My brother the rock star

Well, I knew someone in the family would make it big eventually. And now it's happened.

My brother Benj just put out his first CD. Apparently his group is called Virginia. If I recall correctly he was born in Virginia, so that must be the connection.

I guess he's become somewhat of a celebrity up at BYU Idaho (the college formerly known as Ricks), because of a song he and his friend sang at a Guitars Unplugged event. The song is called Snow Fort Heaven, and chronicles their ill fated efforts to create a Snow Fort for the ages.

They have an even funnier song called "The Girl For Me (Polydactyly)," which includes such lines as "She's got a little something extra," "She has something other girls lack," "She's good for gathering nuts and berries in a primitive society," and many more. (For those not in the medical field, Polydactyly means having an extra digit, a la the six fingered man ("My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die..."))

The CD is entitled "She Usually Wears Mittens," which is another lyric from the Polydactyly song. The CD totally rocks, and it can be yours for a paltry $7.00 including shipping. If you would like to help support a new young talent, just send the money through paypal to "tannerb _at_ gmail.com" and put "CD order" in the instructions field. Enjoy!

Blog Alert gets some notice!

I noticed a little traffic starting to build on my Blog Alert page, so I checked the web stats, and I found out that Blog Alert was listed on a tech site called eHub that lists "next generation" web products. Pretty cool!

In case there starts to be too much traffic on the Blog Alert site, I thought I would mirror some of the content over to here. (Google, who owns Blogger, can probably handle the traffic.)

For those of you wanting to add Blog Alert functionality to your own blog or site (allowing people to sign up for email notifications of your blog posts), you can use the following HTML. Just replace http://YOUR-FEED-URL-HERE with the URL of your RSS Feed, and paste the HTML into your blog template:

<!-- START BLOG ALERT BOX -->
<div style="padding-top: 16px; padding-bottom: 16px;">
<table style="border: 1px solid rgb(13, 41, 183); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" width="160">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h3 style="border-bottom: 1px solid navy; margin: 0px; color: navy; display: block; height: 20px;">Subscribe</h3>
<div style="font-size: 9pt; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">
Enter your email address to receive notifications when there are new posts
</div>
<form method="post" action="http://www.shootthebreeze.net/blogalert/index.php">
<input name="formSubmitted" value="true" type="hidden">
<input name="fromBlog" value="true" type="hidden">
<input name="feedURL" value="http://YOUR-FEED-URL-HERE" type="hidden">
<input name="email" size="20" maxlength="200" value="" type="text">
<input name="submit" value="Sign Up" type="submit">
</form>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<!-- END BLOG ALERT BOX -->

When you add it to your blog, it should look something like this:

Subscribe Enter your email address to receive notifications when there are new posts