Finished listening to "Split Second" by David Baldacci on abridged audiobook last night. Very cool. Misti made the best "Deluxe Chicken Breasts" (Great American Recipes, Group 5, Card 7) for dinner two nights ago. Mmmm, very tasty. Terri Shiavo finally passed away today. Very sad.

Okay - lazy American pronounciation test: say the number "20" out loud. Did you end up pronouncing it "twenty" (twen-tee), or "twunee" (t'won-knee)? I find myself pronouncing words very lazily like this all the time, and I'm not happy about it. It sounds like I'm slaughtering the language. I hear others around me doing it as well, and it actually sounds quite comical at times. My favorite is the word "Atlantis" - it's "aT-LAN-Tiss" (enunciate the T's), not "ad-lan-iss" or "Alanis".

Heather, Bonny, and Darlene came over for dinner last night, and they wipped up some tasty indian tacos (frybread). For dessert we enjoyed Misti's wonderful chocolate cake with minute fudge icing with some Dreyer's Grand Vanilla Bean ice cream. Mmmm.

Watched "Mother" (1996; Albert Brooks, Debbie Reynolds, Rob Morrow, Lisa Kudrow) last night on VHS. Funny. Upgraded our older Adobe Reader 6.0.2 (Win98) systems to Adobe Reader 6.0.3.

Funny/cool sites I've visited recently:

Mouse Pad Couch
GUIdebook
MP3 information
Freecorder
DirCaster
ID3-TagIT
Belarc Advisor
RAM Basics
Mac Sucks

Listening to the following on CD this week:

"Belly of the Sun" by Cassandra Wilson
"Prelude - The Best of Charlotte Church" by Charlotte Church
"Die Letzten Leiden Des Erlösers" by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Jared and Becca loved their Easter baskets this year. Jared's had a racing car, whilst Becca's had a cell phone & credit card Barbie doll. We also had a small Easter egg hunt inside with a map, which Becca found very enjoyable. We also spent a wonderful time eating a delicious ham dinner at my folks' place, and thereafter playing 'Golden 10' with a deck of Rook cards.

I accompanied the ward choir on "There Is a Green Hill Far Away" on Sunday, a very beautiful hymn with a particularly awesome piano arrangement.

I got a new toothbrush: Oral B Sensitive Extra Soft Compact 35. Did you know that clinical research proves that a new toothbrush can remove 30% more plaque than one 3 months old? I also tried some Clearly American Blackberry Apple soda. Mmmmm.

Found the 'Let it Idle,Wild man' [sic] cache this morning, then we enjoyed the Kiwanis Club amusement rides (also at Idlewild Park) and a grape sno-cone. Jared's favorite was the gunnysack slide, while Becky's was the merry-go-round.

Misti made "Uncle Dave's Noodle Bake" (Great American Recipes, Group 10, Card 34) last night for dinner. Not bad. We enjoyed some Carl's Jr. today for lunch, but I had to laugh that the "Low Carb Six Dollar Burger" is simply a burger with no bun. They just wrap the burger in lettuce and give it to you. Truly bizarre.

Cleaned and vacuumed out the interior of our car today - there had to be at least a pound of old french fries, Goldfish, Chocolate Donuts, and M&M's in there. WOW!

I tried some Sam's Choice Clearly American Strawberry Sparkling Flavored Beverage. Okay, is it just me, or is that really too long of a name for a product? Why didn't they just call it "soda" instead? Anyway, it's caffeine-free, calorie-free, sodium-free, sugar-free, and carb-free; sweetened with aspartame. Not bad tasting.

Changing B.C. and A.D. to B.C.E. and C.E. is just dumb. Reading a little 'Franglais' is always fun.

I don't like how a lot of people do their podcasting. The RSS feeds they provide sometimes don't actually have a link to the MP3 file, so you have to visit the website to get the link - LAME. The good podcasters seem to include the MP3 link in the actual RSS post (as an item link) - allowing easy access to the audio, in addition to an RSS enclosure. I don't agree with RSS enclosures (attachments), because they are huge bandwidth hogs (each MP3 file is typically 8 to 12 MB). (I only want to stream the files I select, I don't want to download every single show automatically, especially if I'm not interested in the accompanying description.) The idea of having an item link for each item allows users to not have to mess with enclosures but still have easy access to the MP3 file, even with traditional RSS reader applications (not just podcast clients).

Found the 'UNR' cache at lunchtime today. Watched "View from the Top" (2003; Gwyneth Paltrow, Christina Applegate, Mike Myers, Candice Bergen, Rob Lowe, Kelly Preston) last night on DVD. Hilarious mention and depiction of Silver Springs, Nevada. Here's a good article on cell phone viruses and the differences between (and definitions of) 'bluejacking', 'bluesnarfing', 'bluetracking', and 'bluebugging'. 867-5309.

Becky recently finished watching the complete second season of "Spongebob Squarepants" on DVD. She just loves that show. We viewed "Hanging Up" (2000; Meg Ryan, Walter Matthau, Lisa Kudrow, Diane Keaton) a few nights ago on VHS, as well as "The Complete Guide to Geocaching" on DVD yesterday.

Misti made an "Easy Pork Chop Dinner" (Great American Recipes, Group 7, Card 23) last night. Tasty, indeed. I tried out some Armor All wipes for the car a couple of days ago - the dashboard and console are all shiny and slippery now as a result.

Misti and I celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary together a couple of nights ago. Wow, times flies! It doesn't seem that long, but then again, Becky is almost 4, and Jared's getting bigger each day. Becky has discovered baseball - she's always picking up a 'bat' (usually a stick or piece of a toy handle) and hitting toy balls around the house. She wears my Boy Howdy baseball cap on her head sideways, which is simply hilarious to see.

"Becky" is trying out the new Chocolate Lucky Charms cereal (she ended up not wanting to eat them as much as Jared and I do). Mmmmm. Interesting bills introduced recently in the Nevada Legislature: AB 246, AB 264, and AB 334.

I've enjoyed listening to the "Uncorked (At Sachem Farm)" original motion picture soundtrack on CD over the past few days. I especially love track #5, "Ross' Concert", which is all about his guitar solo in the movie. The music for the film was all composed by Jeff Danna. Misti managed to procure one of these limited edition CDs - we got number 1127 (out of only 3000 copies). Top notch, indeed.

Upgraded my copy of Firefox to 1.0.2. The funny thing about Firefox is that if the security-minded person unchecks the "Allow websites to install software" option, then the Firefox Software Update feature doesn't work... Kudos go out to British and Israeli police forces for stopping hackers from pulling off a 421 million dollar bank heist. I'm trying the new Diet Sprite Zero soda. Mmmm.

I predict the demise of all Mac's within the next few months. Hackers and worm/virus writers have started targetting Macintosh OS X computers, and since Mac users don't have the virus experience that the rest of us have, I predict that all their machines will succum to virus/worm attacks within the next few months and be rendered useless and therefore disappear from the 'Net completely. Apple, of course, is worried, as they've just recently patched a slew of OS X security flaws, but since consumers are always slow to patch their systems, I'm sure many a smug Mac user will get hit by these known attacks. Pretty soon you'll start seeing commercials about switching from Mac to a more secure operating system (probably SELinux or something).

Watched "Father's Day" (1997; Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Mel Gibson, Nastassja Kinski, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mark McGrath) on VHS two nights ago.

Went to Susanville today to visit Grandma Faye, and also found the following two caches:

Fast Food Toy Exchange
Your My Inspiration [sic]

There's a good, short article in today's RGJ about the lure of audiobooks.

Got an alignment and some new tires for the car yesterday at Reno Toyota (Mohawk Millenium Pluses - 185/65R14, rated for 60,000 miles). The old ones we bought two years ago (and 25,000 miles ago) were already shot. So much for Tires Plus's 50,000 mile warranty! Since then, I've heard nothing but horror stories from other people about Tires Plus, too. Add mine to the list.   =(

Got bit (like many others) by the recent Microsoft "KB891711" patch/startup executable (very strange for a MS security patch to always run an executable at startup) - had to disable it and fix the mess it left behind: the dreaded "incompatible version of the RPC stub" message in IE when using the Find feature. Despite what all the forums say, reverting to an older version of the oleaut32 file DOESN'T work. The only thing that fixes this is to install Windows Script 5.6. Lame.

Splenda gives me headaches, so I'm switching back to aspartame. Have you seen the new, free RSScalendar.com? Pretty slick. Mondrian 2.0 - it now has a frame:


Picked up "The Incredibles" fullscreen DVD last night at Wal-mart. I'm happy to see that Rated-R movies are less successful than PG and PG-13 movies. Misti made some wonderful Barbequed Chicken Breasts (Great American Recipes, Group 11, Card 1) for dinner two nights ago. Mmmm, tasty marinaded, grilled, moist chicken. =)

Currently listening to:

"Room For Squares" by John Mayer
"Serious Hits...Live!" by Phil Collins
"Mi Sangre" by Juanes

Found the "Another Micro In A Park" cache yesterday. Tried some new products last night: Sierra Mist Free diet soda, Wrigley's Extra Sour Green Apple sugarfree gum, Ocean Spray Cherry Craisens, and Promise Buttery Spread Fat Free. The first three are all excellent, but the 'Promise Fat Free' isn't as good as my old standby 'Take Control Light'.

Finished listening to Eric Van Lustbader's "The Bourne Legacy" (the 4th book in the Bourne series) today on audiobook. Excellent book, but it does start off a bit slow, and Van Lustbader does use too many instances of the word 'cadre', in my opinion. Other than that, though, it's very entertaining, and has an excellent ending.

I'm growing weary of Adobe's inability to release memory once their programs have been closed. The following processes are always left in memory after using their products: 'acrodist.exe', 'acrotray.exe', 'acrord32.exe', and 'acrobat.exe'. Why can't they properly close down like any other program does??

I was pleased to read about the new Sarah Winnemucca statue in Washington, D.C.

Watched "Never a Dull Moment" (1968; Dick Van Dyke, Slim Pickens, Jack Elam) on DVD yesterday evening. I thought, for some reason, that I'd never seen this before, but a few minutes into it I realized that I had. The funny thing about it, though, is that the DVD version has all the deleted scenes put back into the main movie, so it was a bit different (and longer) than the old VHS version we had previously seen.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea...? Becky has enjoyed watching the complete first season of Nickelodeon's "Spongebob Squarepants" cartoon series this past week (40 episodes on 3 DVDs, plus special features). Absorbant and yellow and porous is he!

Okay, here's a hilarious oxymoron I saw on Saturday:

Spent an enjoyable day out in the sunshine today. Visited Rainbow Ridge Park for awhile, then checked out the new Smith's grand opening and later visited the mall. Also found the following caches:

UFO Landing Site
Gone Fishin!
Mr. Smith's Phony Cache
Noble Quest (multi-cache)
HIDDEN HORSES IN WILD VALLEY

Happy 03-04-05! We watched "Honey" (2003; Jessica Alba, Missy Elliott, Lil' Romeo, Mekhi Phifer, Joy Bryant, Blaque, Tweet, Ginuwine, Jadakiss, Silkk, 3rd Storee) on fullscreen DVD last night. Liked it; toe-tapping hip-hop music.

Misti made a cool new recipe for dinner tonight: Hot Baked Seafood Salad sandwiches (Great American Recipes, Group 4, Card 13). Very tasty.

We watched "Paycheck" (2003; Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman) tonight on fullscreen DVD. Very cool.

The new Netscape 8.0 beta browser came out today. I found it cool that Eric Van Lustbader mentions a character 'scribbling hurried notes on a tablet computer' in "The Bourne Legacy". Reached the 6,500 mark on Seti@home today.

Watched "Secondhand Lions" (2003; Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick, Emmanuelle Vaugier) on DVD last night. Not bad.

Watched "Spiderman 2" (2004; Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe, Cliff Robertson) tonight on DVD. I like this sequel better than the first one.

Had an MD5 hash (checksum) yesterday on a file that actually started with 89502 (a local zipcode) - what are the odds? Slim, indeed.

My order of Girl Scout cookies came in yesterday: Iced Berry Piñatas with Real Strawberries. I was forewarned that they were nasty - but they were actually quite enjoyable.

New CDs I'm listening to that I borrowed from the Library Bus:

"The Chronicles of Life and Death" by Good Charlotte
"Cafe Olé" by Luis Villegas
"Rio" by Duran Duran
"Black and Blue" by The Gene Harris Quartet
"Lo Que Te Conté Mientras Te Hacias La Dormida" by "La Oreja de Van Gogh"

In the news, the latest Firefox/Mozilla vulnerability. The Tooso.B, Tooso.C, and Tooso.D trojans are making their rounds today, also.

Here's the first pane of the comic strip I drew during the Comic Strip Game the other night:


(Click on the image to view the whole 8-pane strip.) To explain, we each had 5 minutes to draw a comic, cartoon, or image that incorporated the five following terms or ideas: "Ewok dung", "buffalo skeleton", "mad cow", "fart filter", and "afro". These concepts were all drawn randomly out of a hat containing a much larger selection. Props to you if you can determine which one(s) was/were my suggestion(s)...

Despite the hype, NASA's World Wind 1.2e/1.3 program isn't as cool as it could be. Why is all the lettering fuzzy? And they need a 'zoom' button. It would also be nice to be able to rotate the globe on one axis only (and not both at the same time). It also runs slower than a dog. And their 'patch' for the server connection problem doesn't work...