Wayne Keith Walrath

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08.08.06 | Comments Off

Beaver Island, Lake Winnipesaukee, NH

Some photos from magnificient Beaver Island on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.

If you live in, or grew up in a northern region of the US where there’s a healthy four-course change of seasons, you hopefully appreciate the warm months of summer as much as I do. Fresh berries and corn, the irrepressible surge of life as flowers open up in bloom; relief from the long wintertime, and most of all, time spent on or near inland lakes.

I had a good run of midwestern summer lake time growing up: fishing, catching baby turtles, swimming and skiing, and scratching mosquito bites. But the waters of New England — from the Catskills to the Adirondacks and the jagged Maine Coast — equals in experience all that I read in the history and literature of the area. There is no shortage of books celebrating and embellishing New England life. Moose in Maine. Lobsters all along the northern atlantic coast. Fall foliage, deer and turkey hunting.

This is my second visit to Lake Winnipesaukee this year thanks to a friend, Brad Will, in Woodstock. This last visit rekindled my passion for gliding across the water under wind power. Now I need to find someplace in the Hudson River Valley where I can spend more days under sail. If you have a sailboat or have recommendations for renting them within an hour’s drive of Kingston, NY, please email me or leave a comment.

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06.06.06 | 0

Steely Dan: The Furry Years

My 20-odd-year-old dream of meeting Donald Fagen was realized last Sunday night when he and wife Libby Titus popped in for a late night dinner where I was having a drink. Today I was poking around on their web site and found this humorous note written by Walter Becker.
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27.02.06 | 0

BlockBuster Video Locator Application

I’ve been having fun with Google’s Mapping API the last couple days. I wrote a little application for locating BlockBuster Video store locations anywhere in the US and displaying them on a Google Map. Click the map to visit the locator application.
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17.01.06 | 0

Michael Dell Bad at Predicting Future

… or so Steve Jobs says in an email sent to employees this week.
In 1997, after Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped found in 1976, Dell’s founder and chairman, Michael Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple, then deeply troubled financially.

“What would I do?” Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”

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10.01.06 | 1

Manage Ads on Your WordPress Blog

Last year (2005) when I started my first WordPress blog, I was looking for a better way to stick Google AdSense ads to the posts, and an easy way to manage where and when those ads are shown. Since nothing existed at the time, I sat down to write my own WordPress plugin, AdSense-Deluxe.
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04.01.06 | 0

About.com Should Be "Annoying.com"

It seems that everytime I start trying to satisfy some curiosity of mine — like learning about electric food smokers — About.com pages come up high in the search results. But I can’t stand that site! Maybe I’ve never given them a fair chance, but my intial reaction is always that there’s too many ads intermingled with too little information, and they string you from one page to the next with the hope that following an enticing link will bring you to what you seek. And let’s not forget the framing of offsite pages…. But they are so ubiquitious (and now owned by the Times Corporation … think NYT). Anyone have some good things to say about About.com?

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02.01.06 | 0

Kitchenaid Artisan Stand Mixer

I went on a post-Christmas kitchen buying spree tonight picking up a couple of items for my kitchen which I’ve had my eye on for several years. One, a heavy-duty stand mixer, the other a food vacuum packaging device.
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24.12.05 | 0

Catskill Classic Hotels and the Borscht Belt

I picked up this book (Catskill Hotels) in Phoenicia (NY) today for a last-minute Christmas present to give to my parents in Michigan. Spent some time surfing through it this evening. It contains some great photos and brief stories of some of the more famous hotels in the Catskill mountains, along with tidbits about the activities which went on during those hotels’ heydays… While digging up an image of the book cover at Amazon.com, I came across several other intersting books about the Catskills and the Borscht Belt days.

Catskill Hotels (Images of America) - Irwin Richman

At one time, according to the Catskill Institute, there were more than a thousand hotels spread across the mountains of Greene, Ulster, Delaware, and Sullivan Counties. The Catskills were an exciting world full of pleasures to be enjoyed, with summer and winter activities characterized by entertainment, food, sports, card playing, and food again. Catskill Hotels, with a collection of some two hundred images, tells the story of this world, which began with Americaís first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House, continued with places such as the world-famous Grossingerís, and can still be found today at Kutsherís Country Club, the Mountain House at Lake Mohonk, and a few other hardy resorts.
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20.12.05 | 0

Shiira Mac OS X Browser First Look

There’s a new open-source browser for Mac OS X based on Apple’s WebKit and the KHTML rendering engine… Read more of "Shiira Mac OS X Browser First Look" »

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19.12.05 | 0