Straight Stick 101

This is my first post since August, I apologize to my loyal viewers but promise to resume posting on a more regular basis.
Everyone that has driven a manual transmission car or truck remembers their first day. Here is my nephew and I as I attempt to teach him the skills he needs to be a Master of the Straight Stick.
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Music by 4 Bolt Main under a Creative Commons License

Gregory Bald

We had been planning on hiking to the top of Gregory Bald in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Finally last month we made the 11 mile round trip hike. Here is a vlog from that outing.
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Music by None of the Above Bluegrass under a Creative Commons License

Blueberries

Today we are picking this healthiest of fruits...Mmmmm blueberries.
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Music by The Ball Sisters under a Creative Commons License

Live Bait

We're on the road in North Carolina. We stop for gas at a convenience store in the country and find this...
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Music by Forest View Express under a Creative Commons License

Caribbean Reds (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of the Caribbean Reds series. The first vlog was back in April of me planting the seedlings in soil packs. Now we are transfering the plants into planters in my yard. When done I'll have some of the hottest peppers available anywhere.
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Music by Swampman Jams under a Creative Commons License

Cloudland Canyon

Cloudland Canyon State Park is located in northwest Georgia. I've visited the park several times since my first visit when I was about 13 years old. This week I returned to the park for a short visit.
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Music By: Guitar Boy Under a Creative Commons License

Simple Rule

This is a simple rule to live by when out in the woods or in life in general. This video was recorded beside the Horse Pasture River in North Carolina (more video of the area will be comming soon).
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Something Fishy

The Pisgah Center for Wildlife Education located just outside of Brevard North Carolina is a great place to learn about wildlife, forests and their interdependence on eachother. Centers like this serve to educate the genreal public and organized groups including school children.
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Music by Swampman Jams under a Creative Commons License

Photo of the Week; Highway Beautification Act of 1965

Flowers in the median.
Originally uploaded by dougb61.

The next time you are traveling down a highway and see wildflowers in the median or right-of-way thank Lady Bird Johnson, wife of president Lyndon Johnson. As First Lady, Mrs. Johnson was a strong advocate for environmental landscaping and beautification, and successfully lobbied for the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, whose effect is seen across the country. She was also the founder of the National Wildflower Research Center.

New Neighbor

I've met (kinda) my newest neighbor. He introduced himself at around 1:00am last night.
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Music By Victor Stone (fourstones.net) under a Creative Commons license.

Mulberry Tree

Just off our back deck lives our closest neighbor.
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George Galloway: My New Hero!

Everyone in America needs to see this clip. This is George Galloway of the British Parliament sitting before a Senate Sub-Committee on "Oil for Food" allegations. He thoroughly rips senator Norm Coleman a new asshole and puts it all out there for the world to see. Why can't we find politicians here with balls this big?

George Galloway tells it like it is.

LVM Announces their "Clip of the week" feature.

Lunch Video Magazine (LVM) is well known in the whitewater kayaking world for their outrageous and extreme whitewater kayaking trips. The boys at LVM are "Creekers" meaning they run steep creeks and wild rivers. It's common for these guys to run 40 and 50 foot waterfalls. I've seen clips of guys running waterfalls over 100 feet!
Creeking is the most dangerous type of kayaking. Every year there's always a list of kayakers that have lost their lives creeking. The places they go are usually remote and medical help is always hours away.
These guys kayak all over the world. They finance their trips and make their living by selling videos of their adventures. They have what may be the first "Video Magazine". You subscribe to the magazine and four times a year they send you their most recent DVD, professionally packaged. It's a cool idea. In addition the the video magazine they also have several individual kayaking movies on the market. Watching an LVM feature is an experience in itself. You won't believe the places these guys go and paddle.They have also picked up several corporate sponsers along the way.
L.V.M has just announced their RSS feed so people can subscribe to their new Clip of the Week feature. The link to their RSS feed is: http://www.lvmvideo.com/cotw_feed.xml Check it out!

They also have several blogs that are loaded with pictures and VIDEO! Check them out here!

Pre-op Post-op

I had shoulder surgery last Friday. Everything went well and I'm on the road to recovery. I want to thank everyone that took time out to comment on my last vlog and wish me well. Thanks everyone!
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Friday the 13th

I'm going under the knife tomorrow. This is a long anticipated shoulder surgery to repair my torn rotator cuff and shoulder impingement. This puts me out of kayaking for the rest of the summer. I guess I'll have to spend my time videoblogging instead.
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Recycle This Too

How many old phones do you have lying around? I had two.
Another way to help the environment by recycling. If you can't find a recycle box like this one, here are a few sites that collect old phones for recycling.
Charitable Recycling
Wireless Recycling
Collective Good
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Jacks River (Hi-Res)

This is the high resolution version of the previous post, my trip into the Choutta Wilderness to Jacks River Falls. This video features the song "Music Across The Miles" performed by Phil Hamilton and Josh Leo in a long distance collaborative effort posted on their blogs. The download is huge but worth it. A special thanks goes out the Phil and Josh for allowing me to use their song in this video. Thanks Guys!
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Cohutta Wilderness (Jacks River Falls)

As planned Luke and I went to the Cohutta Wilderness hoping to catch a black bear on video along the way. We got to the trailhead and I was suprised to see three vehicles already there. I knew the chances of seeing any bear would be slim. We didn't find the bears but we did have a great hike to Jack's River and the waterfall there.
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The Plan

I'm going on a trip to the mountains tomorrow. I'll be hiking deep into the Cohutta Wilderness in North Georgia. My dog Luke and I will be hoping for some sort of encounter with a Black Bear. What ever the result I'll bring back some video of the adventure. Tomorrow look for a special edition of The Southern Video Blog with the option to download higher resolution video from the trip.
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The Spring Visitors

They didn't even call to tell us they were coming. They just showed up on our front porch one day and will stay the summer. We're glad they're here.
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Photo of the Week; Steroids in the food chain.

Bovine Death Row
Originally uploaded by dougb61.

Once again congress is misguiding it's energy. We've been hearing a lot about Congerssional hearings concerning steroid use in professional sports this month. Suddenly some members of Congress think it is the government's role to over see and regulate activities of the NHL, NBA, MLB, and NFL. What business does congress have that concerns any of us in pro sports?

If congress wants to concern itself with steroids it needs to turn its attention to the use of steroids and hormones in American beef production. Beef producers use steroids to alter the way cattle use energy in food. The results are leaner/bigger cattle. Maximizing the profits for ranchers and corporate beef producers. Dairy farmers use bovine growth hormone to stimulate the production of milk. What is the effect on us? Studies into the safety of steroid and hormone use in food production are more that 20 years old. While better research techniques have evolved over the years a bonified modern study into the effects has not been conducted. The regulatory goal of the FDA and the Department of Agriculture is to ensure that anyone eating beef will get a dose of residual hormones that's less than 1 percent of the highest dose that caused no ill effect in test animals. But is any amount of these substances safe? It is interesting to find that since 1988, concerns about the potential health risks of drug residues has led the European Union to ban importation of the meat of hormone-treated animals. My question is why is congress more concerned with baseball that the public health?

The Phone

I try to do the right thing. I try to treat others the way I want to be treated. When you cross paths with someone with different values it can be a dilemma. I guess it's funny when a trip to do a good deed turns into a rant.
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Radical

Would you do something radical to help someone you didn't even know? A small sacrafice can go a long way towards helping a child in need.
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You can help too The Locks of Love Website.

Earth Day 2005 (Photo of the Week)

spring2003 095
Originally uploaded by dougb61.

On Tuesday, Tennessee state meteorologists issued an unhealthy air quality alert for the Great Smoky Mountains. That's nothing out of the ordinary. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most polluted national park in the country, and with the warm weather of spring comes smog season.

What is unusual is that President Bush will be paying the Great Smoky Mountains National Park a visit on Friday -- for Earth Day.

It's hard to miss the irony here. One of the Bush administration's biggest legislative priorities has been to rewrite the Clean Air Act to allow twice as much soot and smog pollution than strong enforcement of the current law. The administration's plan would even strip the right of states to force upwind sources of pollution to clean up their act. In fact, North Carolina has invoked that right to address the smog problem in the Smoky Mountains.

Because of its position downwind from coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities, the Smokies' air pollution levels rival those of urban areas, at times exceeding levels in Washington, DC and New York City. This contamination brings haze, ozone, acid rain and mercury pollution. You'd think such an alarming situation in America's most visited national park would move the Bush administration to protect our air quality. That's clearly not happening. We need strong enforcement of the Clean Air Act to achieve the clean air standards that Americans want and deserve.

Area meteorologists are predicting rain today, which should wash out the smog in the Smokies for the time being. So the presidential party should get their photo opportunity with a clear view.

We fully expect that the picture, like the Bush administration's dirty air plan, will take our breath away.

Recycle This

Our planet is dying, we throw away so many things that could be reused or recycled. I recycle EVERYTHING! Here is an easy way for you to get into recycling too.
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Caribbean Reds (Part 1)

We're planting some of the hottest peppers available. This is the first of what will be a multi part vlog. The next segment will come in a few weeks.
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Picture of the week.

Mountain Scene
Originally uploaded by dougb61.

I've been traveling to the Smoky Mountains since I was about 20 years old. I never tire of the area. I guess as National parks go it is one of the most visited. You can still go to areas that are not as heavily traveled if you know where to go. As the mountains east of the Mississippi River are considered these are the tallest and most beautiful.

Girls at play.

Two of my friends and I took advantage of the warm spring weather and went to the river Monday. Again I had planned to bring my camcorder and blog from the river. I got to the river to find that I had left it on and the battery had died. I did the next best thing and used the movie feature of my photo camera and took some clips with it and edited everything together. In movie mode it has no sound so I put some music in the background.
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Photo of the week feature started this week.

I've always been a very visual person. I've been taking pictures since I was about six years old. My first camera was a 99 cent wonder(yes a real working camera) that I found in the toy section at the grocery store. It took black and white photos. I remember you had to feed the film across the shutter in the back of the camera to the spool on the other side. My parents always had to help me. My earliest subject matter was such fine objects as tree limbs, garbage cans, and my cherrished Batmobile. Very few of those early pictures survive today.
When I met my wife and we married in 1985 we found that one of the things we had in common was a love for photography. She has a Cannon AE1 and I had an old Minolta that I had picked up for $15 at a yard sale. As the years went by we went through a couple more cameras then about four years ago I bought my first digital camera. It was a 2.1 megapixel Kodak DC290. I bought it used for $400.00 (Remember this was the early days of digital). The convenience and instant gratification of digital sold me and I've sworn to never go back to film.
In 2001 we took a trip to Maine and I shot over 300 pictures with the Kodak. When we got home we downloaded the pictures to the computer and there were the images that would represent our memories of the trip forever. My wife was still using film at the time and it was months before we developed all her film from the trip.
I soon learned a valuable lesson on the draw backs of digital (perhaps it is the only drawback). I had been backing up my photos on CDs. This was a convienent way to permanently store the images just incase of a computer melt down. We'll one day that melt down came. My Compaq crashed one day taking all my valuable photos with it. I felt confident of the safety of my photos though, after all I had them backed up on CDs. Here's the valuable lesson. I got a new computer and started loading my photos saved on CD to the new machine. I put the CD containing the photos from Maine in the drive and I got a read error. I found that some CDs can become corrupted over time. My 300+ photos from Main are now all but lost. Only about 40 survived on a seperate CD that I had made. Several other pictures were lost as well.
Today I back up all my photos on an External Hard Drive. This is a much more stable medium than CDs and I can more easily transfer photos from computer to computer. The External drive connects using either a Firewire or USB 2.0 connection. Now all my digital pictures exist in at least two places. My main computer and the ext-HD. Everymonth I do a back up of all the photos (and scans) taken the past month. I keep file structure the same on both drives so I can just copy and paste the folder for the past month onto the External drive.
Our cameras continue to increase in resolution. Last year my wife bought me an Olympus Stylus 400 4 megapixel camera. I had picked out the tiny camera because it had a available waterproof underwater case that I could use for taking pictures while whitewater kayaking. I take the unit with me on all my kayaking trips, teather it to my life vest and am able to snap photos while in the boat. This tiny camera takes amazing shots. I've taken photos with the Stylus that I would put head to head with the most expensive SLR digitals out there. I'm very happy with the choice.
Last summer I took advantage of the drop in prices in SLR type cameras and bought my wife the Cannon Digital Rebel 6.3 megapixel. I actually use the camera as much if not more that she does. The features of this camera are awesome and the quality of the shots are remarkable. Now we are both stuck on digital photography as is the rest of the world. Back just 4 years ago I bought a Cannon EOS film camera for around $600.00. I was looking on Ebay the other day hoping to unload the antique and it seems you can't give a film camera away these days. The best price I found for the same model was about $50.00 and no one is bidding on them.
So with my love for photography in mind, this week I've started a new feature on my video blog; The picture of the week. Ok, so it's not video but it's the next best thing. Don't worry, my video will still be evolving and the vlogs will keep comming but I though some of my photos may be worthy of viewing from my readers. So I hope you enjoy the new feature and I look forward to your comments. I'll try and make Fridays the "Picture of the week" day.
This is the Southern Video Blog, we'll see you next time...bye.

A tiny frog in a Day Lilly

A tiny frog in a Day Lilly
Originally uploaded by dougb61.

No vlogs today but I was hoping you might be interested in viewing this from my photos page.

Land of the Noon Day Sun

My seventh vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005 (Late Entry).
Nantahala is a Cherokee word that means "Land of the noon day sun". When we got to the river Saturday it was anything but sunny. The weather had deteroiated to a wet snowy mess but we ended up kayaking down the river anyway. We were so cold by the time we got off the river all we could think of was a hot shower and food. This final vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005 didn't turn out as I had planned. My original intentions was to blog from on the river along the way. With it raining and our goal for the day was to just get down the river without freezing, I didn't even bring the camcorder. I did bring my digital still camera along and shot a few pics as we went down the river. I've added additional shots from our trip home which includes my nephew Austin "Snowyaking" in the N.C. mountains and some video from a beautiful waterfall in Tennessee called Bald River Falls. Hope you enjoy!!
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Pack it up.

My sixth vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005.
I'm off to the Nantahala River to go kayaking Saturday and maybe Sunday with our kayaking group. First I have to get everything together and pack it up.
Tomorrow I'll be blogging from the river but won't get to post that vlog until Sunday night.
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Fun with plastic and water.

My fifth vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005.
A lot of people think that Whitewater kayaks are made of fiberglass, they're not, they're made of plastic.
Tomorrow I'll be packing for the weekend.
This weekend I'll be heading up to North Carolina and vlogging from the Nantahala River.
Here is a music video I made last year that appeared on our kayaking group's DVD.
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What does your bumper sticker say about you?

My fourth vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005.
The back of my truck is full of decals and bumper stickers. Here's a tour of the back of my truck.
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12 Hours Later

My third vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005.
I don't have much time for anything else, so here is a simple vlog of me driving into work and 12 hours later.
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This Week...

My second vlog for Video Blogging Week 2005.
I have a busy week ahead. Here's my plan.
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A Hole in Space and Time.

This is my first video entry for "Video Blogging Week 2005". Some of my post this week may be a bit short since I will be working 12 hour shifts at the hospital. I'll be gone out of town on Saturday so that day is out for sure but I plan on attempting to post Saturday's movie late Sunday night. So here is A Hole in Space and Time

Every spring we experience a phenomena that can only be explained as a hole in the Space and Time continuum. The effects have never been caught on video... until now.
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The first day of Spring is here!!

The long cold winter is fading fast down here in the South.
We can start to look forward to the spring.
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Street Performers in Savannah GA

We took a trip to Savannah this weekend.
The street performers were the best part of the evening.
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An excellent article on the power and freedom of blogging.

This well written article pretty much sums up the attraction of blogging on the grand scale that has taken America by storm. Now it's the mainstream media (MSM) trying to catch up with public opinion and the new search for truth. I'd like to see video bloggers taking it to the streets looking for the true facts in the issues that touch our lives everyday. Power to the people.

Vacation vlog (#2) Max Patch

Another vlog from our mid-winter vacation. Meet Max Patch.
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Vacation vlog (#1)

While on vacation last week my wife Becky and I were discussing our day ahead over breakfast.
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The Pyromaniac VS The Christmas Tree

I invited my nephew over for a little barbque. I suppost I could have had it ground up for mulch but this is a whole lot more fun.
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Breakfast and a Blog.

I was thinking that maybe the best way to get some dialog going would be to have breakfast and a blog. Hope you're hungry...
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Ramblings

All this video equipment and this is all I can come up with...
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Is my mail carrier dyslexic?

Aggggrivation is the theme of the day. Does anyone do their job right anymore?
Click on the picture below for the video.

Quick intro blog

I'm doug and I'm opening this blog page to try to communicate with the rest of the world. Click on the picture to see my first video blog. I'll try and have at least one blog a week up.
Cheers!