the game.
• Rickie Weeks making up for his error by hitting an RBI double.
• A revolving door of 11 pitchers playing for both teams, including a save from Milwaukee’s hot reliever, Francisco “Coco” Cordero.
• An attendance of over 35,000 people (we were very suprised at the size of the crowd).

Box Score: Brewers vs. Giants, June 20, 2007.

I just upgraded to version 2.2 of WordPress (actually 2.2.1), and there are a few display problems going on with some of the pages. Hopefully I’ll have it fixed soon.

Update: Problem solved. For those of you interested in the geeky details…

The new version of WordPress didn’t like the spacing in between the object elements I’m using to insert Flash files. I had carriage returns after the opening object tag, and the param tags. For some reason, WordPress inserts paragraph tags after those single carriage returns. That in turn would take those elements out of their containing DIVs, and mess up the layout. Once I eliminated those carriage returns, things were fine.