Life Starts Out Small

For something as big as a panda bear...and to see it start out as small as a mouse, this is awesome. See all the pictures in the article link below. Now only if they had these at the pet store I would end up with a pretty cool roommate. Pictures borrowed from the article...Development of a new born Panda Dave, hope you enjoyed National Treasure 2 on Friday, and it won't be but a week or two until SR has you running around like a madman in Florida. Enjoy the perks buddy and show 'em what you're made of. Even though not as cute as the panda to the right, they do deserve some big credit as the Tarheels rolled over Valparaiso tonight. It wasn't pretty at first, but UNC comes out in the second half and doubles all points that Valpo put up on the board(54-27) to finish 90-58. Their next game is on Wednesday against Kent St on ESPN.

Final weekend 2007

Today after work I will be heading home for the weekend...mostly to celebrate mom's birthday, but also to hang with Dave(because he wants to retire early down in Florida for some reason...oh & by the way, I am going to steal your iPod Touch too) & friends. I'll have some pictures up later sometime this weekend of the past few shots. Hopefully your Christmas was just as fun & fulfilling as ours in China Grove & Pilot Mt.

GMail users: beware of thieves...

For any of you, like me, that use GMail as your email client, make sure you read this article: WARNING: Google’s GMail security failure leaves my business sabotaged. It's a developing story of why you need to check your GMail settings right away to make sure no one is seeing or forwarding any of your private information to another email account without you knowing it. Make sure to check your settings on your 'Filters' & 'Forwarding and POP.' Any forwarding or filtering that sends any messages to unknown email addresses look at carefully and delete if necessary. Also make sure you recognize all of the email addresses entered into the filters. GMail has fixed this issue, but the fix does not delete any issues that could be in the Filters & Forwarding settings.

Also, if you have personal information saved in GMail, think about saving it on a thumb drive to keep on you physically instead of having it on the internet. Keeping a passwords file, personal information, etc...on GMail is not a good idea.

Bad Day at the office

This is beautiful!

Christmas Schedule

Merry Christmas(No Happy Holidays please). So the schedule for this coming week isn't so bad despite having to work half a day on Christmas Eve. After work I'll be flying(not literally, just fast in the car) home then heading up to Pinnacle, NC for some Christmas festivities. The next day on CHRISTmas will be all in China Grove. Unfortunately I have to work the 26th but have the 27th & 28th off. Maybe I should start wrapping presents now? Maybe so.

By the way, the Carolina Tarheels just finished their Saturday game to stay at #1. They are 11-0.

Texas Pete Hot Sauce commercial

Hahahaha, Genius!

Poor lame Duke

Worthy of its own space on the internet(here), I had to post that Duke lost last night to a lesser ranked team(Pittsburgh Panthers). See to the right as Jon "Lamer" Scheyer(misses Duke's last two chances to win the game) whines as they lose the game. Just watching the game and how Duke's head coach has always taught his players to "act" out a touch foul in the most extreme makes anyone mad. But, seeing them lose their large lead in the second half and get a little behind was worth it. Duke losing = priceless!

Sorry Ab, it is true.

I've watched the actual show a few times, Man vs Wild. It is interesting for a few reasons, but nothing to be taken to seriously. After all, it is just another "reality" show that tries to pull in more and more of an audience. But, the truth is, and Sorry Abby & Charlie, it is not real.

To live up to his public image of a rugged, ex-SAS adventurer, it must have seemed essential for Bear Grylls to appear at ease sleeping rough and catching his own food in his television survival series. But it has emerged that Grylls, 33, was enjoying a far more conventional form of comfort, retreating some nights from filming in mountains and on desert islands to nearby lodges and hotels.

Now Channel 4 has launched an investigation into whether Grylls, who has conquered Everest and the Arctic, deceived the public in his series Born Survivor. The series, screened in March and April and watched by 1.4m viewers, built up Grylls’s credentials as a tough outdoorsman. In a question and answer session on Channel 4’s website, he recalls how station bosses pitched the venture to him stating: “We just drop you into a lot of different hellholes equipped with nothing, and you do what you have to do to survive.”

But an adviser to Born Survivor has disclosed that at one location where the adventurer claimed to be a “real life Robin-son Crusoe” trapped on “a desert island”, he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and spent nights at a motel. On another occasion in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains where he was filmed biting off the head of a snake for breakfast and struggling for survival “with just a water bottle, a cup and a flint for making fire”, he actually slept some nights with the crew in a lodge fitted with television and internet access. The Pines Resort at Bass Lake is advertised as “a cosy getaway for families” with blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

In one episode Grylls, son of the late Tory MP Sir Michael Grylls, was shown apparently building a Polynesian-style raft using only materials around him, including bamboo, hibiscus twine and palm leaves for a sail. But according to Mark Weinert, an Oregon-based survival consultant brought in for the job, it was he who led the team that built the raft. It was then dismantled so that Grylls could be shown building it on camera.

In another episode viewers watched as Grylls tried to coax an apparently wild mustang into a lasso in the Sierra Nevada. “I’m in luck,” he told viewers, apparently coming across four wild horses grazing in a meadow. “A chance to use an old native American mode of transport comes my way. This is one of the few places in the whole of the US where horses still roam wild.”

In fact, Weinert said, the horses were not wild but were brought in by trailer from a nearby trekking station for the “choreographed” feature. “If you really believe everything happens the way it is shown on TV, you are being a little bit naive,” he said. Channel 4 confirmed that Grylls had used hotels during expeditions and has now asked Diverse, the Bristol-based production company that made the program, to look into the other claims. “We take any allegations of misleading our audiences seriously,” said a spokeswoman for the channel.

The latest suggestion that Channel 4 may have breached viewer trust comes as the broad-caster’s supervisory board prepares to issue new editorial guidelines to suppliers in order to stamp out alleged sharp practices that mislead viewers. “Born Survivor is not an observational documentary series but a ‘how to’ guide to basic survival techniques in extreme environments,” the spokeswoman said.

“The program explicitly does not claim that presenter Bear Grylls’s experience is one of unaided solo survival.” Nevertheless, the disclosure is likely to disappoint fans of the Eton-educated adventurer, who at the age of 23 became the youngest Briton to scale Everest. Just two years before that he had broken his back in three places after his parachute ripped during a military exercise. On screen he has emerged as a natural performer, with stunts such as squeezing water from animal dung and sucking the fluid from fish eyeballs. Grylls could not be contacted for comment this weekend as he was trekking in the Brecon Beacons with his four-year-old son.

Article from Times Online

Another short video of Bear wearing a life jacket during a fake shot of him "roughing it."