It appears that Microsoft will be unleashing 6 versions of Windows Vista (the next version of Windows). That should make it simple for the purchasing public. (Not!) In better news, it seems that chocolate is good for your health, but only for men. Sorry, ladies.   =(

In lame news, the on/off button on my Gillette M3 Power razor broke (it's stuck in the 'on' position). Thus, to shut it off, I have to remove the battery. Super lame, especially since it's fairly new - just bad luck, I suppose. Guess I'll be trying the new 5-bladed Fusion next... Stay tuned.

I finally broke into the top 50 (of the highest-ranking) Oil Fight players! I also heard the coolest cello rondo ever, by Ethan Winer - the entire multi-part song was composed, played, recorded, and filmed by one guy - on one instrument (including percussion)! UPDATE: Looks like his site has been slashdotted for the moment, but you might try it in a couple of days.

Miscellaneous items in the past 2 days: we filed our tax returns (didn't owe on Federal, owed a tiny bit on State); we visited both the downtown Boise library and the Caldwell branch library; I tried some wonderful Frankenberry cereal; we surpassed 75k miles on the car; Mist made a million copies at Kinko's/FedEx; and theNug got an RSS feed!

Also, I listened to the Big Head Toddcast and their Monster songs; we listened to some catchy instrumental music by the band "Mend" at work; we got a new hide-a-bed couch for the living room; and actor Don Knotts passed away.

I have recently tried out the Tor/TorCP/Privoxy trio of software (Tor stands for The Onion Router). Very cool! I did, however, discover that the SwitchProxy extension for Firefox doesn't always work correctly. Lame - can you say "uninstall"?!!

Well, I was off by one: Sasha Cohen won the Silver, not the Gold, but still a wonderful performance. Arakawa from Japan won the Gold, and Slutskaya from Russia won the Bronze.

Google has another new service: Google Page Creator. Hmmmmm, guess I'll have to check it out. I did see that they were swamped, though, and had stopped handing out any new accounts last night.

Well, iTunes has now joined McDonald's: over 1 billion served! My disdain for iTunes aside, it's still cool to see a new business model thrive and serve a billion customers in less than two years.

Know any Filipinos willing to painlessly donate bone marrow? A life depends on it!

I think Hollywood should do a sequel to "The Cutting Edge" (the toe-pick/hockey movie from 1992), and have Sasha Cohen be the daughter of Moira Kelly and D. B. Sweeney (Douglas Dorsey) from part one, and detail her progress through her training to winning the Gold at the 2006 Olympics in Torino. Good idea, huh?!! (And I get 0.25% of all the profits!) You heard it here first...

In more IE 7 beta 2 testing, I've noticed that folder view for FTP sites doesn't work, which means that FTP file uploads through the browser don't work yet (but downloads do). Also, authenticated FTP login is tricky (you are not prompted), but there is a workaround. (See the official IE7b2 release notes.)

We enjoyed watching Sasha Cohen move into first place in the Olympic Women's Figure Skating short program tonight. Flawless! It was also nice to learn the incredible family story of U.S. bobsled star, Vonetta Flowers.

We watched "Sinbad - Legend of the Seven Seas" (2003; Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michelle Pfeiffer), the animated film, on VHS last night. Nice.

In more of the literally daily bad news for Mac users, an "extremely critical" security hole in OS X and Safari was discovered today dealing with ZIP archives, where a Mac user could become affected simply by visiting a website. We should see a virus taking advantage of this tomorrow. Ouch.

Two more new pieces of Mac OS X malware discovered yesterday: Inqtana.B and Inqtana.C. That brings the total up to 4 new Mac virii in the past 5 days. There's also a new virus for Linux systems, as well: Mare.D. Not a good week for Unix-based OSes.

I hope Bode Miller does better in his remaining Olympic alpine skiing race. Poor guy.

My mommy made me a new blanket. I love my new blanket. It's a cool Estrella, Dora, and Diego blanket.


Dora and Diego are playing soccer. Love, Becky

Misti whipped up some wonderful homemade biscuits from scratch, along with some exceedingly tasty Southeastern Mills Old Fashioned Gravy for breakfast today. Mmmmm.

She at first also tried their Country Biscuits, but they turned out a bit nasty, so she tossed 'em. Can't beat homemade.

We visited Great Clips yesterday and all got haircuts except for Jared. I do believe this was Becca's very first actual salon haircut. She was excited, and seemed to enjoy the visit.

A friend of mine at work, Dan DeLuca, is in a band named the SuperVapors. A recent interview of his was published in Thrive weekly. Check it out.

I saw the most amazing art site a couple of weeks ago, called Sand Fantasy. It's truly fantastic, check it out!

Despite the mostly peaceful Haitian elections on February 7, there was bound to be some tampering of ballots or deliberate miscounts or something, and there was. Ex-president René Préval, however, was the leading candidate by a wide margin, although not initially a majority of total votes. Ex-president Leslie Manigat, on the other hand, trailed far behind, garnering only 12%. There was an uproar, of course, because there were 120,000 void ballots and 85,000 blank ones that had surfaced. Accident? I think not. Préval has been declared the winner, nonetheless, without a runoff election - with a final 51% of the vote. Congratulations!

It was fairly weird that the new Adobe Reader 7.0.7 update required two reboots.

Well, it's no secret that Apple has been looking bad over the past few days. They've now found the second Mac OS X worm in 2 days! (The first was Leap.A spread by iChat, and the second was Inqtana.A spread via Bluetooth.) Looks like Mac security was a fallacy after all...

We had, unfortunately, more DNF's (Did Not Finds) than caches today, but here are the three we did manage to find:

Hidden Haven
Hole in the Wall
Park it !!! Ride It !!!

Well, in absurd news, Firefox's horrible memory hoggishness turns out to be a "feature". Classic. Since when did caching 8 webpages require a gig of RAM? What a crock.

We acquired two new bottlecaps for Becca this afternoon: Refresco Goya Cola Champagne soda, and Sidral Mundet Apple soda. Both tasty, too, y hecho en México.

Have you heard about Amazon's Mechanical Turk yet? It's stuff that computers can't do, so they ask humans to do them and report the results back to them for processing. Very cool idea, and you get paid for it, to boot.

Ever wondered about podcasts, but were afraid you couldn't participate because you didn't have an iPod? Well, worry no more: no iPod required!

Speaking of music, I think it sucks that Myspace Music videos won't play with a Firefox/Windows Media Player combination. Lame. Speaking of Myspace, the musician "Bill" now has a website (as opposed to just a Myspace Music band page). Cool.

I found another cool podcast transcription service, Castingwords. It's very cool to see this new type of service come about. For Valentine's Day last night, we celebrated with a heart-shaped pizza from Idaho Pizza:



Here are some IE 7 beta observances I've made recently:

1. I like the built-in ClearType font scaling and smoothing, as well as the wonderful zoom capabilities. (Much better than Firefox!)
   
   
2. I don't like that some RSS feeds (including vBulletin RSS 1.0 feeds) won't display correctly in IE 7, but will just fine in both Firefox and IE 6. Question: is the problem only with 1.0 feeds - 2.0 feeds seem to be working just fine...? UPDATE: No, also some 2.0 feeds with certain doctypes won't display.
   
   
3. Blogger's homepage looks completely wacked in IE 7.
   
   
4. I don't like that the toolbars aren't movable/configurable yet. Note to MS developers: make sure that all the toolbars can be combined side-by-side into one bar, like in IE 6.

Dick Cheney's shotgun-faced friend had a mild heart attack. Does the fun never end for him?! Poor guy.   =(

Well, I've been doing some testing on the new IE 7 Beta 2 browser - I like it for the most part, but I've noticed at least one problem with it displaying an RSS feed that displays just fine in both IE 6 and Firefox 1.5. Hmmmm.

Jump for joy, people, it's Patch Tuesday - yeah! Oh, yeah, Happy Valentine's Day, too - you LOVE patch tuesday!   =)

New music I like:

The Veronicas (coming out with a new album today)
The SuperVapors (just entered the Podsafe Music Network today)

You know, one of the great things about Windows Live (Live.com) is that it actually feels live - when you post a new blog entry, it shows up in Windows Live (via RSS) quickly. I can't say the same for Start.com, 2rss.com, ItsAStart.com, and some others in the RSS services category.

Joy of joys, our ward split tonight, and while we're technically in the same ward, it's at a new building, a new time, with a new bishop, and with new people, so... we're yet again in a new ward - the 3rd time in 6 months!

I had the pleasure of catching Shaun "The Flying Tomato" White winning the gold medal in men's snowboarding (half pipe) tonight. Very cool. Here's a weird bumper sticker we saw in the parking lot yesterday:



Our 'scubacast' from yesterday is a quick carcast that Becca did while we drove around. The sound quality was so bad, though, being recorded in the car with a crappy microcassette recorder, that I tried using Audacity's built-in filters to try and eliminate some of the background noise. The result? It sounds like it was recorded underwater. Tune in here:

Show #: 23  
Length: 1 minute, 30 seconds
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Size: 1.39 MB

I installed the new uBrowser 3-D web browser (version 1.0.1). Interesting, but I'm not sure how it's [currently] useful. I suppose this could be cool in the future or something...

We watched with great interest the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italia. Very extravagant!

We found five caches today:

Mall Mania
Road Block
pumped
Elements
You Gotta Be Kidding

I viewed "Ancient Mysteries - New Investigations of the Unsolved: Tomb of the Gods, The Great Pyramids of Giza" on VHS a few days ago, but was actually lulled to sleep by the production. Sigh. I did, however, enjoy a Kern's Pineapple Coconut Nectar today, mmmmm.

We've been watching "Ernest Goes To Africa" (1997; Jim Varney) over the past few days - the kids love it!

I was pleased to hear that the Haitian elections went forward in peace.

I finally found a person online (Alicia from Podtranscript.com) who claims to know what the "P.O.D." in Apple's iPod and "podcasts" stands for: "the 'POD' in podcast [and iPod] stands for Portable On Demand." Mystery solved!

Cool new tunes heard today on C.C. Chapman's Accident Hash podcast:

"Throwing Stones" by Tourist
"Patra" by Les Bigos (from Poland!)


Join my army in the fight to control the world's oil supplies!
Oh, did I mention that I'm really kickin' butt at my new favorite online RPG, Oilfight!?! Feel free to click this link once every 12 hours... (hint, hint - it scores me points; click the link, fill in the captcha, then click 'submit' to visit my 'recruitment center'; you don't have to join if you don't want to play, but certainly feel free if you do! You'll score me points whether you join or not!)

Speaking of fights, have you checked out Songfight.org yet? Several weird topics are assigned each week, and musicians then compose, perform, record, and upload an original song in MP3 format, then we all vote for our favorites! New topics each week!

We found the following nine caches yesterday:

Another Cache and Dash 2
King Middleton
Middleton Townsite
Hey, There Should Be A Cache Here
"Oh Grate!"
Lake Ustick
McVideo
Neerpaichum
A Tribute to Cachehoard

Before that, though, we ate a nice breakfast at Mr. V's Restaurant in Caldwell. Very tasty. On an unrelated note, here's a funny website about a serious subject. Oh, and at one of the caches, I spotted the Haitian flag waving:



Becky's 'singingcast' from last night is a collection of short songs sung by Becky, including an original in which she laments not having any friends... How sad!! Listen here:

Show #: 22  
Length: 5 minutes, 16 seconds
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Size: 4.83 MB

I finished listening to "Shock Wave" by Clive Cussler on abridged audiobook today. Very cool story. We also found the "Wally Lights The Way" cache tonight while going to the store.

New music heard at work:

"Idaho" by Nerina Pallot
"Clocks" by Coldplay

I think it's funny that there's a band named "Belle & Sebastian", and there was, of course, the children's TV show with the same name. I'd be willing to bet that they stole their name from the show they grew up watching... UPDATE: Yes, they named their band after the show (although not necessarily the 1984 anime version - there was an older, original French version).

We found two virtual caches tonight:

Book em Dano
The Ultimate

and learned a smidgen of local history in the process.   =)

We finished reading Jeremiah last night - finally! On to his Lamentations...

I just today polished off a brick of "Harry and David" medium cheddar cheese that I received for Christmas. I also tried some Wild Berry EMS Hydro Energy Drink this afternoon - not bad.

Firefox 1.5.0.1 came out today. And get this - the upgrade went smoothly - finally! Good times.



I viewed a cool PBS program tonight (albeit on DVD), entitled "Idaho: A Portrait". Since we now live here, I figured it can't hurt to know a little about the place...

After visiting the store tonight, we arrived back at home with two new beverages to try: Dean's Skinny Cow fat-free chocolate milk, and Topo Chico strawberry soda. Becky and I decided upon the soda because it sported a bottlecap that she didn't yet have. =)

We've been watching "Kronk's New Groove" (2005; Tracey Ullman, Eartha Kitt, David Spade, John Goodman) on DVD over the past few days. A good sequel to the original. Can you believe that January is already over!? Crazy. Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Coretta Scott King) passed away yesterday in Mexico.

I started playing the online roleplay game, Oil Strike. It looks to be pretty fun, but since I've only just started, I haven't got the hang of it yet.

As you may remember, I'm running the BOINC distributed computing client at home, and I've finally reached a milestone of sorts - I've finally completed a Climateprediction.net workout (WU)! One of the "sulphur_cycle 4.19" WU's was completed this morning. It only took 1185 hours, 28 minutes, 43 seconds of CPU time! I started this particular WU back in November 2005, and it took a little over 60 days, instead of the 45-50 days I predicted in my Nov. 29th post. This happened because I ended up putting BOINC on a schedule, for only 22 hours per day (instead of 24), so that my RAID array synchronization could run in the wee hours unhindered. 60 straight days of computing on one file - and who says computers are fast?!!