The Comet's Flame

Welcome to the new manifestation of my blog! Please update your links to include the new address www.bluemontline.com! My Blogger site was getting a bit too limited in its capabilities, so I decided to upgrade to a WordPress site hosted on my own personal webspace. I am absolutely amazed at what WordPress has to offer! [...]

Normally, I don’t post advertisements on my blog. However, this is an advertisement which is coupled with an important lesson! The advertisement… I’m trying to get rid of my ticket to the Bob Dylan show in Iowa City this Wednesday (Oct. 24th, 2007) at 7:00pm. It’s a floor seat, Section MF-3, Row 8, seat 16 [...]

Today is an auspicious day, for today is the day that I will address a wonderful topic that is very important to me. That topic is, of course, the Linux operating system. Linux was created in the early 90′s by computer science student Linus Torvalds as a free, open-source alternative to UNIX. Today, various software [...]

On my family’s refrigerator at home is a small dry-erase board which apparently contains some type of grocery/to-do list. The list has been there for probably more than a year, and it seems to be amended quite regularly, each time becoming more and more… uh… interesting. Click on the picture to the left to see [...]

On Saturday, my family and I visited Pike’s Peak State Park near McGregor, Iowa. This was the second time we have visited Pike’s Peak… it is perhaps the coolest state park in Iowa, so make sure you check it out if you haven’t already. We had a very relaxing and enjoyable afternoon. The weather was [...]

People make me sad. They exhibit so much selfishness, hypocrisy, and obscene pride. They act like they own the planet. They wear a smiling mask of happiness and complacency with no regard for the few tortured souls who live every day locked in a hopeless battle against grief and misery. Yet I can’t seem to [...]

Christian harpist Greg Buchanan played a concert at my church tonight. He has a very soulful style of playing that’s fun to listen to (especially when it’s being performed on a harp!) Mr. Buchanan’s harp is an acoustic-electric model, which means it is able to be electronically amplified. Since I love amplified music (especially when [...]

Last night I attended the Mannheim Steamroller concert at Stephens Auditorium in Ames. It was an absolutely amazing show. Chip and the band were in great form… lots of amazing drumming (it’s pretty hard to beat those digital-tom fills!), killer bass (sometimes bass guitar, sometimes electric upright), and of course tons of synthesizer stuff and [...]

I was in Taco Bell today, and within the scope of about 10 min, I had heard several horrible modern cover versions of classic songs from the 60′s and 70′s playing through the ceiling speakers. When an atrocious soul-music imitation of Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” came on, I realized in horror that [...]

Twenty-two years ago on this day, Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation. The FSF has been a continued advocate of open-source software and has played a huge part in fighting for the liberties that the software development world enjoys today. That’s something that makes us Linux-using hippies very very happy.