I know this is a little gimmicky…

but I sometimes wonder if some of our Congressional Senators/Representatives can even ID all of our 50 states much less draw a map of them. Smart of him to start out with his home state too.

A little behind the scenes research indicates that Franken had been doing this for years. I’ve found photos and videos of him doing it on at least two other occasions. I’ve also seen a claim that he first did this for an SNL skit back in the nineties when he was “lamenting” the poor budget that he had been given to do his political commentary stating that he was forced to draw his own political maps.

Does this look like fun or what?

This is Erin, a friend of mine that I met on one of my Wisconsin trips. We’ve kept in touch through the years. She’s a pilot for Republic Airlines, doing commuter hops around the Midwest but recently decided to get a different perspective of flying.

Props to the bride and groom

It took some chutzpah to pull this off but I’ve got to credit the couple (I don’t know them) for having the fortitude to go through with it. What a great way to start your wedding.

This video hasn’t quite gone viral yet (only 10,000 views) but I think it might.

I have a new phone number (maybe)

After a very long wait, I’ve finally been accepted into Google Voice

I signed up for a Grand Central number a long time ago (4-5 years) but unfortunately when I was accepted back then they had no 814 area code numbers so I passed on the service (I could have gotten a number in another area code, and I thought about getting one in Chicago, but elected not to).

They finally got around to having 814 service but were completely backed up on fulfilling requests when they did. I put another application in and Google bought the service shortly afterward (2-3 years ago). Right after Google bought it they shutdown additional requests while they redesigned the application.

At some point after Google’s takeover I dropped my old attglobal email address which is what I had made the Grand Central request. For the last six months or so, Google has been filling those old requests. Unfortunately, since mine was under my old email, it got lost in the shuffle. So a few months ago, I had to reinstitute my request. Today, my acceptance email finally arrived.

One neat thing about Google Voice is that you get to select your phone number (as long as someone else hasn’t already grabbed it). I had really hoped that I’d be able to get something like (814) UncLarx but all the UncLar_or Uncle__ were already taken.

So I wound up with 814-39Larry – which isn’t too bad.

Now I need to play with it some and figure out how I’m going to use it.

Cameras are everywhere these days

Seems you can’t go anywhere without getting your picture taken these days. This just showed up on Facebook last night.

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Over the fourth, I ran into Gary and Katie Gray downtown with a bunch of their family and friends celebrating the 21st birthday of one of their sons. I had just come from a Fourth of July party which had a hat theme (and yes I did win the prize for best hat).

Anybody know Russian?

This is a photo of a friend of mine shaking hands with the President. It comes from a Russian site and I don’t know what the caption says.

Barry and Obama

You may have heard that Obama was in Russia early this week. One of the things that he did there was speak at the graduation of group of students at the Russian New Economics School.

One of the founders of the school is Barry Ickes, who is an econ professor at Penn State and one of my golfing buddies. Barry and I played golf Friday a week ago, then he left the next day for Russia (he heads over there about once a month) for the school graduation and to meet with Obama. Kind of funny that he has to go all the way to Moscow to meet our President.

Happy Valley Heroes

Not resting on my laurels, I present the latest addition to my blogging empire.

Happy Valley Heroes – a site dedicated to athletic accomplishments of past and present Nittany Lion athletes, teams, alumni, and coaches.

I’m still tweaking this somewhat but I consider it at least ready for a public beta. I use each one of these sites as a learning opportunity to pick up a few more skills. With this one, I easily got further down into the site and template code than I ever have before. I had to do a fair amount of tweaking to get the site navigation as dynamic as it is. For someone that basically knows very little about php coding, I’m pretty proud of the way things have worked out.

I still need to add more content before I’ll be happy enough for a total public release. I want to make sure that there’s at least something there for every PSU sport so I’m going to go back through the season for each of them and pull out a highlight or two.