PolarLava::Blog

For Christmas my parents were kind enough to buy me the Canon CanoScan® 8600F that I have been lusting after for several months now.  Happy, Happy.

Like most scanners, this thing will scan most anything.  But its forte is scanning film and negatives.  So what does this mean to you?  It means at some point you'll get to gaze upon the glory of my early 90's permed mullet head via my collection of photos from Japan.  But another bonus for you is that I'll be able to scan then late 60's magazine article where Hugh Downs advocates medical exploration of LSD.  All this and more my friend.

If you don't really know me it would probably be a safe bet to guess I'm somewhat addicted to Lava Lites.  At least 20 years ago now, my older brother gave me his old lava lamp that he no longer wanted.  It's a true classic, a Lava Lite Century with red lava in yellow liquid and a gold base.  It pretty much looks like what used be on the front page of my site:

Anyhow, he got it back in the early 70's and it had spent many years both in our shared bedroom and his dorm room at college.  When he left for good he left it with me.  I was thrilled because I had always liked it and wanted one of my own.  So it has traveled with me through life and spent a good deal of time in a number of places I've lived.  A few years back I took it to work because my wife denied it entry into the living room.  (Her loss!)  And so it has sat on my desk through several job changes over the past half dozen years.  Life was good.  But in my most recent (office, not job) move early last summer brought ill upon it.  It had been on and was warm when I moved it.  It got shook up, which is something you should never do to a lava lite.  Ironically, in the past I've intentionally shook it up with out incident as I didn't know until this time that you should never do that!  Anyhow, it turned very cloudy and sadness fell upon me and my lava lite.  I tried numerous remedies including cycling it on and off for several day, chilling it and also letting it sit for months.  Sadly, it has remained cloudy.  You can see it near the end of it's happy time in this photo which is actually from the collage on the Synacor Careers page.

So I've had to face the reality that it is (might be?) the end of the line for the old lava lite.  So it's out with the old and in with the new!  The 2006 Christmas season has brought me a new white lava with blue liquid lava lite!  This color scheme is more in keeping with the PolarLava motif, thus the change up.

But I refuse to give up on the old lamp!  It's going home this weekend with the intent to try and resurrect it.  I'm going to open it up and try filtering the current current fluid with the hope of removing the particulate (wax/lava) in the fluid.  If that fails I intend to try to replace the fluid.  And failing that…I guess it's off to the lava lite grave yard.  :(

Well, another SFFL season has come to a bitter end for the mighty THRAK as they lost in the Southern Conference final 74-73 to Private's Parts.

It wasn't all doom and gloom, as this season we ripped off a 10-0 start and had our second best season ever.  You can read the capsule recap on the THRAK homepage.

This past week I've learned of the most awesome site if you like (primarily) classic rock.  It's the Concert Vault at Wolfgang's Vault.

So what is it you ask?  Well, legendary concert promoter Bill Graham apparently taped large numbers of the shows he promoted.  These are recordings that were taken direct from the soundboards and are of amazing quality.  There are literally hundreds of shows already online and it grows every week.  We're talking classic groups in their early and prime days.  How about The Who in 1968?  Or ELP in the mid-70's?  Or maybe The Cars in 1978 just as they are about to hit the big time.  Yeah, you can go now.  :)

I am not a basketball fan by any stretch and actually I have never really liked it at all.  But I will give the NBA credit for doing something that other leagues often don't do.  That is listening to the players and righting an apparent wrong that they made when they switched to a synthetic ball.  Kudos to you David Stern for listening and going back to the old leather balls. [Insert your own crude joke here.]