We watched "The Three Tenors Christmas" and "Mommy & Me - Fun and Friends" on DVD. There's a lady at church at looks like Julia Stiles. For the record, Krispy Kreme's chocolate custard filled donut is called a "bismarck" at Safeway's bakery, and (according to Mike) a 'Boston creme' elsewhere. Krispy Kreme's 'strawberry shortcake' donut is mmmmm, tasty, regardless of what it may or may not be called anywhere else.

Rant: I've experienced so many problems with Blackberry PDAs (specifically the older 957 and the newer 6710) that I can no longer recommend them at all. Of the two, however, the 957 was the better product. When traveling across service areas (between providers), it doesn't seem to automatically reregister on new networks (auto-scan) like it's supposed to, so you have to manually turn it off and back on again for it to do so. Neither one seems to be compatible with MS Exchange 2000 when Exchange is set to send out messages in UTF-7 encoding, so you have to switch back to the (archaic) US-ASCII set instead. The 6710 has problems doing simple two-way synchronization with Outlook 2002 (although it does work sometimes). And what's with having multiple (and confusing) buttons that don't do what you would expect them to do - and why so many key combinations just to enter in numbers? I don't feel a PDA needs to have all of the following buttons right next to each other: num lock, num shift, shift, caps lock, caps shift, symbol shift, and symbol space bar. Also, why'd the 6710 take a step backward and lose the orange color button (used to help distinguish key combinations)? When every button can do four different things, you need this feature. As it stands, the 6710 really blows. Also, why can't Blackberry offer some real tech support? You go to their website looking for the latest software update, and they state that version 2.8 is the latest version for your model, when you are clearly already running version 3.3 on your PDA? Then there's a little fine print message stating that if you use AT&T as your provider, you have to go to their website for the latest version. Lame. So then you go to AT&T's website, and there, plain as day, is version 3.6. Why can't Blackberry just offer it? (What ends up happening is that you have to go to Blackberry for the desktop software, but to AT&T for the handheld software.) Double lame.

This past weekend was so beautiful, clear, sunny, and warm - the high was 79°F. Ben got over his 24-hour flu, and Ronda came home from her trip. We're currently at 175 caches found, whilst Brad is not far behind at 161. The reason my copy of SuSE 9.0 Linux was locking up so often was because of the screensavers. Once I disabled all screensavers, it's been a bit more stable. I still am unable to install Java on the stupid thing, however - YaST doesn't like the j2re 'java.rpm' package for some reason.

A couple new virii today: Beagle.W, and Bugbear.E. Ho hum.

So, I got fed up with SuSE 9.0, and installed my free copy of Linspire Linux instead. First weird thing: it's not compatible with the motherboard's TrendChipAway virus detection, whilst SuSE didn't seem to have a problem with it. Strange. First good thing: Java came preinstalled! I already like it more.   =)

Had a wonderful meal at Gene's house, as Don, Faye, and Linda were in town for the night. Don thought Jared was quite the big, chunky little guy. Jared smiled a lot and flapped his wings like a chicken most of the night.   =)