I went out yesterday and bought my Christmas present, a nice percolator from William Sonoma.  Sure, it was pricey, but it's so cool and retro.  I mean, it really perks!

After I got done with that, I ate supper, then checked out the movie times for  Blood Diamond,the new movie with Jennifer Connelly (*sigh*) and what's his name, uhm, Leo.  Right.  I couldn't believe I actually seriously considered at one point waiting for the DVD because Leo's accent was so forced in the trailers I saw.

I'm glad I saw it.  Wow, what a movie.   I didn't even notice that it was way over 2 hours long.  I even got used to Leo's accent in that amount of time!

The acting was good, of course, but the story was riveting -- it was a great mix of thoughtful subjects, compelling personalities, suspense, action, and drama.  It was really moving to see the horror and suffering that so many millions of people went through in Sierra Leone during the civil war, and it was enthralling to see how the 3 main characters, from such different backgrounds, all came together along the same path, even though they all had different goals.

Big thumbs up, and not just because both Jennifer and I belong to Amnesty International and the theme of the movie strikes a chord with us.  It's a good movie.  Go see it.  Then, consider joining AI.

Here are some things I've listened to and watched recently.

NPR : Atheist Brigade Takes Arguments to the Tolerant

Bill O'Reilly and Fox suck. Here's a sample of their lies. Fair and balanced my ass.

Olberman calls O'Reilly out for Malmedy lies

Not just some domesticated animals, Keith, how about 8 year olds?

The coolest 8 year old in the world talks about O'Reilly

Here's my selection of Xmas music I'm enjoying today (all from emusic.com -- the best for online music):

• Barenaked for the Holidays
• A Charlie Brown Christmas with a free download of Greensleeves!
  
• Kelly Sweet's Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas with a free download of Silent Night!
  

Enjoy...

Up goes the Yule, and out come the decorations... Busy night, from hitting Target for some groceries to hauling everything out of the attic. I suspect I'll have a pic up soon for you to marvel at. Got a bunch of xmas tunes to a playlist on my iPod, and am playing that back through my HTS. I like my collection of music -- it's quite eclectic.

Dea hates the white LED lights -- she says they're "blue". It's yellow incandescent lights, is what she wants.

I figure when she gets old enough to put up the lights on her own, and troubleshoot the busted bulbs, and unplug and replace the burnt out bulbs, and do all that without cussing, then she can go ahead and put up whatever color lights she wants. If I'm doing it, it's the LED bulbs. Period.

Rats. I missed Enterprise.

(Later...) Ah, the tree's finally decorated!

I got a call from a buddy at work yesterday afternoon, saying the line at Best Buy was forming already. I had to run out at lunch, and sure enough, there were 18 tents, and two chaps in chairs. Pretty miserable day to be stuck in a chair -- it was 45° and raining.

Yeah, just for posterity's sake, herein I present my score on another Nerd Test:

1% scored higher (more nerdy), and
99% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!!

So, this politician walks into a auditorium. He opens his mouth, and unlike in the movie Man of the Year, he falls flat on his face. Or maybe exactly like in Man of the Year -- the democratic candidate makes a fool of himself, quite the opposite of the comedian.

Gas peaked in July at $3.03 a gallon, national average. Crude peaked the same time, at $75 a barrel.

Crude is now $60 a barrel, a 20% reduction.  But gas is $2.20, a 27% reduction!

So, who do you think is funding the magical missing 7% just in time for the 2006 elections? How do you think they'll pay for it AFTER the elections???  Shades of hollow Orange Alerts just prior to the 2004 elections...

Wow, Kevin sure made a great dinner last night. He made (from scratch) a turkey lasagna that came out just fantastic! We've got tons left over that I just don't know how we're going to eat it -- it could take us a month! Along with that, he did some lemon peppered chicken that was a perfect match. Add in a salad and a glass of wine, and I thought I was eating out...

Got a call from NTB yesterday -- my new tires had arrived. I'm going there this morning to drop off the car, then I'm walking over to Krystal to jack into their WiFi connection so I can VPN into work. That sure is a lot different than "the old days" when I'd have to get a ride back to work, or hope that I had some local documents on my laptop that I could work on.

More, later...

Check out my questionnaire, based on Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" video!  Report back here what you score -- like I said on the page, I got 76%....  (I don't know if I should be bragging about that.)

I'm off to buy my White and Nerdy hoodie!

Shades of things to come, here's a new set of apps that just might someday replace all of the Microsoft tools.  The word processor and spreadsheet are halfway decent replacements, but I've not yet tested the presentation program.  The best thing is this even works on my OpenVMS systems!  It should be good from just about any browser anyplace.

I'm thinking about getting the self-hosted version.  It's good for up to 10 users, and would remove any limitations on storage space.  Right now, the Virtual Office is only available this way, or via a now-closed beta.

And the price is right -- free!

Three days ago, a new organization hit the ground. Known as SEForA or Scientists and Engineers For America, their goals are high -- to restore reason and careful thought to government. From their web page:

Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.

The principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding. But there are times when this is not enough. Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

Their immediate goals are to get 5,000 members to sign their Bill of Rights in the first week. Time's ticking. I'm joining...

Here is one awesome photograph, of the Space Shuttle Atlantis undocking from the ISS and maneuvering away.  It was captured during the fraction of a second that the 2 passed between the sun and Earth, within the tiny swath of French soil where it was visible from.

This also made NASA's APOD.

That's "Who Killed The Electric Car?". It's playing this week at Madison Square 12 (1:10, 4:10, 7:10, 9:35). My son and I saw it yesterday -- definitely worth watching; even Kevin enjoyed it. And in answering the question, there was only one "Not Guilty" verdict -- everyone else was guilty.

I was out cruising in my car Saturday afternoon, and tooled by Tweeter -- they'd not called me about my amp yet, so I thought I'd stop in and see what the story was.  Steve was there, and he said "oh no, they'll call you the minute it's off the truck here.'  Fortunately, he double checked, and when he came back out with the amp in his arms, I didn't have to say anything...

I spent several hours hooking it back up, setting it up, and then modifying the remote control to handle the slight changes in the configuration.  Then I sat down and watche "V for Vendetta", starring Natlie Portman.  Cool movie, but kind of disconcerting, as it did tend to strike close to home with so many parallels to our current administration.  Very "1984"-ish.

It was nice to watch a movie with surround-sound!

Just in time for the kids' schoolyear to start back up, I finally got the last bit of closure on the lightning damage from the insurance company. The check arrived today! I've got the PC repair underway, as well as the home theater amp. I've got to call the appliance store to get my fridge fixed, too, and then decide what I want to do about my camera.

While I love my Mavica, there's some cool new tech out, like the Sanyo HD1 or HD1a. It's not true hi-def, more like enhanced-def, but it's better than any standard tape or disk camcorder for twice the price. I'd have to pay over $1500 to get a true hi-def recorder, and this one fits in a pocket. With the ability to shoot 5 MP pics, too, it's a one-camera does it all.

Is it good enough to replace my CD400? I'm kinda dismayed at its reported low-light performance, but other than that, I'm wow'd by it.

Update: 13 August

I bit the bullet and did it.  I got it from J&R Music World, where they not only had the best price, on it and the battery and SD card I got, but also had the software I need to edit the videos.  They also offered free shipping, regardless of shipping method (so I chose overnight, of course!)  If it truly is in stock as they say, I should have my new camera this week.  I'm looking forward to playing around with it!

About a year ago, a co-worker suggested that he would have no compunction with unplugging an artificially intelligent computer.  I did not agree with that, but didn't challenge him on it.

I've kind of regretted that ever since.

In this opinion piece on ComputerWorld's site, Sticking with AT&T? You're a fool, Ira Winkler lays out the commercial problem with AT&T's recent change in their privacy policy. I've got other issues.

Things are moving along -- I got my last estimate from the contractor today, although I've still got to pick up the one for the AV Amp.

I also got a surprise while out applying weed killer the other night...

Well, okay, technically, I'm a HOA webmaster.  I went to our first Home Owners' Association meeting Sunday, and we had a spankin' turnout.  During the meeting, someone suggested we should have a website, and my hand shot up (of course).  It only took me a few hours, and here's the results: Potters Mill HOA website.  Pretty cool, quite easy to craft, and the best thing, everything (including the domain name) was free!

I think I'll be adding some forums in the near future, too, if there's a demand for them from the community.

I've played around with a couple of my fav graphics programs the past couple days, XnView and ImageMagick, and have discovered the right sequence to add comments to JPEG files. I've now updated the software that generates my gallery to retrieve the comments from within the JPEGs and then display them on the individual photo display page. I'm going to see about doing the same on the photo album page, too, beneath each thumbnail. (Update -- yup, got it changed, so now the Album view has comments too.  Unfortunately, this slows down the page generation tremendously.)

So far, I've only got a couple of very small galleries commented, but I'll keep on playing with it to expand it out to all my photos someday! (Hmm, wishful thinking, me thinks -- last count, I had over 5,000 photos on my server. What's in the gallery is just the tip of the titanic iceberg!)

To give you a head start, here are some of the albums I've done so far:

• Bicycling
• Boston trip
• Decker
• DisnyeQuest
• MB-C230K
  

The house got hit by lightning this afternoon. I'd just gotten out of the shower when it hit on the opposite side of the house.

It hit the peak, ran down the outside of the eave flashing, until it got to the wiring leading from the rain sensor to the sprinkler controller inside the garage. It totally blew the control panel apart. Then...

• it fried the garage door opener
• blew the front panel off the mower's perimeter wire controller
• melted the wire on the night light powered display box on the kitchen window sill
• blew the GFI outlet attached to the above
• took out the garbage disposal
  
• destroyed the alarm system
• fried my Yamaha home theater amp. And my Roku PhotoBridge and Zenith HD OTA rcvr.
  
• toasted the ethernet on my PVR PC, as well as the PVR board's output
• knocked out 2 ports on my Linksys WRT54G
  
• took out both Averatec laptops' chargers (laptops are still okay)
• knocked out cable service (TV, phone, and Internet)
• dealt a fatal blow to my Uniden cordless phone base and one handset
• took out the only corded phone in the house
  
• nuked my new Bluetooth headphones
• messed up the CD recording in my Mavica CD400.

The fire department tore apart the soffit under the eaves to ensure nothing was smoldering. They also switched the main circuit breaker back on and watched for problems. There weren't any more, I'm glad to say.

But something wierd's going on with the home automation system. I may have lost a module or two -- some of it works great, some is acting strange (e.g., I walk into the kitchen, and the A1 module in the bedroom clicks on.)

Busy day today.  I just finished shampooing the living room carpet, Scoobie washed the kitchen floor, and Decker's mowing the backyard.  I've got to go do some food shopping here in a little bit -- perhaps I'll give Decker a break after he finishes the top section of the backyard.

I've got to move the furniture back, and clean up the kitchen countertops.

And to keep me entertained while doing all that, I downloaded a bunch of cool electronica off music.download.com.  Cool site for free indie music.

I got the pictures from both of the kids' graduation and awards ceremonies posted.  Both kids got plenty of awards, including the Presidential Academic Award, Prolific Reader, and Dee got voted Most Outstanding Student by the teachers.  Here's my photo album of the ceremonies.

I know, I'm more than a week late, but this is my fourth attempt at posting this. Each time I tried in the past, I either accidentally closed Firefox, or I ran out of battery power! (Note to self: buy a new battery for your laptop.)

Oh, the purpose of this article? Kevin had a birthday...

Yeesh, what a nightmare!  I kept getting this error about PHP running out of memory when trying to display specific articles on this blog.  Well, after a lot of searching, I found that this is not an unusual PHP error.  All I had to do was up the amount of memory that PHP could allocate, from the default 8MB to a larger value.  This was done through a simple entry in the PHP.ini file, for the value memory_limit.  Sorry it took so long for me to find this!!!

Yay!  I finally got my Scooba!  After the episode with the FedEx guy stealing the bot I ordered from LNT last month, I finally got all my credits straightened back up.  So I called the local LNT today, on a lark, just to see if they had any of the units in stock.  The girl said that they did -- even after I pressed her, to make sure that they were the Scoobas and not the Roombas.

So, I headed over there, discount coupon and gift certificates in hand.  And lo-and-behold, there they were -- quite a stack of them!  I picked one up, went and chatted with the manager, and then, with a bit of trepidation, went to check out.  The coupon worked.  The first gift certificate worked.  The second cert worked...  And my credit card worked!  (Not that I had any doubt about the latter, but with my luck at trying to buy one of these things, I held my breath until I was sure!)

So here's a pic of the little critter cleaning my kitchen.  And here's a video, if you can see it -- not very high quality, as it was taken with my cellphone, but it should give you an idea as to how slowly he moves!  Quite the tortoise...

I'm so happy.  I've got a clean kitchen floor now!  Next, I'm not sure if I'll do the dining room or my bathroom, but I'm sure everything around here will soon be spic and span!

I just purchased a new new programmable thermostat for the house. It's pretty darned smart on its own, with some neat features like "anticipation" and 4 periods for each day, but the thing I really like is the serial interface so I can plug it into my home's brain. Then the smarts that allows my house to know when someone's home will also be able to not bother heating or cooling the house until we get home, or to not bother if we're gone on vacation.

I'll hopefully be installing this next week and will report my progress here...

Take a look on the left.  Just below the "About" section.  You'll find that I've added a new  category -- not quite a "quote of the day", but quotes.  Don't worry, I suspect you'll only find quotes there that I like.  I guess on occasion I could put a really dumb quote out there that I'm absolutely revolted by, but then why would I want to stare at something I hate?  I'm not one to deliberately try and make myself sick...

So, enjoy.  Feel free to send me your fav quotes, too.  If I like it enough, I may claim it for  myself and you'll have the pleasure of seeing it posted here.

Update: I've changed the format of the quotes -- more behind the scenes stuff than anything else.  But most importantly, the display is now down using Graham Keelings' most excellent snippet called random_entry.  This makes adding new quotes a breeze!

I went to Lowes and bought some of the ClosetMaid shelving for my garage this weekend.  I started off with just one 6' shelf, which I thought would be a good cheap way to get going.  Ha!  That came to over $100!  I've got to find a better source for this stuff, because it works brilliantly!  It was easy to hang, taking only about 15 minutes to put everything up.  I even had to go back to Lowes later to get some more string for the weedwhacker, and bought another 4' section plus brackets.  I cut that in half and put up 2 more smaller shelves.  I also took some heavy duty solid core wire -- probably 8 guage -- that I've got and fashioned some hooks out of it to hang things on the vertical tracks.  That's wonderfully flexible shelving!

I also cut a piece of plywood I've got so that I could get it up into the attic.  It's only 1/4" stuff, but it's enough to make for a decent floor in one area up there.  I got quite a few boxes out of the garage that way.  Still not enough to get the Probe inside, but I'm working on it!

The kids got home last night and both spontaneously said they liked the shelves.  I've never known of children to admire something so utilitarian.  Wierd kids, but I still love 'em.

Oh, I learned a new word today.  Figjam.  As in "Bill Gates is a figjam".  It's Aussie Slang for "Frak I'm good, just ask me!"  I like it.  Gotta start using that in my everyday conversations.

All,

After the mess in the conference room, I thought this might be a good safety feature that we should add.  Not only will this prevent possible electrocution or circuit breaker cutouts in the case of another flood, it will also remove a cable that is a tripping hazard for people when walking around the far end of the table.

  http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml

Cheap insurance for $35, I think.

Given the fact that the orientation would be north/south, plus there being 3 walls between the conference room and kitchen, I don't think there's any potential for microwave interference as long as we leave the closet door closed.  We may have to notify the people in the Goodrich office, since the main power transmission will be pointed in their direction.  (Is the shield room still in the corner?  That may provide an adequate block.) 

I do have some concerns that the auditors may confuse this wireless capability with WiFi, but since no data will be going over the connection, I don't see any need for encryption or event logging.  One other concern is that I am sending this one day early, since no one will be here Saturday; I hope you understand before a PO is cut.

No word back from anyone other than one guy in B'ham who asked to be notified if anyone actually cut a PO...

I always liked that Beatles song.  Speaking of songs, I've been grooving to Linkin Park's Plc 4.mie haed.  The tune's pretty cool, but the lyrics mean a lot to me...

I watch how the moon sits in the sky on a dark night
Shining with the light from the sun
The sun doesn't give light to the moon
Assuming the moon's going to owe it one.

It makes me think of how you act to me
You do favors, then rapidly
you just turn around and start asking me
about things that you want back from me.

I'm sick of the tension
sick of the hunger
sick of you acting like I owe you this.
Find another place to feed your greed
while I find a place to rest.

I want to be in another place
I hate when you say you dont understand.
I want to be in the energy
Not with the enemy
A place for my head.

Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well...

It's been a typical week.  Dea's been demanding and thankless; I told her no, and she got ticked.  Tough.  Kevin's had fun.  I got him Kingdom Hearts II.  It's an awesome RPG, and I spend hours sitting watching him play it.  Heck, it took him over 3 hours of serious game play just to get to the opening credits...  I got the Japanese version of the theme song and converted it to a ringtone for his phone, and he was happy.  Now I'm working on making him some

KH2 wallpaper

Work's been busy.  I had one server lose a disk, and work on the new Itanium system got stalled.  But I'm back to working on that now that I've replaced the bum disk drive.  HP sent a replacement drive, but didn't put a return label in the box for the old one.  I called them on that, and they said "No, we don't want you to return the old drive -- we consider that to be disposable."  That's the first time I've had any company just tell me to throw away a disk drive...

I'm impressed with the performance of the Itanium, even compared against our DS10's.  It's always nice to get nice new hardware, and OpenVMS rocks on this system!

I've just started playing with a neat little piece of forum software on this system.  It's really cool, cuz it doesn't require an SQL db, just raw PHP and flat files.  Stay tuned as I get it running.

I've been itching to go to Nashville for some time -- I think it's cabin fever.  So I washed the car, put on the bra (hmmm, I'm missing one of my mirror bras), and hit the road Sunday.

We had a great day.  Even Dea.  Kevin and I spent the day together, Dea wandered around with Blaire.  We met up a couple times for bowling and eating, but everything was great.  I also gave both kids their allowance a day early, so that helped them get the stuff they wanted.  Hmmm, come to think of it, I don't think Dea  bought anything big at all.  Kevin bought a game for one of his game machines, and he played it nearly all the way back home.

I bought a jar of apple butter.  Oooh, big spender.

We ate dinner at the Rainforest Cafe.  It's fun, but expensive,  Especially when I do something like buy each of the kids one of those lightup souvenir cups.  But then the girls had fun playing with them in the car on the way home, pretending that we were a police car...

It was a long drive, but it was nice to get out of Huntsville, that's for sure.

Last Monday was a holiday, so I stayed home with the kids.  Then they both got sick; Dea had an ear infection, and Kevin had the flu.  It was a mild case for him, but he was out the entire week due to his elevated fever.  I stayed home the whole week then, Dea made it back to school a couple days at least.

The kids went over to their mom's Friday night, and I watched the Olympics and Battlestar Galactica.  I totally intended to go meetup with the NAFA folk for their Saturday morning coffee, but when I woke up, I felt like crap -- the fever had hit me!  I've been down all weekend with it, and now it's Monday, and I'm still running a low-grade fever.  It's never exceeded 100, and both Ibuprofen and Acetomenaphin seem to knock the fever out, but they say if you've got a fever, you're contagious.

Dea woke me up at 3AM with a bad earache.  She'd not taken her meds the night before (she was throwing a hissy and had locked herself in her bedroom because I told her we weren't going to BaM because of the way she was treating Kevin and had disobeyed me, but that's another story).  The meds totally slipped my mind.  So she's still asleep, and will probably go into school after she wakes up.  Sucks, because that means I'll have to drive across town another time to get her there.  I should've remembered to give her the meds last night.

I got to work this morning and was surprised to see several trucks from the property owner outside.  I got inside and found out why -- a urinal in the upstair's bathroom had stuck open overnight.  Our conference room, storage room, and part of our main office got flooded.  Ceiling tiles were down, the conference room table was totally covered, and several pieces of equipment were soaked.

So today I got to play facility's manager and did a fair amount of cleanup work.  Our office actually got off pretty easy compared to the hall behind us -- the paint was drooping on the walls!  I've never seen paint do that before...

I'm taking a break for lunch and eating at Aroma's -- I couldn't quite bring myself to eat lunch in the flooded office today!

I've been busy.  Between the kids and working (or is that "fighting"?) mom's new computer.

Besides running the kids all over town, the darned laptop's not working the way my laptop works.  The big kicker is the scanner -- it works on my desktop and my laptop, but not her laptop, even though it's got USB2 ports.  I'm thinking it's got to be the chip vendor, as that's the only other variable -- heck, I even wiped the thing and rebuilt it from scratch, only to get the exact same error.  So last night, I went and bought a Cardbus USB2 card, and I'll give that a whirl this weekend.

I told mom last night that if this doesn't work, I'll just finish setting it up, button it up, and ship it off to her.  She'll be able to use it for just about everything else she needs, it's just the scanner that doesn't work.  While I'd really hate to send it to her without it being complete, I've been working on this thing for over a month now and am no closer to solving the problem than I was when I first started on it.  *sigh*

Kevin just called; he's pissed at me because he's bored over at his mom's and I won't bail him out by bringing him and one of his buddies over to my place.  Ha, he just sent me a text msg saying "I HATE YOU".  That's so funny that he's bored over there and blames it on me!