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...   =)

Last night we briefly attended the Reno 3rd Ward choir social. We were finally able to find both the elusive "Blazerbood" cache last night, and the tricky "Double Diamond Devil" multicache today. Additionally, we also found the following caches today:

Bird's Eye View!!
Thunder Mountain
Under Lock & Key

I tried a "Christopher's Big Cherry" candy today. We also attended the memorial service for Gary Freestone this morning. Misti and I were asked to provide the music for the service, which included "Amazing Grace", "Each Life That Touches Ours For Good", "Where Can I Turn For Peace?", and Michael Crawford's "On Eagle's Wings". In our family reading of the Old Testament, we finally reached the famous Bible verse last night that was featured in Mission Impossible: Job 3:14.

We enjoyed another great dinner last night, this time called "Maryland Fish Fillets" (Great American Recipes, Group 4, Card 1). Mmmm, broiled cheesy fish.   =)

We finished reading Esther (Hadassah) in the Old Testament a couple of nights ago. Both of us were glad we'd recently seen a movie about Queen Esther, Haman, Mordecai, and King Ahasuerus, which made reading the whole story a little more understandable. On to Job!

Becky and I tried the new Reduced Sugar Cocoa Puffs (sweetened with Splenda) today. Very tasty, except that now the roof of my mouth hurts. Abrasive, kinda like Cap'n Crunch. We watched "It Takes Two" (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Kirstie Alley) last night on VHS. Found the "Brain Teaser: That's Peculiar" cache tonight, and afterward watched "The Country Bears", also on VHS - all of our recent movies free, of course, courtesy of the Washoe County Mobile Library Bus.

Finished listening to "Babylon Rising" by Tim LaHaye on abridged audiobook today. Found the "FST: Eat Or Be Eaten" cache during lunch today. Hit 57,000 miles on the car today. I am totally stoked to have learned that Hover Car Racer II is in the works!

Listened to the following albums today: "In This Life" by Collin Ray, "Hysteria" by Def Leppard, "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, "Houses of the Holy" by Led Zeppelin, "Love at First Sting" by Scorpions, "Home" by The Dixie Chicks, "Cry" by Faith Hill, and "Greatest Hits" by Duke Ellington. Good stuff, for the most part.

Had another wonderful dinner tonight, this time it was "Italian Chicken Breasts" (Great American Recipes, Group 5, Card 106). Mmmm, tasty.

Learned how to officially cut a pineapple today, according to Del Monte. First, you twist off the crown, then cut into half, then in quarters. Second, you trim off the ends and the core. Third, you remove the fruit from the shell with a curved knife. Lastly, you cut into bite-size pieces.

Tried some XanGo fruit health drink today, not too bad. Becky totally schooled me last night at Pokémon Monopoly, followed by my getting beat today by Jared at pin the tail on the donkey.

I've tried two new products in the past few days, both of which are mixed berry flavor: the new 7up Plus Mixed Berry, which is quite tasty and deliciously sweetened with Splenda, and the not-so-tasty Dentyne Tango Mixed Berry sugarless gum, which leaves quite the nasty aftertaste in your mouth.

Played a round of the 'Battle of the Sexes' board game today at my dad's birthday party, boys vs. girls. Needless to say, we got smoked.

Went to the Nugget Rib Cook-Off tonight, but found it lacking compared to previous years.

Found the 'Brain Teaser: A Piece of the Action' cache yesterday during lunch, but still haven't been able to find the 2nd leg of the 'Double Diamond Devil' multicache.

We went caching in Virginia City today and found the 'FST: Forward Into The Past' and 'A Valentines Day Cache, For Lovers' caches, as well as the first leg (answers) of the 'It Is All About Education' cache, but not the second (physical) leg yet.

I'm trying out Google AdSense on my blog, but so far I'm not impressed, as the ads haven't changed, and obviously aren't relevant to anything, except for the fact that I did mention the word 'pop-up' once in a post a few days ago (and again just now). Thus, the jury's still out, and we'll just have to wait and see if the ads change with my blog content like they're supposed to. UPDATE: if I access this blog the normal way (via richardbarnet.com), then I get pop-up blocker ads only. If I access this blog via richardbarnet.tk, however, I get different ads for creating websites. Interesting.

We watched "The Accidental Spy" (Jackie Chan) tonight on VHS. Not the greatest Chan film ever, but not horrible, although we're convinced we saw part of his genitalia in one shot. Becky, however, has been watching a lot of "Blues Clues: ABC's and 123's" over the past few days, which, needless to say, is a little more benign.

Found the following caches and benchmarks during lunch today:

Brain Teaser: A Prime Example
KR1151
KR1149
KR1146

and the first leg of the 'Double Diamond Devil' multicache.

Misti made the best fish dinner tonight, one of the set of recipes we scored at the annual Hidden Valley Community Garage Sale for just $4, marked down from $6. Tonight's dish was "Easy Baked Cod with Dill Sauce" (Great American Recipes, Group 4, Card 5). A couple of nights ago, we tried "Creamy Cubed Steak" (Great American Recipes, Group 6, Card 55), which was also quite tasty.