It turns out that there is a reason for both his appearance and his appearance. Leon has been sick, and Elton had earlier decided to bring him back from his recent obscurity by doing a joint album and tour. Well, sick is a bit of an understatement: he had brain surgery last year.

• LA Times article about the album/tour
• Leon Russell Back to Work Just Days After Brain Surgery

For a refresher, I decided to look back at some of Leon's history. I knew he did a lot of session work, but no idea how much. There's more than enough to inspire awe on the Wikipedia article about him. There is also this info from AllMusic.com for a little of the variety of what he did:

As a member of Spector's renowned studio group, Russell played on many of the finest pop singles of the 1960s, also arranging classics like Ike & Tina Turner's monumental "River Deep, Mountain High"; other hits bearing his input include the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man," Gary Lewis & the Playboys' "This Diamond Ring," and Herb Alpert's "A Taste of Honey."

And finally, don't forget about Russell's "This Masquerade", which earned a Grammy Award for singer George Benson.

Blogger is about to quit supporting ftp and wants to have all blog sites hosted at Blogger. That doesn't work for me. So I started working on the conversion to WordPress about one month ago. None of the processes or tips I found online worked for me — it seems that my setup was different from what everybody has.

I had to write a conversion program to get the posts to look like they should because WP wanted to insert all sorts of extra line feeds. Then I found out just how complicated WP is. I sure learned a lot, and finally today took the plunge and redirected the old blog links to these new ones.

Now it's done unless I find some other gotchas that I haven't noticed. And all of this in spite of the news that blogging is dead.

Thanks, Michael

If you don't have 2 1/2 minutes to watch the video you can read a little more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Launching_Fridge.

Conwell's home page, http://www.duke.edu/~jwc13/beerlauncher.html, was last updated just before he went on the show. I guess he either graduated or no longer has time for a website because he's so busy making Beer Launchers.

I was expecting the first day of Spring to be today, March 21, but it turns out it was yesterday. That got me wondering, what is the definition of the first day of Spring. This year, according to National Geographic, in the Northern Hemisphere spring officially begins at 7:44 a.m. ET on Friday, March 20, 2009—the vernal equinox, or spring equinox.

So many interesting tidbits!

The word equinox derives from the Latin words aequus (equal) and nox (night); in reality, the day is longer than the night at an equinox. Commonly, the day is defined as the period when sunlight reaches the ground in the absence of local obstacles. From the Earth, the Sun appears as a disc rather than a single point of light, so when the centre of the Sun is below the horizon, its upper edge is visible. ... The date at which the time between sunset and sunrise crosses 12 hours, is known as the equilux. Because sunset and sunrise times vary with an observer's geographic location (longitude and latitude), the equilux likewise depends on location and does not exist for locations sufficiently close to the equator.

But when is it?

Currently, the most common equinox and solstice dates are March 20, June 21, September 22 and December 21; the four-year average will slowly shift to earlier times in coming years. This shift is a full day in about 70 years (compensated mainly by the century "leap year" rules of the Gregorian calendar). This also means that in many years of the twentieth century, the dates of March 21, June 22, September 23 and December 22 were much more common, so older books teach (and older people may still remember) these dates.

And finally:

It is perhaps valuable for people in the Americas and Asia to know that the equinoxes listed as occurring on March 21, which occurred frequently in the 20th century and which will occur occasionally in the 21st century, are presented as such using UTC, which is at least four hours in advance of any clock in the Americas and as much as twelve hours behind Asian clocks. Thus, there will be no spring equinox later than March 20 in the Americas in the coming century.

Read lots more, complete with illustrations, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernal_Equinox

There are a lot of PDF converters out there, but most have nag screens, add information to the conversation, of just plain don't do a good job. I finally settled on doPDF because it fixes all of that stuff. It just works as expected. The description from their website:

doPDF is a free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create PDF files by selecting the "Print" command from virtually any application.

	Price	Package Size	Cooked yield	Price per cooked oz.	Price per slice
Bacon Bits	$1.89	3 oz.	3 oz.	$0.63	31?
Raw Bacon	$5.99	16 oz.	4.75 oz	$1.30	63?

As you can see from this chart, the Oscar Mayer package of bacon bits are a good price for their weight. Bacon is priced like diamonds: The smaller the pieces, the cheaper they are per ounce.

It's good to finally know the conversion factor of 16 oz. of raw bacon cooks down to 4.75 oz. My pricing is very different because I tend to buy in bulk and when things are on sale, but the bit price per ounce still wins, just not by as much: $0.39 vs. $0.53.

"Mixing the classic VIC-20 text-adventure games' style with the enthralling plot of Pac-Man for the ultimate in retro gaming action, we present Pac-txt."

Play Pac-Txt. You'll be bored in about 1 minute.