Last Boring Post of 2006

Instead of any great, lasting, earth-shattering news, 2006 will slip quietly into memory, and 2007 will silently dawn upon us. The following blogworthy items from the past few days are certainly nothing too exciting, but need to be mentioned, nonetheless. Here goes...

It seems that I experienced some tasty, new food and drink items over the holidays, including some Romano's Italian Soda (creamy strawberry flavor), some Perugina Spicchi candy (Al Gusto Di Limone flavor), and some Cott Premium Black Cherry Soda ("It's Cott To Be Good!").

In addition, I seem to have consumed quite a bit of dark chocolate over the past week, too, including a delicious Terry's Dark Chocolate Orange, some Hershey's Dark Kisses, and some delightful Valor 70% cacao premium dark sugar-free (sweetened with maltitol, acesulfame k, and aspartame) chocolate from Spain. I had to chuckle at the hilarious labeling on the latter, however:

"It Is Not A Low Calorie Food - No Es Un Alimento Bajo En Calorias"

"Excess Consumption May Cause A Laxative Effect. - Un Consumo Excesivo Puede Tener Efectos Laxantes."

"Keep In A Cool, Dry And Smellfree Place. - Mantener En Lugar Fresco, Seco Y Alejado De Olores."

We unfortunately didn't get to see Chatell and her family since we came back from Oregon a little sick and didn't want to pass along any illness.

We did manage to watch some quality films recently, including "The Private Eyes" (1981; Don Knotts, Tim Conway), "The Gods Must Be Crazy II" (1989), "Clue^®" (1985; Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Lesley Ann Warren, Eileen Brennan), "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (2005; Tilda Swinton), "Daylight" (1996; Sylvester Stallone, Viggo Mortensen), and "Love Comes Softly" (2003; Katherine Heigl), all on fullscreen or widescreen DVD. Whew!

I also recently tried out the portableapps version of ClamWin AV. I downloaded it, unpacked it on my iPod, and ran it on itself - first thing it does is crash. Lame.

Boring Christmas Cheesecake

We attended our Christmas party at Church last weekend - it was a great dinner (and cheesecake - mmmmmm), and a fun time chatting with the Boring family (that's their last name, not their status - LOL).

The kids and Mist have been mildly sick over the past few days. Cough cough. Not horribly, though. We upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.1 recently, which fixed some security holes.

In stat updates, we recently surpassed 92,000 miles on the car, and BodySpace now has over 24,000 active users.

We're excited to see both Miren Mattson and her family and Chatell Wallace and her family over the next few days. Chatell's family will be here in town visiting some of her husband's side of the family, so that's an unexpected yet welcome Christmas treat!   =)

Random Computing Annoyances

Windows Media Player 11 doesn't play well embedded in Firefox 2.0. (It's fine in Internet Explorer, however.) In Firefox, embedded media players often lose their toolbars (they appear initially, but disappear moments later or when clicked), thus rendering them unusable. In addition, the toolbar nearly always "floats up" when it does work. Neither one of these bugs happen in IE 6 or 7. Lame.

I was pleased as punch to notice that Firefox 2.0 fixed the annoying "can't search in a textarea" bug that older versions had, which is nice, but Firefox 2.0 introduced the even-more-annoying "clicking a link jumps you to the top of the page instead of following the link" bug. Lame.

Thunderbird Portable 1.5.0.8 doesn't do well with more than just a few RSS feeds - it gets really slow (to the point of being unusable). It also isn't very reliable with Usenet newsgroup posting. 1.5.0.8 did fix an annoying problem with displaying newsgroup messages that was quite a problem in the older 1.5.0.5 (replying to a message would not allow you quote a previous message or even display it), but it's still not completely right.

And another thing - Thunderbird doesn't truly display plain text, even on the plain text (stripping out all HTML) setting. Some of the text is bold and some isn't. (There is no bold in plain text.) Thunderbird also seems to unexpectedly close sometimes (albeit rarely) when working with newsgroups that have a large number (roughly 5,000 or more) of messages in them (like "microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general" - LOL). Frustrating.

UPDATE: Thunderbird will close unexpectedly every time if you're using newsgroups and use the "click here to remove all expired messages" feature. It then opens up a second window (weird in itself), and then both windows will disappear moments later. Yeah, that's quality programming for ya. (Not.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another bug with Firefox (2.0.0.0 & 2.0.0.1) is that if Firefox gets a 404 error, it just doesn't display anything. The user has no way of knowing that the page couldn't be found, it just sits there and doesn't update anything - you're still sitting on the last page you were at. This is very deceiving, as the page displayed is not what's at the URL in the address bar.   =/

Zeus's Christmas Target Peach

I watched Questar's "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" on VHS, courtesy of the Caldwell Public Library. To sum up, the 7 wonders were:

    The Great Pyramid of Giza
    The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
    The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
    The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
    The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
    The Colossus of Rhodes
    The Pharos (Lighthouse) at Alexandria

I enjoyed a Peach Treaty at Kèva Juice not too long ago - very tasty.   =)

I currently enjoying some Ken's Steakhouse Lite Raspberry Walnut Vinaigrette salad dressing. Very tasty, also.

We attended a multidenomination church choir for their community Christmas program in Emmett at the Church of the Nazarine. It wasn't as well done as we had hoped it would be, but kudos go out to them for their effort and good intentions.

We tried out the new Nampa exit last night (the Target exit). Very nice. =)

I Love Heart Tests

Well, after some initial excitement a couple of weeks ago when I fainted (blacked out) after exercising and then jumped into a hot shower, things are back to normal.

I got to exercise our medical insurance plan a bit and have some tests run on my heart. I'm glad to report that everything's 100% normal.

I had the following tests performed:

• Electrocardiogram (EKG/ECG)
• Echocardiogram (TTE/cardiac ultrasound)
• Cardiac Stress Test (Stress ECG)

Diagnosis? A simple case of Vasovagal Syncope. Phew!   =)

Jerry's Snowtruck Juice

We had a wonderful visit in Reno for Thanksgiving. We stayed and visited with my family, and also got to spend some quality time with some of Misti's family, too. I seem to have mysteriously acquired 3 new seasons of Seinfeld to boot.   =)

The other day, we enjoyed some very tasty Kèva Juice. Having now tasted Jamba Juice and Kèva Juice back-to-back, a taste comparison was easy. And the winner is? Kèva Juice! (It's sweeter than Jamba. Don't know if it's as healthy, though.)

We got our little red truck out of the shop finally, and it drives very nicely now. And we have officially already used it to haul stuff (both for ourselves and for other people)!

Last night, we experienced the first snowfall of the season here in the Boise area. The drive home from work was fun (NOT!) - everyone was driving 20 m.p.h. on the freeway, which I felt was too cautious - 40 was reasonable considering the conditions, and if everyone would've been driving 40, I would've been home twice as fast! But alas... dang Idaho drivers. Actually, I'm spoiled because of our brand-new tires - maybe everyone else's tires were bald.   =)