A small update for all those who have noticed the lack of original content on my blog as of late. The birth of our first son is the main reason for that. Add to that more work and a full time class schedule, seasoned with the third year and capstone of the Roundtable, and you get a lot of unoriginal content.

That said, all things are well and I am hoping to write some more in the near future. Playing with the idea of writing about torture next.

Sound familiar? Bad economy, charismatic leader, a nation of sheep. Where have I heard that before. Starts with 3 and ends with “rd Reich.” Hope I am wrong.

Go grab it! It’s at http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/publicdiscourse.xml

Another well-written article from The Public Discourse. If you aren’t checking it periodically, you should; and shame on you for not doing so already.

WorldNetDaily has a nice article by Chuck Norris on what’s wrong with this country with respect to the financial disaster going on right now. Very insightful, I wholeheartedly agree with him!

Not the first one I caught in our little pond, but one of the first. Fly fishing is fun!

The ultimate in total connectivity: posting a blog from my iPhone and broadcasting that to twitter and facebook at the same time. Wow…

This will demonstrate not one but TWO neat technologies. This post is written on my iPhone with the new wordpress app and should be sent to twitter as well! Let’s see if it works…

By the way, my Twitter username is ckoehler if you’re interested in what I am doing.

This just in: To search channels on Freenode, simply do:

/msg alis list searchword

/msg alis list * -topic searchword

My dad-in-law and I went to Bell Cow Lake this weekend to do some fishing. It’s near Chandler, Oklahoma and just 45 minutes east of OKC. It’s a very nice lake with lots of open shore access and fishly looking areas. Since I got a fly fishing rod for Christmas, I thought now would be a good time to break it in. We hit three of the four areas of the lake.

For the first area, I didn’t even bother putting the leader on. I just practiced casting and got pretty good after about 30 minutes or so, though the wind didn’t help. It still didn’t quite click, and in a moment of discouragement I remembered the gift of technology in form of my iPhone. One Youtube fly fishing video later, I remembered the technique and did much better. Blisters we starting to form on my hand and my thumb started hurting.

The second area was on the east side of the lake. After my casting success previously I decided to go all out and put the leader and a wooly bugger on. I bravely cast a few times, somehow lost my first wooly bugger after a few dozen casts and decided my tackle box was too far away and my hands hurt too much to continue. I never had a bruise in my thumb until that day; it doesn’t feel good.

The last area was by far the nicest. Lots of open shoreline. My decision to stop fishing for the day was overruled by the awesome fishing potential, so I grabbed my rod and started casting. A few guys were driving up in their pickup into the parking lot and seemed to be watching my awesome casting skills. I wonder what they were thinking…

My streamer got stuck after one of the casts and while I was trying to get it loose, I apparently used enough force for it to snap back behind me and snuggly attach to my t-shirt. It didn’t hurt, but was quite difficult to get out So much for awesome casting skills.

I had a really good time even though I didn’t catch a thing. Oh, and weight forward line does indeed mean that the thick end of the line is in the front. I put it on the wrong way, so casting should get a lot easier once I get that right