Blogtree

I’m waiting here for some guys from Corp IT to show up, so I think I’ll goof off for a few minutes. This weekend I saw a post about blogtree.com. It’s an interesting way to show the linkages between different weblogs.

You can see the Cruft entry by hitting the icon below.

So if you run a weblog that was inspired in some way by Cruft, you can register and add me as the parent. You can search on ‘cruft’ or use the blogid, 800. I think it would be very cool to see how all the weblogs interact.

Even if your weblog isn’t inspired by Cruft, go register.

Sunday Night

We had a great time at Casey & Heidi’s party on Saturday. Tons of good food, close proximity to the beach and a 1/4 keg of beer combined with fun people leads to a good time.

There was one tragedy though. During the party I walked up to the liquor store with Len and I happened to pick up a Starbucks Doubleshot, the pure essence of ice coffee. back at the party, I showed it off and was about to drink it when Zoe had an allergic reaction to the cats and I had to leap into Dr. Daddy mode.

She had rubbed her eye after touching the cat and it was swelling up. I cleaned her up, gave her an anti-histamine, and calmed her down. When I returned to the back where I had left my Doubleshot, it was gone. Alas, I fear another guest drank it. Drank my precious…

On Sunday I completed the upgrade of Michele’s computer.

She’s now running an AMD 1700+ on a ECS mobo with a new Maxtor 60 Gig hard drive with Windows XP. It’s smooth as glass. She’s happy. I’m happy.

The girls start camp tomorrow. We went to a parents meeting today at 5 to introduce Mira to the counselors. Zoe and Mira are both quite excited. Michele is a bit pensive over the whoel thing. She wants them to go to camp, but she has all the normal worries a mother would have the day before camp starts. I’m sure once they come home happy and smiling all will be better.

Thursday

For those keeping track, I was up to 2:30AM working on Michele’s computer. It was worth it though. The next day she was *ecstatic* about using Windows XP.

Yesterday I got involved in city politics. Here in South Pasadena, they big news is the desire of the school board to propose a $29 million bond to pay for a bunch of work on the Middle School. Michele and I talked about it and I decided to go to the school board meeting. As Michele says, I can ‘talk that bullshit’ with the best of them.

I headed out to the meeting. I walked into the city chambers and the Council just went into session. The first thing on the agenda was the public speaking where anyone could get in front of the council and talk for a minute. I was the youngest person in the room. One older person after another got up to the mic and blasted the council for the proposed traffic changes in town. I wondered when they were getting to the school bond issue. After about ten speakers, the city council was visibily tired of being called nincompoops. One guy got up and complained that the council hadn’t put the meeting notice in the local paper. Angry senior citizens nodded their heads in agreement. Hrrm, I read about the meeting in the paper in the morning. The woman next to me leaned over and said, “If it wasn’t for the school board meeting, there’d be more people here.” Huh? I asked here if the council was going to talk about hte school bond. “Heaven’s no,” she said, “the school board meeting is somewhere else. This is just about the horrid traffic plan!” Damn. I walked out of the chamber. As I did, several in the audience stared at me. Perhaps they thought it was my protest gesture against the traffic plan.

After a short walk, I entered the school board meeting. There were 4 others in the audience watching the school board (6 people). As I sat down and flipped open the info packet, the chairmen said, “Well, that about wraps it up, are we ready to vote?” Damn. After a bit of parlimentary stuff they voted to place it on the ballot. Meeting adjorned.

First lesson of city politics: Be at the right place at the right time.

In other news:

Michele has continued to update her weblog. It take my utmost self control to not edit her entry and put in paragraphs. She was inpressed with the lifewithageek page and hopefully she can emulate a bit of the text formatting there before I am driven to drink.

It appears that Brad has been bitten by the weblog bug and has a case of weblogitis. [mrburnsvoice] Excellent [/mrburnsvoice]. He’s on a cruise ship vacation, yet finds a way to update his weblog.

My other two progeny weblogs, Pat and Mike, continue to post but do not seem to be as obsessed as Brad.

The new hardware for Michels’ computer showed up and I need to find time for the motherboardectomy. I splurged $20 on myself and got one of those cool front panel connection extension.

Cool, eh? Yes, I know it’s geeky but I don’t care. That’s the CPU temperature measured directly off the heatsink. Woot!

One last thing, Matt updated Crookdimwit with a new top banner. It’s neat, but I thought the Crookdimwit color was light blue not red.

Install

It’s 12:44AM and I’m still up installing Michele’s new hard drive. Getting her email backed up took forever. formatting a 60 GB hard drive took forever.

On the way home from work I stopped at the 99¢ Only Store. Damn, what an amazing store. I stopped to pick up the pool toys they had advertised. Goggles & masks for the girls to play with in the water. When I got inside, I was blown away. It is full of great things. They had audio cabling! They had tools! They had soda! They had everything. And all for 99¢!

I fully intend to spend one of my lunch hours there inspecting ever last nook and cranny.

Monday

A few things today.

1) The bad part about being the boss is that sometimes you have to be the boss.

2) I lost an auction on eBay today. I was bidding on this postcard:

I wasn’t willing to pay more that $24.50 for this postcard. There were two other postcard buyers bidding against me in the last 30 seconds. Fuckers.

3) My co-workers at work recognized my birthday today. It was great! You can read all about it.

Happy Birthday to Me

I am currently sitting outside, wirelessly connected to the internet. The girls are playing in the spa and I am sitting in front of them playing lifeguard.

One of my birthday presents was router/print server/wireless access point. Thanks Mom & Dad! I had been eyeing it for a while since it would solve a few problems I was facing like running out of IP addresses and needing a networked printer. The wireless is just a bonus. Michele’s cousin James has moved to LA and he is laptop kinda guy. After my playing with wardriving, I’ll be interested to see if anyone wardrives me.

Right now I’m on a work laptop with a 802.11 card. It’s good to be a CIO… It is tasty to have a laptop, so I may have to invest in a cheap laptop. Since we’d probably only use it for net access, I’m sure a couple year old model would do. Perhaps a combination of ebay sales and a RL garage sale could raise the cash for Michele and I to snag a bargain.

For those that have issues with their mother-in-law, let me show off. My mother-in-law Marcella is so web saavy that she not only tracked down my Amazon.com wishlist, but see bought me Unreal Tournament 2002. Rock on! It’s not even available yet, but she pre-ordered it anyways. Sweet!

I hope my loyal readers have a good day, I intend to!