Misti made the best beef jerky a couple of days ago. It's wonderful. I just got back from another NCAA conference today. (No, it's not the NCAA that you're thinking of.) We ate dinner with Grandma Nord (Misti's grandma) last night, and it was wonderful. Misti is nursing a sunburn, as she and Becky went swimming in the pool for the past couple of days. We watched some weird DVDs lately, "Uncorked" with Minnie Driver, and Baraka, a photo documentary of the world, that we checked out from the library.

Uncorked was weird at first, especially because it's really hard to hear. The music is really loud, but the dialogue is really quiet. After turning on the subtitles, however, everything was great. Ross' guitar solo is just the best, and Uncle Cullen turns out to be just hilarious. I would recommend it if you're in the mood for something a little different.

This weekend we got out and enjoyed the sun. We took in the Reno Rodeo again this year, enjoying the bullriding competition, the food, and the carnival games. Becky won a prize (called a "Slap Happy") at the duck pond. It's a blow-up little yellow smiley face on a stick, and she loves to bop mom and dad on the head with it. We also travelled up to the Lake to enjoy the cooler temperatures. We sat on the beach over by Emerald Bay and threw rocks into the water. Becky had a field day. Misti and I amused ourselves by trying to hit a buoy about 30' out with rocks, left-handed. Remarkably, both of us did.

I had a wonderful Father's Day this year. Becky and Misti got me a DVD player and the newly-released Harry Potter DVD. It's just such an awesome movie, we've already watched it 3 or 4 times in the past couple of days.

I got to speak in church about being a new father, and we also spent some time with my folks and had a wonderful smoked turkey meal with a strawberry cake that Misti is famous for. It was all delicious. I even got to try the turkey in a little bit of my favorite barbeque sauce: Bull's-Eye Honey Smoke. Then we went to Galena Creek Park and took a little nature hike and got to splash around in the water and play a little soccer in the dirt.



I finally got the Memorial Day camping photos up (they're in the photos section). They're for friends and family only, so you'll need the user name and password to view them (contact me if you need them).

We finally went and watched Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones on Saturday. This is easily the best Star Wars yet. To all those people that think the original episodes are better because of the actors, the plot, or something else, you're sadly mistaken. In fact, here is an article that supports my opinion: the original Star Wars movies were just as ridiculous ("Ewoks", need I say more?) Special effects are all that is important in Star Wars, and that's that. This episode is far superior in that respect, and hence the best one yet. Gotta love Yoda!

Well, I uninstalled X²ScreenShare because it plain doesn't work right on my system. I found and am now using a far better program, SnagIt 6.1. It automatically takes a screen shot of my desktop every 30 minutes (my setting) and uploads the file to the website as a .PNG file (better compression than .JPG). It's stable and is intuitive to use. The other one wasn't intuitive, didn't have as many features, and wouldn't retain settings. It also didn't offer a .PNG option. This one isn't free, however (the other one was freeware), but it's shareware, and I've got 30 days to decide if I want to pay for it or not.

Misti is refinishing a toybox that has been in her family for a number of years. She has really enjoyed this project, and as soon as she's done, we'll post a few photos. She started off by sanding the box, then painting it with white as the base color. She then affixed a locking hinge and some handles, and is now embellishing the box with an ocean life theme (fishes, seahorses, seaweed, starfishes, whales, etc.) She has a custom shell knob on order, and it should be here in a few days.

Well, I decided that the webcam would be better in the more traditional configuration (simple FTPing of images every few seconds) instead of the realtime java applet configuration that I used to use. It was great, but this is easier as far as the router goes, and troublefree. I'm trying to find a desktop capture/FTP program (to automatically upload a screen capture of the desktop every few seconds), but there doesn't seem to be a wide selection for Windows (like the Mac program Screen Dump). I found one called X²ScreenShare, and am testing it, but it doesn't seem to be stable. Stay tuned.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, we all went camping (Misti's extended family were in town) and had a family reunion in Ravendale, California. It was really fun and refreshing to get out, get some sun, and blow off some stink (as my dad would say). Stay tuned for photos within the next few days.

Becky had her first birthday celebration a few days ago, and we had a small family party for her. She had 2 sets of grandparents there, 1 set of great-grandparents, an aunt, her parents (of course), and a sister-in-law's sister. I'll have these photos up within a few days also.

Becky also went and got some 1-year-old portraits done at Sears. We'll have these photos up, too, in a few days. Sears has (and, indeed, most portrait studios here have) a stupid policy that they take 5 or 6 poses, but their wonderful package deals are only limited to the "first acceptible pose". What a crock. What they ended up doing to us is making the first pose really screwed up (the background drape is all messed up behind her), and then they tell you "oh well, it's acceptible". Acceptible to whom? Them, of course. So then you end up with a whole package of 100 crappy photos, and you are forced to buy the good poses at full price. Sears sucks.

Router update: I was finally able to set up the filtering last night by MAC addresses, and I also finally got the 128-bit WEP encryption working, with a little help. The problem turned out to be that the router wants ASCII values, but the wireless NICs wanted HEX values. Once I finally figured that out, it was a simple conversion, and then it worked fine. By the way, in case anyone is wondering, 40-bit and 64-bit WEP encryption are the same thing. I ended up trying 64-bit WEP encryption when I couldn't get the 128 to work, and then switched back to the higher level only after I got the whole ASCII/HEX thing figured out.

Now I've just got to figure out how to map the webcam port to the router (using PAT - Port Address Translation), and then the webcam will be back online. Sorry for the delays.