March 2007 Archives

Sadly, we watched the last episode of Firefly tonight. It really is too bad that the show didn't go on. Oh well.

We have decided that, due to the very racy nature of several scenes in various episodes, we will not be purchasing this box set. The movie had nothing like what the TV series did; go figure. It used to be the other way around. I feel so old-fashioned. Or maybe just old. Have I mentioned that in May I'll pass my 30th birthday?

This weekend promises to be enjoyable. Jamie is going to her quilting workshop tomorrow morning and when that is finished she and I (and the baby) are going out for an overnight away from the house and older kids. A very gracious friend of ours will be holding down the fort back home. It is so nice to have friends when you aren't living close enough to family. What a blessing!

Tonight at the dinner table my 5yo asked me what the words on my shirt meant. He can read pretty much anything now, so the world is his oyster. And as for Jamie and I hiding conversations in plain sight by spelling words to each other -- yeah, that's pretty much gone the way of the Dodo in our house.

I explained to him that "pachyderm" is another word for elephant, and that the team I played for in college was represented by elephants. He didn't get it.

The T-shirt in question is the 1997 Rose-Hulman Ultimate Frisbee club team shirt. It is one of my oldest T-shirts and lately has been used as an undershirt to go with my uniforms at work. Tomorrow I'll be wearing an even older shirt -- a bright red model sporting the geekarific phrase "Rose-Hulman Mathematics" that is a badge of honor for all who wear it.

My absolute oldest T-shirt will be 14 years old this year. It is from the 1993 Mennonite Youth Conference in Philadelphia, PA. It is the oldest piece of clothing I own and it is in fairly good shape, mainly due to my battles with weight gain. It was too small for me when I got it; sometime during college, it started fitting again, and it saw extended wear for about 4-5 years from 1999 to 2003 or 2004; and then it got too small again. It is starting to get bigger again, and that's a good thing.

T-shirts are one of the great institutions associated with college life. Most of my favorite T-shirts are college-era relics. Every one of them carries dear memories with it. Like the 1996/1997 Skinner Hall shirt with the ransom note asking for $10 million or a goat in exchange for access to Bigfoot from campus. Priceless. Got any special T-shirts in your wardrobe? Talk amongst yourselves. I'm getting a little verklemmt.

I know that things are slow over on the 004um, and that people (other than me) are having babies and getting married and all that, but let's get back to reality here: we are more than halfway through March and I haven't heard a peep about Gamefest 2007 yet. I've posted on the 004um (a rarity, I'll admit) and now I've written this. The next step will be annoying emails to key parties. You've been warned.

Seven years isn't long enough for an event like Gamefest to last, if for no other reason than it is an excuse to get together from all over and enjoy sweet fellowship (and talk smack, of course -- but only in a loving truthful way). Gamefest VIII must take place!

On Saturday we took a day trip to somewhere in the middle of Missouri to visit a family we mostly know from cyberspace. We drove through a blizzard to get there after experiencing 70F weather 4 days earlier. By the time we left their house, after a splendid afternoon of conversation, pool, visiting their chickens, and lunch, the snow was pretty much gone. That's March in the Midwest in a nutshell.

So, our hostess made some yummy beef stew as the staple for the adults at lunch (there were 4 adults, 2 young adults, 6 children aged 2-7, and 1 infant present -- the children ate a homemade chicken noodle soup that looked equally tasty) along with homemade whole wheat bread (yeah, they are that kind of people). They set out some hot sauce for the adventurous soul to try out on the stew, if a soul was so inclined. Well, being an adventurous sort when it comes to eating, I decided to try the Insanity sauce. Except, of the three kinds they had out, it appeared to be the least hot, so I put 6 big drops in my little bowl of stew.

WOW! Now I'm no spicy hot connoisseur and I'm definitely not a hothead, but I've been trying out spicy dishes recently so I thought I was up to it. I did finish my stew, but my face was beat red, my nose was gushing, I was sweating, and my tongue was pretty well numb by the end of the experience. Needless to say, I won't be rushing out to buy my own bottle. However, I can recommend the Insanity sauce if you like hot sauce. This is way, way, way beyond Tabasco. Good stuff. :)

Yeah, so maybe I'm not going to be streaking much anymore. I thought I had a good thing going for a few days there but now we're more back to normal. Although, I do hope it will be more like two-years-ago normal than the past-18- months-type normal. That is to say, 2-3 posts per week instead of 2-3 posts per month.

We meet regularly (almost weekly) with two other families to fellowship and read through Scripture, and most weeks (lately) it has been on Thursday nights. We really enjoy our time with all of them and it is nice to learn from couples who are farther down the road we're on (lots of kids). Tonight our crew was a bit unruly, unfortunately. Somehow (I don't know how -- I was busy cleaning up a 3yo who had what we like to call a "potty training setback" and I missed the start of the conversation) the after-study-time topic became Monty Python sketches (I think it may have started with someone singing about Spam, but how that came up I really don't know). And someone (I won't name names) mentioned that the Argument Clinic sketch is available on YouTube. So, there it is. Enjoy!

We are making a lot of mayonnaise (relative to what we were producing before) and so my time at work has had to increase slightly. That's not a problem, but yesterday started way too early and when I got home it was all I could do to keep my eyes open until the kids went to bed. It didn't help that we had some out of town friends (the kind previously only known to us in cyberspace) stop by on Sunday night (which we expected) and end up spending the night (not expected, but not a problem). Long story short: I didn't get enough sleep Sunday night. So my old March streak is over.

My new streak starts today. Tonight we went to a Christian homeschool library in another St. Louis suburb. Some friends of ours volunteer there on Tuesday nights so we went to see them and check the place out. I got a book about Teddy Roosevelt. Hopefully I'll be able to make a good dent in it by the end of two weeks.

I have to get up early again tomorrow, so I'd better call it a night.

I ordered a Netgear Rangemax router to replace my old Netgear 802.11b router. I am hoping that it will resolve the issues I'm having with intermittent service to my MediaCenter PC.

I also reinstalled ZoneAlarm on my main computer. I think I'll stick with it for now. One thing that a new clean install has done is speed our computer up considerably. Good thing, too, because it was slowing to a crawl sometimes. We'll see what ZA does now.

This morning I went to a men's breakfast with pretty much the entire adult male population of our church. I was glad to have the time to do it. I have spent the rest of the day supervising the children playing outside (it's gorgeous spring weather here) and trying to fix our main computer.

So far, so good. I installed and partitioned the new hard drive, and installed and configured and updated Windows XP. So now it's time to start installing other programs, and I have a question.

I have a wireless firewall router (an old one which is next on my list of hardware to replace) and for the past 3 years I have been running ZoneAlarm on all my computers. My question (directed at Dave, Jacob, Slacka, Nagi, and any other computer/security types who read this blog) is, do I really need ZoneAlarm? My subscription is coming up again. Since I started using the router, it seems that ZoneAlarm has been pretty much useless (except for the anti-spam, which is nice). Would I be just as well off running XP's built-in firewall software and saving my money, or do I need a real software firewall to back up my router? I guess the real question is, how important is anti-virus software if you are running a firewall, and where can I get the most bang for my buck? I would like to run the same sofware on both desktops and the laptop, so I want something (like ZA) with a subscription that covers multiple units.

ZoneAlarm seems to slow performance considerably. Other than that, I have been pleased with it. Any and all comments/suggestions (including picthes for other firewall/antivirus software) are welcome. Thanks in advance!

Somebody is trying to get a piece of my action, so to speak. My 3yo has told my wife that he wants to marry her when he grows up. I believe that my 5yo made similar proposals when he was that age.

My 5yo and 4yo pretend to be married all the time. We have to remind them that they cannot, in point of fact, get married. At least when they pretend to be married they treat each other nicely.

It's interesting to see how children view marriage, and how it changes as they grow older. I only hope that what they see in our marriage will serve them well in the relationships they form when they grow up. Only by the grace of God. But then, that's pretty much everything.

One of the movies we enqueued[0] via Total Access was Facing the Giants. If you don't know, it is an unabashedly Christian story about a high school football team. I enjoyed it and the sappy part of me was tearing up at the end. It is encouraging to see movies like this being made.

The good: faith in God and in His Scripture is portrayed positively -- well, more than that, it is central to the story.

The bad: I didn't like that everything turned out perfect at the end. I mean, I did, but it didn't seem realistic to me.

The ugly: well, there isn't really an ugly. The acting wasn't the sharpest but it wasn't atrocious (as in Kirk Cameron in Left Behind) either.

[0] If this isn't a word, don't credit the coinage to me -- I got it from Jacob Ansari.

We decided to go with a "1 movie at a time" option with Blockbuster Total Access. We figure for $7.99 between the movies mailed to us and being able to use the mailer for a free rental, we will still be able to rent 4-5 movies a month -- one for every weekend. And that's plenty.

With our last mailers, I rented One Night with the King, Lady in the Water, and a comedy that I wouldn't rent again if I had known how crude it would be.

One Night with the King was amazing. I particularly appreciated how overtly religious it was -- in contrast to the source material, the biblical book of Esther, which makes no mention of God at all. The movie itself was well acted and spectacularly produced (in my layman's opinion).

I enjoyed Lady as much as I have enjoyed all of director Shyamalan's other movies, which is to say moderately to highly. There was nothing in it to dissuade me from anticipating his next offering.

I have more to write, but my wife is pressuring me to come to bed so we can watch another episode of Firefly. Life is so hard.

The new hard drive for my old computer arrived today. I bought a 160G Seagate 7200 RPM hard drive to replace the 40G Maxtor that came with the computer. The bearings are going out on the Maxtor, which may or may not be related to the recent crash. At any rate, I decided that if I was going to have to reload Windows XP, I certainly wasn't going to put it on a hard drive that was on its last legs. 5 years is a pretty good life span for a hard drive that saw as much use as the one on our primary computer.

Besides which, it felt kind of silly to have a portable media player with more storage capacity than the computer on which we keep all of our music and picture files.

The 160G hard drive cost me $80. That's $0.50 per gigabyte of storage. Amazing. So now I know what I'll be doing with my free time this weekend.

We here at Soulfood are going to try and string together a nice little run of consecutive posts. Four and counting. . .it's been a while since Soulfood has been this regular. :)

Speaking of regular, my wife has managed to (mostly) potty train child number 3, thus reducing the number of children in diapers in our household from 3 to 2 (again). And there was much rejoicing.

We got the SSN for Daddy's latest deduction today, which means that I can finally get the (bigger) refund that I so little deserve. But what are you going to do? My net contribution to society is still positive. And I figure that if the tax system has to be broken, it might as well benefit me. :)

Unfortunately, I was counting on the guvmint bureaucracy to be too slow and I decided to file while the filing was good, without Daddy's latest deduction. (I was a little late getting to the SS office with the proper documentation, and the boilerplate states that it takes approximately 12 weeks to get a new SS card.) Now that it is early March and I have the SSN in hand, I'm thinking that was a miscalculation. But it gives me a chance to expand my understanding of the tax system as I will file my first ever Form 1040X: Amended Federal Return. As I discovered tonight, this form cannot be e-filed. Bah. However, the money involved is significant enough that I will jump through a hoop or two to get it. :)

Monday, February 12th, around 7 AM I drank my last cup of coffee. Monday night I became violently ill, as detailed in an earlier post. Tuesday morning the thought of coffee repulsed me. I felt like nothing so much as hung over, although I've never been hung over since I've never been drunk. But I digress (as usual).

Wednesday morning I didn't even think about coffee. I was still feeling terrible, but it didn't occur to me that some of what I was feeling might be caffeine withdrawal until my dear wife suggested that I drink some tea on Wednesday evening. So I drank some green tea, and immediately the pounding in my head subsided.

So now, instead of 2-3 cups of coffee, I drink one cup of green tea with mint evey morning. I will probably still drink a cup of coffee every now and again for pleasure, but it is no longer my caffeine-delivery vehicle of choice. Mmmm, green tea.

As a worker in the industrial food processing business, I receive a couple of daily email digests about the state of the food industry. I have noticed in the past couple of weeks a new doublespeak phrase: "quick-service." It is used to describe restaurants like McDonald's. Of course, it's no coincidence that "fast food" has recently become a dirty word in the health industry. I expect the MSM will pick up on the new phrase soon enough, and you'll be expected to forget that "quick-service" food is no better for you than "fast food." Consider yourself warned!

I recently entered my fifth year of blogging, and I forgot to mark the occasion. This blog was started on February 28th, 2003. I'm too busy to look up the stats right now, but thanks to everyone who has kept reading. Hopefully year five will be more productive than year four, in which my post count was suppressed by the crazy amounts of hours I had to put in at work during startup.

I fixed my furnace today, then cleaned up the garage. Now I'm working on fixing my 'puter. Today's post is brought to you by our laptop. I have thus far resisted telling my wife "I told you so," but I don't think it's necessary. The benefits of having secondary (and tertiary) computers become intuitively obvious when the primary computer fails. :) Now if I can just convince her that we need a new primary computer. . .

This will probably end up being long. A lot has happened since the last time I posted.

First, we spent a nice extended weekend with my parents in Goshen three weekends ago. We hadn't been to Goshen in nearly a year, and I wish we could have stayed longer. I hope that next time we will be able to make it a 4-day weekend.

On our way home, we stopped in Indianapolis to lunch with some friends we hadn't seen in a while and enjoyed their hospitality. Given the number of friends we have in the Indy area, I hope to impose upon the hospitality of others on future trips to and from Goshen (Indy friends, beware!). :)

The night we came home, I got sick. Really sick. I came down with the chills, climbed into bed, and woke up sometime later with a fever of over 105F. I probably should have gone to the emergency room just then but I'm a stupid man. Sometime during the night my body violently expelled pretty much everything I had in me nutrient-wise. I spent the next 3 days recuperating and the following week made my first trip to the doctor in a couple of years. They couldn't find anything wrong with me. Three weeks later I'm still feeling weak. Whatever bit me hurt me badly. Ugghh. And no, it wasn't peanut butter.

I recently acquired a 60Gig Toshiba Gigabeat personal media player. So far I'm pleased. I don't mind using MS Windows Media Player 11 (much). The battery life hasn't really been tested yet, since I don't use it much while traveling. Mostly it stays plugged in at my desk outputting to my computer speakers. I haven't tried watching a movie on it yet, either. Like I said, so far I'm pleased with my choice.

On Monday, our primary computer (a 5yo Dell Dimension) bit the dust. Blue screen of death and all that jazz. It's been flaky for the last couple of months. The BSOD said something about the registry file being corrupted. After I get my furnace working properly again I'll work on salvaging what I need to from our hard drive and then try reinstalling XP. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm appreciating one of the often-overlooked benefits of using a wireless router: namely, when the computer goes down the internet connection lives on. Jamie has been making do with the laptop, and my custom built Media Center PC is doing just fine, thank-you (that's where I'm at now).

The draft inducer on our furnace shot craps a week or so ago. Tomorrow I'll be working on replacing it and un-bypassing the safety I had to jump out to keep our house heated until I could get around to repairing it. So that's my weekend; repairing a furnace, and repairing a computer. Oh, and going on a date with my wife! My mother-in-love is here this weekend and she's giving us a night out. Exciting!