Time to Drop Some Links

We got some unusually large surf this last weekend and Tradewinds HD captured some in some rather gorgeous HD.

Haley Viloria Contortion - need to have your mind messed with just by watching some one do yoga? Yeah, this'll do it.

Congratulations to Santa Cruz's Luke Rockhold for his dominating win over Chris Weidman this last weekend at UFC 194! Some highlights from the fight.

Here's Where Gun Laws Stand In Your State - this helps sort out what states to avoid like the gun plagued wastelands they are (oh hai, Texas and Floriduhhhhh). Careful though, this site may make you think we live in a giant beehive with their hexagon state shapes.

Walk Around the World at Verdenskortet - a Danish landscaping project that's global in scope but not global in scale. This is really kind of awesome!

Patriots' Tom Brady not in the mood to answer questions on Trump - Starting to see why so many people find Tom Brady to be a near complete asshole who just happens to be really good at football.

We may not be our associations but we definitely can and should be judged by who we choose to call friend. Calling a screaming fascist your friend ain't too fucking smart.

Samuel Bernier and Andreas Bhend Collaborate on the next next-level Ikea hack - they take two Frosta stools apart and use a 3D printer to make a few choice bits and voila, they end up with a rather slick looking kid's balance bike!

The 25 Most Florida Things that happened in Florida in 2015 - read these and weep from laughing so hard.

Feynman's Trick to Learn Anything Faster - famous physicist Richard Feynman has always kept a "Things I Don't Know" notebook and actively seeks to add to it while answering the things he's already written in it.

Verizon Exec in Charge of TV Services Admits She Cut the Cord - when you can't even keep your executives as customers, your business model is dying rapidly.

Instagram Husband - if you are one, run, if you know one, give him some running shoes and hold the door for him.

And, finally, a few of my own photos from the last couple of weeks

Google took a storm photo and applied some filters to it and dropped me a note about it. I like the effect it added to what was a wild, stormy day out on the coast.

 A quick snap of a surfer on his way out to test his mettle in the thumping winter swell from this last weekend. This is pretty much straight out of the camera without any cropping or filtering, kind of proud of that.

And this last shot was on a late afternoon walk along West Cliff, we'd just watched a SUPer catch a nice wave past us and I noticed how pretty the sky was above Cowells.

A Resharing Experiment from Google+

This morning's overlook photo, beautiful but pretty chilly.

I am active on Google Plus, there are lots of active there and I really like the community that's developed.

Because I share quite a bit over there every day, the blog over here feels forlorn and semi-abandoned. Until I can build out an IFTTT recipe to repost my G+ posts here, its a time consuming and labor intensive practice to re-share posts here.

But, for shits and giggles, I thought I'd give it a try today.

What I've posted so far today:
NoTubes - Tire Sealant, Path of Death Puncture Demo

Improved GWX Control Panel does an even better job at keeping Windows 10 off your PC - I hate Microsoft since they've decided that spying on users is okay. And they'll try to install software on your Win7 or, shudder, 8 machine to give them access now. I will not ever be upgrading to Win10 because I don't want Microsoft to be able to record my office or home for their own damned reasons. Not acceptable. Same reason why the Amazon Echo speaker will never be found in my house.

Ben Carson's "helper" guide...

A couple of posts from yesterday:
Kaleidoscope: See Things Differently (4K) - a pretty darned amazing and beautiful BMX video, yeah.

Ronda Rousey gets KO'ed Mortal Kombat style!

Will Ronda Rousey follow in Gina Carano's footsteps after violent KO loss?

And another MMA post (there were fights this weekend with utterly unexpected finishes, the gif to the right there is one of them).
UFC Quick Quote: Cain Velasquez claims champion and teammate Daniel Cormier has been 'hard to deal with' but this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Cain and DC are long time teammates and good friends. And, watching Cain talk, its clear he's having a little fun with his friend. I look forward to Cain rematching against Werdum and annihilating him. If all goes as expected, DC, Cain and Luke Rockhold will all be champions in their weight classes within a few months, these guys all train together at AKA in San Jose and Cain and Luke are local guys.

Weekend Recap

A sunny morning stopover always makes for a good start to the day.

One of the benefits of having weekends on and weekends off with my children is that both give me an opportunity to have fun, different kinds of fun but lots of fun nonetheless.

This last weekend was a very good one. After an expensively annoying last week. I need to stop thinking I'm getting ahead, everytime I do that, I get smacked in the face with an expected expense on top of expected expenses I forgot about...

West Cliff at sunset is pretty awesome!

The highlight of the weekend was spending a few hours at the beach and in the water and my older son decided to join us and play in the water too. He usually sticks to digging or reading in the shade but he came out and we all had a really good fun time playing together!

Seeing as how it is now Wednesday, let's add in a bonus recap of the last couple of days, specifically the afterwork portions of the last couple of days.

I've been super fortunate enough to be able to get out and enjoy some of the recent swell while also becoming much more familiar with my new SUP.

We got out for a short bike ride

Suffice it to say that I spent a good chunk of the last few evenings with a giant shit-eating grin on my face as I caught waves to ride the length of Cowells two evenings in a row! The  guy I bought my board from said it was un-pearlable (that's when your front digs into the water and you slide off the front of the board usually) but I've proved him wrong and I pearled a few times before getting a better stance and launch sorted out.

Unlike the bigger board, the shorter one can zoom right down a wave face and go right down the line happily. It also carves back nicely and I'm starting to get into harder and deeper turns.

Pro tip to other SUPers catching waves: Keep using your paddle on the waves, you can gain speed, retain balance and save waves and more by keeping an active paddle. I keep seeing folks standing on their boards with their paddles held mutely in their hand as they cruise along.

More fun on tap this weekend!

Link Round Up, Down and All Around!

Surf cam shot run through Flowing Photo iOS app.

Time to drop some links as it has been a little while since I've posted here.

First up will have to be some of my own content, I've recently started to standup paddleboard surf and posted a short video of a couple of rides mashed into one. Warning, it has been pointed out to me that my butt is the main character in this short clip.

16 Year Old Charged for Harassing Cyclists he was charged with six counts of attempted homicide and bunch of other stuff. This kid terrorized cyclists in the area he lived in and should face the maximum punishments he can get.

The age old question....Is Riding One of the World’s Biggest Waves on a Skimboard Freakin’ Rad or Just F*cking Stupid?

In news for the slow, stupid or those who live in Jenny-McCarthy-Isn't-a-Moron-land, No link between MMR and autism, major study concludes

This is Zeba, she is awesome!

It looks like a commode but is really a Modern Root Cellar, Electricity-free Groundfridge lets you store perishables without traditional refrigeration

This Imgur series of Drunk Andre the Giant Wrestling in Japan led me to this site discussing Andre the Giant: The Baddest Alcoholic of All-Time

And How to Stop on a Fixie from an Imgur discussion where a fixie guy swore he could stop in the same distance as a bike with regular brakes. He was wrong.

Some really shitty reasons to vote Republican.

Oh, and if you needed some reasons to cast your vote in the next election cycle for any of the Republican candidates, here's some solid reasoning to do so. Yes, tongue in cheek and done with a humorous bend but the underlying reality is still true.

A great quote I saw the other day makes it really simple. There are two kinds of Republicans: Millionaires and Suckers.

If you're not a millionaire and you voted for the GOP then you are a sucker.

Some more links to share:
The effects of taking sugar out of your diet
Police: Muslims threw Christians overboard during Med voyage
Religion Doesn't Make People More Moral, Study Finds
No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning

Santa Cruz, Love This Town!

 This was my changing room on Sunday when I went out SUPing and SUP surfing. My friend came down to try her hand at SUPing again, she'd tried it the day before, but she chickened out due to aggressive waves and her lack of wetsuit.
Which was okay by me, I got a good cruising paddle in, watched some top notch kayak surfing competition action at the Lane and then spent a few hours SUP surfing among the hordes of other noobs.
Yep, I'm a noob and raw and not very good at surfing at all yet. Yet.
Sorry, SUP surfing. I'm planning on getting a surfboard as well but I need to concentrate on getting one new set of skills in the books before jumping into another sport. Maybe. I've got some feelers out for a loaner board to get rolling on.

This next photo was one I took while out for a bike ride last week. Saw this little family all in their wetsuits, all on two SUPs and looking like they were headed out for adventure. I pulled over, snapped a couple of pics and then they "battled" until the girls SUP tipped over and they tumbled in. Victory was declared and they all laughed and it was just another little happy scene in our happy little surf town.

And here we have a tarted up (that's Fenspeak for thrown through Snapseed filters to make it purtier than originally snapped).

This has been my regular stop in spot for the last year on my way to work. I like to take a moment to appreciate the splendor of the area I have chosen to live in.

Many more images on tap, this place is positively over-flowing with photo ops.

Hot Damn, Back Again!

Like most technical repairs, if you dick around with it enough, you'll either really break it and have to call in an expert or you'll fix it and look like a fucking genius.

Guess who has two thumbs and looks like a fucking genius? This guy. Don't ask me what I did, I did a whole bunch of stuff and the blog is back. Looks like it badly needs to get updated though, huh.

Let's start with some newer images.

Taken during an impromptu beach trip a few weeks ago.

Looks like I still need to fix a few broken pipes, can't access newer images, at least not on this computer (shared house computer).

Will add more tomorrow. It has been a good while since a good update has gone up here. I had a good weekend. Gonna write about it tomorrow.

Trying to Fix

Let's see if republishing now that nameservers have updated and the site should be back under my control. I doubt it, nothing is ever simple anymore, is it?