2009

Wow, it is January 31st of 2009 already! I need to spend some time updating this site but have been too busy chasing kids between Water Polo, Swimming, Volleyball, Soccer and the rest of life...

Happy Holidays Eveyrone

Happy holidays everyone, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and a great, changing, New Year!

Nitro Circus Thrillbillies, Castaic, CA

Damn Travis is crazy...

Will Ferrell Back As Bush With Tina Fey's Palin On Thursday's "Saturday Night Live" (VIDEO)

iTunes 8 quick review

I downloaded iTunes 8 today and installed it. It quickly went through my 70 gigabye music library and then asked me if I wanted to start the Genius tool. It took a little while though I have heard complaints that it could take quite sometime to go through a library of my size. My system is a rather speedy XPS 720 (3.7Ghz, 4 Gigs, 2x1TB RAID 0) and it only took about 15 minutes to get though the entire library.

I tried out the Genius playlist tool. It is FAST! I selected 25 songs and reminds me of Pandora. Unfortunately it does not analyze the music to determine the songs to select after you have made your song selection. It relies on user input and eventually will get better as users begin to use it. It did a fairly good job with locating songs that made a nice playlist. I will definetly use this tool in the future.

Apple needs to be real careful where it is heading with iTunes. It is nearing bloatware as they continue to add features. It is no longer a music player but an entertainment center. Your games, podcasts, movies, tv shows, music, and now your education center (thanks to schools like UC Berkely, Stanford, MIT, etc). It is struggeling with my 70 gig library and in the recent past I have had the xml file it uses to index the library get corrupted. I am happy to use the program and have to say it works just as well on my Vista machine as it does on my iMac. I am sure there are many features waiting to be discovered...

Family Trip to the Big Island of Hawaii

Here are a few pictures from our trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. It is a beautiful place and we have a great time. We stayed in the Kona area and enjoyed adverturing around the island. Unfortunately when they say big island, they mean BIG island. A week is nowhere near enough time to even see the good tourist spots much less the not-so-traveled areas. I will get more pictures up soon, just too busy with school starting for the kids...

Our new car

We bought a new Honda Civic. It wasn't quite what we wanted (no hybrid, wrong color) but we are happy. We bought it in Eugene and on our drive down along with some running around town today we averaged almost 34 MPG. Not bad but I think we might be able to get 40 out of it...

Happy Cinco de Mayo

It is cinco de mayo again, enjoy your fifth day in May...

Spring Break Cruise to Mexico Pictures

Here is a slideshow of pictures from our Spring Break cruise to Mexico. We went on Princess Cruises on the Golden Princess. It is a nice ship, but I will disucss that more later...

So what is up with big oil profits

Okay, I am not a conspiracy theory person, mainly because I don't think there is enough intelligence to pull off a conspiracy on a grand scale. But, how can gasoline skyrocket in price and oil companies all of a sudden make huge profits? And more importantly, why? I started to think that there may be more to this than just big dollars for "good friends" and others. What if this is all part of a big plan? We have enraged the public at large, making it difficult to go to work, recreate, and stressed us to the point of breaking with gas prices. The common theme I hear, it is a supply shortage. So if there is such a huge shortage then how do you make record profits?

My thoughts on this, scare the American public into near pandemonium, then swoop in with a saviour. Sounds good, right? So, where is the saviour? Alaska! 400 billions barrels of oil just going to waste and the only thing getting in the way, the environment. We know at least 40%, maybe 49% of the country seems to support drilling for oil in Alaska (completely anecdotal). Now that we have strangled the economy, the middle class, and even the poor, how many of us are ready to say screw the risks, start drilling?

So once again, what are the chances of a consipiracy of this size? I use to think it was too complex but I can only wonder now. I would predict that before the end of the year we will be drilling in ANWR. The oil companies are primed to spend a fortune on research and it is "good" for the economy. It sure sounds like a win-win but unfortunately we will be blinded by economic rage to think clearly and away we go. If we could just put half the effort into finding alterative solutions we would be considerably better off in the long run. I guess only time will tell...

Welcome to our newest member of the Family, Calvin

Merry Christmas

Wow, it has been quite sometime since my last post. I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone! More pictures to come soon...

Lightning Pictures 7-10-07

Green Gorillaz Soccer Highlights

Here are some highlights from the end of the year tournament for the Green Gorillaz.

Mothers Day Poem

Happy Mothers Day! Forrest, our 13 year old son wanted to write a poem for his mom this morning. He once again wrote a very touching poem and I wanted to share it, so here it is:

MOM by Forrest G. (c 2007)

It doesn't seem easy,

being a mom,

'cause you got to be every where at once,

and everything got to be jus' right,

with little time to relax,

having so much to do,

with too short of a deadline,

which make me wonder...

Why do we have only one day for moms?

I hope you liked it as much as we did...

Cinco de Mayo is coming

OK, it has been quite awhile since I have had a chance to post anything, so I just wanted to remind everyone that Cinco de Mayo is coming up in a week and want to make sure that everyone is taking this as serious as my dog! More to come shortly....

This Show Socks

Pretty funny!

Dell Outlet changes checkout. Is it for the better?

Dell Outlet has recently introduced a new screen to the selection of a system for purchase and checkout. This means that every time you want to purchase a system (or multiple systems) then you need to enter a verification code on what they call the "Add to Card Validation". Here is what Dell says about the page:

"Why do I need to type characters from a picture before I add a product to the cart? Typing the characters from a picture helps ensure that an individual, and not an automated program, is adding a product to their cart.

This is important because hackers use harmful programs to try to reserve large amounts of inventory, which then means inventory is unavailable to our customers. To protect the integrity of your purchase, we ask you to take this step. In most cases, an automated registration program can't recognize the characters in the picture."

You are then prompted to enter an eight digit alpha code. For all those "retailers" using scripts to grab large amounts of inventory and then sort through them while in your cart this will hopefully level the playing field for the rest of the regular users. In general this seems like a step in the right direction as I have purchased many systems off of their web site and have been frustrated more than once to see a system, selected it to add to cart to find out that it and all the rest of the items are all of a sudden gone. I only wonder if you are too slow on typing in the verification code if someone else can grab the system out from under you.

All in all I think this is a good step for Dell and I applaud them on this effort. Now if they can work on their support side I will be one happy camper!

Very Cool Stop Motion Movie

Ok, this was just too cool not to post! These guys have some real talent! Enjoy...

Another Aerial Photo

This one is for all the golf fans out there. This is an aerial shot of the Rogue Valley Country Club in Medford, Oregon. I wonder if anyone ever thinks about this stuff in advance. And for what its worth, this is not a doctored picture, it is right off of an aerial photograph used by the City...