Be The Pigeon

So I had probably preface this post by saying that if you drive a Buick, you'll more than likely be offended. Read on at your own risk! :-) First, some context... Several years ago, I took a business trip and received a complementary upgrade from Hertz to a full-size car. Nice, right? Well, it would have normally been fantastic, though in this case I guess it was just simply a little too much car for this man. You see, they gave me a absolutely-freaking-huge Buick. This was the kind of car that normally comes with simulated-wood-grain paneling as siding, Sinatra and Lawrence Welk preprogrammed on the XM radio, and 0-60 times measured in minutes, not seconds (but that acceleration is oh-so-smooth). I drove the thing around (alone) for a day before concluding that it just wasn't the vehicle for me. I think people must have been following me around most of the time wondering when we'd get to the funeral.  When I went back to the airport to trade, the Hertz guys were som...

I know I probably do more "techy" posts than I should, but it's my blog and not yours, so there.  If you're not an avid Firefox user , shame on you.  It's so-way-entirely-cooler than Internet Exploder.  And, version 3 came out just recently.  What's so cool about version 3, you ask? Simply put, it's the " Awesome Bar ."  Does your browser have an Awesome Bar?  If not, you need one. The so-called Awesome Bar is the navigation bar where you enter your URL.  In Firefox (FF), you can now enter the actual site you want to visit, but you can also put in partial names of bookmarks, places you've been, and so on, and it's remarkably good at finding just the perfect place you want to go.  There are many sites out there explaining the finer points of it, so I won't waste space here.   You can now also tag bookmarks for easy lookup, plus it's pretty much the fastest browser out there.  My gmail loads 3x faster than with FF2.  I love it.  Whe...

A while back, Jolayne blogged about our summer project with having the girls move a good-sized pile of rocks in our yard (primarily for the "work" experience).  Then, she just recently posted about some of the problems we're having with sassiness , especially in our eldest.  I feel compelled to offer a little more detail.  Last night, we were talking at dinner and I said something about being respectful to parents, but I was kidding and having fun.  Amy took it a little too far when I asked her to do something a shot off a "like I care" comment.  That left me no choice but to demonstrate my pecking-order superiority by handing down swift punishments as though I was Zeus on Mt Olympus!  (OK, maybe not.) The rock project has moved along, and they are nearing the end.  However, due to Amy's speak-before-you-think problem (which incidentally I had just as bad at her age), she now has the awesome punishment of getting to finish the job HERSELF!  You would have t...

The Boulder County Fair is coming up soon, and on the opening night they have their demolition derby. I've always wanted to go to something as white-trashy as that, and this is my year. I'm trying to get a group of guys together to go, so if you're interested, it's Aug 1st, let me know. That means you have only two weeks to totally trash a tshirt and jeans so you'll have something appropriate to wear! HOMEWORK : If you're going, you must watch 10 hours of CMT reality shows before you can buy your ticket. Start with My Big Redneck Wedding . By the way, the fair is changing things this year, in case you didn't know, and admission and parking will both be free again. Yay. Now we can go with the kids and see all the animals. No way I was paying last year.

Update (07/21) : it appears that a anti-static bag (or something that looks similar to it, anyway), will help kill that annoying noise. Check this out: He's charging $5 for a 2-pack . Just need a way to get it to have that shielding while in the holster; then it would sell very well! Thanks for the tip, Dave. I came across a very interesting article this week that explains why a blackberry or (less often) cell phone causes that annoying buzzing sound near speakers . I'm sure you've heard the noise; it's kind of like a bunch of buzzing bees. Basically, here's the crux of the whole thing: To get to the root of the issue, I spoke with Duncan Bradley, Research In Motion's (RIM) director of global market intelligence. RIM is the BlackBerry manufacturer. Bradley explained to me that cell phones cause this buzzing interference when near some speakers or other devices that can resonate radio frequencies (RF) because such devices often feature poor quality shielding...

As promised, I took the kids to the Church farm way up north last Saturday. We had to get up at a lovely 4:30am and drive for a good hour to be there around 6:00. Then a short ride in the back of a pickup and we were in our very own field the size of Manhattan, full of beans. Not sure if you can make it out in the picture from my phone, but the rows are about 2/3 mile long. We were supposed to have 300+ people for our field. We had maybe half that. Many folks misinterpreted the "rules of engagement" and were down on hands and knees pulling every little weed. After more than an hour, many of them were only a few hundred feet down their first rows. I was somewhat more liberal in my application of the rules. In fact, as time went on, I became about as liberal as a granola-loving biker wearing hemp pants with a special prairie dog pouch in Boulder. By the time we'd been there 3 hours, my rules were "anything two feet or taller". It was a good rule. The ki...

There's things we each take for granted in life. Today, I'm no longer taking for granted the ability to breathe clearly. One of the perks of having kids is that they love to bring home germs as pets. I bet they even name them. If that weren't enough, they incubate these pets and then pass them on to their parents once they've developed the appropriate antibodies. Of course, not being immersed full time in the same biologic cesspools as my kids, I'm already at a disadvantage. Normally, I have good sense about things and by simply not sharing a cup and by washing my hands more than them (ie: once a month), I avoid 90% of the junk they bring home. This time I was simply stupid and got what I deserved. I recall sharing some drinks and such when they were sniffly. Smooth move, exlax! (a phrase we explained to them this week, as well) I first picked this bug up several days ago, but kept telling myself it wasn't getting hold of me. We took the kids for a nice...