1960 Austin-Healey
I hadn’t seen an Austin-Healey of these since I was a kid. Cool car. They wanted $7,000 for this one and it needed a new interior.
1960 Austin Healey I seen sitting in Utica, Ohio for sale.
Happy Father’s Day
Anyone that knows my Dad, Jim Spearman, knows about his love for bicycling and his family. Besides over 40 years of working at the same company, biking and family or anything he could do to combine them, like camping, were pretty much what life in small town Mount Vernon, Ohio was all about. As far as Dad was concerned, there wasn’t really much more that you needed in life than a job, family, a house, and a bicycle.
I remember Dad taking to bicycling in the mid-70′s. I was young, but I remember it was rough times. Cooper-Bessemer had laid him off and he had taken a job with a long commute and lower pay at HPM. A work related accident at HPM caused a back injury that required extensive surgery. Things seemed to be going from bad to worse. The doctor told him that walking or biking were exercises that would relieve the pain. Dad got on his bicycle and it worked. Not only did it relieve pain, it saved us money, he enjoyed it, and he made friends doing it.
Not long after all of this Coopers started to boom with business from the Alaskan Pipeline project. Money started coming in and Dad worked all the overtime he could, cut lawns for extra money, and worked night shift janitor jobs to get caught up. He would ride his bike to and from these jobs, even when they were in the middle of the night. Things greatly improved and a few years later, he had time for more bike riding.
In this photo, he’s holding the numerous patches from organized bike rides he was on. I don’t think any of them were less than 50 miles. Sign-up money usually went to a good cause and you’d receive a patch. The oldest one he had was from 1977 and they kept going up to the present. In his retirement, he still keeps biking whenever he gets a chance. When he’s not spending time with his friends and family, he’s usually on the Kokosing Gap Bicycle Trail.
On Fathers’ Day, I’d like to thank Dad for all the hard work he put in over the years and everything he’s done for all of us in the family. Just as he’s never waivered on his bicycling hobby, he’s never waivered on taking care of the family either. We love you Dad!
RSS Feeds. A Simple Explanation
I don’t like the computer jargon and acronyms. They make things that are really not that complicated seem that way. Sure, some things like COBOL, they’re complicated. There’s no reason for a person to see the word COBOL and get excited. It’s a 50 year old computer language that’s miserable, so who cares?
RSS isn’t like that. This is more exciting than “Blue Ray“, DVD, IPAD, or IPOD combined. What RSS does is allow you to pull in “feeds” from websites. A “feed” is something that occurs every time a post is made. It’s a little excerpt of the post that can be sent out to millions of “readers” every time a new post is made.
For example, I’m going to make this post on my website, and because I’ve done the work, it’s going to go out to thousands of readers that have chosen to accept my “feed”. You can have your own reader to take in these feeds. Some of the most popular readers are
There are more and a Google search for “RSS reader” will find them for you. I use Google Reader because it’s simple enough and works with my e-mail. It’s not the best, just handy and good enough.
The benefit is that you can take all of the feeds from websites you like and put them in a reader. At a quick glance, you can see all of the new posts. It eliminates taking the time to go to the website looking for a new post. It also gives you the title and preview before you decide if you would like to go to the website. In short, content comes to you instead of you going to it.
As you’ll see in the video, the most difficult part is getting the feed address. Most often, right clicking the link and using “copy link location” is the best way to get the address of the feed. Many are simple. For example, markspearman.com’s feed is http://markspearman.com/feed. You just place /feed on the end of the address.
A nice feature in Google Reader is that you can save searches as RSS feeds. For example, if you do a search in Google’s Blog search, scroll to the bottom and you’ll see that you can save this search to Google reader. Everytime a new blog post from any blog comes out about your search, it will be stored in reader. It’s a nice way to compile information on a subject.
Here’s a movie that explains RSS a little better.
Top Reason I Never Got a Tattoo. Misspellings.
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
I don’t think anyone cares that I never got a tattoo, but some have been shocked when I told them that I don’t have any. I fit the mold I suppose -
- Army Veteran
- Truck Driver
- Motorcyclist. We’ll leave it at that, I don’t consider myself a “biker”.
I almost did get a tattoo once. As me and a few Army buddies pulled into the lot to go into the tattoo parlor, I noticed something odd. “Customer Parking” was spelled “Custumer Parking”. I’m not a grammar and spelling fanatic. One could probably find errors all over this blog. When it comes to tattoos though, I want perfection. I passed on the tattoo.
I did get a kick out of this post of misspelled tattoos. I’ve embarrassed myself a few times when a tattoo owner shows off their tattoo and I let the question, “What is it?”, slip out. Many tattoos I’ve seen barely pass for anything recognizable, let alone something I would want to consider as “artwork”. I would really be embarrassed if I told them that it was misspelled.
To find the perfect tattoo, Click here! There is a huge database of designs at this tattoo design site. It’s up to you to be sure that they’re spelled correctly.
June 2, 2010 Rain Storm in Newark, Ohio
Rain storm comes into Newark, Ohio.
