Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

Treehugger: TreeHugger 100-Mile Thanksgiving Challenge

Beth and I are strongly considering taking the 100-Mile Thanksgiving Challenge. But it’s a bit difficult. (I guess if it was easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge, now would it?)

So far we’ve found a decent variety of ingredients all grown or raised locally – beef and pork, mushrooms, cheese, pumpkins, squash, and beans. But I doubt we’re going to find some of the stuff that’s pretty traditional for Thanksgiving. For example, I doubt there is a flour mill within 100 miles that mills wheat grown within 100 miles of here. So that eliminates most kinds of bread, rolls, pie, and cake. There’s a turkey plant right here in Broomfield, but I don’t think they have a retail outlet and I have no idea where their turkeys come from.

And just try finding salt, pepper, wine, beer, or soft drinks where all the ingredients are from 100 miles or less from Broomfield! Even Coors, with their famous “Rocky Mountain Water” (formerly “Rocky Mountain Spring Water” but they dropped the “Spring” a while back) uses hops from too far away.

In the same day, Apple has (finally) released the new Intel Core 2 Duo based MacBook Pro notebooks and the Mozilla project is supposedly releasing Firefox 2.0. Yikes! If I only had three grand sitting around in a bank somewhere waiting around to be spent on something… Oh wait, I do!

Catholic Priest Claims Relationship With Foley – New York Times

Holy cow, now this thing has gone from “conservative hypocrite outted” to “drug-using homosexual Catholic priest puts man in the closet, congression page brings him out.”

BBC NEWS | Americas | Jumping stingray stabs US boater

This is getting creepy!  First, Steve Irwin (the crocodile hunter) is killed by a stingray, now this one jumps out of the water and into a boat, and stabs an 81-year-old guy in the chest!

I got a domain renewal notice a couple weeks ago for the domain 404notfound.net.  That’s been the home of my musical project / band for the past several years.  But I decided not to renew it.  First, after the “live rock band” version of the 404 Not Found project broke up, I haven’t felt like using that name again.  Second, I haven’t been playing any music at all lately.  Instead, I’ve been focusing on filmmaking.  Unless I have a huge change of heart, I think I’ll keep myself busy enough with making movies that I won’t have time for making music for quite a while.

So, I’ll keep the old 404 Not Found website pages as part of my general www.toddbradley.com site.  But the name 404notfound.net will go away and be snatched up by someone else.

That said, if you’re interested in grabbing some tracks from either of the best two 404 Not Found CDs, you can download tracks from the iTunes Store and from eMusic.  Here are the links:

iTunes Store

404 Not Found: Paper Cuts
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=5005311

404 Not Found: Eclectronic
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=5902631

eMusic

404 Not Found: Eclectronic
http://www.emusic.com/album/10844/10844901.html?fref=700329

404 Not Found: Paper Cuts
http://www.emusic.com/album/10854/10854828.html?fref=700329

I wrote a while ago about hating Steve Jobs because Apple’s iPod software update killed my iPod. Well, in the end, I took it to the local Apple store, where they ordered a replacement under the warranty program. A few days later, I got a phone call that my new (replacement) iPod had arrived. So I went to the mall and picked it up. It sorta worked, but I noticed that whenever it would go to sleep, the only way to wake it up was to plug in the power or reboot it. That sucks! So I took it back to the Apple store, where they replaced it – again! Now I’m on my 3rd 5th-generation iPod in 4 months. Not too impressive. I felt compelled to buy their extended warranty, which I did. Assuming they didn’t botch the process of registering the extended warranty (called AppleCare) to the correct iPod, it should extend the 1-year warranty for an extra year.

Yesterday, I got 10 spam blog comments and 0 real blog comments. I was tempted to just turn commenting off completely on my (undervisited) site. But Beth convinced me to leave it on. So I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and installed the Akismet plug-in, which is supposed to dramatically help cut down comment spam. We’ll see! So spam away, comment spam bots…

I forgot to mention this, though it happened several days ago. Not even a week after I got a thank you note from the people at Stang Auto Tech, for taking my truck there for service, I got another personalized thank you note from the owner and head chef at a restaurant we visited a couple weeks ago. The restaurant is called Rioja, and it’s on Larimer in downtown Denver. The food there was very good, although the service from our waiter wasn’t outstanding. But it was nice getting a card from the proprietors afterwards, thanking us for our business. I thought maybe I’d written a mini-review of Rioja, but I guess not. Anyhow, it’s expensive and didn’t seem unusually Mediterranean (which is its supposed theme), but it was quite tasty.

I got my first ever sub-30 minute bike commute this morning. Well, since I moved to where I live now, at least. Last Friday, I set my personal best commute time from work to home at 36:13. This morning I rode from home to work in 29:52.

The morning commute is easier, given that it’s mostly a slow and gradual downhill ride with about a mile of steep climb at the end. Going home in the afternoon, I get to coast for that mile, but then it’s a long grind the rest of the way.

And best of all, nobody tried to run me over today! (yet)