January 30, 2004

we're getting a niece!!

My sister-in-law just called... It's a girl! Still four or five months to go, but we now know we're not getting a nephew. ;-D

Lydia is thrilled... and I'm happy about it too. Lydia's more excited though because she gets to buy frilly girly stuff for her.

January 28, 2004

wednesday night blogging continued

It worked! Of course, it's kind of tough to edit, but it works!

It's vaguely interesting, so I'll elaborate... I'm running PowerPoint for out Wednesday night prayer meeting. Looking around, it looks like everyone here has me beat by at least fifteen years... most have me beat by thirty. I was the one who suggested PowerPoint for this service. Why? I'd love the "seasoned" members of our church to get used to the idea of seeing things up on the screen instead of down on their laps. We don't have screens in the sanctuary yet, but when we get them, I'd love to be part of the process of creating widespread acceptance of it.

Also, there's no good reason that I'm the youngest one here. The meal is great and cheap, and Frank's messages are good. If you're reading this, and you can make it here on a Wednesday night, come!

wednesday night blog

Here I am at church, running sound, powepoint and blogging on the Treo at the same time! Actually, I've never blogged on the Treo before, so I'll upload and see if it works...

I've travelled this wide world all over...

Patrick's states:


create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

And Patrick's countries (not as impressive):




create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

what brought the house down

For all you budding speech writers out there, Every line in the State of the Union address that got more than twenty seconds of applause.

January 21, 2004

the old tab

One of the next things about my job is that I get to work with the folks at The Brooklyn Tabernacle. Recently, they moved to a new facility on Fulton Street in Brooklyn... an incredible space with space across the street for youth, church and community education programs. Tracy was looking for information about them on the web and ran across this dramatic picture of their former sanctuary at lightningfield.com. Like most buildings in New York City that get repurposed, it's not being razed. It's being converted into apartment homes.

January 20, 2004

President Bust

CNN.com deals with spellcheck. In case they've fixed the caption under the picture here's a screenshot.

the future, Alton?

Tivo alert! Be sure to record Kitchens of the Future. Hosted by Alton Brown, this takes a look at experimental prototype kitchens of tomorrow at Microsoft, IBM, Philips and elsewhere. Plus, the fifties footage is well worth the record time! I want the internet-enabled refridgerator-oven.

Of course, the kitchen of the future has to catch up with the garage of the future (actually the garage of today) and its Freezerator, a combination refrigerator/freezer or freezer/freezer.

it's a Mac world after all

Roger Ebert in the current edition of Macworld:
"A historian of the future, counting all the on-screen computers between 1983 and today, would likely conclude that Macs represented 90 percent of the computer market."
"But since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple's market share does provide us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society."

That's for all my Mac fans out there.

when good homonyms go bad...

Mike Rowe, proprietor of MikeRoweSoft Design got in trouble with a company that sounds a lot like his name (guess who??) C-Net gives an update on the story.

January 17, 2004

we made it out!

We're home. Lydia's doing superbly... eating and resting... and laughing at The Daily Show. She's got lots of Tivo to catch up on.

January 16, 2004

mars in 3D!!

On Friday, January 23, CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown is going to take viewers on a 3D tour of Mars. They're recommending that you obtain 3D glasses for the full effect. This is part hilarious and part genius!

health update


  • Dad
    Dad went in to the hospital on Wednesday for elective surgery on a bone spur near his rotator cuff. He's home... and very sedated! Mom says he came through fine, but they couldn't repair his muscle, so there will be lots of therapy needed so that he can get back to pitching in the majors.

  • Lydia
    Lydia went in to the hospital on Wednesday, but it wasn't elective. She's been having terrible spasmodic intestinal cramps for about a week. She's spent the last 48 hours rehydrating and getting attention from at least three different doctors to rule out possibilities, and they've come to a conclusion: diverticulitis due to diverticulosis. The good news is that it's a very treatable condition. Right now, the GI doc is prescribing Bentyl to take care of the spasms and an antibiotic to take care of any infection. We hope to see her home on Saturday morning. Our spirits are good though... we can feel your prayers! Thanks.

how silly can you get?

crayolastore.com has 5 lb. blocks of Silly Putty available for $59.99 shipped free. If you add coupon code BBTHANKS03, you get the price down to $50.99. If you buy it direct from Dow Corning, it's $8 a pound and you have to buy 100 lbs. at a time! Thanks to fatwallet.com for this deal.

new additions

Congratulations to Tracy and Lee Eric on their new 120GB hard drive in their Tivo and to John and Shelley on their new Tivo/DVD player (arriving tomorrow)! This is John and Shelley's first Tivo. Both mother and father are doing fine.

January 6, 2004

for the PC user who thinks he has everything

Pop in a Cigarette Lighter from PCToys.com. There's even a review of it at systemcooling.com - how it stacks up against the competition.

January 4, 2004

Christmas Party pictures up!

Fellow Baylor graduate, church member and all around good guy photographer Harry Butler came to our Christmas party and took some great pictures! Thanks, Harry! We had a blast having everyone over this Christmas.

speaking of Tivo, we now get free Tivo service (in a manner of speaking)

As of January 1, our lifetime subscription has "paid for itself." When we bought our Series 2 Tivo, we had the option of going with the monthly rate or paying $250 (now $300) for "lifetime" TV listings service. Note that in this case, "lifetime" is the life of the Tivo box, not the lifetime of the owner!

I should also mention that this Tivo has been upgraded with two hard drives to approximately 320 hours at "basic" recording speed. It has a 120GB and a 160GB drive in it. For reasons only known to Linux gurus, the 160GB drive only has 137GB available for recording, but I got a great deal on it, so I'm not concerned about the "missing" 23GB.

If you have a Tivo, and haven't upgraded it, what are you waiting for? You can even do it with a Mac! When you do so, you can save your original Tivo hard drive as a backup in case something goes haywire with your new drive(s.)

fun with ballistics gel, lexan and things that blow up

Run, don't walk, to your Tivo and set it to record MythBusters on the Discovery Channel. This show with two special effects experts use scientific method (pretty much) and a wide variety of materials to recreate and try to prove or disprove rumors. Find out if you can get sucked into an airline toilet, if you can build a cannon out of a tree, if you can blow up a gas station with a ringing cell phone, if a penny dropped off of a skyscraper can kill someone (probably not... but you should see what it does to a head made out of ballistics gel!) and much, much more.