For the last day or so, Becky's been sick with a slight fever and a runny nose. We taught her to wipe her own nose with toilet paper, so now whenever it's runny or she sneezes, she says "Becky Paper Nose", which means she needs some toilet paper for her nose. I thought it sounded like a good Indian name, myself. Anyway, it's cute to hear her say it. Email upgrade at work this last week was a pain in the tush. Had a bunch of problems with some mailboxes, user accounts/logins, etc. - don't want to go through that again anytime soon! (We migrated from Exchange 5.5 Enterprise Edition to Exchange 2000 Standard Edition - a feat that Microsoft said couldn't be done at all (because it's downgrading, and the installation program prevents you from installing it if it sees a previous 'higher' version). We count ourselves as successful, because even though we experienced a few glitches, as no one lost any data, and it sure beat redoing the whole thing from scratch.)

Becca got a cute book from cousin Marilynn for her birthday, entitled "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". She likes to look at the pictures and point out all the objects she recognizes. It's cute to watch her carry the book around with her saying "Mouse! Mouse!" and pointing to the mouse on the cover.   =)

I just finished another audiobook, "The Presence" by John Saul. Pretty good sci-fi mystery. The new sister at church, Tiana Hulse, accompanied by Emily Giles, sang a wonderful song in Sacrament meeting yesterday - it sounded just like a professional recording. My Metrocall pager is weird, it eats through batteries like crazy. Each AAA battery lasts for only a couple of weeks. Most other pagers seem to save their batteries for months, from what I understand. Very strange.

All of my blogs finally got transferred over to the new Dano system - lost the template, but had a backup fortunately. Passed the 4,400 mark on Seti. Got stuck waiting for two trains in two days, once at Galetti by the DMV, and once at Kirman/Sutro. Becky got her 2-year-old portrait taken recently:



After using a VPN for a long time now, it's finally obvious to me that the reason so many companies are steering away from VPN usage is because they're so slow! No matter what anyone tells you, there's just no way a VPN can be fast. You're limited by Internet bandwidth, and until we all get fast ethernet (gigabit) or at least USB 2.0 internet speeds (480 mbps) at home, any goofy little 1.5 mbps network connection is just wwwwaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too slow. A better solution for most purposes is a Terminal Services session, Tight-VNC, Citrix Metaframe, etc., where only screenshot differences and mouseclicks are being transferred instead of actual files. Even these all seem a bit slow, but they're far faster than VPNs.

Attended another NCAA conference in Carson City at the Piñon Plaza. It went very well. This was Joy Kryder's last conference, as she's retiring in a couple of weeks.

Reno Toyota (at least the service department) doesn't even know they have a website. That's nice. So where did all the info I sent them via their online "schedule a service appointment" form go? Stone ages, people. UPDATE: took our car in, very nice clean shop, free shuttle, free popcorn, car fixed, wonderful. Aside from the whole website thing, it was an enjoyable experience.

Met with Adriana Hernandez from Wells Fargo Mortgage - she's a very nice lender, and seems confident and knowledgable. The first lender guy we went to was way too pushy and cocky. He was trying to get us a loan at 7.25% or something ridiculous, whilst Adriana is trying to get us one for 4.85%. Ummm.... no contest.

Ward choir performance was excellent this past Sunday for Ward Conference. The Stake visitors had nothing but compliments about it. We performed a version of "In Humility, Our Savior" that we bought from LDSmusicsource.com. We didn't get the Green Labels in time for the performance, although since I had already ordered them (and hence paid for them), the music says it can be copied and performed even without the labels (as long as they were truly ordered).

Finished another audiobook, "River God" by Wilbur Smith. This is one book that would make a great movie - very gory - very suspenseful. Kinda like an Egyptian version of "Braveheart". I can't wait to read the second and third books in this series.

Last night I felt baby Jared kick for the first time. (We're not 100% sure we're going to name him Jared, but we're pretty sure.)

Brad scored me a bent baton for the ward choir (I'm the director). It makes me feel like Harry Potter. If it breaks, then I'll tape it together like Ron Weasley.   =)

Becca calls Emilie and Brad, "Hemilie Blad". It's cute.

We went down to the Carson City Rendezvous, but we missed the Chris LeDoux concert the night before. The rendezvous, itself, pretty much sucked - there wasn't a whole lot going on, and not very many people there. Saw some cool swords, though. Some celtic lady was passing out flyers with the comment, "Come to the Reno Celtic Festival and see some real athletes". She was saying this right in front of the guys in kilts trying to throw the telephone pole. Kinda funny.

Becca really likes the 'Mini Bobbledy Heads' that one can find in Kellogg's Rice Krispies cereal. So far we've amassed 3 Goofys and 1 Mickey Mouse. We were pleasantly shocked to see that Brad had a Buzz Lightyear Mini Bobbledy Head at his house. We were so jealous. (I think he got his out of a different kind of cereal, though.)

Becca got a new little doll for her birthday, and she named it Baby Emma. It's a water doll - you fill it up with water so it feels squishy supposedly like a real baby. When you squeeze it, it makes a cooing sound, too.

We celebrated Father's Day by having a picnic at Galena Creek park. I think I got bit by a spider, though. Grandma, Bonny, and Becca played a little frisbee, ate some hotdogs and han-guh-mers (that's how Becca says 'hamburgers'), a little kool-aid, a wonderful potato salad that Misti made, baked beans, etc. Grandpa was in charge of the grilling.

Becca also got a little rocking chair for her birthday. She likes to sit in it and watch TV. One of her favorite things to watch is herself on TV in her older baby videos. She watches them over and over and over again. She also really likes Mary Poppin's "Step in Time" song. She sings and dances around to the music.   =)

We found the hidden "Parking Lot Lake" in the South Meadows area. It's this strange little lake that's only accessible from business parking lots. There are no other places to park around the lake but local business parking lots. Weird. Swarm of gnats above head on walk. Becky's 2nd birthday party. FIPS55 census tract finally codes figured out ('FIPS' stands for the 'Federal Information Processing Standards' developed by NIST).

Can't "view all mail as text only" in Outlook 2000 SP3 - sucks. Can in Outlook 2002, though - thankfully, with the free third-party plug-in "Attachment Options" by Outlook MVP Ken Slovak.

Pickett park - McDonald's slides - Misti's first-time home buyer's class. IMing Scott Myler - Natellie Yurtinus - Jaylene Staehouwer in Vermont.

Working on new XHTML/CSS websites for redhalosreno.com, csareno.org, richardbarnet.com, reno-map.com - a change for the better, although frustrating at times, due to differences between browsers - need to hack IE a lot.

Bohlender Graebener in Carson - ribbon speaker manufacturing plant.

Planning on moving from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 at work - excited about using a blacklist for spammers, open relays, etc. The Exchange 2000 software won't let you "downgrade" from 5.5 Enterprise to 2000 Standard. If you're going to upgrade, it assumes you're upgrading from like to like. Of course, you can't tell if you're running 5.5 Standard or 5.5 Enterprise without looking in the event log for the 16 GB information store limit or not. If it says "unlimited", you're running Enterprise, if it doesn't, you're running Standard. How stupid is that?

We found out it's a boy - we already "knew" this though - 6/9/2003

I found a bug in Blogger - can't use raw < > codes - some like "code" and "noscript" in my previous post hosed my entire Blogger interface until I could figure out how to use it again - all the controls, toolbars, edit link, etc. were gone because of this interaction. Not good. Hope this gets fixed in Dano.

Mixed review of the new Adobe Reader 6.0. When installing on both XP and 98 machines with previous versions of Acrobat Reader 5.1.0 and Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5, the new version didn't replace the old version of Acrobat Reader, thus PDFs still opened with the old version, although the new version would work, but you had to manually select it instead of the associations handling this for you. And what's the whole NetOpsSystem's FEAD Optimizer about? Like that was necessary (can anyone say "slow"?!!) Two thumbs down on the installation. One nice new feature (at least I've never noticed it in the older version) is the "snapshot" feature which lets you select a portion of a page and print it off directly, great for graphs, sections, maps, etc. Two thumbs up on the new features!

UPDATE: I guess you *could* actually do the "snapshot" in Acrobat Reader 5.1.0, but it just wasn't called "snapshot", it was called "graphics select" instead.

I finally figured out how to do liquid layouts using valid CSS2 and XHTML 1.0. I know, I'm a little behind, but hey. I'm glad to get rid of HTML with all it's quirks, but the learning curve is kinda funny for XHTML. On the surface, there's an illusion of being nothing more than stricter HTML 4.0, but dig a little deeper and you find out that many of the ideas, practices, and miscellaneous things you're accustomed to doing "the old fashioned way" aren't valid in XHTML, such as many simple things like <link> tags within <noscript> tags, unescaped inline JavaScript (need external files for those), no tables for layout (must use CSS), accessibility issues are huge (different media types in CSS), everything must validate (no one really cared with HTML), not using <p> and <blockquote> tags for spacing, etc. There are some of the old familiar traits, however, lest we long for the nostalgic browser wars - incompatibilities amongst the browsers' CSS support is probably the biggest. Oddly enough, Opera 7.11 and MSIE 6 SP1 are both fairly similar to each other in this respect (from my experience - I know others will disagree), whilst all the Gecko-based Mozilla 1.4b/K-Meleon 0.7 SP1/Netscape 7.02/Camino 0.7/Galeon/Epiphany/Firebird 0.6/Safari browsers are all similar. Using validated stylesheets, it's amazing how differently the same page will display in these two different camps. At least it's a problem that we're all used to - at least no one uses NN4, Netscape 6, or MSIE 5 any more!

Online mission database now back up and running, thanks to GBIS's great tech support. I discovered a Neopets secret a couple of days ago. On the potato counter game, the correct answer is always option #13 in the source code. So, if you're in a hurry and/or don't want to count all the potatoes by hand, you can "view source" and page down to option #13, then close the source and just type in your answer. Pretty fast and easy.

Well, the 72nd (2003) session of the Nevada Legislature is finally over. That means less work for me in bill tracking and updates at work.   =)   Of course, they are in a week-long additional "special" session now, but primarily regarding the stupid tax stuff (which I wasn't concerned about anyway). All the important stuff has already been decided, either dead or sitting on the Governor's desk at this moment.   =)

Saw Sara McCombs at Wal-Mart the other day. We hung out at Brad and Emilie's house after the Brandt family baptism (second one, the parents this time). Since they don't have A/C, they open the windows at night sometimes to cool it down. The weird thing is that even though there are screens on all the windows, an amazing amount of mosquitos and gnats still find their way inside and love to congregate on the kitchen ceiling. Emilie has a little routine she does with a Dustbuster to suck them up and (presumably) kill them - it's quite hilarious to watch. We were also talking about Brad's recent black widow excitement, and as we were leaving, I opened the front door, and there was another spider on the door frame - freaked me out!

Brad also introduced us to Big Turk candy bars (fake Turkish Delight), which turned into quite the discussion topic, considering there's an entire chapter in "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" entitled "Turkish Delight". Subsequently, in looking up turkish delight on the web, I found this hilarious site that thinks that C. S. Lewis was a drug addict or something. Whatever. We also had some dill pickle chips and a brownie cake to snack on, too.

Helped my dad move his office out of Carson, then ate at Denny's. Becca choked on a small ice cube. Wasn't happy. A ton of people at choir practice on Sunday. Online mission alumni database just died. That's nice. Out of disk space at GBIS.   =(