Eric Stoller's Blog

From Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, comes Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Neil Patrick Harris stars as Dr. Horrible, an aspiring super-villain, whose attempts at villainy are constantly thwarted by his nemesis, the heroic Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). He must take his efforts to the next level in order to get into the Evil League of Evil while also mustering the courage to talk to Penny (Felicia Day), the girl at the laundromat. And it’s a musical!

I downloaded Acts 1, 2, and 3 on iTunes. It’s spectacular!

Watched WALL-E. It was wonderful! I think it’s my new favorite Pixar film. WALL-E is loaded with social commentary. I highly recommend it to anyone who is waiting in line on Friday to see The Dark Knight. Trust me, you’re going to need a backup movie because Batman is going to sell-out faster than you can say Joker.

Here’s a real life, home video version of WALL-E:

John Mayer allows audio recording at most concerts. This is a good thing. Audio of the entire John Mayer show from July 5th in Noblesville, Indiana is available via John Mayer’s website. The concert is in .flac format. It’s a lossless format which means that anyone who listens to it automatically wins.

The audio can be downloaded two different ways. First, you could download each .flac audio file individually from the Internet Archive.

Or, you could download the entire show using a torrent client.

Note, a lot of audio playback apps do not support .flac files. Fortunately, one of my faves, the VLC media player (free + works on almost all OS’s) easily plays .flac files in all of their lossless awesomeness.

John Mayer photo from the actual show in Indiana courtesy of thecon12.

According to Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, “regular folks” = “white folks”. Chris Matthews isn’t even trying to be covert anymore. He’s just outright saying that whiteness is “regular”. Unbelievable. The stench of white privilege is emanating from the video. Whiteness is “regular”. Whiteness is “normal“. That’s what he’s saying.

So Chris, if white folks are regular, what are folks of color? I can’t believe that you are allowed to sit behind a desk and broadcast this racist garbage and call it news.

From Media Matters:

On the July 7 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews teased an upcoming segment by saying: “They’re the working-class white voters Hillary Clinton won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama now win over the regular folks, white folks, against John McCain? We’ll ask the strategists.” On the June 30 edition of Hardball, Matthews similarly teased a segment by asserting: “Up next: They’re the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?”

I remember the first time I closed my eyes, put on a pair of headphones and browsed the web using a screen reader. It was extremely challenging. Images without ALT attributes, Flash objects, and poorly coded websites left me feeling extremely frustrated and gave me even more empathy for web users with visual impairments. I think all website designers/coders should experience what it’s like to browse the web using a screen reader. This video shows Aaron Cannon, blind since birth, browsing a website using a screen reader.

I didn’t monitor my web stats in 2004 (shocker!), but here’s a snapshot of how my little blogging experiment has grown from 2005 to 2008:

This video is from a 2004 Iowa Public Television story on my hometown of Columbus Junction, Iowa. It’s an interesting clip and it has a variety of different viewpoints. It’s a 10 minute synopsis of my hometown. Enjoy.

via IPTV

The face of Iowa is changing. This past year, the number of Hispanic students surpassed the number of Anglo students in the small school district of Columbus Junction in southeast Iowa.

Living in Iowa profiles Araceli and Maria, a couple of teenagers who recently immigrated to Iowa from Mexico, and find out how they are adapting to school in a new country with new rules and a new language.

We’ll also meet educators from Columbus Junction who are committed to helping immigrant students learn to speak English and to succeed in their new school.

My blog was featured in a news story in the local Corvallis newspaper, the Gazette Times: “Former Iowan blogs back to his flooded homeland“.

I have 3 copies of the print edition, per my mom’s request, that I need to mail back to Iowa.

When I purchased them the cashier asked if I was in the paper. I said yes and she rolled her eyes .

While he’s lived in Corvallis for nearly four years, Eric Stoller will always identify himself as an Iowan.

He spent more than 20 years living in Iowa, and has close ties to his family in Columbus Junction. So when reports of massive flooding of his home state began appearing on the news, he paid close attention to the water’s progress. When it hit his hometown, he started blogging.

“I was in Oregon, and (so) blogging seemed like the only thing that I could do,” Stoller said. “It was cathartic. I quickly went through several (Internet) searches for information about Southeast Iowa flooding.”

This is my 500th blog post. I’ve been blogging for almost 4 years now. Time flies when you’re blogging. I never thought I would last this long. I’ve had a few breaks here and there. It takes a lot of juice to keep blogging on a regular basis. The blogosphere and the brickosphere require a lot of energy.

The most rewarding aspect of blogging is the community that I have grown to know and love. Brownfemipower, Kevin, Vegankid, Kortney, Kai, Jenn, and Rachel are all bloggers that I connected with during my initial dips into the blogging pool — people who I have never met in person (hopefully someday!) that I admire and respect. It is the blogging community that makes blogging so special to me.*

I appreciate all of my friends, colleagues and family members who continue to read my posts and provide spectacular comments. I have learned a lot from your shared wisdom. Thanks for visiting!

*I want to also acknowledge the following bloggers as they too have helped me grow as a fellow member of the blogosphere:

• Michael Faris
• Nezua
• Devious Diva
• Joseph Orosco
• Racialicious
• The Angry Black Woman
• Belledame
• Vox

Video of flooding in Oakville, Iowa. Hundreds of hogs died when floodwaters swept into hog confinement buildings after the levees broke in Oakville. This video gives a compelling account of the emotional impact of flooding in Oakville, Iowa. A few hogs were rescued, however, several were euthanized. Please note, some of the images in the video are quite graphic.

Jeff Boyer never imagined that one day he would be riding over his corn fields in a fishing boat. But early Thursday morning, he and his wife, Barb, were doing just that, as they went to assess the damage to what had been a highly productive 1,000-acre family farm.

The farm sat just below the convergence of the Iowa and Mississippi Rivers near the tiny town of Oakville, Iowa. Five days earlier, the Boyers and their neighbors lost a frantic battle to save their homes and farms when the levee that had held back the Iowa River broke, submerging the entire town of Oakville and flooding 17,000 acres of prime farmland.

video auto-plays after the jump…
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