recent things of minor awesomeness

• Costco's super-giant pack of paper towels no longer has each individual paper towel roll shrinkwrapped for retail sale inside of a giant shrinkwrapper. I wonder what genius figured that one out. Forget the environmental benefit and savings to the manufacturer in materials and incremental shipping cost. Now I don't have to tear into one every time we run out.
  
• More flavors for Fiber One bars. Really, I love these for the taste, not just the fibery goodness (don't tell John McEnroe.)
  
• Nightshot video cameras, X10 wireless video senders, Picture-in-Picture, a PowerBook, and ustream.tv
• Scrabulous
• The fact that I have 90% of the new iPhone features when I updated my iPod Touch with the new generation of software. That never happens.
• GPS provided by Mr. T
• Google Alerts
• Thanks to twitterbook, cronjob.de, net2ftp.com, and e-rice.net, my "status" is everywhere whenever I update Facebook.
  
• Sleep

(I told you it was minor awesomeness.)

Oh, and if you're a regular AdamTV viewer, please know that he's going on summer hiatus for a little while. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming as soon as possible.

the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks

I "love" this "blog."

what do you do with insomnia?

Redecorate your blog!

There are still some tweaks to be done, but everything you have come to love and expect from patrickandlydia.com should still be up and running. The one thing I can't quite get working with this template is the tag that says who posted... it only appears if you click on the post title and link to the full post at this point.

I am aware of some anomalies, like the facebook text not displaying, but I'll get those worked out over the next few days.

Also, you'll notice that the address is now "blog.patrickandlydia.com." Don't fret... patrickandlydia.com and www.patrickandlydia.com both work to get you here.

a new typical tuesday

New things that happen on a typical Tuesday (in no particular order):

• Dad (me) takes a 30 minute nap from 7:00-7:30 p.m.
• Adam gets a real bath (first one post-drop-off-of-the-stump)
• Lots of snacking.
• Mom does laundry

I'm sure there'll be more... that's just kind of a play-by-play of the evening so far. I don't know if it'll be like this every Tuesday, but I'm thinking that the similarities will be stronger than the differences.

Special thanks to Lydia's parents for coming over today and loading the dishwasher and taking out the trash. Also thanks to the Roselles for bringing food last night (the Coca Cola cake is gone... as of... now.)

accurate and dependable

Do you long for the lazy, pre-always-on-Internet days of the nineties when you would sit aimlessly and watch The Weather Channel for your local temperature? Well now anyone with an always-on Internet connection and a spare computer can relive those days with your very own WeatherStar 4000 emulator.

The WeatherStar 4000 was the machine that cable companies ran for "Your Local Forecast" every so often on the Weather Channel... and thanks to the open data at NOAA and the fine hobbyists at Taiganet, you can run one of your very own.

netflix for purses

I love the name of this website.

Gee, I wonder what else this business model could be extended to??

in the [power] line of duty

Our Uninterruptable Power Supply was interrupted. In the course of the storms this week, we must have had a power surge, and the UPS did its job. We have a new one coming from Circuit City (hat tip to fatwallet.com of course.)

Irony of ironies though, our UPS is coming via FedEx.

turning 37 and aretha franklin

I believe in lifelong learning. I also believe that there are certain things that are revealed or taught to you at different stages of your life because you are ready to learn them.

I turn 37 today, and, thanks to closed captions on a commercial as I was surfing channels, I now know that the fourth line of the chorus of "Respect" is "take care to T.C.B." I did not know that before I turned 37. I did not pursue that information - it was revealed to me.

I'd love to know the significance of this. Maybe I'll find out when I'm 38?

8:45 at the depot

Tonight, I stopped by the Home Depot at 8:45. This is a pretty good time to go. Since they close at 9:00, everyone who is ambling through the aisles asks you "can I help you?" which is actually their way of saying, "what can I do to get you out of the store so I can go home?"

One horizontal pivot rod and one universal flapper later, and I'm in the big line at checkout at 8:50. Cue the extra checkers... again, "what can I do to get you out of the store..." and I'm out the door by 8:55.

And by 9:15, both my plumbing repairs are done!

stages of the summer cold

1. Inability to focus. Looking at a page and reading it, and then realizing you took none of that information in.
2. Weird sleepless night/dreams
3. Realization that it's not hay fever
4. Start popping the Airborne
5. Fall asleep early
6. Wake up with a stopped up nose, feeling like you haven't slept
7. Stay home all day, popping Sudafed
8. Fall asleep early, wake up at midnight with a sore throat
9. Pop all sorts of things in a vain attempt to get sleep
10. Go to work, get told you need to go home
11. Go home at lunch
12. Nap
13. Wake up with a sore throat

The next step is "pray it doesn't go into a sinus infection."

traveling notes

• If your flight leaves Nashville at 6:55 on a Thursday, you can pretty much get there at 6:00 and do fine through security.
• The "3-only" exit row side of Southwest's 737s offer LOTS more room than the "3+2" side.
• Maybe it's the luck of the draw, but it seems like lots of the Southwest flights at Nashville either turn around or originate there. At Oklahoma City and Kansas City, everyone's on the way somewhere, probably due to their central locations.
• Whoever designed the Kansas City Airport has a lot of 'splainin to do. See this chunk o'the wikipedia article for details.
  
• The "infield" parking at the Kansas City Airport is $18 a day. Whew!
• Probably because they don't fly to Nashville, before today, I had never heard of SkyBus. Sounds EasyJet-ish.
• The Will Rogers World Airport has no sit-down restaurants behind security.
• Nashville and Oklahoma City airports have Boingo Wireless service. If you sign up at the Nashville airport, you can get three months for $9.95 each... slightly less than their off-airport signup deal.
• The Kansas City Airport's main redeeming value is free VPN WiFi, at a pretty decent speed... also the reason why you're reading this post.
• If you look at a map, it seems much more efficient for Southwest to have a DIRECT flight from Nashville to Oklahoma City, but that's not available.
• Traveling from Nashville to Oklahoma City and back in one day is doable. Not pretty, but doable. With the layovers from Southwest's schedule, I almost spent more time in Kansas City than Oklahoma City today... about 30 minutes difference.
  

how lightsabers work

Chances are that you have seen a lightsaber at one time or another, whether on the evening news or down at the local cantina.

i am officially old

I don't know exactly the day, but sometime in the past few months, I had a very significant event happen that signaled my transition from "young guy" to "not so young guy." I discovered Twitter, and I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Katherine reminded me of this - well, sort of reminded me. It's more like she indirectly made me aware of the fact when she posted about Twitter, and later how she better understands it and is now Twittering.

By now, you're probably wondering what the heck it is. Their tagline "What are you doing?" is essentially it. Twitter-ers "check in" to Twitter with what they're doing right now. If you're blogging, you Twitter that you're blogging. If you're headed to Starbucks, you're pumping gas, you're asleep, whatever. The idea is that if you that your friend is headed to see Superman 17 at the Regal 98, you might be able to hook up with them and go to the same movie.

Maybe it's because (like Katherine) my Twitter would be something pretty exciting like:
- At my desk
- in a meeting
- in a meeting
- in a meeting
- eating lunch at my desk
- in a meeting
- in a meeting
- in a meeting
- at my desk

Or maybe it's because I can go five minutes and not wonder where all my friends are. Or maybe it's because I don't have any friends? :D

Really, this is kind of the first "big Internet thing" that I haven't been able to get my mind/time/workflow around... so that must make me old. I could do Digg, and I could also do MySpace (although I pretty much elected not to do so) but this is beyond my mind map. Now I have a bit of a perception of why some parents don't get rock music...

informal blog posting poll for our eight readers

If you're a Gerry House fan, you get the significance.

If you have a blog, do you post while you're away on a trip, or does putting up a post while you're gone feel like you're hanging a sign outside the house that says, "burgle me!"??

fool me once...

The grand list of internet April Fool's pranks for 2007. No, really, that what the link is. No fooling.

why we're slow posters

Some of our more regular readers (hi Mom!) may have noticed that the velocity of our postings have slowed down over the past few months. This can be attributed to several things:

1. In my new job, I have a lot more 7:30-4:30 focused content than I did in my previous one. In my previous job, there were more extended times of "hit button, wait for results" and "send email, wait for response." Now, there are a lot more "give response to someone who sent email" and "put out fire." I think I've said it before that the old job was more about pushing bits and responding to people. The new job is all about people, and very little about pushing bits. All that to say, there's less waiting time to think and compose posts.

2. Lydia's not behind a desk 8/5 anymore. Although I bet she's still online 40 hours a week, like me, she doesn't always have the occasion to think and compose. Her online time is more purpose-driven: answer these emails, find this smocking plate, research this purchase, etc.

3. Things are going great for us. I love my job, Lydia loves her part-time job, we love our family, we love the friends we have, we love our neighborhood... there just isn't a lot out of the ordinary that we want to post about.

4. Things are in progress. A good example would be the car post before this one. For various reasons (some potentially legal,) we wanted to tell the WHOLE story before posting. There are some other things (not as huge as the car) that we want to post about, but aren't ready for posting yet.

5. Things are private. There are some things that we wish we could post about to ask for prayers - things affecting people we know... but for one reason or another, would not be appropriate to talk about. Suffice it to say that there's probably a thread of need like this behind every blog that you read and every face that you pass, and we're called to pray for each other. Thanks in advance for the prayers you lift.

totally ripped

The project is complete. Last CD ripped into iTunes: U2 "Please" (the single.) Now our entire library of CDs is sync-able to our iPod.

Oh, did I mention that we got a new iPod? After a couple of great years of service, our 40GB iPod photo gave up the ghost with a clicking hard drive. We decided to replace it with the new 80GB 5.5 generation model. It's so pretty. Right now, we have 34.43 GB of music on it.

Also, I got a deal on Toast 8, so we can move Tivo shows to the iPod. Look for the other 40GB-ish (after formatting) to be filled up quick.

of some import

I've been chided for not blogging recently, so I thought I'd detail my latest obsession: ripping our CDs.

A couple years back, we moved into this house and realized what a ton of CDs we had. Granted, organizing your CD library isn't usually on the top of your list. However, I had a bit of extra time and cash flow over this Christmas, so I splurged on a bunch of multi-colored sleeves and boxed up all our jewel cases.

I thought we had ripped all of this before... but evidently in some set of computer migrations, a bunch of our tracks had disappeared. Now the task is to a) see what we have on the system now and b) add back anything missing. It's a bunch... and it's why I'm blogging at 12:11 a.m. :)

If you're curious, I'm ripping as 160kbps MP3s so that they can be played on the widest variety of devices. Last CD ripped: Eric Clapton: Unplugged.

freezer monocle pelican

This is totally what the Internet should be used for:

fixed!

Someone behind the scenes at Blogger seems to have pulled a trigger or removed an extra space or something. We're back to normal publishing!

Actually, it seems like it's better than normal publishing. When I hit the "publish" button, it's almost instantaneous. No more waiting for 25%... 35%... 45%...