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!