October 2006 Archives

I took the following picture with my Palm Zire 72 this afternoon:

I tried to position the shopping cart from the store in whose parking lot this car was parked in between the two bumper stickers, which read: "Wal-Mart is a bad neighbor" and "Wal-Mart sucks the life out of your town."

To see the picture a little more clearly and appreciate the irony more deeply, follow the link below.

I'm just not a "hate Wal-Mart" kind of guy, I guess. And I find it particularly ironic how many people say they hate Wal-Mart but shop there anyway. So coming across this particular bifurcation was particularly delightful and I'm glad I had a camera with me.

Another postless week. . .I s'pose if there are any of you left you're used to it by now.

Things may get better soon. Or maybe worse. Work is entering the next phase -- from construction to production. Back to hairnets and beard snoods. Back to worrying about how things are running and how much money we're spending instead of just how much money we're spending. I have decided over the course of this project that I enjoy production way more than construction, so this is the good part.

We will make some mayonnaise this week *unless something goes horribly terribly wrong.* Since I can't think what that might be it's a good bet that it will happen this week. Maybe as soon as tomorrow afternoon.

But enough of work. We were fortunate enough to get to host Elizabeth Sobota this evening. She was attending a (work-related) conference in the area and was able to break away to spend some time with us tonight. Good fun. Thanks for stopping by, Elizabeth!

Speaking of the Indy crowd, congrats to Dave and Mel (heroes of the InterWeb, as Nagi says) on the birth of their firstborn, Emma. Yay for babies!

I stopped by the Zookeeper myspace site this evening to see if there was any news about an album (or something!). And bliss is this -- there was! Zookeeper's first EP is on its way to my house. Yippee skippy!

I'm too lazy to post links for any of the above tonight. I was not, however, too lazy to follow through on my craving for caramel popcorn. It is very yummy to my tummy.

Before I get too much more stupid with this post, I'm calling it a night. G'night!

I have used MusicMatch Jukebox as my audio player on my primary computer since I got my first Dell back in 2002. I liked the trial version enough to buy a full version when the trial expired, about 4 years ago. I have used it to rip thousands of MP3's from my personal CD collection. The only thing I don't like about it is that it organizes an album's files in alphabetical order, not in track order. It is a minor inconvenience.

Why do I have my personal CD collection ripped to MP3? Well, duh -- it's the portability, stupid. My PDA and my car stereo both play MP3's off of SD flash cards, and of course both of our desktops and our laptop are networked so that I can listen to anything anywhere in the house. It worked great.

Recently MusicMatch prompted me to get a free upgrade to a newer version. Should've read the fine print, I s'pose. As it turns out, this new version by default copy protects the MP3's when you burn them. So much for portability.

The long and short of it is that MusicMatch has fallen from my good graces. There may be a simple fix -- but it is sneaky and underhanded to change something like that without a big red flashing warning: "You won't be able to do anything with the music you own if you rip it using this software!" Bother it all.

Anybody have a suggestion for a good (cheap) audio player? Hatred of the Evil Empire aside, how does WMP shape up against the other players? Please discuss.

Have you ever wondered just what children think about? I had a friend in college who married a young man who was absolutely fascinated with what children think about. I told them "have some and you'll get a glimpse of it." Well here is one of those glimpses.

I just put the children down for naps today and I was still hearing some coughing coming from the monitor of the room that the almost 3 yo shares with the 20 month old. Well, I walk in and look at him on the bottom bunk and he is sitting up. I look over at the baby who is fast asleep. I tell may soon to be 3 year old, "you need to lay down and go to sleep." So I lean in a little bit to lay him down and I see 5 stuffed animals hanging from the slats of the top bunk above him. It was a hilarious picture! I almost burst out laughing but knew that would not be good for him. So I asked, "did you do this?" "Yeah I did," he replied. Oh my too funny.

Oh and yes, he is like his daddy as they were equally spaced with the same number of slats between each animal.

Maybe 5 is too many animals for him to be sleeping with?