Why Sheep?

I stumbled upon this great picture at Photobasement.com 

(From Yahoo Pictures) Icicles hang from a statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library in Springfield, Ill., Sunday, Dec. 9, 2007. The brunt of an icy winter storm system hit central Illinois leaving up to a quarter of an inch of ice accumulation and creating dangerous driving conditions.

 (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Eye-Fi is a normal-sized SecureDigital memory card with a built-in Wifi radio that will automatically connect (when in range) and upload its pictures to some Internet site. That is so cool! Link to Eye-Fi.com.

iSquint.org offers a program (iSquint) to convert video files to other formats, most notably iPod format. I learned of it from Jesse David Hollington’s column titled “The Complete Guide to iPod, iPhone and Apple TV Video Conversion (Mac)” at iLounge.com. An interesting (and accurate in my observation) point that Mr. Hollington makes is that while QuickTime Pro can convert just any format to another, it does so very slowly. iSquint is much faster and has excellent defaults. It will even quietly convert a DiVX .avi (such as one might find via BitTorrent somewhere) to an even smaller iPod-ready MPEG-4 (.mp4) file.iSquint will graciously drop the new file into iTunes (in Movies) ready to be pushed over to an iPod with video smarts. It can also conveniently accept a drag’n'drop pile of files to be converted while you sleep. (Allegedly, ffmpegX can do this job well, too, but it requires that you install the Linux-grown (?) utilities such as ffmpeg separately. iSquint seems to be a very easy all-in-one solution.)

From CuteOverload.com. Hopefully, this crow is helping remove some Bot Fly eggs from the sheep’s nose.

Abraham Lincoln,
An Account of His Personal Life,
Especially of Its Springs of Action as
Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War

Link to (free) full-story-page at Project Gutenberg

The Gettysburg Address (MP3) from the Great Speeches in History Podcast from LearnOutLoud.com

This collection of Lincoln’s letters gives us a glimpse into the inner self of a great American president. After a brief autobiography, the letters appear chronologically, beginning with his courtship and early political life and continuing into the presidency. In these letters, Lincoln reveals his private side. His letter to Mrs. Orville Browning is a parody of his rejected proposal. In the letter to John T. Stuart, he reveals his depression at breaking his engagement with Mary Todd, with whom he is later reconciled and eventually marries. In letters to his friend, Joshua Speed, he laments the loss of resolve, the “chief gem” of his character. The letters to generals and statesmen give us insight into Lincoln as a commander and deepen our understanding of the Civil War. Beautifully performed by George Vail, this program provides a unique insight into the man, the times, and the making of this country.

Link to iTunes

Link to Audible.com

(Link to Yahoo)

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
Artists, sculptors and photographers knew Abraham Lincoln’s face had a good side. Now it’s confirmed by science. Laser scans of two life masks, made from plaster casts of Lincoln’s face, reveal the 16th president’s unusual degree of facial asymmetry, according to a new study.

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