My last post of 2005, and I have both nothing really important to say, but also a lot to catch-up stuff to mention. Ugh.

We've listened to some sweet music at work lately, including:

"Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" (album) by Bright Eyes
"Shine" by Kevin Reeves
"Sound Scientist" by Bill
"Get Behind Me Satan" (album) by The White Stripes
"Betty" by The Lascivious Biddies (check out their biddycast!)
"Good" by Better Than Ezra
"From Under The Cork Tree" (album) by Fall Out Boy
"Trashed & Scattered" by Avenged Sevenfold (A7X)

I enjoyed some very tasty Blue Diamond Honey Roasted Almonds, as well as some delicious imported Lindt Extra Fine Dark Chocolate ("Lindt Excellence", made in France) - 70% cocoa. Mmmmm.

Adam Curry has been discussing the Gillette M3 Power razor a lot lately (on his Daily Source Code). In a fluke deal, I also got one of these razors a short while ago (although I got the cooler black Nitro version). The vibrating head gives the illusion of using an electric razor, while still getting the satisfying close shave of a triple-blade wet razor. It does numb your hand, though. The weird thing is that I accidentally dropped the razor and lost the orange lube strip on the initial blade, and I thought it wouldn't matter that much, but -oh- was I wrong! That little orange strip is the secret of the smoothness of the whole experience!

At work, we also recently listened to the Bodybuilding.com-sponsored broadcast of the Boston College vs. Boise State game (the MPC Computers Bowl) on the radio. It was a very rainy second half, and Boise almost won it, but couldn't quite pull it off during the last minute. They came from behind, though, and scored three touchdowns within one quarter and were just a few yards from winning the whole thing with just 45 seconds left. Very intense last quarter, for sure!

We were all shocked at work about the Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan murder case recently in the news. The Las Vegas abandoned car burning, their fugitive flight to Boston (but not Greece), and subsequent arrest had us all very occupied for a few days.

Weird fact of the day: typing "www.x" in the browser address bar resolves to paypal.com - bizarre. Why'd they register x.com?

We've viewed many Christmas-gift films over the past few days, including "Batman Begins" [Two-Disc Deluxe Edition] (2005; Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman) on widescreen DVD, the entire first season of "House" (2004; Hugh Laurie) on DVD, "Fantastic Four" (2005; Jessica Alba) on DVD, and "Hitch" (2005; Will Smith).

Here's an interesting piece of audio: the signatures of every Billboard Top 100 Chart #1 songs from 1958 to 2000, all mashed into one long song.

Did you hear about the leap second? Speaking of time, we received a very cool, very large SkyScan analog clock (24" diameter, model 88204) over the holidays. It automatically sets itself and keeps itself in sync with the NIST atomic clock in Colorado. Very cool!

Did you know that Silly Putty shatters (instead of stretching, compressing, or molding itself) when impacted forcefully? Very strange.

NOTE: Obviously, this didn't get published on the 31st, but I did start it before the year ended, despite it finally getting onto the site a week later. Thus, I'm calling it my last post of 2005.

Well, we're back. We finally got the DSL back on, so the blogging, podcasting, and caching, etc. should resume fairly quickly. Congrats to Brad and Emilie on the arrival of baby Chase! I'll be blogging some more this weekend, so look for some updates soon! (Ugh, so much to catch up on!)

UPDATE: Christmas photos, house photos, etc. coming soon, too!

We moved into our new house on Saturday, woohoo! We're super tired, though, so more details will follow later. Zzzzzzz.

Here's a short list of eccentric/cool/nerdy things I've seen on the 'net since yesterday:

Lady-like Holiday decorations
Dickens' classic "A Christmas Carol" - the 5-part podcast series
Bigfoot's autobiography

I saw this fake-blue-enhanced fountain on my way to work, and had to snap a photo to share (oops, is it cold outside?):



Question: Is there any way to have Firefox set as my default browser for one XP user, but IE as the default for other XP users (in WinXP Home)? Sucks if there isn't. I tried it, but it changed the setting for all users at the same time. Lame.

I met and shook hands with Bob Cicherillo yesterday. He's quite funny in person!

I tried (and enjoyed) the very tasty Turkey & Cranberry Club sandwich at Blimpie today for lunch. Mmmm.

First there was the Sony DRM that could be bypassed with a piece of scotch tape. Now, apparently, biometric fingerprint scanners can be easily fooled with Play-Doh. Doh!

Speaking of Sony woes, Sony has decided not to recall any more CDs, instead just offering a software patch to fix a new problem with CD DRM protection.

Sony's affected artists include Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, and Santana. (Recap: First it was the XCP rootkit, then MediaMax security holes, and now songs being blocked from being transferred to iPods.) The saga continues. Artists have been bypassing record labels and mailing out unprotected, burned copies of CDs to fans to help save some face. Ridiculous.

In other music news, I've heard some fairly good new music over the past few days, including:

"If Every Day Were Christmas" by Podsafe For Peace
"In The Morning Sun" by The Lingus

We did a 'taste test' recently, comparing two brands of protein bars:

PowerBar ProteinPlus Chocolate Crisp (23g protein)
vs.
Myoplex Storm Chocolate Peanut Caramel (27g protein).

And the winners are PowerBar ProteinPlus (for taste), but Myoplex Storm (for feeling full in your stomach). Personally, I think they're both quite tasty!   =)

Oops, Sony CDs have yet another bug. Some people are actually suggesting that this is exactly the kind of copy-protection Sony secretly wants - that people will be too afraid to play the CDs in a computer and will therefore only listen to them in regular CD players, hence no piracy. Hmmm, I love a good conspiracy theory. =)

We watched a rerun of a Idaho Steelheads vs. Utah Grizzlies hockey game (at Qwest Arena in Boise) for a few minutes on T.V. Interesting.

We saw "White Chicks" (2004; Shawn & Marlon Wayans, John Heard, Jessica Cauffiel, Terry Crews) on VHS a few weeks back, but I obviously forgot to mention it. Funny.

There were two similar unfortunate Wikipedia stories this week: Adam Curry trying to rewrite podcasting history, and the unfortunate John Seigenthaler joke.

It appears that Sony has patched their second DRM flaw. Oh, joy. Britney Spears and Billie Holiday CD's sport the new Sony DRM this time around (Sony dumped the first DRM that caused all the problems, and has embraced that of another company).

I found the "Picture Perfect" cache yesterday during lunchtime. More excitingly, though, is the fact that I won an iPod Shuffle from Litehouse Foods! It came in the mail yesterday, and I was completely astounded. There were 1,000 winners, and I was one of them. Crazy. Thanks, Litehouse!

Regarding the Shuffle, however, is this the hardest thing to use or what? How the heck do you synchronize this thing without using iTunes? (I really hate iTunes, by the way. Besides, why should I have to put in a credit card number just to download the free weekly songs? Lame.) And what's the deal with music mode vs. file storage mode? In storage mode, the Shuffle shows up as an external drive, allowing me to copy over MP3s with no problem, but then apparently in this mode the Shuffle can't play them because the songs aren't in the Shuffle's database? Lame. And then when you're using it in storage mode, you now have to stop the USB device before removing it from the USB port? Lame. In music mode, the Shuffle doesn't appear as a drive (it's hidden or something), so I can't transfer files over. Lame. And this is supposed to be easy?

Okay, a little searching around and I finally found a solution: Shuffler. It allows you to transfer files to the iPod Shuffle, and then it rebuilds the database with the playlist, so Shuffle will recognize the music. No iTunes needed! Slick. I previously tried iShuffle, but it didn't work for me. (It looks very pretty, though.) I also checked out, of course, the Sourceforge offering (shuffle-db), but I didn't want to install Python just for something this trivial. Here's more information.

We're both disappointed with Google at how "off" both Google maps and Google Earth are when you overlay satellite images with street maps. Try it: the street lines from the maps and the streets on the satellite photos never line up very well when you zoom in. Here's an example:



Granted, it's only ever off by about 100 yards or so, but can't they compensate for this? I guess you get what you pay for (it's free).

We went and saw "Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" at the $3 theater last night. Although Becky snickered at a few parts during the film, she enjoyed the closing credits the most. Jared, however, slept through it. Sleepy son.   =)

The word "podcast" will now be added to the dictionary, while "sudoku", however, will still not be (yet).

We signed all the paperwork on our house today (at Pioneer Title) and scored some sweet pens in the process. =)

We've been enjoying a plethora of forensics/murder mystery shows on primetime TV as of late. The newest additions to this litany are "Cold Case" and "Killer Instinct". Not bad, although CC seems to be better than KI, in our opinion.

We swung by an event cache tonight ("TVCA Meeting - The Winter Opener"), and I got to see our first 2005 White Jeep Travel Bug. (About time!)

Today's Word of the Day is "logorrhea", which is just a hilarious term. I think it's cool that there is now a Gold's Gym in Reno.

We found our 500th geocache tonight: "Sudoku Numbers" in West Boise. Misti solved the three Sudoku puzzles requisite to getting the cache's coordinates. A new twist, indeed.

I guess I hadn't noticed this before because it didn't apply to me at the time, but since we're now in the market for a garage door opener, it's interesting to note that alleged DMCA violations affect even garage doors. Hmmmm.

Save The Muppets!

Our 'podcast' from last Sunday night is an interview with Darlene Barnet, plus some wonderful podsafe music. Tune in here:

Show #: 20  
Length: 13 minutes, 5 seconds
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Size: 11.99 MB

Mentioned in the podcast:

The Secret Life of Bees
Cruisebox
Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute
Craig Caesar
Alex Brooke
Aux and Big Mike

I tried running the new SNARF email tool, however when I ran it, it threw several errors and exited. Hmmmmm.

Did you know that Gmail can be made secure with a trivial hack? Use "https" instead of "http" and all your traffic will be safe from looky-loos. Simple, yet effective.

Well, I finished listening to "A Knight of the Word" by Terry Brooks yesterday, as I mentioned would happen a few days ago. I love this series.

We tried to find three caches yesterday, but only found one of them (the "Be Prepared" cache). The other two are currently buried under piled up snow from the parking lots.

Speaking of snow, here's a photo of our place a couple of mornings ago. It all melted away, however:



For our Christmas party at Bodybuilding.com, we attended the Idaho Stampede game last night at Qwest Arena here in Boise. The Stampede won, beating the Rockford Lightning, 105-103.

Misti's been enjoying some Sudoku puzzles recently. We actually stumbled across this game because a cache is requiring us to solve three sudoku puzzles to get the proper coordinates. Interesting.

Well, there is a javascript exploit now in the wild that affects even fully-patched XP SP2 using MSIE. Ouch.

New music discovered while at work:

Electric Six
"Feel Good Inc" by Gorillaz

The new version of Firefox has been released, Firefox 1.5. I do like it better than 1.0.7, although I've still got the RC3 version both at work and at home, and neither one will auto-update to the final release version. Lame. I do like that you can drag and drop tabs now. Cool.

Music played way too often on the radio here (at least it's not all Dave Matthews Band!):

"Save Me" by Shinedown
"Stricken" by Disturbed
"Hypnotized" by System of a Down
"Truth" by Seether
"Goodbye For Now" by P.O.D.
"Right Here" by Staind

Microsoft has launched their One Care Live Security Beta (anti-virus service), which is currently free (but they'll charge in the future). Very interesting.

Well, what's been going on? We had a wonderful Thanksgiving lunch at the Wilsons', followed by a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at Ginger's. I ate too much, of course. Very tasty, though. Mmmmmm.

We've been having lots of fog (and a little snow!) in the Treasure Valley this past week. Very eerie.

Blogger now does this weird pinging thing periodically, then tells you if it can't 'phone home'. It's bizarre because it causes the bottom portion of the screen to flash every once-in-awhile, apparently using an Ajax-like mechanism to see if your post will get posted or not (in advance) - if not, it displays a nice little message saying "Could not connect to Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Test connection now." I've only seen it a few times, as it doesn't happen that often. (It normally goes away in about a second.)

We watched Nerea's kids this past Saturday morning. They enjoyed playing with Becky and Jared. Becky and Jared got sick on Sunday, Jared with a cough, and Becky with a fever and unsettled stomach. They're better now, though.

Am I the only one who hasn't seen this yet? DNA genealogy:


Where/How do you get DNA from a deceased relative?

We went shopping with Darlene and Bonny at Boise Towne Mall on Saturday night. Bonny and Becky both got some Book Thongs at Waldenbooks.

I scored "Seinfeld" Season 5 on DVD for my birthday, also. We watched the infamous "Puffy Shirt" episode - not as funny as I remembered it, though. I also got "Eldest" by Christopher Paolini on audiobook, but haven't started listening to it yet. I'm in the middle of another audiobook right now: "A Knight of the Word" by Terry Brooks, and will hopefully finish it here in a few days.

In looking through the Hickory Farms 2005 holiday gift catalog, someone would have to be silly to pay $125 for ~5 lbs of meat and cheese (in "The Diplomat"), when you get the same amount for $60 (in "The Gold Miner") if you can live without the goofy crackers and nuts. (They're certainly not worth doubling the price.)

We ate some grub from Panda Express and McDonald's whilst at the mall. We also tried the new Cranberry Mustard and melt-aways at Hickory Farms. Mmmmm. The kids got a balloon butterfly and balloon hat at the mall.

I scored Brad a sack of potatoes (different from the last time), which he can pick up at my folks' place once again. =)

We happily did the house inspection and the "almost final" walkthrough on our new home on Monday. It's amazing that a thorough inspector can find some things wrong even on a brand-new house. (They're going to fix them.)

I've been running the Boinc distributed computing client with it's associated projects for the past couple of weeks - very cool. I like that you can manage all the projects in one place. I'm currently contributing on Seti@home, Rosetta@home, Einstein@home, Climateprediction.net, and Predictor@home. Climateprediction.net is a killer because each workunit takes around 1153.5 hours to complete (that's 48 straight days). The others usually only take between 2 and 8 hours, so it's easier to see progress on those. Since I've got a dual-core CPU, however, I can run two workunits at once, so I run Climateprediction.net on one almost continuously, and cycle through the others in a random order. They give you a "due date" for each workunit, and for the quick ones, it's just a few weeks, whilst the Climateprediction one is a year out. Of course, I'm aiming to finish mine in the 48-50 days timeframe, but I can see why it might take up to a full year if you only run it as a screensaver.

I've heard lots of new music (to me, anyway) recently at work, including:

Chance
O.A.R. ("Crazy Game of Poker")
Morningwood
Scissor Sisters

Has anyone else noticed that Firefox 1.0.7 and 1.5 RC3 both suffer from the "I can't type in the address bar sometimes" bug, as well as the "find on this page even when I don't want to" bug? 1.5 RC3 is better (doesn't happen as much), but both exhibit these odd behaviors. I'm actually wondering if it isn't the theme's fault, since they both share the "Noia 2.0 eXtreme" theme.

To resolve the first bug, you have to minimize Firefox, click on the desktop, then restore Firefox, and then it should let you type again in the address bar. If it still doesn't, open a new tab, click in it somewhere, then switch back to the previous tab, then it should let you type again in the address bar.

To resolve the second bug, unfortunately, you may have to close and reopen the tab, and in extreme cases, Firefox entirely. This one is the killer. (What happens is this: you have the find toolbar open at the bottom of the screen from a previous search, and you go to type something in the address bar, or the google search bar, or in a form field on a page, etc., but Firefox thinks you're wanting to find what you're typing on the current page. Even after closing the find toolbar (either by hitting escape [which doesn't always work], or by pressing the little X, the unwanted behavior continues.)

I hope Firefox gets their act together and fixes these two bugs - they're aggravating! I tried an orange Tic Tac Silver yesterday. Beautifully wrapped.

So I installed the new Juice podcatching client, but I also noticed something hilarious on their download page:



Windows 200, huh? Must've missed that one. =)

Also hilarious: it turns out that a piece of scotch tape will defeat Sony's DRM. Nice.

Lots has been going on, where to start? Windows Live keeps telling me to log in even though I'm already logged in. Lame.

Speaking of LAME, Sony BMG apparently broke the law in their recent Digital Rights Management (DRM) rootkit coverup fiasco because they used the open source LAME MP3 decoder without following the terms of the GPL license - doh! Also, not only does the removal uninstaller tool Sony hurriedly released actually opens up another security hole, but their backdoor also affects Macs, not just PCs. They have finally recalled 4.7 million affected CDs. Businesses are advised, however, to scan their networks for Sony malware. Luckily, Microsoft will detect the rootkit and remove it, but I can't say the same for Apple. Sony, at least, is finally sucking it up and offering to exchange affected CDs for clean ones. Finally! Affected CDs include albums by Celine Dion and Neil Diamond, among others.

Speaking of Macs, Apple's iTunes has a new security hole, in addition to the recent Quicktime flaw from a few weeks ago. The iTunes flaw affects Mac OS 10 users, not just PCs. The real shaft, though, is that it was discovered just two days after their recent security patch was released (which, of course, didn't patch it). They'll have to release another patch next week. They're turning into Firefox, which is turning into Microsoft! I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

We found the "Decoy" cache today. A new twist! I tried out Frappr, which is making news in the podcasting world on such shows as Cnet's Buzz Outloud and Adam Curry's Daily Source Code. Interesting (a cross between Flickr and Google Maps).

I've been enjoying some wonderful new music lately, sweet tracks all:

"There She Goes" and "Summertime" by Brother Love
"Fly, Fly, Fly" by Adrina Thorpe
"Rocket Science" by Brain Buckit
"Bad Religion" by Jimmie Bratcher
"Photograph" by Nickelback
"Get Through This" by Art of Dying
"Waking Up The Neighborhood" by Planet of Women
"Upside Down" by Bob Gentry
"In A Long Time" by 46bliss
"Wasting My Time" and "Drive Away" by Mathew Ebel
...as well as some wonderful tracks by the Candy Butchers and Mike Viola (his solo stuff).

Shopping for Home Owner's Insurance is like pulling teeth. Enough said. We drove by our new house (we haven't closed yet, though) and there was a sign on the front lawn saying "Sale Pending". It was cool to know that it was referring to us!

For my recent birthday, I scored a new MP3 USB FM Modulator for the car. I simply plug in my USB thumb drive into it and it broadcasts the MP3s straight to the car radio - no iPod or cords needed! Works like a charm! I also scored "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith" on widescreen DVD. Nice. =)

I was also surprised by being taken to view Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire at the theatre (Edwards Nampa Stadium 14). Down side: even though we got our tickets via Fandango, we still had to wait in line for tickets since the fandango kiosk was out of order. Lame - especially when the movie starts in 3 minutes, but the line is at least 4 minutes long!

My ISP, Qwest, is one giant, collective idiot it seems. They claim they don't block port 3389 (terminal services/remote assistance), and yet it doesn't work. They claim it's because my router is doing NAT (network address translation), despite the fact that I've done terminal services, remote desktop connection, and remote assistance many times before on different connections (i.e., from different ISPs such as SBC, Charter, and ATG), always from behind NAT routers and various firewalls. Their answer: "try port forwarding". Um, yeah - doesn't work. Qwest is the problem, and they won't fess up to it. It's interesting to note, however, that port 3389 services didn't work by default on these other lines - it took a phone call or two and some patient yelling to get them to unblock the ports. (Thus, the only thing left to do here with Qwest is to figure out who I've got to talk to who actually knows what I'm talking about.)

They also don't provide an outgoing SMTP mail server to customers, just an MSN mail account - what's with that? Whatever. I can't complain about the speed, though, it's 5 mbps down/896 kbps upload (and, yes, I'm actually getting those speeds). Not bad for DSL. Too bad the customer service sucks so bad. Am I the only one who thinks that Keira Knightly and Natalie Portman look like identical twins?

The new Google Sets beta site is interesting. Their newly-free Google Analytics also looks promising. Also, Google Print is now called Google Book Search.

Well, the inevitable has happened: Sony BMG has now been sued over their DRM copy protection blunder. Also, inevitably, a few malicious backdoor threats have already appeared over the past few days that exploit the Sony rootkit (Breplibot.b, and Breplibot.c/.d).

On the radio at work, we've heard a lot of Death Cab For Cutie ("Soul Meets Body") and Dave Matthews Band ("American Baby") lately. While I've always liked Dave Matthews, they overplay him here - bad. Every third or fourth song is DMB. Give 'em a rest, people.

We found three (3) caches on Saturday:

Big-Time Micro
Boise history series #5
Happy Days are here again

The Big-Time Micro cache was one we couldn't find this past summer on our vacation here. As it turns out, it was apparently muggled before we tried it, and was replaced at some point thereafter. No wonder we couldn't find it! Anyway, it was an easy find second time around.

We also ate at Boise's supposedly-famous Westside Drive In. Becky had the popcorn chicken, Misti had a wonderful BLT, and I tried the Cajun Burger. Mine was a little too drippy, but the other meals were great. The cool thing was that the drive-thru window was on the right-hand (passenger) side of the car.

In cool tech, gravity tractors may help save the planet from intrasteller bombardment. In bizarre tech, these two photos are from the inside of one of our old computers, I kid you not:





Now, I've heard of hard drives and floppy drives, but come on...

We scored two toy alligators at our neighbor's garage sale on Saturday for 50 cents. The funny part was that it was actually in the garage (inside). Hadn't really seen that before, despite the fact that that's why they're called 'garage sales', I suppose. It was fully contained within the garage, proper - nothing was on the driveway. Q.: Do the Japanese have garage sales?

Our 'podcast' tonight is an interview with Becky and some podsafe music from the Podsafe Music Network. Tune in here:

Show #: 19  
Length: 19 minutes, 51 seconds
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Size: 18.10 MB

Becca was in her very first Primary Program at church yesterday. She loved it - she sat all by herself (with her class, of course, but not with us) on the pulpit (front row), sang loudly and confidently, and recited her part at the microphone in front of the entire congregation without help. She got many compliments after the meeting. =)

In top news this morning, Brad and Emilie's baby page is now available - check it out!

A Linux-only virus (the "Lupper" worm) has appeared. I think we all saw this coming. In antispyware news, Microsoft has given an official name to it's antispyware beta product: Windows Defender.

We've been enjoying a couple of new shows on TV recently, including "Da Vinci's Inquest" and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" (SVU).

I recently shopped online for a new computer, and Brad'll be happy to know that I didn't go with Dell. Actually, it's kinda funny how it happened, because Dell's website simply didn't work, and actually prevented me from building a system:

Click to enlarge.

Thus, I was forced to look elsewhere. It boiled down to a choice between Gateway and HP. Gateway had great prices, but HP ultimately won out because they simply offered better options.

I ended up getting 160 GB in RAID 1 mirrored drives, 2 GB of dual-channel DDR2-400 RAM, and a Pentium D 820 dual-core CPU (plus the normal extras), all for less than $1,400. Sweet!

It was recently brought to my attention that Shelby has a blog, too. Check it out. I wonder if Lisa, Jodi, and Brenda have secret blogs they've been hiding from us, too...?? Hmmmm.

I listened to some wonderful Matthew Ebel ("Drive Away") and Sunspot ("The Breach") on some newly found (to me) podcasts two days ago. Great stuff. The Intelligent Design trial is now over, but the verdict won't be out for another month or so.

I found some nice open source, cross-platform DVD playing software yesterday, named VLC Media Player from VideoLAN. Works great, and it's free!

The Sony rootkit disaster took another nasty turn yesterday when it was discovered that their "patch" actually can potentially crash your system, and also that the DRM software is actually spyware (communicating back to Sony's servers without your approval). Furthermore, it's actually now preventing CD sales and therefore hurting the artists.

I took a peek at the new Live.com site, just to see what all the fuss was about. Pretty cool. It's quite obvious now, however, that Start.com was a testing bed for Live.com, and that I've already been using some Live-like features for the past month or so. Live.com does look like it has some cool additional ideas, however.

Listened to some Korn ("Twisted Transistor") and Nickelback on the radio at work. Interesting.

The Google Print saga continues, as Google resumed scanning books yesterday, but then halted again today.

Sony is in deep doo-doo with the recent and audacious Sony rootkit fiasco. How embarrassing.

We watched "The Cost of Redemption" (2004; Ronnie Coleman) on DVD last night. While not the most professionally-made video, it's interesting how big Ronnie is and how much weight he can lift. Anyone who can squat 800 lbs. and leg press 2,200+ lbs. gets some respect from me!

Misti and the kids have been a little sick over the past fews days. Becky sounds like she's partially lost her voice (which sounds cute, though). Jared inexplicably broke out into hives yesterday and puked early this morning. Too much sugar? Bizarre.

The Wilsons came over last night for dinner and Jared's birthday, and Misti made a cute, green, dinosaur cake for the occasion. Jared scored a ton of new dinosaurs, so he's obviously been preoccupied since then. Here are a couple more photos:




Enjoy!

Here are some photos for Dave:







Enjoy!

This weekend has been eventful. We celebrated Jared's birthday (accompanied by some wonderful strawberry cake, lots of cool toys, and some Halloweenish family members!), I watched a little Farscape, we had some wonderful fish and clam chowder at Skippers, as well as some wonderful Popeyes chicken and biscuits, along with cajun rice, and a wonderful coleslaw that's comparible to that offered by Skippers and KFC - yummy!

We took the kids to the 'Trunk or Treat' at the church, and they raked in lots of candy, and visited Kathryn Albertson and Ann Morrison parks and had a wonderful, picturesque walk. (There were hundreds of families there taking portraits, bizarre!!) We also watched "Herbie: Fully Loaded" (2005; Lindsay Lohan, Michael Keaton, Matt Dillon) on DVD. Fun stuff.

There have been some pretty catchy songs on the radio lately, including stuff by Aqualung and Ben Harper, as well as by people whose first names all start with the letter "J":

James Blunt
"You're Beautiful"

Jack Johnson
"Good People"

Joe Satriani
"Always With Me, Always With You"

It was recently discovered that Skype contains a major security flaw. Nice. We enjoyed some tasty grub at Zip's Drive-In a couple of nights ago. Very good, mmmmm.

Q: How old is email?
A: Email is 34 years old!   =)

Even though Google was slammed and sued for Google Print (scanning books and making them searchable), three other groups are doing the same thing: MSN Book Search, Open Library, and the Open Content Alliance (OCA, which includes other industry heavyweights like Yahoo and HP). While they're starting with old books, they haven't dismissed the possibility of scanning copyrighted works. Hmmmm.

Speaking of Google, they're definitely taking on the world, with the recent news about Google Base, Google Wallet, and Google Purchase. Google Base is a competitor to eBay and Craig's List, while Google Wallet and/or Google Purchase are competitors with PayPal. A little competition never hurt, right?

Lots of varied things have happened recently. First and foremost, Becky and I enjoyed an Owyhee Idaho Spud candy bar on Saturday (not to rub it in, Brad - sorry), but Misti did not enjoy it. She doesn't like the "guk" in the middle. Becky, upon hearing this, promptly replied that she does like the guk in the middle. Cute.

I finally got rid of the mystery "Linux IGD" gateway connection in my network connections folder. I've read several messageboards with people similarly afflicted, but none have mentioned the real problem with it: constant traffic. It would've been okay if the connection had just been there, silently not hurting anything, but there was a constant flow of data being transmitted (around 40 kbps) in the background. Very annoying.

Anyway, you'll only ever see this problem with this combination of factors: WinXP, Windows Media Connect update, and an ActionTec DSL router. Near as I can tell, the Media Connect update enables the Universal Plug 'N Play (UPNP) service in Windows XP. The Qwest-provided ActionTec DSL router/modem runs Linux internally and supports UPNP. Thus, when the two are connected, Windows XP will detect the router, and the UPNP service will automatically configure the router as an Internet gateway device, thus adding another connection in your Network Connections folder. The stinker, of course, is that it won't let you disable the connection (like any other normal connection would), so it logically raises a few eyebrows with it's seemingly spyware-like characteristics (can't disable it; constant flow of traffic).

Anyway, I got rid of it by disabling the UPNP and SSDP Discovery services and also by removing the Windows Media Connect update, as detailed on these sites:

http://snurl.com/iyue
http://snurl.com/iyug
http://snurl.com/iyuh
http://snurl.com/iyum
http://snurl.com/iyuo
http://snurl.com/iyup

(Perhaps this information will help someone else.) Last Friday, I enjoyed listening to a little Karla Bonoff and Velvet Underground on CD at work.

Misti scored some new Nike Air Monarch III shoes at JCPenney's recent "sweet sale" - 40% off!

While at the mall, we dined at the food court. I, knowing that Mike and Brad like Panda Express for their fortune cookies, decided to grab some Chinese food. I got shafted, however: no fortune cookie. =(

Becky, averting the whole lack of fortune fiasco, wisely chose Mcdonalds instead. Smart girl.

We attended the ward Elder's Quorum social Saturday afternoon, and enjoyed a little homemade root beer floats and volleyball in the Bodily's back yard. (An event I like to call the "Bodily function" - ha!) Becky enjoys sitting on my shoulders and spiking the ball over the net.

I finished reading "A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Miserable Mill" (book 4) by Lemony Snicket today. Speaking of books, the library bus was apparently broken this past weekend, so they substituted a van instead. Not the same. I'm finding that our local library system doesn't seem to be as sophisticated as the Washoe County Library System (i.e., that's my impression, anyway). =(

We attended the "Praise to the Man" Joseph Smith Fireside, Sunday night at the stake center. Misti and I spoke in church earlier in the day, on the topic of Family Home Evenings. I ran into Brad York from Nevada, too, in the church hallway. Small world.

I installed OpenOffice 2.0 yesterday and am trying it out. Okay, but, so where's the Publisher and Outlook alternatives? Hmmmm.

I tried the developer preview of the new Flock browser tonight. Not bad, but it did crash on me (not surprising - it's not even a beta yet). It looks nice, though, and has lots of potential.

Well, Firefox has had its 100,000,000th download. This does not mean that 100 million people are using it, merely that it's been retrieved, cumulatively, that many times counting all versions. I, myself, have downloaded it at least 15 times, no joke. Thus, more than likely, 10,000,000 fans have each downloaded it 10 different times, whether due to upgrades (they require a whole new download, unfortunately), or simply just installing it on multiple machines, friend's machines, etc.

UPDATE: eWeek says that Firefox acknowledges that only 45 million unique people have retrieved the software, and that many of those have come back for different versions. I knew it! (Of course, I still think 45 million is too high, I still think it's about 25% of that.)

The company I work for, Bodybuilding.com, has just entered Inc. Magazine's Inc. 500 list at #230 today! Very cool. In virus news, there's now a Skype trojan making the rounds. In Apple news, there is now, finally, a dual-core Mac available. The scandal, though, is that it's based upon the old IBM PowerPC chips, not the new Intel chips Apple is evangelizing lately. And speaking of Intel, they have abandoned work on 4.0 Ghz Pentium CPUs, switching more of their focus to dual-core chips instead.

Brad's second podcast was, of course, very entertaining. Keep 'em coming, Mr. C.! I added two new maps (Southwest Idaho and Boise) to my Geocaching.com profile. They pinpoint where we've found caches locally so far.

I thought it was interesting that MI6 is recruiting for spies on their new website. Could you be the next 007? Send in your résumé! In unrelated news, I finished reading "The Wide Window" (book 3) by Lemony Snicket tonight. Good stuff.

Weird news: Brad killed by iPod. I finally attained another milestone tonight: half a million neopoints in the Neopets.com Neopian Bank. My savings account is now at the "Diamond Deposit Gold" level, which yields an even 10% annual interest rate. =)

Yesterday marked the start of Joe Weider's Olympia Weekend 2005 Bodybuilding Competition in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Orleans Arena. At work, we watched some of the live Fit Show video feed yesterday - interesting stuff. Check it out this weekend if you see this in time! (Here's the webcast schedule, and here's the official site.)

Today we found the following four caches (including two we couldn't find before):

S A M Cache
Poltergeist
Are you hungry?
C L M Cache

In cool news, Neopets is coming out with a Playstation 2 game, called "Neopets: The Darkest Faerie". The Wilsons came over for dinner and a movie tonight - it was fun, and the movie hilarious. We watched "Robots" (2005; Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Greg Kinnear, Mel Brooks, Amanda Bynes, Drew Carey, Robin Williams) on fullscreen DVD.

Well, I didn't puke. On the contrary, the flight was quite smooth and enjoyable. Ryan's a good pilot - shocker! J/K. The plane was a Cessna Skyhawk II. Here are some photos:






I also finished reading "A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room" (book 2) by Lemony Snicket last night. I like his conversational and commentary-like style of writing. Becky and I have also been enjoying some 12 oz. cans of Minute Maid Light Lemonade and Raspberry Passion sodas this week. Very tasty. At work, I've also overheard some hilarious cover songs and comedy routines by Richard Cheese and Tenacious D. (The latter not necessarily the best for sensitive ears, however.)

Well, since I don't really have anything too interesting to write right now, I'll borrow some recent news: Wallace and Gromit's factory goes up in smoke. Very sad for Aardman fans. The new beta Yahoo! Podcasts search tool debuted, and I'm listed! =)

Speaking of Yahoo, they and Microsoft are now allowing their IM clients to communicate with each other! That's been a long time coming. In other news, fish keeps your brain healthy and scientists have found hobbits on a remote island, but they're dead. Maybe they didn't eat fish...

Oh, Misti and I did finally finish reading Isaiah last night, so that's a milestone worth mentioning. Whew! And depending on weather, I'm also scheduled to go flying tonight with Ryan, so I'll let you know tomorrow if I puked or not... (I probably will - it's a small plane.)

We saw John "Pressed Sandwich Meat" Prestwich and his family at the park last night. It had been four years since seeing him last, I believe. I tried the new beta Google Reader (feed reader) today, but I'm sorry to have to admit that I really hate it.

Seen in a non-spellchecked LinuxWorld article: "Google has exploited AJAX for some of its most eye-pooping services such as GMail and Google Maps." (Paragraph 11.) The DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 is now almost over. Three vehicles have already crossed the finish line, however.

I finished listening to "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier on abridged audiobook today. Becky also enjoyed watching the last four minutes of the Boise State Broncos vs. Portland State Vikings game tonight on TV (BSU won, 21-14) after we got back from playing a little tennis.   =)

We briefly attended the TVCA Cachaholic's meeting event cache a couple of nights ago, and got to meet a few local cachers. I finally got to hold the Holy Grail of travel bugs, too: a Moun10bike coin. (I somehow missed the one that made the rounds at the 2004 Fallon GeoRally.) I tried some Fresca Black Cherry Citrus soda also recently, but it's not all that great. Phil and Nerea married recently in the Boise temple. Happy times!   =)

Well, my 4-week "vacation" is over - I started work full-time today at BodyBuilding.com here in Boise. I also enjoyed a chicken chalupa this afternoon at Casa Mexico - very tasty, indeed. This "Hail to the prophet" article made it onto Google News' front page tonight. Very cool.

In "it's about time" tech news today, the next version of MS Office will natively support PDF documents. In "ouch" news, Kaspersky's antivirus has a security flaw. Not good. In the "Brad Rocks" category, have you listened to the first-ever Bradcast yet? Very cool.   =)

I finished reading "A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning" (book 1) by Lemony Snicket tonight. Cute. We listened to the rest of Conference today, and it was wonderful. Mike's Fight for Nevada 2005 started yesterday, and I can't wait to see what Saturday will bring! Three interesting tidbits I heard about today: the Super Mario Opera, the iPod Nano dissection video, and that they've discovered that beyond Pluto lies the proposed tenth planet and her accompanying moon: Xena and Gabrielle in the Kuiper Belt.

Microsoft will offer a phishing filter in IE7 eventually. Very cool. We tried some delicious Tillamook yogurts last night - very tasty. The Vanilla Bean and Marionberry flavors are especially wonderful. Mmmmm. We surpassed 70,000 miles (112,654 kilometres) on our car today. Ouch. We listened to the Saturday morning session and I watched the Priesthood session of the LDS 175th Semiannual General Conference today and tonight. Very nice.

We visited both the Boise and Meridian libraries today, and they're great. We're both now officially cardholding Idaho library patrons. Watch out. We viewed "Sabrina" (1995; Harrison Ford, Julia Ormond, Lauren Holly, Greg Kinnear, John Wood, Richard Crenna, Angie Dickinson) tonight on VHS. Not bad, but not my favorite. Thereafter, Becky expressed an interest in trying to understand football, so we watched a bit of the Boise State vs. Hawaii game on TV. The Broncos defeated the Warriors, 44-41.

The Google Suggest beta is ingenious as a simple let slick Ajax add-on to regular Google Search.

I've been testing out the Microsoft Start beta recently as a showcase Ajax portal/RSS aggregator application. It's incredibly simple and intuitive to use, but seems to lack support for organizing feeds into groups and subgroups (and therefore importing OPML files organized as such). It is web-based, of course, so at least it's portable and quick.

In legal news, the landmark trial over Intelligent Design has now started. In health news, pomegranate juice might guard against prostate cancer. A different kind of rice update: Condoleezza Rice visited Haiti. A historical update: Sacajawea now has her own website. In recent weeks, the church has been making news with it's well-executed hurricane relief efforts. Very cool.

In shocking geocaching news, a local cache (on Idaho 55 Rainbow Bridge) created a bomb scare yesterday, shutting down a highway for 6 hours, and was publicized widely over TV, newspaper, web, and radio outlets. Ouch.

We celebrated Neal's 140th birthday last night (he has two birthdates each year) at Scott's home in Nampa. We thereafter toured Ginger's new house just down the street from him. Very nice.

Finally, someone with some common sense has stepped forward in the Google Print copyright debate. In this first article, a lawyer has switched sides on the issue. In this second article, lessons learned in the past shed some light on the current issue. I am also glad to see at least one other person besides myself that has actually TESTED what everyone else is simply talking about. His results are interesting, and add value to the discussion and my own understanding of Google Print's implementation.

At first, Ben thought his dead car battery was just some crappy, run-of-the-mill battery.



Think again.   =)

Most of Misti's folks and family are in town this weekend for Mari's baptism, which was today. Afterward, we all went to lunch at the Golden Corral in Nampa. Since seeing the phrase "Oy Vey!" in the film "Shark Tale", I had to look it up. (Not many Ashkenazi Jews around here.)

Hurricane Rita is, of course, already headline news today. Rice update: Misti made some more rice tonight in the rice cooker, but used a 2:1 water to rice ratio, and it was plumper and not dry at all (like it was before with the 1:1 ratio), but was a little clumpy. Tasted wonderful, however.

To illustrate (instead of just talk about) the real problem with Google Print, click on these links to six successive pages of a Print Publisher Program book, clearly printable, saveable, emailable, bookmarkable, etc., and beyond the supposed 5-page limit:

http://snipurl.com/hwq1 (Page 1)
http://snipurl.com/hwq3 (Page 2)
http://snipurl.com/hwq5 (Page 3)
http://snipurl.com/hwq8 (Page 4)
http://snipurl.com/hwq9 (Page 5)
http://snipurl.com/hwqa (Page 6)
...and so on...

Anyone can view the source on a Google Print page of a book governed by a Print Publisher Program's agreement to get the actual image's location (link), and therefore directly access more than five (5) successive pages to a book. That's the real problem, not all this Print Library Project garbage that everyone is whining about. They're all barking up the wrong tree. Why isn't anyone else noticing this?

Of course, in reading over Google Print Publisher's Terms of Service (see #4, "Restrictions on Use of Authorized Content"), they don't guarantee that they can stop anyone from being able to print, copy, etc., so I guess if you're a publisher and you agreed to these uncertain terms, there's nothing you can really do about it? Also, it doesn't say anything in there about the five pages, it clearly says 20% of a book in any 30-day period. Hmmmm, I'll have to look into that. In any case, I guess Google is still covered - it's clearly not copyright infringement. The plot thickens.

The recent debate over Google Print is really interesting. Here are the facts: there are three different scanning scenarios in Google Print (public domain books [copyright expired], copyrighted books submitted voluntarily by a publisher with permission to use, and copyrighted books not submitted but scanned via The Google Library Project). Thus, there are three different types of results you can get from Google Print: full book viewable, limited page access, and snippets only (which is allowed under the 'fair use' exception of copyright law).

The only potential problem I see is in the middle scenario. If you've ever used Google Print for a book in this middle category, you'll notice that the entire book is not viewable at first, but only a couple pages before and after a search result. According to Google's FAQ (item #6), this is the way it's supposed to work. There is, of course, a way around it - if you out-smart the system repeatedly to bring up subsequent pages (which is possible using a simple refined search), it'll let you the first few times, but then it'll require you to log in (with your Gmail account info) - presumably so they can track your movements. It does, however, let you continue on. For books scanned in as part of the Print Library Project, if a particular search term appears many times in a book, the search engine allows you to only view three instances of the term, thus preventing you from accessing too much of the book. No similar control seems to be in place over books submitted via the Print Publisher Program. That's the problem.

Thus, in theory, you can view (but not easily print) the entire text of some copyrighted books (at least for now until Google reads this blog entry). Of course, they're probably watching you, but it is possible and fairly easy to do, and even then possible to print off the entire book if you are determined to do so.

Herein lies what should be the crux of the copyright case against Google by the Authors Guild and the concerns of the Association of American Publishers (AAP): Google is allowing access to the entire copyrighted text of a book out on the web for free, contradictory to Google's own Print Publisher agreement. The Authors Guild is focusing on the wrong aspect - they're trying to build an argument based upon the Print Library Project, when they should be concentrating on the Print Publisher Program's logistics instead. It's not copyright fair use theory that should be under scrutiny here, but rather Google's implementation of the Print Beta's web interface and adhering to the Print Publisher Program's terms of service.

In my opinion, any lawsuits against the Print Library Project focused on the Fair Use doctrine are doomed to fail. As a primer, there are four (4) factors in the Fair Use privilege of the Copyright Act:

1) Commercial nature of the purpose and character of the use.

Is the usage being done exploitatively to make a commercial profit? Does the usage supplant the need for the originals? Are the results of the secondary usage used for the same, or for a different function or purpose, as the originals? Also important here is how "transformative" the new work is - the more it's been altered (i.e., the less it resembles the original), the better.

2) The creative nature of the copyrighted work.

Creative works are more covered under copyright law, whereas fact-based works are less so. Has the work already been published? Published works are less-protected (i.e., more subject to fair use) than non-published works, because the artist/authors have already expressed their ideas to the world and potentially already profited from it.

3) The portion of the work in ratio to the work as a whole.

Fair Use says you can copy a portion, but not the whole thing. This factor, however, depends on the intended usage. If the usage only makes sense if the entire work is copied, then that is allowed.

4) The effect of the usage on the value of the original.

Does the secondary usage undermine or supplant the market or value of the original? Can someone get the original work from you instead of going to the original copyright holder? Does the secondary project harm the ability of the original copyright holder to license or sell the original work?

Since Google Print doesn't negatively impact or tread upon any of these four fair use factors, I feel that Google is in the clear.

In browser news, Opera is now free (without ads), and Firefox 1.0.7 is now available (and patches a new 'extremely critical' security hole in Firefox 1.0.6 [running on Linux/Unix only]). Interesting. Here's Becky, as promised, with her new training wheels on Bonny's old bike, and also our joint sidewalk chalk fish masterpiece:





Dan tipped me off to this hilarious ROTS (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) page. It loads completely slow (and sometimes not at all, due to the poor overworked, coralized images - not to mention the Slashdot effect), but it is worth the wait if you are into Star Wars and/or want to see horrible English-Chinese-English subtitle translation at its absolute worst. Here's another one.

Our new ISP uses PPPoA instead of PPPoE for its ADSL. Interesting. We found "Eddy's" cache tonight, but it had been looted, so I gathered up its remains and am providing it safe haven 'til such time as its owner comes to retrieve it.

The recent Symantec threat report (for Q1 & Q2 of 2005) confirms something I've always suspected: Firefox and Macs are not more secure than IE/Windows, they're just not as popular. In fact, Firefox is less secure than IE so far this year, with Firefox suffering from double the number of security holes of IE. From the article: "...switching from IE to Firefox as a way of minimizing security risks [is] no longer valid advice." Ouch. In those immortal words, "...there is no 'safe' web browser."

Misti made round three of rice last night, but she used our rice cooker that we got as a wedding present. (Shamefully, I think this was the first time we've used it.) It wasn't perfect, but it did turn out fairly good - it was light and fluffy, wasn't clumpy or stuck together, but it wasn't as plump as it should've been. Once again, it recommended only a 1:1 ratio of water to rice, which is why I believe it seemed a little dry. The quest for perfect rice goes on. In unrelated news, Apple's new iPod nano came out recently and is already making quite the splash. Becky 'graduated' from her red tricycle to Bonny's old bicycle yesterday, with the addition of some new purple training wheels. I'll post a photo tomorrow.

Hot dogs. The selection at the store is quite wide, with some brands proudly proclaiming their product "franks", with others calling them "weiners". Interestingly, however, none of them actually use the term "hot dog". So, what's the difference between a frank and a weiner, any way? Apparently, nothing.

I have, however, learned a couple of interesting trivia tidbits in trying to get to the bottom of this most pressing of questions. First, it would be false advertising if they actually called them "hot dogs", since they don't actually become "hot dogs" until they're: 1) hot, and 2) in a bun. If there's no bun, it's not a hot dog. Second of all, tangentially, ketchup is for kids. Never use ketchup on a hot dog. Period. Oh, and never boil them, either. Ever.

There are also lots of names for this type of food, including (but not limited to): red hots, white hots, frankfurter, frank, hot dog, tube steak (not kidding), danger dog (in Mexico), Coney dog, sausage sandwich, weenie, wienie, wiener, perrito caliente (Spanish), cane caldo (Italian), chien chaud (French), heisser hund (German), worstjes (Dutch), wienerwurst, dachshund sausage, Hummel dog, cheese dog, chili cheese dog, kraut dog, pretzel dog, kosher dog, mustard dog, corn dog, francheesie, francheezie, polish dog, Ripper, French hot dog, chorizo, banger, etc.

Hot dogs are basically just a type of cooked sausage, and date back to circa 850 B.C. and are mentioned in Homer's Iliad. The hot dog, as we know it today, however are generally thought to have come into existence around the 1880-1900 period. The towns of Frankfurt (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) both claim to be the origin of the modern dog, but no one is sure. Frankfurt obviously gives us the name "frankfurter", but Vienna is actually "Wein" in German, thus giving us "weiner". The most common length of a hot dog is 6 inches (15.24 centimeter), with other sizes including the foot long, and Vienna sausage cocktail weiner size (a la Lit'l Smokies) - approximately 2 inches. The average American will consume approximately 60 hot dogs annually. Conversely, Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi, the world record holder, devoured 53.5 weiners in 12 minutes.

The USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) regulates how domestic hot dogs are made. (No rats, hooves, etc.) No one type of hot dog has been standardized, however, because of the vast numbers of differing brands, meat mixtures, preparation methods, casings, cooking techniques, seasonings, and sizes. And that doesn't even touch on the near-infinite possibilities of condiments, toppings, and buns - the combinations are mind-boggling! In Toronto, Canada, apparently, hot dogs are the only 'street food' allowed by law!

There are, of course, thousands of hot dog eateries or more. Leading brands of dogs include:

Nathan's
Oscar Mayer
Hebrew National
Armour
Ball Park
Bar S
Jennie O
John Morrell
Hillshire Farm

Hot dog fanatics and purists may insist upon pure beef dogs, but many dogs on the store shelves are actually a combination of turkey, pork, chicken, and/or beef. In fact, the all-beef dogs are generally cheaper than the combination dogs, thus leading one to believe that all-beef dogs are the "cheap" variety, whilst the bird/pig/cow combo are the "quality" choice. I leave that decision up to you, the reader, to decide.

We watched the 57th Annual Emmy Awards on TV last night. Bizarre, as usual. Cooking rice seems to be more of an art than a science. Since I love "cinnamon and sugar rice", I decided to whip some up, and it did take a couple of tries. The myth about equal parts rice and water is just that - a myth. Most recipes I've seen in the past few days recommend more water than rice, in ratios of 1.5:1 or 2:1. Tonight I successfully made a wonderful batch using the 2:1 ratio. I'm not talking about instant rice, which is pretty fool-proof, I'm talking about good old fashioned non-instant rice.

My first batch ended up too wet, simply because I used the 1:1 ratio, and after a few minutes it was clearly going to burn for lack of liquid, so I kept adding more water every few minutes for fear of burning it. It cooked for 30 minutes this way, partially uncovered, and it ended up wet and gluey. My second attempt tonight went much better, covered, simmering for only 20 minutes, with the 2:1 ratio, then sitting without heat but still covered for an additional 5 minutes. It tasted wonderful, not wet, still a little clumpy, but quite nice overall. I'm sure there is more skill involved to get it to turn out non-sticky with no clumps, but I'll have to work up to that, I suppose. I didn't rinse it first, like most recipes recommend (to get rid of potential excess starchiness), so maybe therein lies the key. Others recommend tilting the lid slightly so some steam can escape, not using a lid, boiling in too much water then draining and drying in the oven, using salt, microwaving instead of boiling, using a rice cooker, etc., etc. The experiment continues.

Here's a backward twist: The U.S. is currently receiving foreign aid for Hurricane Katrina victims. Interesting. We found a few caches today:

Copy Cat #3
A Sign of the Times
Stroll in the Park # 1

and also went over to Nerea's place to eat cake for Phil's birthday. There were also a couple of caches we couldn't find today:

Are you hungry? (GCNC2H) (again - my second try)
Cacheaholics Program - Step 10 (GCM38E)

I read an awesome article today on the phishing economy which explains how banks aren't doing enough to protect their customers. Bank of America should be commended on being one of the only banks that uses Triple–DES encrypted magstripe tracking methods which thwart ATM fraud. It also explains why I would never use Washington Mutual or Key Bank.

We found the "Emerald City" cache today. Here's a brief description of various sweeteners (taken in part from an excellent Beachbody Nutrition article):

Sucralose (Splenda): animal tested, calorie-free, and FDA approved. Too new to know of long-term effects, however. Tell-tale aftertaste for about half the population.

Sugar Alcohols (Xylitol, Sorbitol, Mannitol)/Tagatose (Naturlose): Some calories; FDA approved. Causes flatulence, bloating, and diarrhea. Yucka.

Aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal): calorie-free, FDA approved. Can cause headaches. Many people think it's harmful (science is undecided, however).

Acesulfame (Sunett): causes rodent tumors. Aftertaste.

Stevia: not a chemical - it's an herb. Not approved by the FDA, but available as a 'health food supplement'. Causes reproductive side effects in rodents.

Saccharin (Sweet'N Low): caused cancer in Canadian rats once, so the FDA tried (unsuccessfully) to ban it. Generally considered safe now, however.

Sugar/Corn Syrup: sucrose, glucose, dextrose, fructose - they can all make you fat, which is a major cause of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Makes kids hyper, then extremely emotional. Cheaper than the others, however.

Take your pick.   =(

UPDATE: Here is another excellent article on these substances.

Well, some idiot got recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance ruled unconstitutional in California. Write your Congressmen!

In better news, Google's new Blogsearch looks promising, and we were the first to find the "Child's Play" cache tonight - woohoo!   =)

We've tried some new foods lately (at least new to us), including Caffeine Free Diet Dr Pepper, Vanilla Yogurt Burst Cheerios, Jumex Strawberry Banana Nectar, two different Hershey's Limited Edition Twosomes (Reese's Mini Pieces and Heath English Toffee Bits), and a Herr's Chocolate-Flavored Pretzel Rod. Speaking of food, check out Dan's Japanese Oreo's.

I attended the Idaho Business League's Idaho Job and Career Fair yesterday at the Western Idaho Fairgrounds. A little lame, in all honesty. The job hunt continues... In older news, a 13 billion year old explosion has just been observed from edge of universe. Very cool.

I was slightly dismayed to learn that MS Windows Vista (the upcoming successor to XP) will come in 7 different versions. Oh, joy. No confusion there... Speaking of lame, another Firefox security flaw has surfaced. Wasn't Firefox supposed to be the secure browser? Guess not.

We attended Mari's birthday party at Nerea's on Friday night. She had a group of friends over and got some cool presents. We then returned home and viewed "The Pacifier" (2005; Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Chris Potter, Carol Kane, Brad Garrett) on full-screen DVD. Funny film.

I enjoyed watching some more of the US Open yesterday with Andre Agassi beating Robby Ginepri in another excellent match. Becky has become interested in tennis in recent weeks, so I we stopped by Fairmont Park last night to play a little tennis with her. We all had fun, and Jared enjoyed running around the court chasing balls. Cute. Speaking of Pat Poyfair, someone in our new ward here is related to Dan Stucki, too - she introduced herself after Sacrament today, but I'm horrible with names, so...

We enjoyed a wonderful "get to know you" BBQ at Shane Carlson's house yesterday afternoon. They are friends of Brad's from Intuit, but they're also from Carson City, which is funny because we know some of the same people there and attended the same ward, etc. Small world. Becky and Jared enjoyed playing with their kids, and there was even an amusing bathroom incident that made us all chuckle.   =)

Well, well - our move from Reno to Boise is finally complete and we're all settled and unpacked - phew! Many thanks go out to everyone who helped us load the truck in Reno and unload the truck in Boise. Not blogging for a week and a half is torture, because now that I'm back online, so much has happened that I've got a whole backlog of things to mention - so here goes (in no particular order):

Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf of Mexico states this past week, of course. The destructions, floodings, and death toll are simply horrific. There have been so many side stories related to the hurricane that I would have never even considered, like the scores of unclaimed premature babies from the evacuated hospitals. Sad times, indeed.

Bob Denver (Gilligan) dies at age 70. Poor little buddy. We grabbed a VHS copy of "Cheaper by the Dozen" (2003; Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Hilary Duff, Tom Welling) for only $2.88 at Wal-mart. Cute flick.

I spent a few hours on Labor Day watching some incredible U.S. Open tennis with Andre Agassi narrowly beating Xavier Malisse, and learning about the incredible personal comeback story of James Blake. Great players, all.

I also just learned about an interesting addition to geocaching, called waymarking. Very interesting, and I'm glad that the stats tie into the regular geocaching.com stats, too - convenient. Becky said the cutest thing the other day: 'metal defector' - very cute.

We went out in search of a nearby park, and ended up walking around the slightly stinky Redwood Park in Boise, instead. Weird smell. Is is the fake lake? The nearby orchard? Hmmmm. Since moving in, we've replaced a few cheap household appliances, with such items as our new Bissell PowerForce bagless upright vacuum, a new Uniden EXI 976C cordless phone with Caller ID, and a new Sanyo VWM-950 Hi-Fi VHS VCR. The older counterparts of these items either didn't survive the move, or were left behind.

We went out caching with Bradigan last week while he was here on business, and we visited 23 caches, but only found 19 caches, plus 1 benchmark:

Macaile's Charmed to the Point
Disc Me
SAINT THOMAS
Ugly Duckling
Fun & Games by the River
Crane Series #2
Intro to benchmarking II (with benchmark OH1122, also)
Family Pet's Nest Here
Lowe's down on the whole town
A R N M Cache
L R I H M Cache
In PUB-lic view
Wheels On The Bus Go...
50 States
"NEW RELEASE"
Near the Border
M8 For You Ron
High and Lowes
For My Teacher
OH1122

Not too bad for a little casual caching. The four we did not find (for various reasons) were:

Are you hungry? (GCNC2H)
C L M Cache (GCPB0Y)
Home Run Zone (GCK69C)
Sonic Stop Before School (GCPBPW)

During the moving process, we consumed some very refreshing Propel fitness water, some delicious chinese food from Confucius Restaurant, and some obligatory IHOP. Additionally, we had a bizarre but free experience at the Denny's by the airport with a missing salad, unchocolatey hot chocolate, raw meat, and Brad's "fish and stuffing" combination. I also enjoyed the Italian Ciabatta w/ Basalmic Viniagrette sub at Port of Subs a day later. Mmmmm.   =)

During the drive from Reno to Boise, I captained the moving truck, while Misti piloted the family car and kids. We communicated quite well between vehicles with a pair of Uniden GMR325-2 walkie-talkies. Effective, but they sure seem to eat up the batteries.

Becky scored some new bottlecaps recently, with one new one from the nearby 'Beerhouse' (Hooch Hard), and a Tommyknockers Strawberry Creme soda that I imbibed while pondering John 14:6 (which was imprinted on the label) while Brad choked down a reportedly yucky Almond Creme by the same vendor. At least the Chocolate Cowtail cheered him up, though.

Slow Qwest DSL here is killing me, but at least we're connected. We enjoyed some characteristic pink Breast Cancer awareness M&M's - two shades of pink, in fact. Our cheap little podcast recorder didn't survive it's first day in Boise, as a critical drop on our new driveway spelled death to the small black little handheld device. =(

We picked up a rocking chair at DI, and we also unloaded 9 bags worth of old clothes there, too, that we hauled up here with us for some reason. (Our old rocking chair also didn't make the move.) I saw Pat Poyfair (from high school) at church on Sunday. It was truly a fluke deal, since it was our first day in our new ward, and he was just visiting from Utah. Serendipitous. Becky has been enjoying our new back patio, which now sports yards and yards of sidewalk chalk drawings and tic-tac-toe games. I enjoyed a wonderful lunch recently at Highlands Hollow Brewhouse. Very tasty.   =)