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.   =(