Maleya- 7 months old.

We went to Sand Bay last week for a day and got to see maleya. She loves the water and finally fits into the dress we bought her in Jamaica.

YouTuber's are a Strange Breed

So last night I was bored, but didn't feel like doing anything constructive so I started to play the guitar. As I was looking for a new song to learn on the computer, I realized that I have this camera on my macbook (iSight) and some very easy to use video editing software. I then proceeded to conduct an experiment. I made a video of me playing a song and uploaded it onto YouTube. (I have an account there so that I can put videos on this webpage). Either way, I finally got around to uploading the video right before I went to bed. So I said that I was conducting an experiment, well I wanted to see how little of an effort it would take for people to find you on YouTube, that is of course, assuming you had some sort of talent (which I don't). But there is a story of a guy named Andy Mckee who put some videos of himself playing guitar on YouTube and now has become fairly well known and has benefited quite a lot from it.

Alright, back to my experiment... When I woke up in the morning, the video had been "live" on YouTube for approximately 10 hours, and I already had 17 views and 1 comment! I was extremely shocked for a number of reasons: (i) it was on there during the night, (ii) I only gave it a few tags (used for searching for videos), and (iii) I'm not very good at guitar!

In my scientific opinion - it would be very easy to get recognized on YouTube because apparently people are on there in the middle of night browsing for material. All it would take is for a few people to like it, pass it on to their friends, to their friends, etc and you might be the next Andy Mckee.

Well that's all I have for now (and yes I realize that I didn't run proper controls in my experiment, but it was at least good preliminary data). If you want to check out the video you can click here.

New Job Country Western Judge

Mom the country western judge. She judged the 26th annual Colgate Country Showdown held at the lake front. I guess Tyler W won. The salmon derby is also going on. So there was a crowd. I hope you can see the weed in her mouth. Zoe goes to Kurts week after next for a little training.

Organic Dairy Farming

Long time no post, so I figured somebody had to do it. As part of my plant pathology field identification class we visited an organic dairy farm today. It was a pretty cool experience, they produce milk under the Organic Valley trade name. What I was most impressed with was their milking set up. They have about a 1,000 acre farm, which includes about 250 acres for the cows to graze and the rest is for producing certified organic feed for the animals. I included a little video of the milking operations because I thought it was super sweet. They have about 325 cows that get milked twice a day, each milking only takes 2.5 hrs with their sweet set up. Check out this video to see more.

After leaving the farm I was seriously thinking about buying their milk, sort of nice to know where your food comes from. On our field trip we also visited an organic vegetable farm, called the JehnEhr Family Farm, in Sun Prairie. They have a program called a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Basically it is a program that allows consumers to buy fresh organic produce directly from the farmer. For about $20 a week you get a large box of produce, the catch is that you don't have a choice of what vegetables and fruits will be in it, you just get whatever is ripe and in season. It seems like an interesting idea and I think Anthony and I are going to give it a try. You can read more about it on the JehnEhr website.

All for now, keep the blogging comming. --Jon