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! =)