Barnet/Luke the fish is no more. Jennie at work has Nerds and Willy Wonka's Bottle Caps candy.

Caches found:
"Desert Stars"
"Lowcountry Dash Target #3 (SCPFLC2)"
"Octagon Buildings"
"Railroad Locationless: Depots"
"Fading Ads"

Movies watched:
"Daredevil"
"The Rainmaker"
"A Close Shave" (Wallace & Gromit)
"Goldmember" (Austin Powers)
All three of the "Anne" movie series (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Return to Avonlea)

SpamBayes works excellently with Outlook 2002, and somewhat excellently with Outlook Express 6. It's a snap to install with Outlook, but requires a bit of fiddling and knowledge to be able to setup the OS version. Both work great, however, as now all of my POP3 and IMAP spam is filtered into separate folders (not clogging up my Inbox). SpamBayes is cool because it's trainable - it learns what you consider to be spam over time and with training from you. Very chic. I would definitely recommend this free spam solution for Outlook users, but I wouldn't advise it for OE users unless you already know what Python, POP3, and Proxies are, and aren't afraid of some fiddling with the DOS prompt, CTRL+C, paths, ports, etc. If you're up for the challenge, go for it - it works great once it's all running!

The OE version isn't as integrated as the Outlook version. In Outlook, you get buttons added to your toolbar which let you classify messages simply by clicking a button. In OE, however, you have to classify messages via a web interface (localhost:8880/review) - you can't do with from within OE. It's not really a problem, just a small inconvenience. A small price to pay, however, for a free, open-source, and wonderful spam solution.

I'm really getting tired of hunting for illegally-placed caches. A&W Sparkling Vanilla Cream Soda is really quite tasty, but was SHOCKED to find out it contains caffeine. What the heck does it need caffeine for?? Misti got Brad's favorite album for Christmas [Justin Timberlake - "Justified"].

I really think that it's time for geocaching as a sport to evolve. The growing sentiment in many circles that Geocaching.com is not keeping up with the 'evolution', so to speak, has really got me wondering if Geocaching.com will remain the dominant resource for this fledgling sport, or if a linux-type contender won't surface in the next few years to offer the people a viable alternative. Trying to keep cache owners legal and ethical is like trying to plug a leak in a cracked dam with bubblegum.

Hood "Carb Countdown" chocolate dairy beverage is disgusting. I cannot recommend it, despite its claims to 90% less carbs and 33% more protein than chocolate milk AND the fact that it uses Splenda (which I think is cool).

Caches found:
"Chocolat" (private property - no permission obtained)
"Where's the Salt Shaker?" (private property - permission granted)

Caches not found:
"I-80 Flume Cache" (posted 'no trespassing' sign)

I honestly feel that the future of geocaching lies in the virtual and reverse caches, not in physical or micro caches. As more and more people flout the geocaching.com cache placement guidelines and illegally place physical caches on private property (especially commercial property), and more and more people get caught loitering and trespassing on such land, I think some tough choices will have to be made by the geocaching powers that be.

Caches found:
"A Carson City Multi-Cache"
"TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES"
"Dome Home"
"On the Ponies - Pony Express"

Christmas gifts - got some Chocolate Frogs with collectable cards inside (Daisy Dodderidge - builder of The Leaky Cauldron, and Lord Stoddard Wither - flying horse breeder); new Josh Grobin album "Closer", "Now (That's What I Call Music!) 14" (as seen on TV), LOTR I and II, Austin Powers Goldmember, other movies, slippers, robe, pants, etc.

Songs:
"Where is the love?" - Black Eyed Peas w/ J. Timberlake
"(there's gotta be) More to Life" - Stacie Orrico

Listened to a little KTPL radio, but Monty wasn't in.

Watched "Time Bandits" - wasn't as cool as I remembered it from my childhood.

ALL HAIL BRADIGAN, KING OF THE CACHE

Yep, it's official, Brad beat us to 100 caches found. As of yesterday, the official score was Bradigan - 100, Chocolate Blobby - 91. I think we gave him a run on his money, however, because we hit the 100 mark today - only one day behind him (probably not even 24 hours). Very close!   =)

Caches found:
"Time to find something Historic !"
"Observatory Quest"
"How Vane is It"
"Painted Ladies"
"Nevada History Lessons"
"A Gated Community"
"Hot Springs"
"NevCachers Book Trader Cache"
"Railroad Locationless: Steam Locomotives"

I disagree with this article on which color cars get in the most accidents. They claim that silver cars are the safest (which may or may not be true), but they suggest toward the end of the article that white or light-colored cars might be the least likely to get in automobile accidents. In my observance, a majority of cars in accidents are white. Maybe their findings are only applicable to New Zealand drivers, not Western U.S. drivers. To me, white cars are the hardest to see on the road, especially on a sunny day. Darker cars are easier to see (for me).

Finally figured out a WinXP mystery today - the reason that sometimes desktop icons lose their transparency (background color appears behind icon text) is because "lock web items on desktop" is checked. If you uncheck it, they're regain their transparency, depending on what theme is currently applied, that is.

My little daughter never ceases to amaze me. We exchanged gifts early with Heather this year since she can't get time off work to be down for Christmas. One of her presents to Becky was a 48 piece floor puzzle with an ocean scene as the picture. Becky was so excited about it that we had to put it together the next morning. We have put it together a number of times since then and she has gotten better and better at getting sections of it done herself. Last night, she wanted to put it together again so, we opened it and set in on the floor for her. I intentionally kept as busy as I could but would come in and check on her every now and then to encourage her and see how far she had gotten on her own. And, after about an hour and a half she came in yelling, "I did it! I did it!" So, I went and looked and, indeed, she had completed the entire puzzle by herself. We were very proud of her. It amazed me that a two year old could put together a puzzle of that size! She's a smartie!

More caches found:

"Radio K.A.O.S."
"Metamorphosed Buildings"
"Whaling Wall (Wyland)"
"Former Fire Fighter"
"Log a Lion"
"Smash a Penny"

Watched "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" - great soundtrack. Also rewatched several movies from the Library Bus: "A Bug's Life", "Sense and Sensibility", and "Star Trek: Generations".

Also watched "Finding Nemo", and "You've Got Mail", two early Christmas presents from Heather (one for Becca, one for Misti).

Brad's kickin' our butt at Geocaching, all of a sudden - afraid that he's going to hit 100 before we do.

Hillaryous to see that Brad got ripped.   =)

More caches found:

"Where's My Name ???"
"Yellow Jeep Fever"
"US FLAG"
"Maze and Labyrinth"
"Mailboxes (1 of a kind)"
"The Chair"
"Hippie VW Microbus"
"The Sound of Music"
"No Sharp Corners"
"Out of place Pyramids (SCPFLC3)"
"The World On His Shoulders"
"Murals Across America"

SpamBayes works so well at work with Outlook, that I'd try to set it up at home with Outlook Express - setup is a little more difficult, and functionality isn't as great, but the jury's still out...

Turns out our "local" approver for Geocaching.com lives in Colorado... uh, that's *not* local...

In my informal quest to find a good global coordinate finding application on the web, EarthBrowser (although not a web application - but freely available via earthbrowser.com) is by far the best. Yes, you could try and use the ICBM address locater, and many others, but they're all cumbersome. With EarthBrowser, you can pretty much pinpoint your position (coordinates) by just clicking on the globe. Here are some observations, however, about the product: version 1.7 for Windows crashes sometimes when trying to turn off the webcams. Version 2.0 and 2.01 for Mac OS X doesn't have any proxy settings (like 1.7 for Windows does), and the language selection settings don't work (the 2.0 version is multi-lingual). The program is still excellent, however, and I'm just lucky to be able to test both versions on the differing platforms.

Okay - I'm lame - about 3 minutes of Googling gave me an answer for my previous question about the "A. L." designation on the sides of buildings. It stands for "Anno Lucis" (the year of light), which is a Masonic calendar reckoning date. It's not refering, apparently, to the creation of the world (Anno Mundi, at 9:00 a.m. on October 23rd, 4004 B.C., as determined by Bishop James Ussher and Dr. John Lightfoot), but is 4 years off - not sure why, however. On second thought, it probably is referring to the Creation, as the 4-year difference can most likely be attributed to calculation margins of error between calendaring systems.

So, Mapquest officially sucks now (they made some recent changes) - you can no longer get a map by coordinates. What were they thinking?

More caches found:

"Flatirons Everywhere!"
"Gramatically Incorrect"
"Arboretum Walkabout"
"Diners Club"
"A Googie View"

I think it's cool that Wal-Mart is now in the music download business (only 88 cents per song!).

Black and white M&M's

Mimi's Cafe

SpamBayes for Outlook Express via Python and POP3 - Jason Brome

Not sure if I've mentioned this before or not, but P.T. Cruisers look like stink bugs (or dung beetles).

I wonder if anyone knows what the "A. L. [year]" stand for on building cornerstones. It's always listed below the "A. D. [year]", which - of course - stands for Anno Domini (the year of our Lord), and cooresponds with the year the building was finished/dedicated, which obviously has a Judeo-Christian reference to the birth of Jesus Christ and cooresponds with the Gregorian calendaring system. The "A. L.", however, is always exactly 4,000 years earlier. What happened in 4000 B.C. that a builders association or a general contractor would acknowledge - the Creation? Here's an example, this one from a stone plaque on the front of the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Reno:

More caches found:

"History is all around..."
"Frozen In Time"
"AV8R"
"For the love of the Game"

New Michele Branch album "hotel paper" - early Christmas gift - I like it - why the two different websites, though (michellebranch.net and michellebranch.com)?

Policies at geocaching.com that I think should be changed:

"virtual caches aren't the basis of the sport" - says who? Finding a virtual cache is just as (or more) rewarding, difficult, and sporty as regular caches. In light of 9/11 and legal issues with regard to private property (not to mention all the public/federal places that are banning geocaching), I think virtual caches are the only way the sport is going to survive. Way too many cache hiders are not asking permission to place their caches, and are subsequently getting in trouble - even here locally.

Lift the moritorium on locationless (reverse) caches - same reasoning as above - these are a great alternative to tramping across private/commercial property with security guards hassling you every step of the way.

Local approvers should be just that - local, not some shmuck from the next state over that has happened to vacation here once upon a time.

Blogmatrix's servers seem to be doing funny things lately - my RSS feed seems to be currently unreachable...   =(   UPDATE: I guess they had a major crash, but it's now working again.

We just sent out our family Christmas newsletters today - look for yours in the mail soon!

Bonny's birthday party recently.

MS Outlook 2002 on an XP system is goofy - when you receive an email message with a Macintosh attachment (like a *.sit file), it doesn't think there's really an attachment (even though it's clearly there). When you try to save the attachment using "file...save attachment as...", the only attachment listed is "none" - although when you click on "none", the reesulting dialog box does know that the *.sit file is the one being saved. Strange - or deliberate on M$'s part? You be the judge.

Ok, here's another weird Outlook 2002 thing: the ALT+letter keyboard shortcut labelling is confusing. When composing a message, a key combination of ALT+s sends the message (there's an underline on the send button). But in the file menu, a ALT+s (well, an 's' after the alt - there needs to be a pause in between) saves the message, whilst ALT+pause+e actually sends it. It's even more confusing because the CTRL+letter combinations also come into play with a CTRL+ENTER to send, and an CTRL+S to save. No wonder people have such a hard time figuring out their computers.

Lots of wooden nickel stuff going on lately:
Charlie's Angels - 'wooden nickel' line
Found a wooden nickel at the 'Mardi Gras' cache from http://www.wooden-nickel.com/
A bit of history on wooden nickels, at http://www.wooden-nickel.net/history/
"Rusty's Revenge (don't take any wooden nickels)" cache

Caches:
"About that Garden (Botanical that is)"
"Water Towers, Plain Jane or Picturesque"

Interesting to note the debate in the banking industry about ATMs switching to the Windows OS. To 'XP' or 'XPE'? That is the question.

Sony is giving away free 'Spiderman 2' Blogger templates. Pretty slick.

A hilarious article on Wired.com, called "Are You Too Stupid to Surf?"

Trying out SpamBayes at work (an open-source Bayesian spam filter) with Outlook 2002. Good experiment.

MSNBC got ripped a good one today for their horrible CSS implementation on the 'css-discuss' listserv. Ouch.

Caches:
"The Barber Pole"
"Ponderosa Ranch Relic"
"The King's Beach"
"Just What the Doctor Ordered"
"Take Me Out To The Ball Park"
Now tied (at least on paper) with Bradigan at 62 caches found (although I know he's found a few more that he hasn't logged yet)

Movie:
"Maid in Manhattan"

Turns out I've known how to convert decimal to sexagesimal, but didn't know that's what I was doing (such as converting coordinates from DecDeg to DegMinSec).

Christmas program at church

Christmas party at Brad and Emilie's

Found both the "Higher Learning" and the "Inspiration point cache".

Found the "Funky Flat Stash"

Georgia-Pacific makes a really cool restroom towel dispenser, the "enMotion": it's self-dispensing, fully automatic, and has built-in motion detection. I had the pleasure of using one in Carson City on Butti Wy.

Found the "Spanish Springs View" physical part of the multi-cache finally...

Mac OS X (10.3 - Panther)'s voice clock is wacked. In 24-hr (military) time mode, it incorrectly announces the top of the hours as "It's fourteen hours" (instead of 'fourteen hundred hours). It does, however, do other times right (like "It's 14:15"). Weird.

Cool websites upon which I've recently stumbled:
BMLwalker
Computer Cops
Coordinate Systems Overview
WindowMetrics
Viruses of the Mind
Virtual Magnifying Glass 2.0
quickSub
Listamatic
HTML is not an acronym
What is a meme?

I thought it was cool that the world's 8th worst spammer was caught recently.

Heard about the first lesbian divorce in the news. Added an RSS feed to my blog - check it out (if you know what it's for). Heather made me an Original Rockford Red Heel Sock Monkey Doll. At work, we've unofficially determined that OfficeUpdate only works on about 82% of computers that it should work on. Hmmmm.   =(

The website for "the cluetrain manifesto" really sucks - they promise you the entire text of the book, but they're missing a chapter, and some of the chapter titles are wrong, and the book image is missing on one page. Lame.

Jared the House Elf - Ward Christmas Party

Borgward Museum - Geocaching.com wouldn't approve it as a virtual cache - dorks

'emerods' - 1 Samuel 5, 6 - gross
1 Samuel 2:32 = the 'sea anemone' verse
I Kings is actually III Kings - weird

movies:
"The Hulk"
"The Lion King (special edition)"
part of "Pirates of the Carribean"

stupid rotating billboards that are always broken - whose dumb idea was that?

Caches:
- "Mardi Gras"
- "Key to Reno"
- "Where Kermit Met Piggy"
- map of caches we've found so far

TB:
- "Reno Geocoin Traveller"

green lights at Hilton = trying to copy the Silver Legacy?
nasty cold for last few days
Misti has made some wonderful meals lately - just wanted to mention it, including some nice broiled Whiting. Mmmmm.

Moved "STOP AND GO,GO,GO 3" to a better, more 'consistant with the cache owner's intent' location today, and also found the "KITTY LITTER" cache. Was dismayed to learn of the existence of the Travel Bug Graveyard. We passed the 50 caches found mark this weekend. Woohoo!

Since the nearest Wal-Mart DVD rental warehouse is in North Las Vegas, it takes less time for movies to reach us than with Netflix.

Here's an awesome recipe that I have invented (but not yet perfected - still experimenting):

1 scoop - Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate with Marshmallows
1 tbsp. - Aspen Valley French Vanilla Sipping Hot Cocoa Mix
1 squirt - Blackburn's Butter Maple Pancake & Waffle Syrup
8 oz. - warm tap water

Stir until smooth. Microwave on High (in a 2000-watt oven) for 40 seconds to get steaming, yet comfortable. For an extra bold twist, grab a bigger mug and add 2 additional ounces of hot water, a splash of 2% (homogenized cow's) milk, and 1 tsp. of 6-year-old Family Canning Hot Cocoa (best if used within 5 years). Mmmm.

Skimmed the current copy of "Toiyabe Trails" that I picked up recently at the Patagonia factory outlet store. B-b-b-b-oring. Of course, it was the election issue, and since I don't care about the elections, it was pretty much a waste of time. Hopefully future issues will be more stimulating.

Well, baby Jared is getting chubbier - he's got a double chin now.   =)

We're currently trying out the Wal-Mart DVD rental service - seems faster than Netflix, and they seem a little more 'honest' about their pricing, too. Watched "Star Trek Nemesis" and "Pete's Dragon" so far. Wal-Mart gives you a free month, whereas Netflix only does two weeks. I'm thinkin' Wallyworld is the better service...   =)

Becca got the flu, but got over it quickly. Had a fever of 103.7°F, and about 24 hours of puking (no, not constantly - duh), and she was feeling better the next day, fever came down, and kept her food down. Out geocaching and eating M&M's today again.

Had a wonderful Thanksgiving at Gene and Ronda's dwelling. Didn't know a lot of the people around the table, but the food was great, despite our rough entrance (we lost a pie due to the increased gravity of Gene's porch). Watched about half of "Finding Nemo", but I can't say I'm all that impressed with it.   =(

Found three more caches today:

"Putt's Mormon Station Park Cache." (in Genoa)
"Putt's Cemetary Cache" (Genoa)
"A Capitol Idea" (Carson City)

and checked on the roaming cache "STOP AND GO,GO,GO, 3" (we were the last to hide it, and no one's been able to find it again in a month, so I figured it was too hard, so I'm going to move it to an easier location).

Another cache found: 'Alphabet Rock'. I also placed my first Travel Bug ["Ancestral Quest (pt. 1)"]. Took a Mac G4 into the shop for some retrofitting - getting OS 10.3 (Panther) and OS 9.2.2 installed (for the Classic Environment), after having struggled with OS 9.1 and OS 10.0.3 for long enough - Software Update didn't work quite right, programs wouldn't install, hard drive crashed (key failure), incompatibilities, networking problems, the only browser it liked was MSIE 5.1 beta (!) - Neither Netscape, Mozilla, nor Safari would even install, etc. Not a positive Mac experience, let me tell you.

Sure a lot of Mimail.J's going around, and when is Klez ever going to die? Read a hilarious book that Lynn gave me, entitled "Walter the Farting Dog" (it's a children's book by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray, illustrated by Audrey Colman) - quite funny.   =)

Been doing some video editing/finishing lately at work using Windows Movie Maker 2. Pretty cool program, actually, and it only takes a couple of hours to become fairly proficient at it.

Thought it was a little funny that the word "McJob" is now an actual word, despite McDonald's wishes to get it taken out of the dictionary.

Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks that CPanel 6 (used by many web hosting companies) really sucks. The password changer doesn't work (although maybe that's just the host's setup problem), and it's really not that user friendly, despite it's seemingly friendly appearance.

And what's with Symantec's MD5 checksums not matching those on their beta files? They are accurate on their final releases, but not on their beta ones. If you're not going to support checksums on beta releases, fine - but don't pretend to (just remove them). Weird.

Baby Jared, asleep in his carseat:



Caches found this weekend:

'Skate Parks'
'GBES Poker Run' event cache, and Silver Springs card cache
'Sign Here - The World's Smallest Cache?'
'Goat Girl's Geocache'
'Santa's Cache'
'thoughts of home'
'Churchill County Museum'
'September 11th Remembered'
'Center of Town'
'Sir Vi ver'
'I-80: Painted Rock'

Traveled on Friday to Fallon and Dayton for work to nab a bunch of photos of apartments complexes that we own. Parking lot repaved - pain. Recently bought 'Kermit's Swamp Years'. Recently rewatched LOTR 1 and 2, courtesy of Gene and Ronda.

Birthday "multi cache" for presents - 'Daddy Day Care', Christmas cactus from work, 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' audio tapes.

Mapquest is now broken, when you print, it prints the wrong level of map -

Brad's lip/magnet incident - hilarious

retiring some of my original Gs that I've had since 1989 - pathetic, I know -

finished "Daisy Miller" by Henry James

LaPriel's funeral and wake in Seattle (Bellevue/Issaquah) - flew in Sunday morning, flew out Sunday night

Met some more family - Celia, Pat, Stormy, JoAnn, Chad, 'Cornface', Jason, Dove, Ron, Steve -

Alaska Airlines - no peanuts on first trip, only 11 people on return flight - empty private jet

Visited Melissa's nice lakefront house in Carnation

Becky's favorite song "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" by Shania Twain.

Ate some 'Bottle Caps' at work on Friday while everyone else was getting sick from their flu shot immunizations.

Went out to some caches today: "Fernley Fly-In Fast Flat Stash and Free Car Wash", "Another Fernley Flat Stash", and both the Reno and the Fernley parts of the "GBES Poker run" cache.

For those working with HUD's income eligibility guidelines, you've probably noticed by now that MFI and AMI are not the same - despite HUD's and HUDUSER's explanations to the contrary. If you're using the 60% and 80% figures, for example, please note that these really aren't mathematical percentages at all - they're numbers that originally started out as percentages but have since been adjusted for several external factors and then rounded up or down to the nearest $25. Thus, you can't strictly use them as mathematical percentages. All this, of course, is different than the DHHS percentages of poverty guidelines, which are, in fact, real percentages, and can thus be manipulated in mathematical formulas in spreadsheets, etc.

Baby Jared went in for his 2 week appointment on the 10th and he has grown a bit! He has gained 25 ounces since leaving the hospital and has grown almost 2 inches. He's going to be a big boy. The doctor was very impressed. He said they like it if the baby gains at least 1 ounce a day but baby Jared is averaging about 2 or more a day, so he's doing very well. He's a hungry little dude. He's now, at 2-1/2 weeks old, about the size Becky was at 7 weeks. =)

We finally succeeded in finding the physical 'Reno View' cache, with some extra family members along for the ride (Rick, Bonny, Darlene). Reno's very smoggy when you get out and above it all. Yuckka.

Heard that LaPriel passed away on Tuesday. Very sad - heart attack in her sleep. Not sure when the funeral is going to be.

"Staci's Mom (Has Got It Going On)" by Fountains of Wayne is a hilarious song. A little overplayed, but kinda catchy. Hillary Duff's song "So Yesterday" is also kinda catchy.

Found some info and photos of Terry and Antoinette on the web. Good to hear that they're doing well.

Rotating billboards with slats really suck - always stuck, wind-blown, or just plain broken. Cool in theory, lame in reality. Played a hilarious few rounds of "Mad Shark" at Shockwave.com.

Found some more caches this weekend (surprise, surprise) - 'Rusty's Revenge (Don't take any wooden Nickels.)', 'MEET ME AT THE GLEN FOR A FREE ICE CREAM CONE', and 'GBES Geocachers Reno Travel Bug Port', as well as the 'Little Red Motorcycle' travel bug. This was our second attempt at Rusty's Revenge. Both times, we made the trek with Brad and Emilie, and we found this very creative cache quickly on the second trip. I feel bad, though, because Mike started out going with us on this second attempt, but because we were so late getting started, he ran out of time before having to leave for a prior engagement. It's all my fault - sorry Mike.   =(

We ended up in Carson City on Saturday (for the ice cream cache), and decided to grab a quick little something to eat whilst there. Ummm, the ice cream was great, but the rest of the food could use a little improvement. You have been warned.

Well, the Primary program is finally over. I thought I was done with Primary when we moved, but, alas, I was called into our new ward's Primary to play the piano as a substitute. Thus, I had the honor of playing for yesterday's annual Primary program in Sacrament meeting. There was some pressure because I've come to find out that almost everyone in the ward plays the piano (thus they're potentially more attentive to how the accompanyment's played). But it went very well, actually. One funny thing I noticed is that key #32 on the piano (yes, they're numbered [under the cover]) at the Robb Drive chapel seemingly hits a string of its neighbor's, so it sounds a bit muddy.

I appreciated Brad's excellent reference to Occam's Razor - from the 1997 film "Contact" (with Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, and James Woods) in one of his recent blog entries. And who says that movies aren't educational?

Learned a few XHTML/CSS tricks the hard way today at work. If you have overlapping DIVs that you hide and unhide, don't use relative positioning, use absolute instead. Of course, using absolute positioning causes the dreaded 'text selection' bug in IE6, but only in standards (CSS1Compat) mode. Solution? Force IE6 into quirks (BackCompat) mode using the XML prologue. All the tutorials I've read have mentioned *not* using the XML prologue because of the IE bug. In this case, however, it's actually *beneficial* to the site in question in helping solve some rather unpleasant problems. Nice.

Surpassed the 5,200 WU mark on Seti@home. Mike had an interesting question on theNug.net about why leaves actually change colors in autumn. After doing a few minutes of research, I've come to the realization that it's a very interesting subject indeed. The shorter periods of sunlight during autumn commence halting the production of chlorophyll (green pigment) in the leaf, and cooler temperatures at night inhibit the movement of pigment-laden sugars to travel out of the leaf after being created during the day, causing other pigments to become dominant. Here are three supporting and informative documents on the subject: one, two, three.

We all hear about computer virii so often that sometimes it's refreshing to hear about a good, old-fashioned, physical virus once in a while. This one, a highly contagious gastrointestinal bug called a norovirus, made an entire cruise ship start puking, and the ship's guests were denied access to Spain because of it. Cool.

Milky Way Caramels are the bomb, as are Mentos Mixed Fruit chewy mints (The Freshmaker, The Chewy Mint) in the box. Joshua 24 and Judges 2 are hilarious - Joshua dies twice. Joshua 24:15, famous verse: "...choose you this day whom ye will serve...but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD". Judges 4:21 - nail through the head. Ouch!

Marie Calendar's boxed lunch sandwiches are really bland and dry. No matter how much mayonnaise and mustard you apply, it's still a dry sandwich. I had expected more from Marie Calendar's.

I don't know how it happened, but we somehow missed the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Carson City this past Saturday. It's an international event that has never been hosted in the U.S. ever before, and it was right here in our backyard. It is held bi-annually in various countries around the globe, but it won't be returning to the U.S. any time in the near future.   =(

Halloween was anticlimactic this year. Becca was a cute little cow (moo moo), but as Brad so aptly noted, the weather got oddly cold outside - all of a sudden - just for Halloween, making for some cold, pink, little noses. It was 36° outside the night of the 30th at 10 p.m. while we were out for a little shopping at the newly remodeled Wal*Mart Supercenter on Kietzke, and 30° outside Sunday morning on the way to church, with a crisp sheet of snow covering the hills. The forecast for the next few days shows the temps dipping down to 20° at night. Brrrr. But although it was a snowy wet Halloween, Becca still managed a good haul for such a small, little person. Jared, however, was obviously too little to enjoy the festivities, so he and his mama stayed indoors, but with a sinister combination of sugar, hard plastic car seats, and the lateness of the hour, we ended up with one screaming child and one whining/crying child in the car on the way home. That's always nice.   =(

I, and many of my co-workers, found it funny that HIPAA is causing such widespread confusion. Anyone that's tried to understand this law knows that it's about 600 pages of pure crap. And I thought CSS was hard to implement... sheesh.

In food news, I tried the new Cheez-Its 'Cheesy Sour Cream and Onion' snack crackers, and they are wonderful, although they too contain the dreaded MSG. I also have determined that Hormel's Mary Kitchen brand Roast Beef Hash is not as good as their corned beef hash. Jared's poor mama is the queen of Lansinoh lanolin and nursing pads during this first two weeks of feeding. It is fortunately starting to get better now, though, and will hopefully be pain-free within the next few days. By the way (note to self, in case I ever forget) - Wal*Mart's Great Value brand 'Black Cherry with Chocolate Bits' ice cream is the best ever made. I highly recommend it if you don't have a problem with purple ice cream.

Found parts of the 'Secret Lunch Cache' and the 'Spanish Springs View' multicaches Saturday afternoon (the clues only), along with actually physically finding the 'Steamboat Cache' along with Becky - she grabbed a small pinwheel from the cache that was just the most exciting thing in the whole world to her. And speaking of cute, baby Jared has the cutest sad pouty lip. Becca loves using the 'puter' now to play online games. She loves the videos, coloring pages, learning activities, and Flash games found at sesamestreet.com, pbskids.org, bearinthebigbluehouse.com, and thewiggles.com.au. And although she has nearly mastered the mouse (which would be an accomplishment anyway for any 2-year-old), she is apparently just as comfortable using the mouse with either hand! She'll play computerized Yahtzee on mom's computer with her right hand, and matching games on dad's computer with her left hand. She'll be hacking by the time she's 6.   =)

Misti found 'grumpys cache' on Sunday afternoon (I had previously found it), and we all physically found the 'Secret Lunch Cache' today, including The Doctor of Rockology's 'The Adventures of Monty and Willy: Kokopelli' travel bug. Neither the evil cell phone tower nor the bees were a problem for us on this cache. After finding the secret lunch cache, we naturally got hungry, so we ended up at IHOP, which turns out to be Jared's very first restaurant visit. I managed to catch the movie "Broken Arrow" (Christian Slater, John Travolta) on TV (the milder, edited-for-TV version). Pretty cool.

We tried a Kwencher Orange creme enhanced water drink for the first time today. Mmmmm. Saw Katty Blatty (Kathy Blattman) and her kids at the Kietzke Super Walmart today. Speaking of the new store, here are a few observances:

1. The 'check the price by scanning your item here' pillars, umm, don't have any scanners.


2. No Wal-Marts in existance seem to be capable of keeping the 77¢ popcorn in stock, so when you see some, you have to grab as many as they have left in preparation for the famine.


3. The 'pancake mix' aisle doesn't actually, umm, have any pancake mix. It can, however, be found in the syrup aisle. Hello.

The plumbing industry should be ashamed of themselves. Why haven't they developed some sort of a priority system yet for regulating cold water usage? In other words, why is it that when I'm taking a hot shower and the toilet is flushed, that the toilet gets priority for cold water flow, and I'm left with no cold water - which just happens to disturb the delicate balance between hot and cold in my shower mix, thus scalding me? Apparently, there is virtually no plumbing research taking place at any level, whether at the university level or in the trade. Shame on so-called 'modern' plumbers.

Baby Jared born on Sunday. He's such a cute, sleepy, hunchy, hungry little muncha muncha dude! [More details to come.] Photo:



A recent dinner conversation and a current television ad have both made me wonder what the difference is between black pepper and white pepper. Apparently, black pepper, Piper nigrum, which originates from Madagascar, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, has many uses, ranging from culinary (obviously) to medicinal, and from currency to perfurmery. Opinions seem to vary on how white pepper is made, but it's either picked at a different time (ripeness), or simply the inside of a black peppercorn. Also interesting to note, is that many commercial containers of black ground pepper do not have to list their ingredients on their packaging the way other foods do (even when, like unsalted peanuts, they only contain one ingredient). Interesting (there's a commercial about another food that doesn't have to list ingredients, but I'll have to see it again to remember what food that was).

Enjoyed a most exquisite box of Triscuit Roasted Garlic. And although they contain MSG (tsk tsk), they still rock - the best Triscuits ever created, in my opinion.   =)

Jared has now polished off his first 40-pack of White Cloud newborn diapers (featuring artwork from John Lennon's 'Real Love' collection).

I'm one day overdue now and still no baby Jared. I have had very mild contractions but nothing that warrants a run to the hospital. So, we're still waiting.

Richard, Becky, and I went geocaching some more today - found a couple more caches ('STOP AND GO,GO,GO, 3' and 'Teed Off In Reno') and enjoyed a beautiful day outside. The fall leaves were very pretty along one of the paths we walked. Becky enjoyed throwing rocks and sticks in a small stream and running on the grass.

Tried one of Weinerschnitzel's new Bacon Ranch Chicken Sandwich (the #4 combo meal). Mmmmm. During a recent cache visit, we found a cool camouflaged leaf. See if you can find it in this photo (beware, it's camouflaged):



McDonald's Monopoly is the best, won a free lunch burger and a free breakfast sandwich so far. My Groundspeak travel bug finally came in the mail, but now we've got some work to do to prepare it for it's journeyings.   =)

There are apparently three (3) geodetic benchmarks at the corner of Stanford and Prater in Sparks, only about 20 ft away from one another (I've found two of the three ['KR1328' and 'KR1329'], but not the other that apparently is in the direct center of the intersection ['KR1749'], so it's a little hard to look for with cars whizzing through there 24/7). Strange - what would prompt them to do that (originally)? Usually they're far in between.

Mist's had good luck with Ranitidine tablets (75 mg) lately for heartburn/acid reflux. It's the generic equivalent of Zantac 75.

As near as I can tell, there are twelve (12) different types of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) configurations in practice: RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5+Hot Spare, 6, 7, 10, and 53. Almost enough to drive you silly. Here's a good site that describes most of these differing RAID configurations, plus each of their advantages and disadvantages.

On Sunday, we went to church (yes, I'm playing piano in Primary again), and then came back home and took a nice nap. Before going over to my folks place for a wonderful dinner, we stopped and retrieved the last couple of caching clues that we need to find the 'Reno View' multicache (although we're saving that for another day).

Dinner was excellent, we had rotisserie BBQ chicken, green beans in Campbell's Cream of Mushroom condensed soup, whipped potatoes, grape-raspberry juice, and B&M canned Brown Bread with Raisins. Checked out Mike's Prospector vs. Great Pumpkin site. Pretty creative. I'll be interested to see how it progresses.

I had the weirdest dream last night. I was flying one of the Blue Angels' fighter jets during their 'public fly day', with Misti as my co-pilot, and Becca was in the back in her carseat. I was following somebody else who was flying ahead of me, and everything was great at first. The speeds were mild (around 200 to 300 m.p.h.), no problem. We flew to Salt Lake City and hovered in front of the temple (the plane could hover like a Harrier jet), waved to the people there (it was a beautiful winter night, and the temple was all lit up in Christmas fashion with brilliant colors), then made a U-turn, and flew back. We were flying around, above (but parallel to) the freeway, when suddenly I noticed that the plane in front of me "opened it up" and was rapidly disappearing, so I floored it, and quickly accelerated to more than 1,000 m.p.h. and caught up. As I did so, they slowed way down to merge onto an on-ramp, so I had to try and slow down, too, but I didn't have enough room, so we had to eject and self-destruct the plane in order to not cause a huge accident. The Blue Angels weren't happy.   =(

Today, Betty brought in a nasty bug she found in her house, and after she took it to the State Entomologist for identification, it turned out to be a 'Jerusalem cricket', which are apparently quite common in this area, but since they're a subterranean bug, no one ever sees them. It looked like a mutant between an ant, a bumblebee (it had a stinger on it's butt), a regular cricket, and a stinkbug (it was quite stinky). Weird.

Lemonade Snapple contains less then 1% juice. Hmmm. At least you can save their bottle caps and spend them at their online 'yard sale'.

Symantec's daily antivirus definition update file finally hit the 7 MB mark. It's been hovering at about the 6.99 MB mark for several days. Woohoo! By the way, most people don't know that you can also download beta definitions from Symantec, too, so you can be protected from new virii hours ahead of everyone else!

Been playing around with IM encryption lately, including both the free certificate from AIMencrypt.com, and Zone Lab's new offering, IMSecure. The certificate approach works well, and it's a no brainer to set up. IMSecure, however, royally sucks and won't even install correctly. Once you do get it installed, it doesn't seem to work. What was Zone Labs thinking?? (It's no wonder that you can't even *find* IMSecure on their website, unless you specifically do a search for it - they're too embarrassed about it!)

It takes my computer almost exactly as long to boot as it does for me to get a bowl of cereal in the morning from a new, unopened box. We went caching again today, and found three more caches and another travel bug. We found the 'It's a Jungle In Here', 'Summer stash cache', and 'Truckee River Stash, revisited' caches, as well as the 'Kermit Key' travel bug. We now have both clues for the 'Where Kermit Met Piggy' cache. In addition, we also went and found one of the three clues needed for the 'Reno View' multicache.

Well, still no baby yet. This is always the hardest time - the last week! It seems to drag on forever. But, I'd rather he be here when he's supposed to be than to be early and have problems. I can't wait to see his little face and hold him. I have had some very mild contractions but nothing serious yet. He is extremely low, though, and causing strain on the muscles at times - which can be somewhat painful - but he is healthy and doing well. He still kicks and plays in there all the time. It is reassuring to know that he is ok. I can't wait to see him! Becky is quite anxious also! She asks me often if it is time for Mommy to go to the "hopital" to "push, push baby Jedid right out". It will be nice when the day comes that I can say - yes, it's time! We are anxiously awaiting his arrival.

Found the 'Cache of the Century', 'Tiny-NV', and 'Street Vibrations Riverwalk Cache' caches last night in the dark. Lots of black widow spiders at the riverwalk site. Becky liked the short playground equipment at Pah Rah Park - first set that I'd seen of that height.

REMSA/Point of Impact car seat checkpoint (two of them) - had to wait for 3 hours with Becca in the sun in a long line of cars (we ended up washing the windows, cleaning the car, and playing every imaginable game we could think of), and then it took 2 more hours to install both seats correctly. It turns out that the new Graco car seat we bought a couple of months ago was defective, so REMSA replaced it for free. I was amazed that it took a team of 6 people an hour to *correctly* install each car seat. I also didn't know that you can only use seatbelts or the latch system, but not both simultaneously.

Becky says "purple eggplant" in a very cute way. Misti's baby shower - Ronda made some tasty food. Gene reroofing their house. Spencer going to be a killer whale for Halloween. Moriah's funny because she insists that I do "the bull thing" everytime she see's me (we clash foreheads). Experimenting with Kool-Aid: surprisingly, only using between 1/3 and 1/2 cup of sugar is tasty and refreshing.

Brad and Emilie came over to visit, and we ended up going geocaching with them, but alas, 'Rusty's Revenge (Don't take any wooden Nickels.)' stumped us. Not only did it turn out to be a very difficult cache to try and find (we couldn't find it), but the terrain was a bit more than I thought it would be. The hills were a little too steep for what I thought Misti should be climbing (since she's nine months pregnant), but she made it, and she actually enjoyed the trek! She's a trooper!

Found the "Ice Station Zebra" cache today, and nabbed the 'Piggy Key' travel bug while I was at it. Tried a Honey Roasted PayDay candy bar the other day, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference compared with a normal PayDay. I guess Botox injections cure migraine headaches.

In the first movie of Charlie's Angels, I found it very funny that the creepy thin man, who has quite a large part in the movie, never speaks throughout the whole thing. He makes sounds and noises as he's fighting and such but he never says a word. He's the same guy who played McFly in Back to the Future and he played the wimpy guy then. So, maybe they thought he didn't have a manly enough voice for the part or something. Who knows. I just thought it was interesting that he never says anything to make you dislike him, in the movie, yet he makes a great bad guy.

Found "grumpys cache" (N 39° 31.530', W 119° 52.944') this morning on the way to work (after Misti's doctor's appt) - Arnold Schwarzenegger elected to become new California governor - had to throw away Becca's pink binky today (she has a habit of biting clean through them) - enjoyed Napster's flash animations - Found the "Track Your Fortune" (N 39° 31.012', W 119° 48.419') and "Wide Open Space" (N 39° 34.085', W 119° 46.317') caches today at lunch.

Finally found out the story behind the Sierra Spirit RTC buses. Dismayed to find out that the wooden train whistle I nabbed from "Wide Open Space" is defective. It sounds more like a bird than a train.   =(

I'm further dismayed that no one has written an updated document on how to create a custom DTD for XHTML. All the docs out there are geared toward HTML 4. Misti discovered that Target will give away their popcorn for free if you ask them for some just as they're cleaning up for the night (around 8:30 p.m.).   =)

Misti just got done refinishing our coffee table. She sanded it, stained it, and water-proofed it, and now it looks 200% better than before.   =)

Visited 'Oxbow' again (for a travel bug), found the 'NLCN (No Library Card Needed)' cache, cancelled Netflix, website's still a little broken, but I'm working on it, visited the 'KR1365' benchmark (again) for photos, found the 'Dry Creek Map' and 'Miss Reno Rodeo 1937' caches (Esther Bennett was the very first Miss Reno Rodeo), had my very first geocache placement attempt (a webcam cache) rejected by the powers that be at Geocaching.com. Dorks. Back to the drawing board.   =(

Only got in six (6) movies during our free Netflix trial period (Die Another Day, Daddy Day Care, Bear in the Big Blue House: Tide Time, Piglet's Big Movie, Men in Black II, and Shanghai Knights) - the 14 days is a joke, since it takes like 5 days just to get your account set up and the first one mailed off to you. And then you waste several days because they send you your first three all at once, and you start sending them back, but you've already watched all of the first three and sent them all back before you get the 4th one, and then with the snail mail delay and everything, there's no way someone could watch 14 movies in 14 days.

On 10/2/2003, I ate a Puntini Menta Fresca (made in Italy - 2.5 calories) that I've had sitting in a box for a decade (no joke). It was actually quite refreshing.

Geocaching has been causing me allergies. I'm normally not allergic to anything, but I think that might be changing. There are some really stinky weeds out there amongst the sagebrush. Tried the Wal-Mart generic brand (Great Value) version of Grape Nuts. Not as good as the original, but still not too bad.

Ben (the Chinese guy) gave me some White Stevia Powder (an herbal sweetener) to try. It's alright, but makes Kool-Aid taste a little funny - my pink lemonade kinda tasted like a plant. It's supposed to be a sugar replacement, but I think it's a little too expensive to compete, much like Splenda, Xylitol, and Erythritol (all four of which are Aspartame-free, zero calories, and safe for diabetics).

Lisa Hodes and J.P. Tanner's wedding reception. [photos coming soon]

General Conference via Internet. Good stuff.

Today, after church and a nice long nap, we visited 'Cayboo's Cache' (N 39° 32.784' W 119° 50.028'). On the way back to the car, Becca saw her first tiny, little frog (about 1/2 inch long). Lots of goose poop at Rancho San Rafael. Learned some brief history about the Tree of Utah. Have seen it before, but didn't know the story behind it, now I do!

I'm in the middle of transferring my mission website over to a new owner. It should be back up within a week or two. I was dismayed to see that a park in Wisconsin is banning geocaching.

Misti's definitely a trooper. At 8 months pregnant, she still likes geocaching (hiking around in the wilderness looking for hidden 'treasure'). Yesterday, we made 6 cache visits (at 5 unique caches), thanks to Brad's spare Garmin Geko 201 GPS unit that he lent us.

Misti, Becky, and I visited the 'Basque Sheepherder' cache (39° 33' 14.32" N, 119° 49' 57.28" W) at 10:55 a.m., then went across the street to the 'Dam Curiosity' cache (39° 33' 22.14" N, 119° 49' 28.84" W) at 11:20 a.m. and scored some Silly Putty, then we drove across town to grab Darlene and Bonny, then we all headed up to the 'Galena Creek Park Cache' (39° 21' 16.31" N, 119° 51' 36.65" W) by 1:15 p.m. This was their first cache, and between the excellent hint and the aid of the GPS, we walked directly to it. Becky took a little frog that, I believe, was placed there by Matt and Jennifer Sadler.

We then ventured into the Toiyabe National Forest and visited the 'American Beauty Cache' (39° 21' 41.5" N, 119° 51' 44.56" W), which was also very easy to find. We had tried finding this one with flashlights in the dark last week (but without a GPS), and to our credit, we were in the correct spot, we just didn't go 'in' the few extra meters necessary to find it. We found it at 2:15 p.m., our fourth find of the day (and Darlene and Bonny's second).

Our fifth visit of the day was 'The Hanging Gardens of Galena' cache (39° 21' 44.35" N, 119° 51' 46.51" W) at 2:50 p.m. Bonny spotted it first, and this was only her and Darlene's third cache. Darlene scored the travel alarm clock from this one, which she's very proud of. On our way back out of the park, we visited the 'American Beauty Cache' again so Bonny could retrade her American flag pin back for the yo-yo she originally grabbed at her first cache find (but had subsequently traded at the second cache for the pin). I guess she had second thoughts on the matter.

We got back into town at around 3:30 p.m., and had some tasty Wendy's $1 Bacon Cheeseburgers, then headed to Carson City to help Rick move some tables, chairs, and partitions from a storage shed into his office. Today was a great day to be outside, breath some fresh air, and soak up a little sunlight.

I like some of the changes happening on geocaching.com, such as newer, better mapping feature, but feel that the 'easier' logging is more restrictive. Recently watched "Piglet's Big Movie" and "Shanghai Knights" on Netflix DVDs. Should have some more coming on Monday or Tuesday.

We went to Lisa and JP's wedding reception on Friday night. Some tasty refreshments, and some hilarious conversation, too. It was funny to hear that Brad and Mike both have a bear story (separate ones). Brad actually scared a bear away - that's pretty macho in my book.   =)

I think it's cool that Senators Reid and Ensign have provided bottled water for some Churchill County schools (because of the Fallon cancer cluster issues).

Misti's now registered at Target for her baby shower. You can print off a registry sheet right online. I read a cool article about bacteriophages and antibiotic resistance. Found out one can pre-register at the hospital online. Pretty cool. Hospital cafeteria food - bleh.

Please note: I'm going to be moving my website shortly [just moving hosts, not domain names], so there may be some down time involved. Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause. (I know - you're riveted to this site and anxiously await each update!)

We're trying out Netflix for the free 2-week trial. We'll see how many movies we can watch in 14 days (should be 14, right??).   =)

We looked Sunday evening for the 'American Beauty Cache' near Galena Creek Park after nightfall, but came away empty-handed and a little scratched up. We'll try this one again shortly.

Sure a lot of viruses going around with the 'W32.Swen.A@mm' worm (a.k.a. 'Automat.AHB', 'Gibe.C', 'Gibe.E', 'Gibe.F', and 'Gibe.2').

As anyone knows who drives south Keystone at night, the area between the freeway and the railroad tracks is the 'Lillywoo Doodie Cheese' section. Hollywood Video's lights are partially out on their sign, so it reads 'llywo' at night. Whoever changes the McDonald's sign must've ran out of the correct letters, because their sign proudly proclaimed "Doudie Cheese 1.00" a few days ago. Weird.

Oddly, one day makes a big difference. I sat funny at breakfast this morning and hurt my back again (but only slightly, it's mainly just a little stiff now again). Becky's now suddenly okay with not having anymore bottles. And after 2 previous failed attempts at finding the 'Reno High Roller' cache, we finally found it!

Today was a geocaching day. We first found the 'Oxbow Incident' cache really easily (lots of people out caching today, saw at least 3 other groups at this cache - we all had to take turns!). We then went and found the 'KR1365' benchmark. Then we went and preregistered at the hospital for Baby Jared's pending arrival, and ended up eating lunch at the hospital cafeteria.

After a little break from the hot sun, we went and found the 'Video-Rama' cache and scored a copy of 'Fletch' (we left a VHS copy of 'X-Men', since we also have a DVD copy of 'X-Men 1.5'). We then resigned ourselves to finding the 'Reno High Roller' cache once and for all or to give it up. We finally found it right before it got dark, so we can now move on and not worry about that one any more. Beware if you rely on the topographical maps, as they're sometimes inaccurate (that was our problem on this one)!

A great day to get out and get some sun.   =)

physical therapy over - Kudos to Brian Fearnley and his staff - my back doesn't hurt at all anymore!

getting ready to move website to a new host

I was finally able to listen for the first time to a Sony MiniDisc sampler that I've had for 11 years (never had an MD player before, and once Dave gave me one, I could never find the disc - one of the benefits of moving: getting to go through all your stuff again). Minidiscs have been available in the U.S. since 1992 - I got my sampler disc at a 'launch' demonstration at some audio store; I can't remember where now.

car insurance rate went down because we're living in a less-accident-prone zipcode; interesting.

Becky's officially off the bottle, not taking it very well.

Scored a Wiggles VHS video at Wal*Mart for only $2 (Becky likes several of their songs, including "Romp Pomp a Stomp". My favorite is "Quack Quack Quack Quack, Cockle Doodle Doo", and Misti's favorite is "I'm a cow" - which is simply hilarious considering she's 'so pregnant' right now)

I'm not quite sure, but I think Becky's favorite movie right now is "Charlie's Angels" - which we scored for $1 at the Hidden Valley garage sale several weeks ago.

Level 27 on NeoQuest. Misti went to Enrichment Night and the theme was world cultures. The Norweigan lady didn't show, but the Phillipines lady was there, and there was all sorts of foods from different cultures.

One of our remote sites finally got a virus - the Welchia Worm (the so-called 'good' worm), due to LiveUpdate not working (which happens occasionally).

Brad's story about "Why nighttime caching is over" is hilarious. Ask him about it - definitely a good read, and a sage piece of advice for the rest of us!

Well, in an effort to save a few bucks each month (and also to 'pull a Brad'), we've opted not to install cable TV at our new place. Thus, you'll notice that the TV-cam is all fuzzy, that's because we really only get one channel (UPN) over the air that's good enough to watch, and even then, it's still a bit fuzzy. I still get to watch Enterprise and Jake 2.0, though, so I'm happy.

I passed the 5,100 mark on Seti@home, kind of without even realizing it. My how the time flies. Now that I'm at level 25 on Neoquest, it's getting tougher to stay alive. Misti sanded our coffee table today (the one we got for free at the annual Hidden Valley garage sale). Dang the Spanish navy for killing giant squids!

We took a stroll on the boardwalk at the NDOW/City of Reno's 'Oxbow Nature Study Area' park that's near us. Looks like they have some lofty plans for the park, but many of the proposed trails on the map simply aren't completed yet, so it was a rather anti-climactic visit, although I'm going to have to go back for the geocache that we walked right past without even knowing.

We played with a beachball on the grass by the [Truckee] river for a while with Becky, soaking up a little sunshine. We even saw some rafters float by (of course, they got high-centered on a 'hippo' right in the middle of the river).

I couldn't pass up this photo opp (high gas prices with humor at the Exxon on N Virginia St):


Gave another stab at some geocaching today, logging one failure and one success today. We found the 'I can see where I used to live from Here!' cache (located at 39°26'55.42" N, 119°45'58.93" W), but still couldn't find the 'Reno High Roller' cache (supposedly located at 39°26'58.74" N, 119°46'1.09" W) - we've collectively spent about 7.5 hours looking for that stupid thing, and still haven't found it (it's a camouflaged cache, but still...).

Other random things: Got a hairchop at Supercuts yesterday. Tried the new "Berry Burst Cheerios Strawberry" cereal, tasty - real dehydrated strawberries in it, which, of course, rehydrate in the milk. I think it's cool that the Church has translated "The Living Christ" into Haitian Kreyòl.

I went to the doctor recently because of my pulled back muscle, and she loaded me up with a ton of medications - Skelaxin (metaxalone, a muscle relaxant), Flexeril (cyclobenzaprine, another muscle relaxant), Lipitor (atorvastatin calcium - to control lipid levels), Ibuprofen (to reduce swelling), and even a referral to Nevada Physical Therapy (at the sports medicine complex at UNR) for electrical stimulation to lower back muscles, lumbar stretches and stabilization, ice, etc.

We wrote a letter to Dave recently, as it had been awhile. We're in the process of trying to find a good grocery store close to us, but are really having a tough time. So far, we've tried Raley's, Super K, and Albertsons, but they all suck compared to the Wal-Mart Supercenter, but since it's on the south side of town, and gas being as expensive as it is, I don't want to keep driving that far for groceries. Raleys, Super K, and Albertsons are all almost twice as expensive as Wal-Mart (for identical items), so we might actually keep shopping there, unfortunately. I guess what we need over here is another Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Had some raisin bran with no raisins today, not the best thing. (Becca likes the raisins, so she picks them out of the box.) We like our new ward, very friendly people. It seems like everyone in the ward is just as new as us, so everyone is constantly walking around introducing themselves to one another, it's actually quite funny. I guess our church records got sent to the wrong ward, as we had two different Relief Society presidents calling us.

You know the old saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Well, I think that phrase needs a disclaimer. Honestly, not every picture is actually worth 1,000 words - some are probably worth more, some definitely less. Perhaps it should be restated something like "A picture can be worth a thousand words".

Misti's packing for hospital already, only 6 weeks in advance. Not bad, actually, considering last time I think we were ready to go 3 months in advance.   =)

Finally got DSL transferred over (was 'offline' at home for a few weeks) - the trick to having the DSL people activate your line for you (so you don't have to install the crappy Yahoo software) is to tell them that you're running Linux, Amiga, BSD, etc. (since the software only works on Windows or Macintosh), or I suppose you could say that you don't have a CD-ROM drive (since the software is on CD), but in either case, I didn't have to install the crap software and then immediately uninstall it like I had to last time. Score. UPDATE: you can also just visit their website (from someone else's computer) to activate.

Misti changed our address with everyone we can think of as far as bills, magazines, DMV, etc. - a pain in the butt process, really, especially since they never seem to actually start mailing to the new address until two (2) phone calls to them. (You call once and tell them your new address, and they say 'ok', but don't change it - so you call back a second time, and they say 'oh, yeah' and actually start to use it.)

Becca has this doll that she got for her birthday (I think), and she's named it "Baby Maite" (pronounced 'my-tay'), after Misti's little sister. Tried the new Trident White gum, which tastes a little nasty, but supposedly whitens your teeth as you chew.

Blogger's become a lot better lately, with many of the Blogger Pro features becoming available to free Blogger users. Spell check is back, draft posts, future posts, titles, uploading files via Blogger, pinging weblogs.com, etc. Cool beans.

I'm currently at Level 17 on Neoquest. Cool RPG.

Well, the move is finally complete - we're joyfully unpacking and just glad we're in a new place without all the previous smells with which we were formerly accosted.

I find it funny that ATG's long distance message is backward. When you dial a long distance number as if it were a local number (i.e., you leave off the prefix), it comes back with a recording that says "it is not necessary to dial the prefix...blah blah blah", even when you *do* need to dial the prefix. Strange.

Well, the Rib Cookoff was once again very tasty, but we only sampled two kinds this time, our favorite from last year (Carson City BBQ Company - which did win the People's Choice Award) and Desperados (which just plain sucks). I keep forgetting to try the one that actually wins each year, but maybe next year.

I hurt my back a little during moving - kinda stiff now and aches a bit (just a pulled muscle). Bummer.

We ate at the "Flame" chinese restaurant again - best Chinese in town, I kid you not - just love their spicy sesame chicken. The sweet and sour shrimp was also excellent. The mushrooms in the wonton soup, however, are so big that they're kinda scary.

We were lucky enough to have lots of help in moving: Alice, Jessica, Rick and Rick's truck, Steve Paul, Scott, Jim, Josh, and even the missionaries (Elder Clark & the new guy from Virginia that really likes comic books). Later had a 'game night' at the Nords, they played Cranium, but I just mostly munched on some fried chicken and watched Becky run around.

Brad's a geocaching fiend - 7 caches in three days!

Active Directory's group policies fade in and out - sometimes IE customizations will be there, sometimes they won't - seemingly random - bizarre.

Been having a heck of a time with St. Bernard's iPrism content filtering appliance - won't allow realvideo to pass through (port 554) - their tech support says "it wasn't me" - only started happening since we switched from bridge-mode with transparent auto-login to single-interface proxy mode. This thing is a beast to configure. The filtering and reports are nice, though - although I could teach them a few things about usability!

Finished the Red Halos website last week for Marvell and Michele - they now maintain nearly all content via Blogger - keeps me mostly out of the loop.

Finally configured secure 128-bit SSL communications for web mail at work with a self-signed certificate, but actually found a cheap SSL certificate authority (FreeSSL.com) where you can get a certificate for only $35/yr. Might try it. Needed some troubleshooting help from Cliff re: firewall and a port 443 conflict.

Got Josh Groban's first album at Wal-Mart, and also tried the new Orbit "Bubblemint" flavor - good stuff both.

We attended Marcie and Don's wedding at the Rock Blvd building, and the reception in the cultural hall following. I danced with Misti and danced with Becky - so cute. They had spinach patés, artichoke dip w/ crunchy bread, greek wraps, fruit, a vegetable platter, white and chocolate cakes, and the obigatory red punch for refreshments. Did a lot of chasing Becky around as she couldn't seem to stay in the gym. I'll be posting some reception photos soon.

This has been a crazy two weeks for network worms and computer virii (viruses)! Yesterday, our mail server at work filtered out about 140 attachments infected with the "Sobig virus" (W32.Sobig.F@mm). The funny thing was that all of the messages were for three (3) individuals only, over and over and over again. They also came in batches of three, all at the same time, every 15 to 20 minutes apart. That tells me that all of the messages likely came from one single infected person that happened to have had all three of those individuals in his/her address list.

I've been experimenting with RSS news feeds and feed readers (news aggregator) during the past few days. I think it sucks that there are so many different versions, and it's quite frankly a little confusing (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, rss, rdf, xml, etc.). I tried one free reader that really blows (FeedReader, but promptly uninstalled it), but found another free one that works a lot better (SharpReader).

Finished another audio book - "Point of Impact" by Stephen Hunter (abridged, as read by Beau Bridges). Tried to find one of the two Huffaker Lookout geocaches, but it kicked our collective butt after 90 minutes - it finally got too dark to see anything and even with a flashlight we called it quits.

We took care of 'Barnet the Fish' (Bonny's red betta - his name is actually Luke the Fish, but Becca renamed him 'Barnet') while my folks were up visiting Uncle Bill in Washington. Betta food really stinks.

We went 'saleing' (i.e., shopping at garage sales) at the annual Hidden Valley garage sale. We scored a free coffee table and lots of great cookbooks, Dr. Suess and other books, videos (including "Lord of the Dance", "Charlie's Angels", and "The Mummy"), some good clothes, and some kitchen paraphernalia, all for under $20. Nice.

Attended a Primary teacher leadership meeting earlier in the morning, and watched Becca and Jared Johnson play ball and run around. Came home and had a tasty peanut butter and honey sandwich (the honey is from one of those honey bears, except our came with a broken lid).

A couple nights ago, we had a pizza, wings, and Mug Root Beer dinner with Alice and Maite Garate (up visiting family from Arizona). The funny thing is that I also had an A&W Root Beer on the same day at our company's staff BBQ, but that's three different brands of root beer I've ingested within a week (also had IBC two posts ago). We watched "A Knight in Camelot" (Whoopi Goldberg) while we ate.

Well, I watched with interest the East Coast's electrical blackout, but it seems kind of random, and there's really not a whole lot I guess I can say about it. Of more interest was a "Music of the 80s" infomercial with ex-MTV VJ Martha Quinn. The collection has quite a few great songs from that decade, and it was cool to hear some of them that I'd forgotten.

I updated some info on the two Prince Edward Islands in the world (see my 'weird geography' page). I was a little disappointed that the Marion Island webcam wasn't working.

We finally found the "Starry Night" geocache (39° 23' 0.85" N, 119° 42' 18" W) on our second attempt and after a little more careful studying of the map.

In between saleing, we went to lunch at Chevy's with Monica Velasquez and several Intuit people. I was disappointed, however, because the tortilla chips were cold and they didn't have strawberry lemonade (so had to settle for regular lemonade). Cathy Hill was there and we found out she's going to be in our new ward. Kari Bonnano was there, too, and her little baby is so cute and little!

Tried our first geocache hunt, but couldn't find it - ran out of daylight (we tried it at sunset after work). According to the database, it's supposed to be a real easy one to find, so I guess we're retarded or something.

Hot August Nights is over now - it didn't seem like it was as popular this year as it has been in past years.

Becca says the cutest things lately, including "Max the gog" (Max the dog - a neighbor's pet), and "Himba the cat" (Simba the cat - another pet). We enjoy taking evening family walks, even if it's just around our little complex to get the mail, or visit the little fountain out front. Becca especially likes the 'sleeping geese' (they're fake geese on someone's lawn). She used to call Bonny "Bayah", but has been saying it correctly for some time now. She likes Jake (the dog) downstairs, but daddy gets Jake and Jacob (the boy) confused - who names their baby after the family pet?

Sat back and watched happily as the "MSBlaster" (or "LovSan") worm wreaked a little wanton havoc on everyone elses' computers except for ours (at home or at work). I guess having firewalls and performing all those daily anti-virus updates and critical updates really do pay off. =)

Alice and Maite just got into town last night, so we visited with them over at Aleen and Bill's place. Maite gave Becky a little pink bead necklace that she really likes.

I got hit in the head with corned beef hash yesterday. I was heating up a can of Libby's Corn Beef Hash (gotta love hash) in a non-stick frying pan (with Teflon) on the stove (right front burner, one of the large ones - not the small). Becca comes into the kitchen and is trying to tell me something, so I squat down (funny word, squat) and while I'm about head-level with the stove, a rogue piece of hash pops out of the pan and hits me smack dab in the middle of my head. Crazy.

Earlier in the day, we went to Quest Diagnostics for some blood work, followed by Arlington Clinical, and Jeremy Palmer's wedding reception w/ IBC Root Beer. There are sure a lot of 'stans' on the map in the Middle East (e.g., Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.) 'Stan' must mean something common to all their languages, something like "home" or "land"... Does anyone know?

Later in the day, a few folks met at a surprise birthday party for Matt Sadler and had some tasty treats and shared in some good company and hilarious stories. Matt got a GPS as one of his presents, which got us talking about 'geocaching'. I think we'll try to find a local geocache (sans the aide of GPS, of course [since we don't have one]) and see how it goes. All the coordinates, conversions, and mappings are available at geocaching.com, jeeep.com, and mapquest.com.

I ate a Schlotsky's deli sandwich at work yesterday - weird. This is the third time I've tried Schlotsky's, and each time has been weird. Three strikes and you're out.

MS Exchange 2000 - MS doesn't know how to accurately name things - "critical queue growth" really isn't 'growth' (where the number of messages would actually be increasing in the queue), but merely the queue is getting older (i.e., there's one stupid message, like an undeliverable receipt, that's been sitting in the queue for awhile). It should more aptly be named "critical queue age", not 'growth'.

It's been fun to sit back and watch the "W32.Mimail.A@mm" virus at play - we have been completely unscathed at home and at work, although we got lots of messages from local folks that obviously were infected. Luckily we had decided to manually update definitions (rather than rely on LiveUpdate) both on Friday afternoon (Symantec client) and Monday morning (Symantec for Exchange), just about an hour before we started getting slammed by infected messages.   =)

I finally read up on S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology system) hard drive monitoring. It had been a rainy day project that I kept forgetting about. Pretty cool stuff. I have always enabled it in the BIOS on any computer I work on with a newer hard drive. It always "felt" like a good idea, but now I have documented backup that it's a great idea.

As many of you know, we've been trying to either buy a house or get into a new (non-smoky) apartment for several months now, but have thus far been unsuccessful. I believe we have now found a new place for ourselves, a condo that we're going to rent, that is happily devoid of all traces of smoke, fish, overused cooking oil, dog urine, and all the other smells with which we've been bombarded since living in our current apartment. (Our neighbors are fairly stinky folk.)

I got to eat some more sushi at work (from Sushi Pier), as part of a farewell party for Eboni. Not the first time I'd tried it, but only the second, as I recall. Not too bad, but not as good as McNuggets or something normal. We've now driven over 40,000 miles in our car. My, how the time flies.

I found out that library late fees (if paid) actually do *not* go to the library, they go straight into the county general fund. The library doesn't see a penny (directly).   =(

I think I have a food intolerance (not the same as an allergy) to FD&C Red #40 food coloring (in large amounts). I've been drinking a lot of Kool-Aid^TM (and also the Canadian-made Great Values [Wal-Mart brand] generic flavored, powdered beverage) lately, and I think I overdid it because I got a case of hives, and between examining the ingredient labels and a few minutes of research on the web, I'm convinced that red food coloring in large amounts can trigger reactions such as hives. Well, let me say it this way - food colorings are safe for most people (and even in small amounts for those with food intolerances), but some people do develop reactions to them in large amounts.   =(

Had another Fuze Health Infuzion: "Refresh" (Banana Colada flavor). Tasty. Misti and I counted the decorative boulders within approximately 10' from the curb on Gateway Dr.:



There are approximately 262 total; 115 on the west side of the road and 147 on the east, from where Offenhauser Dr turns into Gateway Dr, all the way down to South Meadows Pkwy. As Donkey (from Shrek) says, "I like that boulder, that is a nice boulder." It was 107*F today, although the news only admitted to 104*F - which I heard still broke records for this area. We wrote a family letter to Elder Dave for FHE on Monday night. And in reponse to Brad's aversion to healthy breakfast cereals, I bought some Grape Nuts cereal at the store and enjoyed (yes, actually enjoyed) a bowl as a late night snack.   =)

Long choir practice at Carpenters. Loose-meat sandwiches. "Car-dee-doo-chee". Hammy Giles. Paul (Dan) Giles - no one knew his name. Everybody laughed at me sneaking into cinema only to find that it was "The Horse Whisperer" (and that I ended up falling asleep and missing most of the movie). Everyone giving Jennifer, Emily Giles' sister, bad ideas. Matt Sadler almost killed his brother. Pinch on the back of the arm. Brad doesn't like Grape Nuts cereal.

Becky got a new bed. It's a toddler bed that is only about half the height of a normal bed. It's not twin size, it still uses a crib-sized mattress, but it's got a nice oak headboard and siderails (the latter so she can't fall out of bed). She loves it and is proud to have her own bed.   =)

Friday night and Saturday morning a bunch of us helped Sister Rubenaker and her kids move out of her apartment. The missionaries scored a new futon couch and a new full-size bed (not a twin). We used Brother Christopherson's trailer and Matt Blattman's green pickup, not a moving truck, so we made several trips. Most of their stuff was moved into storage, so we got to use the cool elevator at the hot storage unit (2nd floor, no effective ventilation, no light bulb in unit). After the move Saturday morning, Matt Blattman treated us to a round of drinks (sounds bad, huh?!) from 7-11, so I scored a free Fuze^TM Healthy Infuzions "Slenderize" (an 18 oz. sugar-free cranberry-raspberry juice loaded with only 14 calories per bottle, but 120mcg of Chromium, 120mg of Vitamin C, 400mg of Citrimax^TM, and 40mg of L-Carnitine - but *no Aspartame* [sweetened instead with Sucralose]). Mmmmm.

Last night we went to our ward's Pioneer Day picnic at Galena Creek Park (South entrance) up Mt. Rose Highway. The company was great and the food was tasty, but it started to rain after about an hour, and we finally got rained out after it really started drenching everyone. Becky was ecstatic to play with Abby Weckerly and Morgan and Mary Rubenaker. A few guys from the ward tried their hands in a few rounds of horseshoes while Tody slaved over the hamburgers and hotdogs with a camp fork.