Okay - wow: 26 inches of snow here yesterday in Reno, and 5.6 feet of it up at Lake Tahoe!

Finished listening to "Rainbow Six" by Tom Clancy on abridged audiobook yesterday. Since Christmas, we've had an honest slew of new DVDs to watch. We haven't made it through the stack yet, but here's the ones I've seen over the past few days (the kids may've seen more):

A Cinderella Story (2004; Hillary Duff)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954; Howard Keel)
Hot Lead and Cold Feet (1978; Jim Dale, Don Knotts, Jack Elam, Darren McGavin)
Sense and Sensibility (1995; Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant)
Shrek 2 (2004)

It snowed a little here in Reno today, Ken Jennings will be back on Jeopardy soon, the Opera 8.0 beta was released recently, and multiple new cell phone virus variants have been found in the last couple of days.

In more important news, the tsunamis in Indonesia and surrounding areas are simply horrifying news. I was glad to hear that my cousin Jon and his wife (who are touring southeast Asia) missed the devastation just in time (they left the area the day before). I can't even imagine 5 million people losing their homes and 120,000 people dying from one earthquake. Tends to put things into perspective, doesn't it?

Found the following caches today:

FST: Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death
FST: How Can You Be In Two Places At Once...
Dad's Cache

but couldn't find the 'Genoa Town' cache in the dark on the way home from Lake Tahoe.

Our place is in a veritable shambles after Christmas with new unfamiliar toys at every turn. The kids really love their new toys, and are anxiously trying to play with them all at once, it seems. =)

Found the 'Jolly' cache yesterday - FTF! Jared does this hilarious stomping walk so much around the apartment lately that he's earned the nicknames "Mr. Stompy", "Sir Stompalot", and "The Stomping Willow".

Between the four of us, we've seen so many movies recently that I can hardly remember them all, but here goes:

The Straight Story (1999; Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek)
Fiddler on the Roof (1971; Topol)
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1936; Shirley Temple)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Holes (2003)
Finding Nemo (2003)
Country Baby (2002)
First Impressions Colors (2002)
Brainy Baby Art (2003)
The Best of Kermit on Sesame Street (1998)
The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea (2000)
Barney's Fun & Games (1996)
White Christmas (1995; the cartoon, not the original)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
Frosty the Snowman (1969)
The Little Drummer Boy (1968)
Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970)
Sarah, Plain and Tall (1991; Glenn Close, Christopher Walken)
101 Dalmations (1996; Glenn Close, Jeff Daniels)

Kinda sucks that Outlook distribution lists are limited to approximately 125 email addresses.

Found the 'Ranch Scrabble' cache today, along with the 'god bless america G.B.A' [sic] travel bug. No one in my family could decipher the anagrams - but it only took Deanne about 30 seconds to do so. Guess we're the losery ones of the bunch.

Finished our Christmas shopping completely today, with a quick trip to the mall. The crowds on a weekday weren't as bad as those of last Saturday, thank goodness.

We procured some of the new Brown and Haley Cashew Roca. It only tastes slightly different from the original Almond Roca. Push come to shove, however, the original tastes better. They also have a new Mocha Roca flavor, which we haven't tried.

I also snagged a 2.5 oz (70g) package of Farley's & Sathers Pop Bottles (liquid filled wax). They weren't as fun as I seemed to remember from my childhood, but they were quite novel, nonetheless.

Spam filtering by reverse DNS is a stupid idea. The problem is that if you obtain an Internet connection (say a DSL line with a static IP address) from a large phone company, they've already got an assigned reverse DNS entry for that IP address. It won't match your mail server's name obviously, so right out of the bag, your emails are going to get bounced. Trying to get the default entry changed to match your mail server is like trying to pull teeth with fruit leather. Chances are that the phone company won't do it because it's against company policy, so they'll delegate it out to your hosting company (who handles your DNS), but they won't know how to do it, and they'll try to say that it's not their responsibility since they aren't the ones leasing you the phone line. Around and around and around we go, chicken in a bread pan pickin' out dough!

Why is it that the Northwest Reno Walmart smells like sulfur in the south entrance area? It's disgusting, but it's happened so many times that we simply can't just dismiss it as someone having farted. There's something terribly amiss there, and it warrants further probing.

We attended the Toys for Tots Christmas concert at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center on Saturday night after having enjoyed Bonny's birthday party and eating all the gingerbread house candies earlier in the day.

Found the following three caches Saturday morning:
Smelly Dog
A Wonderful Bird is the Pelican
Farrier's Game

We enjoyed our ward's Christmas program at church on Sunday. I accompanied the ward choir on "A Christmas Medley" arranged by Larry R. Beebe, and remarkably didn't screw it up too bad, considering I was still a little unsure about parts of it during practice. Becky's going to be a Sunbeam in two weeks and will have graduated from nursery and finally get to attend Primary with me! =)

The same girl at church that reminds me of Christina Ricci also reminds me of Violet on "The Incredibles".

The lyrics in "When Joseph Went to Bethlehem" (Children's Songbook, pg. 38) are funny because there's a line in there about 'goat cheese', and that's all the kids seem to remember on that verse: mumble, mumble, mumble, goat cheese, mumble, mumble... =)

Grisoft's free AVG 7.0 anti-virus program seems to be more refined than 6.0. (And you can't beat the price!)

Watched "Charade" (1963; Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, George Kennedy) last night on VHS. I love a quirky murder mystery.

Well, get ready for copy-protected music CDs, folks. I'm sure that'll make everyone really happy (not being able to make copies of your own CDs). Not.

I transitioned this morning from 'Dymanic Pulse' Adidas Active deodorant (the gray one) to 'Sport Fever' Adidas Active deodorant (the orange one). One on one pit, one on the other. Interesting smell combination.

I enjoyed comparing F-Secure's 2003 and 2004 year-end summaries on Internet security. Very good reads - well written, and informative (with just a touch of nostalgia!).

I also enjoyed reading Maximum PC's new article about how the new AMD FX-55 64-bit CPU running at 2.6 GHz (socket 939) completely trounced on Intel's P4 Extreme Edition CPU running at 3.46 GHz (LGA775 socket) with a 1067 MHz FSB. Very interesting. Of course, they're comparing a 64-bit processer with a 32-bit processor; apples and oranges. Why not test the AMD against a 64-bit Xeon or Itanium or something...?

They also had a great article on the new PCI-Express bus (the successor to the aging AGP bus) and how you can now have dual nVidia GeForce 6800's with SLI running on the same motherboard at the same time.

Watched "The Great Train Robbery" (1979; Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland) on DVD three nights ago. Misti finished crocheting me a nice warm scarf recently, using one skein of Lion brand homespun yarn ("Nouveau 338": chocolate color with dark gray, a touch of tan, and subtle reds and blues mixed in - 98% acrylic, 2% polyester) and a letter N size (10 mm) crocheting hook (Boye vs. Bates: very confusing). It's very soft and warm.

I've wasted a grand total of about eight minutes over the past few weeks playing the new Sega handheld video games that come free in McDonald's Happy Meals.

This was timely: just two days after a report stating that Linux has fewer bugs than most commercial software, some students made the news this morning saying that they found an additional 44 security flaws in Linux. The funny twist after reading the articles is that the first report found 985 bugs in Linux, which sadly is fewer than many other programs or operating systems. This is hilarious, of course, because Forrester also conducted a study that says that Windows has fewer flaws than Linux. Who to trust?

Watched "The Bourne Supremacy" (2004; Matt Damon, Julia Styles, Brian Cox) last Wednesday night on fullscreen DVD, and also surpassed 60,000 miles on our car that day coming home for lunch.

Found the 'Who am I?' cache on Saturday, followed by some monster crazy Christmas shopping at Meadowood Mall and Walmart. Tried the new Wisconsin Fresh white cheddar Cheese Curds at A&W yesterday - curiously delicious. Geico saved me some money yesterday with a couple of bizarrely unrelated coupons: got a free rootbeer float at A&W, and $10 off at Waldenbooks. Weird, but welcomed.

I hate to be the one to say it (because I like the station), but it has to be said: Magic 95.5's holiday carol radio station ID ads are the worst! Completely goofy and just plain lame.

Finished listening to "The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga" by Edward Rutherfurd yesterday on abridged audiobook. Brad and Emilie came over on Sunday night to visit and discuss our recent noveling experience, in addition to bagging on various aspects of geocaching. Last night, we watched "The Medallion" (2004; Jackie Chan) on VHS.

Finished reading/skimming "Piet Mondrian: 1872-1944" by Yve-Alain Bois, Joop Joosten, Angelica Zander Rudenstine, and Hans Janssen today. I was doing a thorough reading at first, carefully cross-referencing the chronology with the art catalogue and it's additional texts, but ran out of time since I felt the library was bearing down on me since I've already renewed the book twice (thrice?). I had already returned the Michel Seuphor book since I didn't have time to read both at once.

It was interesting to me that Mondrian's writings in De Stijl magazine discussed not only art (specifically neo-plasticism), but also music, architecture, and dance. It was also interesting to me the separation he made mentally between his "day job" (painting naturalistic flowers) and his 'real' artwork (neo-plasticism). It was also interesting to note his 'humble' beginnings with naturalism, and then his evolution through cubism and on to his final abstract works.

Speaking of Mondrian, I felt smugly superior for about 3 seconds the other day while watching Jeopardy, and a question came up about what shape a 'lozenge' is, and none of the three contestants knew the answer, but I did because of my recent Mondrian reading. (It's a diamond shape - many of Mondrian's paintings were lozenge-shaped, designed to be hung on the diagonal, not at the square.) UPDATE: after reading the dictionary definition, however, it seems that "rhombus" might have been a more appropriate answer...

In a major bonehead move, Lycos Europe created and distributed a screensaver that is aimed at illegally shutting down websites of known spammers, but is in reality in the process of unintentionally DDoSing (Distributed Denial of Service) their own antispam campaign website. When I posted this, their own site was completely unreachable (effectively shut down). They really should have seen this one coming.

In any case, they're going to get themselves sued by the innocent victims of this 'vigilance justice' they're trying to pull. Illegal is illegal, and what they're doing is plainly breaking the law. They've crossed the line, and have now joined the 'bad guys', despite their 'good' intentions.

"Blog" was the most searched-for word in the dictionary this year. Interesting.

Well, we made it: 55,175 words in 30 days, between 6 people. NaNoWriMo was fun, and our collaborative novel isn't too bad, actually. I can't believe that some people do that much all by themselves - there was someone here in town that did over 100,000 all by herself. Insane. Once we proofread, edit a few items, insert a little artwork, pick an official book title, and wrap up a few minor loose ends, the book will be finished and ready for print. We're now officially authors and writers! =)

Two things I've learned from all this: 1) you don't need a plot in order to write a book, or even an inkling of anything you want to say in advance - just pick a character and start writing, and the character will end up telling you what happens; 2) anything Google touches, sucks! Blogger and Google Groups both sucked this month, and made it very difficult to work on the novel. (Of course they are free, however, so you get what you pay for.) Boo, hiss... =(

I haven't even thought about Neopets for so long, that when I logged in this morning, all my pets were dying (again - it routinely happens if you don't feed them for awhile), and the site had undergone some interesting cosmetic restructuring and improvements. I don't like the large topmost banner advertising, of course, but for the most part the rest of the improvements are just that - an improvement.

Saw a hilarious quote online today (unattributed): "Genius may have its limitations, but studipity is not thus handicapped." Funny stuff!

New: a completely cross-browser security flaw (affects all browsers, including FireFox, Safari, Mozilla, etc.). That's comforting. Also, check out the recent Nokia cell phone virus and trojan horse, and this weekend's SCO website defacement (again). Is nothing safe?

We built a snowman ("Frosty") and a snow bunny ("Snowball") on Saturday, after the previous night's monster snowstorm. Here's a photo:



Well, we're down to the final two days of NaNoWriMo writing in our group novel. We're still only hovering at about 80% completion, so we're got our work cut out for us over the next two nights!!

Went geocaching with Dave today, and found the 'Lexi's Loot' and 'Butter' caches, along with the 'Octavia' and 'Jumbo Jet' travel bugs.

Watched "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde" (2003; Sally Field, Bob Newhart, Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Regina King, Bruce McGill) last night on satellite TV, which is hilarious because any time an airplane flies overhead, the program pauses. Weird. Yesterday's Thanksgiving meal was just awesome, especially Misti's sweet potatoes. The turkey was moist, the stuffing tasty, and the sparkling cider quite refreshing. Tried some pumpkin cheesecake afterward, along with the traditional pumpkin pie. Mmmm. Played a few rousing rounds of 'Pit' afterward. Good times.

It occured to me that the reason that Wal*Mart switched from blue plastic bags to white plastic bags is because their blue bags are too recognizable as litter along the highway and along fencelines. Even though they're obviously not responsible for the littering, it still must've reflected poorly in peoples' minds, nonetheless. Smart move.

Found the 'Guitar Rock' cache today after work, and watched "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (2004; Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Sir Michael Gambon, Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint) last night on widescreen DVD.

Finished reading "The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in Eight Fits" by Lewis Carroll recently. Read the famous Psalm 23 a couple of nights ago, and recently heard it repeated again by Nightcrawler in "X2: X-Men United" (2003; Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Halle Berry, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Sir Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen).

Tried some store-bought S&W candied yams with brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg (in preparation for tomorrow), but they weren't that great. =(

Dave's homecoming talk was great this past Sunday in the Galena Ward. Ginger and Neal and Marta were there, too.

For my birthday this year, I got some cool gifts, including a huge 'Croton' plant (Codiaeum Variegatum 'Petra') from work, a smiley face tie from Becky, a Star Wars tie from Jared, a Mondrian art print poster (of Mondrian's "Composition in Red, Blue, Yellow" [1930]) and a copy of the new Harry Potter 3 DVD from Mist, a generous padded envelope from my folks, etc. Good stuff. =)

Watched "Strange Brew" (1983; Rick Moranis) a few nights ago, but I swear this stuff was funnier back in the day, because it was just a little lame this time around.

Tried some Smuckers Sugarfree Orange Marmalade lately, and I'm afraid to say it's a wee bit nasty. Too bad, too, as I had high hopes for it. Dave scored me some absolutely wonderful Henning's Hickory Smoked Swiss & Cheddar Cheese, straight from Wisconsin. Mmm, tasty. =)

Well, looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and learn to live with tabbed browsing, now that Internet Explorer is going to have it, too. =(

After reading about the recent Sun Java virus security hole, I decided like a good little techie to upgrade my version of Sun Java. Went into Control Panel, clicked on Java Plug-in, and checked for updates, but it didn't find any, saying I already had the latest version. Wrong. I was still running 1.4.2_05, which clearly still has the security flaw. 1.4.2_06, the latest version, is available on a separate Sun page, however, but the fact that it isn't retrieved by the update tool is completely stupid, *especially* in light of the recent bad press about the Sun Java runtime security flaw.

Speaking of recent security flaws, the Linux kernel security flaw made a recent splash on Slashdot. The comments section is particularly hilarious. =)

I WATCHED the gnomemobile the other day. hey diddle diddle. happy happy dog duh duh.

I've tried a few queries via the new Google Scholar, and it looks pretty cool. Also bizarre to hear that Bill Gates gets over four million spam messages per day. Ouch.

In an odd bit of irony, Linux users without a firewall are safer than those with one.

Watched "Glitter" (2001; Mariah Carey) last night on VHS, and "The Gnome-Mobile" (1967; Walter Brennan, Ed Wynn) last night on DVD.

For the record, here is the longest word in the English language (310 letters):
Ornicopytheobibliopsychocrystarroscioaerogenethliometeoroaustrohieroanothropoichthyopyrosiderochpnomyoalectryoophiobotanopegohydrorhabdocrithoaleuroalphitohalomolybdoclerobeloaxinocoscinodactyliogeolithonpessopsephrocatoptrotephraoneirochoonychodactyloarithstichooxogeloscogastrogyrocerobletonooenoscapulinaniac.

It was apparently used by medieval scribes to refer to someone who practices divination or forecasting by means of phenomena, interpretation of acts, or other manifestations related to animate or inanimate objects and appearances such as various animal behaviors, dreams, palmistry, wands, ring suspension and a number of other methods.

The sad thing about it is that none of the online dictionaries contain the word. In fact, their search form boxes typically truncate something that long. Sad. I also find it lame that most of the news sources that have reported on the 9-year-old boy story have expressed an inability to print the word because it's too long. C'mon, it's not THAT long...

Well, sadly, I wasn't able to spend more than a few minutes in front of or on the throne today during World Toilet Day. Maybe next year I'll be able to devote a few hours. =(

Just when you thought K-Mart was finally dead, they up and merge with Sears!

Anyone up for some online hunting? Can your digital camera take 2.5 gigapixel (2,500 megapixel) photos? Didn't think so. Muppets are back!

Things to remember when writing even the simplest of perl scripts (especially on a PC):

Wordpad (and Windows/DOS, in general) uses CR/LF's, while UNIX/Linux only uses CR's. Thus, any script you write you'll need to run through a 'dos2unix' utility first before uploading.

When a script is run via a Cron job, any references to files in the script *aren't* relative to the directory that the script is in (as you would expect it to be, and as it is if you run the script manually), so when a script is run via Cron, you have to modify all file names to include full server paths.

We've also been trying the new Trident Tropical Fruit sugarless gum with Xylitol this past week. Also quite tasty.

Tried some sugarless Pina Colada Koolerz gum with Xylitol over the past few days. Very tasty.

Also watched "The Transporter" and "Rundown" again a couple of nights ago on VHS. (Seen them before.)

Finally got my Atom and RSS feeds fixed, with a ton of help from Christian Renz at CGI Lance. (Blogger slightly mangles the links because of my custom SSI template implementation on this blog, so up until this morning the XML feed links have never quite worked right, but they do now.)

David's coming home today - we're very excited to see him again, and introduce him to little Jared, as he's never seen him before! Becky's sure grown since he's seen her last, too, so it should be fun for them to get reacquainted!

Tried some Vanilla Silk Organic Soymilk this past week. It's not as tasty as chocolate soymilk, but it's not too bad.

It's been fun to listen to all the Christmas music on the radio lately (95.5 FM). Becker and I actually watched "Frosty the Snowman" (1969; Jimmy Durante) on VHS today, just for kicks.

Found the 'The Itchy and Scratchy Show' mystery cache today, after running some errands and just being out and about in general.

We've also recently watched "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986; Nichelle Nichols, Catherine Hicks), "The Care Bears Movie" (1985; Mickey Rooney, Carole King), "Rock 'N Learn: Telling Time" (2001), "Sister Act" (1992; Whoopi Goldberg), and "The Man from Snowy River" (1994; Kirk Douglas) - all on VHS and free, courtesy of the wonderful institution that is the Washoe County Library System.

We took the kids to see "The Incredibles" yesterday at the Riverside Theatre downtown. The previous night we watched all the various trailers and movie clips online, and were stoked for the real deal. When we got there, the 12:30 matinée was sold out, but we got tickets for the 2:00 showing. The parking garage next to the theatre was interesting. We'd been in there before several times before, but this time we were convinced that the tiny, yellow 1941 vintage car (I forget the make and model) on the fifth level by the elevators kept changing. (It didn't really, but each time we walked or drove by it, each of us noticed something different about it, something that we hadn't seen before.) We saw the Donnelly's walking around the garage several times as we drove around and around and around, up and down the various floors looking for any open spots to park. Anyway, the film was awesome, and we recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

The floor of the theater is another interesting phenomenon. It seems to attract items (not just food), but then hides them. During the course of the movie, Jared managed to loose three (3) binkies to the blackhole that is the floor. Search as we tried, we couldn't find a single one of them. Every time I picked up what I swear looked just like a binkie in the darkness, it was a candy wrapper, half-eaten hotdog, or a used napkin. Gross!

Well, I uninstalled FeedForAll 1.0 today. It doesn't support Blogger's Atom 0.3 feeds (despite their documentation stating that it *does* offer 'limited Atom .3' support), so it's pretty useless for me at this point. What I'd like to find isn't really a manual feed fix-it tool, but rather an automatic feed fix-it tool, something server-based, maybe a cron/gawk (search and replace) job, or a simple perl script or something. Anyone know of anything not overly complicated?

Merriam-Webster's is giving a free preview of their unabridged dictionary, but only for this week (11/8-11/14). Cool stuff. (Their regular [abridged] online dictionary is always free, but they normally charge for unabridged access.)

We watched "The Bourne Identity" (2002; Matt Damon, Julia Styles) tonight on VHS that the Crouch's lent us. Very cool film.

Downloaded the new Firefox 1.0 browser that was officially released today, but the jury's still out (my jury - I don't like tabbed browsing, and built-in popup blocking is old news). Also got the FeedForAll 1.0 RSS feed creation and maintenance utility that Chris Pirillo recommended today. Looks cool so far.

Finished listening to "Be Cool" by Elmore Leonard on unabridged audiobook today, along with the author interview at the end. Interesting interview, but I can't recommend the book. The ending was lame, and the book over all contains way too much language.

I had to resist the urge to have a screen full of widgets, as I checked their memory usage, and each one sucks up like 15 MB of RAM. I had about 8 of them running at the same time, but I've throttled it back to 2. Lame.

The kids and I have slight colds, so I'm consuming Halls Strawberry Mentho-Lyptus throat drops like they're going out of style. Found a cool website button maker today. Downloaded Konfabulator 1.8 and several cool widgets today. Pretty cool.

8 dOOrs. Legs. crayon. book. book. tree. raTChET. daddy. mommy. baby. MaRy-kate ashley. kick your knees up. bus. becky. blog.

We found the following caches today:

Equinox
Quixote
Spectre

and I ate a mediocre kraut dog at Wienerschnitzel. Everyone's been writing like crazed maniacs in our group novel. We're already ahead of schedule, and I have a feeling we're going to easily surpass our original goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. It's only day 6 of the challenge, and we've already got 18 chapters.

i ate OrAnGe PaNcAkES . i aTe a lollypop. i watched a movie - Teletubbies.

Wow, Blogger has really sucked over the past couple of days (for reliability). Lame.

I found it quite amusing that there is actually a World Toilet Organization, and that they host a World Toilet Summit, which culminates with the venerable World Toilet Day (Nov. 19)! Crap!

Watched "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc" (1999; Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway) last night on VHS. Kinda creepy, and too much language, etc. I got the copy from the library, unrated, and it turned out to be a semi-legal preview version ("for your consideration, not for resale or rental") from Columbia Pictures. Didn't like it.

Our online collaborative novel is coming along quite nicely, as three of the story lines are starting to converge now. Good times.

I think it needs to be said that no browsers are safe from security flaws. Just within the past few weeks, all browsers have been found to contain notable security flaws.

I think it's rather hilarious that Mike Overton won his election race without spending a dime or even campaigning and even after he dropped out of the race! You know the other guy feels pretty crappy.

Watched the trailer for "Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith" today - great stuff!

I ATE PURPLE pancakes TODAY.

i bought MY new MARY-kate and ashley shoes. they are for geoCAChing.

we had a good birthday cake.

I was glad to see that John F. Kerry called George W. Bush and conceded the election this morning, and thus putting to rest the whole Ohio fiasco and preventing a long, drawn-out futile fight like in 2000. Congratulations to Mr. Bush!

I 'attended' a SANS webcast this morning on worms and virii, but experienced a weird PDF glitch in the process, which they aren't able to pinpoint. Strange.

It's snowing big ol', chubby flakes outside right now. Bizarre weather, since it was so warm yesterday... Who knew that sending spam is a felony?!!

Well, like many, I stayed up past 1:00 a.m. to watch the Election returns unfold and drag on and on (and also to see if there would be any last minute, midnight blogging on our collective novel - alas, there wasn't), which makes me glad I live in the West, otherwise I would've had to stay up till the wee hours of the morning to see the results, but I still got to see them drag on and on and yet still get a reasonable night's sleep. =)

In more exciting news, Becca really likes the new Disney Gummies multivitamins.

I like the little "I Voted Electronically" sticker that everyone got, even though it didn't stick very well to my Lands' End work jacket. I really think it's sad that the entire country can count hundreds of millions of votes in one night, but the state of Ohio can't count 175,000 final remaining 'provisional' votes, and that they want to take up to 11 more days to do so. Lame. If they need help, why don't they just ask? I'm sure there are lots of desparate Kerry fans out there willing to help count...

Well, I, like all good Americans, voted today, and let me tell you - I'm glad I waited until today. In recent weeks, we've both thought about early voting (which was all the rage), but the multi-hour long lines proved to be prohibitive. Tonight at 6:40 p.m., I walked right in and voted. No lines, no wait. Electronic voting was fun, and it was cool to see how the electronic paper trail booths here in Nevada worked. Very cool.

I ate green pancakes yesterday. MOMMY MADE THEM WITH GReEN FOOD CoLORING. tHeY WeRE yuMMY.

Well, we're off to a great start with our group novel. We've presently got a little more than 3,600 words written already between the five of us as we roll into day two of the challenge.

Well, I wrote Chapter One this morning, the first portion of our group effort at producing a novel in just 30 days (part of National Novel Writing Month).

This year's local election is hilarious because of all the funny references based upon candidates' names. Examples include "Patty Melt" (Patty Melton), "Pizza Frazza" (Pete Sferrazza - I think 'frazza' is Italian for 'frozen', thus making him frozen pizza), and Dr. Suess's 'Ziser Zazzer Zuzz' (from the famous ABC book - Richard Ziser). The campaign signs make us chuckle whenever we see them. =)

As Christmastime approaches, I always have to wonder why there are two different versions of 'Away in a Manger' (the traditional tune I learned as a youth, and the newer, lamer tune currently heard all over the place).

Read an interesting short tech article today, entitled "What happens when everyone has a WLAN?".

We celebrated Jared's birthday party tonight, and had the Barnets, Nords, and Larsens over for cake and ice cream. Becky was a queen/princess for Halloween (she couldn't decide which was better), and Jared was a little green frog - very cute. Happy Birthday wishes also go out to Nevada today!

We're starting our 'NevNugNov' 50,000-word novel in 30 days challenge tomorrow, as part of National Novel Writing Month. Should be fast, furious, and fun!

We found the following caches today, on a breezy and fresh autumnal day:

"R" First Family Cache
Kings Ransom (our 350th cache find!)
Haunted Canyon (just in time for Halloween!)

and also checked up on the condition of our own cache, Kitty Litter 2. Becky got another chance to step all over the Reno 'R' today, of course. Oddly, the time on our GPSr (set automatically by satellite) was off by one hour, to account for the end of Daylight Savings Time, although it was hours and hours premature. Bizarre.

Afterwards, we took the kids to the Buena Vista chapel for some more trick-or-treating. Watched "STTNG: Contagion" (Episode 37, airdate: week of 3/20/1989) tonight on VHS as well.

I just remembered that we actually brought some headphones with us in the car awhile ago and listened to the audio instructions at the bank's drive-thru ATM. It's not a real person speaking, it's a very choppy machine voice trying to read to you. The spanish sounds absolutely hilarious! Very weird.

Yesterday I WENT GEOCACHING AND STEPPED ON THE "R" AND TOUCHED THE "R".

Well, I made an honest effort to find a free, outsourced (not on my host), group blogging service besides Blogger/Blogspot, but couldn't find one. Most of the other ones I've seen weren't free, another one that seemed to fit the bill wouldn't load one day (unreliable), and the two (jroller and cheblogs, two different versions of the same software) that I thought did support multiple users (according to the documentation) turned out not to, in fact. I really like their simple interfaces, however, and I might recommend them as a simple alternative to Blogger (though without as many features). Thus, Blogger it is for the 30-day novel writing experiment. UPDATE: Blogger's been really slow over the past two days, and their Blogger status page reflects this information, but promises some impressive and scalable hardware upgrades that should remedy this problem ASAP. Hope so.

We watched "The Midas Touch" (1997; Trevor O'Brien, Ashley Lyn Cafagna) and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" (1989; Leonard Nemoy, DeForest Kelley) last night on VHS.

Misti spent and hour and a half in line yesterday at the Registrar of Voters successfully early voting, after having seen the even longer line at the Reno Town Mall library branch. What a pain. Personally, I'm going to wait until 5 minutes to 7 on the 2nd, because I honestly think the lines will be shorter.

Found the 'Pet Therapy' letterbox hybrid cache today, and Becky got to step on the big, white 'R' on the hill on the way back down. At some point we stopped by BK and Becky got a Donatello (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) in her happy meal, which seems to be a leftover from a previous promotion, since their current one is Shark Tale. We then ran the kiddos over to our ward's Halloween party so they could trick-or-treat.

Mike has stepped up as a co-author for our NaNoWriMo 'novel in 30 days' challenge. I think we'll wait to see what we end up with before naming the book, but in the mean time, we need a nickname for it. How about 'NevNugNov'? Hmmm.

Watched "STTNG: The Naked Now" (episode 3, airdate: week of 10/5/1987) on VHS last night, starring Wil Wheaton (not just featuring - Wesley was the star, actually saved the ship).

Has anyone else tried the "Shrek 2"-themed Ogre Green Twinkies? They're a little unsightly, but still taste great.

We got the cutest, little, yellow, stuffed, soft dump truck Tonka chair for Jared last night at Wal*Mart. He loves to climb on it (and subsequently roll off), it's a hit! =)

I think Wal*Mart needs to cater to the people that buy a lot of items, not just the ones that buy a few. I'm talking about the checkout lanes. With all the 5 items or less, 10 items or less, and 20 items or less lanes, it's almost like they don't want you to buy a lot. If you do, on the other hand, you're punished by having to experience a horrendously long checkout process. They ought to provide '100 items or more' lanes also, so that if you've got two carts full of stuff, you can still get checked out as fast as the guy with only 20 items. This could be done in several configurations, including a circular conveyor belt with multiple checkers, or simply a double or triple checker lane: you unload your cart(s) onto the moving belt that moves slowly past each of the checkers. If the first checker is busy scanning something else of yours, the item moves to the next checker who grabs it, and so forth. Three people could be ringing up your stuff all at the same time, and it all gets totalled at the very end onto one receipt. In the computer world, this is called distributed or parallel processing. So why not in real life??

Congratulations to Femia - she won! I knew it from the very start that she'd win - and this blog is proof. I'm so glad that Linda was kicked off first thing, and that it came down to two wonderful people (Femia and Dominic) for the million dollars. "The Benefactor" is a cool show, and Mark Cuban is a cool guy.

It snowed again today - very strange weather for this area, this soon at least. We've been getting a lot of fake Rolex spam over the past few days, but nothing that a little thing called a spam filter can't take care of in short order. =)

If I'm going to do this whole 50,000-word novel in a month thing, I'm not sure Blogger is going to be the tool to use. Don't get me wrong, I love Blogger, but it's been a little unreliable lately, and I don't want to not be able to publish when time is of the essence, especially if it's a group effort and each person needs to contribute each day. I suppose any web service is inherently prone to outages by the very nature of the Internet, but still. I wouldn't host my own MovableType script, either, as my webhost is similarly unreliable at odd times. Thus, the hunt is on for a rock-solid, free, and simple hosted blogging solution.

We finally finished reading The Book of Job last night in the Old Testament. That one took awhile. We're looking forward to the shorter Psalms. =)

Watched "Wynonna: Live in Venice" (2002; Wynonna Judd) last night on widescreen DVD (1.85:1), as well as "Support Your Local Sheriff" (1968; James Garner, Jack Elam, Harry Morgan, Walter Brennan) on VHS. I like the way the 'support your local...' movies end, with Jack Elam wrapping up the narration, they're funny.

I'm now toying with the idea of having a group of people help me write the novel. If three other people join me, then each of us only have to write 417 words per day, which is only about twice as long as one of my normal blog posts. Of course, if I can round up eight of us, then we'd each only have to write a couple of paragraphs each day. Now, to think of a clever Nevada-themed plot... A modern-day Western? The aftermath of Mike's 'Fight for Nevada'? If Mike joined in, we could even have an illustrated novel, oooooooh! (Isn't a picture worth a thousand words? Heh heh.)

Watched "Beau Geste" (1939; Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston) on VHS. Pretty cool film, I like the ending first, then the flashback. I'm still not 100% sure exactly what happened, however.

Accompanied the ward choir on the piano in church yesterday with "I Know That My Redeemer Lives", arranged by David R. Naylor, along with Twyla Harrison on the organ, and Janet Gillies conducting. Very cool.

Ben and Deanna came over last night for dinner, and we tried "Basque Chicken" with chorizo and rice. It was an okay recipe, a little spicy, but the interesting (i.e., blog-worthy) part about it is which cow parts chorizo (the Mexican sausage variety, at least) actually consists of: beef salivary glands, lymph nodes, and fat (cheeks), along with some vinegar, red pepper, and spices. Apparently, Mexican sausage and Spanish sausage are two very different things.

We've also watched several other movies over the weekend, including "Kipper: Amazing Discoveries!" (2002), "Spot Goes to the Farm" (1993), "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" (1938; Shirley Temple, Randolph Scott, William Demarest, Jack Haley, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson), and "Support Your Local Gunfighter" (1971; James Garner, Suzanne Pleshette, Jack Elam).

'honbatz.com' is a weird website. Ate some BK yesterday, and discovered it printed on the side of the bag. Have you ever noticed how no matter what you order, the total price on the screen is always wrong? The screen will say "Your Total is $13.11", but then the voice will contradict thusly, "That'll be $11.38 at the window". Bizarre.

We tried to early vote yesterday, but were denied. We tried three different polling locations (North Valleys Library, 9th and Wells, and Sparks Library), but the lines at each location were literally hours long.

Tyra Banks' "America's Next Top Model" show (cycle 3) is interesting, but a little slow-moving. We were glad to see the crying Idaho girl (Jennipher) get cut, and think that the non-photogenic black 'snout' girl (Kelle) will be next.

Had a hilarious spam adventure at work on Friday. Messages were getting deleted as spam that contained the word "specialist", which were actually legitimate messages. As it turns out, 'specialist' contains the word 'cialis' (male enhancement drug), which is a real spam word that we block. Good times.

Saur and I tried some 'Cactus Cooler' soda last night at my folks' place while helping them get the Galena Ward's program finalized and printed. Tasty stuff.

I'm only about 1/3 through "Piet Mondrian: 1872-1944" by Yve-Alain Bois, Joop Joosten, Angelica Zander Rudenstine, and Hans Janssen, but I've become rather interested in the painter's life and his early, lesser known works. As of today, my favorite early Mondriaan (his real name) works are:

"Still Life with Gingerpot I" (1911, oil on canvas)
"Study of Trees II" (1913, charcoal on paper)
"Composition No. VI/Blue Facade" (1914, oil on canvas)
"Composition 1916" (1916, oil on canvas)
"Composition with Color Planes 2" (1917, oil on canvas)

Some of the spiral compact flourescent light bulbs we bought two years ago are going flaky. One in particular, a General Electric helical 15-watt bulb made in China, only works intermittently. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't - it's the weirdest thing. I guess that's the *real* reason that flourescents save energy... =)

We found a hilarious dictionary at work, "Webster's New World Dictionary of Computer Terms" (Fourth Edition, published in 1992). Here's a couple of actual definitions that must've been inserted as jokes (or at least written by computer guys):

nerd: A computer amateur. Also called GEEK.

geek: Slang for an unsophisticated computer user.

Hilarious stuff! =)

I'm toying with the idea of writing a small (50,000 word, 175 page) novel in 30 days during the month of November, as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and the associated NaNoBlogMo participants. Blogger has an article in the knowledge base about it, and if I blogged 1,667 words everyday for 30 days, I'd be able to pull it off. That's about two-and-a-half times longer than Misti's post from yesterday. I'm not sure I have that much to say, but I might, who knows. Hmmmm.

We watched "The Rookie" (Dennis Quaid) last night on fullscreen DVD (1.33:1). His son in the movie is the cutest little kid!

Do you ever just have one of those days? I'm sure everyone does! Well, yesterday was a crazy one for me. Our windshield wipers have needed replacing for a while now and, due to the rain yesterday, I decided I'd better get some blade refills so I could actually see out the window. The kids and I set off for Wal-Mart and headed for the automotive section. I looked up our car information (make, model, year) and found the wiper sizes I needed to buy. So, we bought them - a size 20 for the driver's side and 18 for the passenger's side. We then drove home with the old blades still in place. Once I was home and parked out of the rain, I proceeded to change the blade on the driver's side. I took the old one off and it promptly fell apart in my hands. So, I took out one of the size 20s and went to put it on. Well, it was too long. So, I tried a size 18 and it was too short. I thought maybe I put the wrong information in at Wal-Mart, so we headed back over there (without a wiper blade on my side).

The rain was only lightly coming down so I could still see out the window fine. Well, about a minute out from the store, it starts downpouring! I pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, wiped the window off, got back in, and drove about 30 feet before it was too blurry to go any farther and I had to stop and do it all again. I stopped only twice before I realized there was no way I was going to make it to the store, or home, without a wiper blade. So, I pulled out a size 18 blade and put it on the car. It was indeed too short by about an inch but it worked to get us the rest of the way to the store. Upon arriving, I took off the blade again, bundled up the kids, ran into the store, returned the wrong size blades and headed back to get the right size. I again put in our car's information and it came up with the exact same information as before. However, I had forgotten that last year, sometime, we had our oil changed at Jiffy Lube and they had replaced our wiper blades at the same time. But instead of putting on the correct size blades, they must have put on whatever size they had. So, I got the size I knew would fit, went back out to the car, put the kids back in, put the new Pylon blade on and got in the car. I was completely soaked! I drove home and put the second blade on there, out of the rain, and am glad to say they worked great the rest of the day. What a mess, though! I wonder whose idea it was to mess around with the customer's car and not tell them. They could have at least said, you know, if you need your blades replaced again, this one's a size 19 now, not a 20. How hard would that have been? Oh, well! It's over now and at least I'm FULLY prepared for next time!

I got a CD yesterday called "Oldarra - Le chant basque". It is, obviously, a Basque album, sung all in Basque, by a men's choir. They sing a number of the Basque songs from the old country. I am hoping to find a more 'traditional' version of these songs but have not run across any yet. The songs on this album are sung more like hymns. Still very beautiful, though, and they bring back a lot of memories for me! A couple of the songs on the album I have sung with my family from the time I was very little. I love them!

Gotta love rainy days - NOT! What's with all this rain several days in a row? We're not supposed to get rain in the desert! (Of course, the Truckee River is so low right now it could use some serious replenishment, so it's actually a wonderful thing.) I was glad to see that Femia is now in the top 3 on "The Benefactor". I know she's gonna win.

Watched "Frog" (Shelley Duvall) two nights ago on VHS. Am listening to several CDs from the library currently, including "Be Not Nobody" by Vanessa Carlton, "Live Wide Open" by Martin Sexton, "Archive Series" by Sex Pistols, and "Caribe Atomico" by Aterciopelados.

Watched "Shania Twain Live" on DVD last night (Fred was hilarious), as well as "Circle of Friends" (Chris O'Donnell, Minnie Driver), which was a stupid movie. (Whoops! Becky keeps repeating back to us that "we don't say 'stupid'!")

I'm pleased to see the recent improvements in Gmail. It's actually getting to be quite usable (with contacts, email notification, email forwarding, draft saving, etc.).

Weather UPDATE: now it's snowing! What's the deal??! Weird.

Nothing too exciting going on this weekend, just lots of miscellaneous stuff. We watched the following videos (most of which we've seen before):

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
The Fox and the Hound
Star Trek Insurrection (Patrick Stewart)
Rio Bravo (John Wayne, Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin)
Jumanji (Robin Williams)

and Misti made some crème pâtissière the other night - a French Basque dessert recipe that wasn't too bad, but not the greatest either. It's better a la mode.

Heard Elder Porter (Bruce D., I think, not L. Aldin - couldn't really see him as we were in the very, very back of the stage area) speak at Stake Conference yesterday. Didn't do any caching on Saturday because of the horrible smoke that enveloped Reno, so went to the mall instead and got some cool, cheap books at Waldenbooks. Rainy Sunday, choir practice at 3:30 p.m.

Apparently lava is oozing out of Mount St. Helens today. Scary. This week's violence in Haiti is also saddening, of course. Found the 'Chocolate Peak Revisited' cache today during lunch - a beautiful, breezy, autumnal jaunt.

You know, I don't mind most of the cartoons and little shows that Becky and Jared enjoy, but "Bob The Builder" is one that I just can't sit through, unfortunately. =(

I'm trying out Blinkx (version 0.4.27), a new kind of search tool that I read about in InformationWeek magazine, which seems to be rather like Google's similar product. Jury's still out at this point on both of them.

I, like most, was saddened to hear and read about yesterday's death of Christopher Reeve. I didn't get to see the Reeve tribute on TV (the one that replaced "The Benefactor"), though. I spent a few hours in Verdi yesterday at the Boomtown conference center for a meeting.

Watched "Silverado" (Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese) [Collector's Edition] last night on widescreen DVD. I know it's an old film, but I don't recall having seen it before. Pretty good western. Also watched "U-571" (Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Jon Bon Jovi) on widescreen DVD tonight - great flick.

Other recent great things: Mike's "The Fight For Nevada" (which I was secretly afraid had stalled, but looks like it's gained momentum again), and Brad's "House Update" (for your informational pleasure) - both works of art and very creative (and I didn't even mind his shameless Firefox plug)! =)

Found the 'Illuminati' mystery cache on Saturday at Teglia's Paradise Park in Sparks. Would've been easier if the directions would've been accurate, but we finally found it just the same.

We enjoyed our ward's progressive dinner Saturday night, and I even got to partially clear up the mystery surrounding how I already recognized David Davis the 'first' time I met him. Speaking of mysteries, Misti went to the cannery on Friday night and helped Cynthia Mathis put 2 and 2 together on how she is 'linked' to us (through Neil Larsen) - it's a small world.

I accompanied Julie Moore in church yesterday on a song called "No Other Name" by Kenneth Cope. I was really worried that I'd botch the whole thing since I don't really know it at all, but it turned out remarkably well.

Ben and Deanne came over last night to talk about their wedding plans and such, and we also enjoyed some sugar-free, fat-free Jello instant chocolate pudding and then played a few rounds of 'Scattergories' and 'It Came To Pass'.

We've watched a few movies over the past few days that we've already seen before (and therefore probably already blogged about, but here they are anyway): "Save the Last Dance" (Julia Stiles), "Minority Report" (Tom Cruise), and "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" (the first one). We also enjoyed "The Happiest Millionaire" (Fred MacMurray), which Becky and I had never seen before, but Misti had.

Ate a wonderful lunch at Big Horn Bar & Grill yesterday while it was being reviewed for a KRNV channel 4 TV 'hidden hotspot' segment. Very cool - and tasty seasoned fries!

Meeting with Brad's approval, I'm certain, we watched "The Powerpuff Girls Movie" on DVD yesterday. The monkeys were a bit much, but over all the movie was a hit.

Mike's post on the dreaded Subway interrogation was amusing. Sadly, it's all too true, even though I can't concur with him on Quizno's. We like Port Of Subs the best (and I'm a closet Blimpie's fan, but they're a little hard to find these days).

I finished listening to Patricia Cornwell's "Cause of Death" today on abridged audiobook. I've also been listening to the following CDs: "Double Live" by Garth Brooks, "The Song Remembers When" by Trisha Yearwood, "Greatest Hits of the 80's" (a compilation of original songs by the original artists), "Yellow Fever/Na Poi" by Fela Kuti, and "Geeks Gone Wild" by the Silicon Valley Houserockers. Good stuff, all.

Washed my hands yesterday evening with some wonderfully fragrant Vanilla Brown Sugar SoftSoap - mmmmm, smells so good! Arguably the best smelling hand soap on the market.

Sure seems like a lot of the Beagle.AR virus making the rounds lately.

Looks like Femia is still hanging in there (on "The Benefactor") - she's in the Top 4! That Linda chick is really irritating, however - and where does her stupid accent come from? They really need to boot Linda off of the show, she's ruining it for us, and everyone knows Femia is going to win anyway. Go Femia, it's your birthday! =)


Looks like Ev (Evan Williams) is leaving Pyra/Blogger/Google. We'll miss ya, buddy!

I was dismayed to see that the writing pop-up window on Windows XP Tablet Edition doesn't pop up in a Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) session - thus making the pen useless in that environment. =(

I had a hilarious experience over the past few days trying to remember my Hotmail password. (I couldn't, but now I can.) It happened, ironically, directly because of the tablet PC. Many of the passwords I "remember" are 'stored' in a pattern that my fingers 'remember', but my brain doesn't actually know. In other words, if you asked me what my password was, I couldn't tell you, but place my hands over a keyboard and I could type it. I know I'm not alone, because I've seen other people do the same technique on a telephone dialing pad to remember phone numbers. Anyway - all that gets thrown out the window when there's no keyboard (as is the case with our tablet PCs [slates]). I tried so many times to unsuccessfully write out my password with a pen that I actually created a mind block for myself for a few days, so that even when I returned to a computer with a regular keyboard, even my fingers couldn't remember. I worried so much about it that I even dreamt about it, and then when I woke up this morning, I suddenly remembered - eureka! In a related but side note, I am much more impressed with XP Tablet 2005 edition than I was with the original Tablet XP.

Speaking of Hotmail, it's nice to see that they're finally giving everyone a 250 MB mailbox size limit on free accounts (and 2 GB on paid accounts). (Of course, they still have the seemingly industry-standard low attachment limit of 10 MB, which as we all know is really just a little over 6 MB in reality.) Welcome to the 21st century! =)

Yesterday, we listened to (via Internet audio stream) and watched (via satellite) the 174th Semiannual General Conference (different sessions), and spent some time at my folks' place having a great BBQ dinner and talking a walk up at Galena Creek. We later had some ice cream and played a few hands of "Pit" (I won - of course). =)

We also went back and finally found the second leg of the "All in all it's just another" multicache, which was totally easy this trip - I'm convinced that it wasn't there on our first two trips, mainly because I specifically looked in that spot twice before, since that's where I would've placed it, especially considering the name of the cache. Something fishy's going on there.

I can't wait to see tonight's episode of "The Benefactor". I've been reading Mark Cuban's blog lately, and apparently there are some twists on the show that no one saw coming.

It appears that Mount St. Helens is still spewing forth more ash and steam today. I remember seeing it blow back in 1980, as a kid living in Olympia. We had ash in our gutters which I played with, but, like an idiot, I didn't save any. =(

Right before lunch, I got to meet Steve Gillmor, who apparently produced Firesign Theatre's first album and one of their movies. It's funny to me how Firesign Theatre, geocaching, and Gnomedex have been linked together in an odd sort of way. (Firesign Theatre is connected to Steve Gilmor and geocaching [via Monty Wolf]; Steve Gilmor and Wil Wheaton are connected to Gnomedex this year; Both Wil Wheaton and myself go geocaching, and the topic of geocaching was mentioned in Wil's presentation today, as well as in a post by Chris Pirillo a few months ago; Of course, now I've met both Wil and Steve at Gnomedex and everything's come full circle!)

Right after meeting Steve and briefly discussing Firesign Theatre, I decided to go out and try to find the "FST: How Can You Be In Two Places At Once. . ." cache just a block away from Harrah's, but even with all the extra karma of having just met Steve Gillmor, I wasn't able to find it. Shaft.

I'm now sitting in the final session of Gnomedex 4 on the future of online advertising, which is fairly interesting. I've got a couple of cool photos taken of myself taken with some online celebrities, including Wil Wheaton, and Chris and Ponzi:




Gnomedex has been great this year, and I even got a few autographs, to boot! While waiting in line to meet Wil, I got to overhear some friendly banter between Wil, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. It was just great to be there in person and catch some scraps from the table of these web legends. =)

I'm now listening to Wil Wheaton, the keynote speaker for today, which was quite interesting over the past hour since I was also trying to listen to Conference through headphones (didn't work too well, of course). Here's a photo:


Wil's a funny guy, a great speaker, and it very pleasant to meet in person -- apparently unlike William Shatner. =)

Well, today has been exciting already. First, I was able to listen to a little bit of General Conference this morning before leaving for the second day of Gnomedex, and was interested in hearing who the two new apostles are (Dieter F. Uchtdorf and David A. Bednar). On the way up here, I finished listening to "The Blue Nowhere" by Jeffery Deaver on abridged audiobook. I'm now listening to the first session of the second day of Gnomedex, on the future of online content, and the discussion is quite interesting.

Ate a great lunch at Stone St. Bar and Grill at Caesar's Tahoe with Heather and Darlene in between sessions of Gnomedex. It has been a great opening day, and I got some cool swag to boot. Got one geocache squeezed in today, also ('The Full Monty').

It looks like Mount St. Helens erupted today, but nothing near the severity of the famous 1980 eruption.

Did I mention that I recently surpassed the 6,300 mark on Seti@home?

I'm listening to Steve Wozniak ("Woz") right now, the keynote speaker for today - he's hilarious! Here's a photo:


Very interesting stories, and Betty was right - he did used to put on concerts (the US Festivals, back in 1982 and 1983).

Here are some photos of Chris (of Lockergnome and Gnomedex fame) and Ponzi (sorry they're a little yellow and fuzzy - didn't use flash):




I'm now listening to the second panel group on the future of blogging - good stuff!

Having a great time rubbing shoulders with some of the top minds in online content management. =)

I'm here at Gnomedex 4 now, listening to the first session on security (are you listening, too?). The wireless connections seem to be working great! Chris Pirillo, himself, just stepped forward and took a photo of the security panel, cool! Here are some photos:




Very colorful! =)

Listened to an Erasure album that I hadn't heard of or seen before, "Erasure" (self-titled), which is odd because I used to collect Erasure albums back in the day (the '80s), but I stopped before this album came out in 1995. Usually self-titled albums are a group's premiere album, but not so in this case.

For future reference, the ultra-latest Symantec rapid release virus definitions are available via their FTP site, in the "sequence" folder).

I'm off to GnomeDex tomorrow! Woohoo! With any luck, and depending on the wireless connection there, I'll be blogging live from Gnomedex throughout the day. Watch for it!

I found it slightly ironic that updating Adobe Reader from 6.0.1 to 6.0.2 works easily on Win98, but isn't so easy on WinXP. In 98, you just click on help and 'check for updates', which finds the 6.0.2 update available. In XP, it doesn't find the update, so you have to manually go to adobe.com and download the update from the text-only page, despite instructions to the contrary, and even then it takes several clicks worth of navigating to finally get to the appropriate download page. Why the added complexity?

Watched "Hidaldo" (Viggo Mortensen) on DVD last night, an awesome film, especially since it's based on a true story. Also watched episode #3 of 'The Benefactor', and I'm pleased to see that Femia's now in the top six! Way to hang in there, Femia - you go girl!


Here's another Mount St. Helens update. I finished reading "Get The Message: A Business Guide to Surviving the Email Security Crisis" on paperback (a real, honest to goodness book made of paper - shocker, I know) by Tom Gillis today. Garnered some great info and interesting insights from it.

Found Katey's Cute Cache today. Swans are huge compared to geese, and I saw a lobster there in the lake, to boot (ok, it was probably a crayfish). Interesting to note that virus-laden images might not necessarily be just TIFFs or JPEGs, but might possibly be found as GIFs, too.

I've been predicting several things over the past couple of years, some of which are coming to pass, such as the possibility of viruses in non-executable files (i.e., images), the possibility of fax viruses (a pattern on a piece of paper that when digitized [faxed] turns into executable virus code on a fax server), and even nuclear batteries. Of course, I didn't see the second Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption coming...

Tried a can of Great Values corned beef hash, the third brand in my quest to find some really good hash. I can't recommend Great Values, however, as it was much more 'fatty' (oily) than the other two brands I've tried in the past. The taste wasn't necessarily lacking, but it wasn't stellar, either. During the cooking process, however, all of our family members except for baby Jared were splashed with hot sputtering cooking grease, so watch out - this is a dangerous foodstuff.

Misti made a wonderful coffee cake tonight which we enjoyed after FHE. I forgot to mention the games we played last night: first Misti thought she'd teach me a thing or two about 'Phase 10', but the tables turned and it was I that schooled her in the subtle nuances of the last phase. My prowess was quickly shattered, however, as little Becky joined us for a game of 'Uno', and totally slammed the both of us, beating us by a wide margin.

Watched another film starring Shirley MacLaine last night, entitled "The Dress Code" (Shirley MacLaine, Jennifer Tilly, Gary Sinise, Kathy Bates) on DVD. Wow, super lame...

Did a little impromptu caching yesterday and nabbed the following caches:

Derby Dam Cache
"SWINGING BRIDGE"
Flyin' Cache
California Emigrant Trail
"MY PET"

but we're still unable to find the second leg of the goofy cache behind Double Diamond Elementary School. What's it a prerequisite for all Double Diamond multicaches to be rated less than 2 stars for difficulty but take 3 trips to find? Lame.

Well, it turns out I was right on the whole 'false positive' thing with the new Bloodhound.Exploit.14. As it turns out, however, it really does appear that a problem has been identified with not only JPEG images, but also with TIFF images, such that both image formats could be used to transmit viruses. And to think, I was one of the first people to report it!

Watched "Mrs. Soffel" (Mel Gibson, Diane Keaton, Heather Graham) tonight on VHS. Not a great film.

After looking into Wil Wheaton's geocaching stats (user name 'GroundskeeperWillie'), however, it appears that he's only found 9 caches to date, and it's been awhile since his last one. Maybe the allure of Lake Tahoe and it's many beautiful caches will draw him out to do some more... (hint hint)   =)

Misti made another great dinner a couple of nights ago: "Chicken Breasts with Chili Cream Sauce" (Great American Recipes, Group 5, Card 53), very tasty indeed.

We watched "Les Misérables" (Liam Neeson, Uma Thurman, Claire Danes) last night on VHS. Notably awesome film, very well done. I'm not so sure why he's lame, but 'Lame Is Rob'. Poor guy.

I think one of our machines was the first one in the world to get 'infected' with the Bloodhound.Exploit.14 trojan horse (like a virus). I put 'infected' in quotes because I think it was actually a false positive, since the exploit is targetted at the GDI+ problem with Microsoft and JPEG files, but the alledgedly infected files weren't JPEGs at all, they were TIFFs instead. I don't think they were really infected is what it boils down to.

Watched "The Trouble With Harry" (Shirley MacLaine's very first movie, also starring John Forsythe, and Jerry Mathers, but not as the Beaver) tonight on VHS, which both Misti and I had seen before, but couldn't remember how it ended. Quirky Hitchcock film.

I found out today that Wil Wheaton goes geocaching, too.   =)

Listened to some more strange CDs today, including "The Hit Sound of Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra" by Xavier Cugat (Charro's former husband), "In Blue" by The Corrs, and "Is This Desire?" by P J Harvey [sic], and "Reptile" by Eric Clapton.

Watched "Amelia's Moving Pictures" on VHS yesterday. I was saddened to see that the death toll in Haiti due to Hurricane Jeanne floods has reached the 1,000 mark.

I know this is old news, but I think it was cool that Nevada was the first state to successfully use electonic voting with a paper trail in an election.

Had a flat tire twice, two days in a row. Had the flat "fixed" at Tires Plus. Took it back again the next day to have it "fixed" again (the same tire). What a pain. I love changing tires.

Listened to several "new" CDs at work today, including "Brighten the Corners" by Pavement, "Stay hungry" by Twisted Sister, and "Have a Nice Day, Vol. 1" in the "Super Hits of the '70s" collection.

Finished listening to "The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian" by Lawrence Block today on unabridged audiobook. Because of the book, I looked up a few of Piet Mondrian's paintings, and I can't say I'm terribly impressed. If I had to own one in his 'Composition' series, however, it would be probably have to be "Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue" (1930). Honestly, though, I prefer some of his other earlier non-Composition paintings and sketches, such as "Landscape with Bridge and Farmer" (1899) and "Self Portrait" (1913).

Watched the second episode of "The Benefactor" that Sandra taped for me, which features Femia this season, whom I knew from work. It's turning out to be kind of a boring show, but I'll still watch it as long as Femia is on (or as long as Sandra keeps taping it - we don't get ABC on our rabbit ears).

Did a little geocaching yesterday and found both the 'Coyote's by the highway cache' and 'Another Park Cache', as well as the first leg of the 'All in all it's just another' multicache, and the 'I-80 RallyBug' travel bug. We also watched "The Rainbow Fish also features Dazzle The Dinosaur" [sic] on VHS, based upon the children's books by Marcus Pfister.

Gene and Ronda's family came over for dinner tonight, and we had some tasty tacos, followed by cupcakes, peach cobbler, and ice cream for dessert. We played three energetic rounds of the board game "A to Z", men vs. women, while the kids played on the computer and with the doll house and other sundry toys in the play room. The men completely trounced the ladies (of course). It wasn't even close - how embarrassing for them. We then watched a portion of the fine film "Holes" on VHS until the lateness of the hour naturally drew the evening to a close.

Got our tires rotated yesterday at Tires Plus. Read an interesting article there about how Bose revolutionized the shock absorber (yes, the audio speaker company is now making car shock absorbers). Pretty cool idea in my book. Misti and the kids found the 'Shelf Life' mystery cache today during lunchtime. Misti's favorite songs currently are "This Love" and "She Will Be Loved", both by 'Maroon 5'.

This week has been a milestone week, as Jared has started to walk and Becky has started to read. She can also draw a cow now, and it's very cute.   =)

Had another wonderful supper last night, this time entitled "Old-Fashioned Pot Roast" (Great American Recipes, Group 6, Card 4). We enjoyed the 'Kerry for Pez' site that Mike linked to. Good times.

Speaking of Mike, his new PUY page looks quite sharp, and I'm excited about this year's 'Fight for Nevada'. In other carp news, I was dismayed to hear that the new residents of Brad's former house were chomping at the bit to move in, thus crowding the poor carp man before he was completely finish moving out. What an unsavory final memory to have thrust upon you of your first house. Rudeness!

I'm rather enjoying the war on spam at work. We upgraded from version 4.0 to version 4.5 of Symantec Mail Security for MS Exchange, and I like it much better. The heuristic spam detection engine works pretty well, and in concert with the content filtering rules we're now blocking approximately 88.23465497% of spam from getting through. (Just kidding, I have no idea what the percentage is, but we're blocking a lot, and some users have commented on the noticable decrease in spam.) In looking at the stats, almost a full 50% of email we receive is spam. Of course, the percentage of virii-laden messages is much lower, but version 4.5 seems to be handling things just as well as 4.0 did, if not slightly better.

Watched "Amos & Andrew" (Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage) tonight on VHS. Oddly enough, both "Amos & Andrew" and "Finding Nemo" share the same opening theme song. Also finished reading "Present at a Hanging & Other Ghost Stories" by Ambrose Bierce in eBook format.

I discovered this morning that a friend of mine, Femia Durosinmi, is on a reality TV show called The Benefactor (on ABC, Monday nights at 10 p.m.). How cool is that?


She's famous now, and she's in the running to win a cool $1,000,000.00. I hope she wins (and hope she sends me a check for $25,000 just because she's cool like that)! Go Femia!   =)

Something else I recently noticed is that if you are having trouble with version 5 of Windows Updates (in XP), where downloads are not downloading (and hence the installation fails) using the "custom" interface, try using the "express" interface instead. I was able to successfully install the same updates using the express interface that I couldn't do from the custom interface (error code: 80072F78). Weird.

We found the 'Need a Loan, Go out Back' cache tonight, and also viewed "Kipper: Imagine That!" on VHS. I checked on my earnings from the Google ads I placed on the side of my blog, and I've earned so far... (drum roll please) ...a whopping $0.53, woohoo! Of course, after taxes that's really only...   =)