Be The Pigeon

Been a while since I've had any reason (or time) to blog. This one was fun, though. Yesterday, I went to my 3rd BYU football game of the year. The first two were pretty much duds, though still fun. Yesterday's game, though, was altogether different. They finally found their mojo! I had seats on the front row of the visitor section of the CSU stadium in Ft Collins. 4 foot of legroom in front of me, and polite fans behind me. Couldn't ask for more except for the 35-degree weather. CSU has had a bum season, and all their fans either gave up or just got so wasted they couldn't find their way into the game. Either way, the home side was less than half full at peak, and by mid way through the game, it was an embarrassment. The game was 100% BYU. 35-0 at half time. Each time the team scored, the TV cameras came over to do the dutiful screaming-fan pan. As we were on the front row, I got face time with every touchdown. I'm not very well practiced as a screaming...

I've been traveling lots lately for work. The joy of traveling is that I get to observe firsthand how obnoxious society has become. For example, I find idiot guys talking on their phones in the bathroom every week now. Stalls, urinals, everywhere. Yeah, it's totally acceptable for you to talk to your boss while taking care of business. NOT! This week I was in Omaha. Went through security and got tagged for the "backscatter" machine. If you haven't been watching the news lately, these are the machines that have x-ray vision to ensure there's no sharp objects hidden in my armpits. I've gone through these machines several times before, and I've learned that you need to remove EVERYTHING from your pockets to avoid problems. This time, I went through a different form of machine, so I didn't think to remove my wallet, and Mr. TSA didn't ask me if I had anything in them. That's me in the photo! After I got scanned, he asked what was in m...

I suck at blogging now. I freely admit it. The good news is that I know no one really cares. I just finally figured out how to get pictures off my iPhone (which I've had for 4 months or so), and I managed to grab pictures from lots of different activities this summer that I meant to report on, but which got forgotten. So, working backwards in time, here's some neat things I've been involved in. LA Trip I have been traveling lots for work in recent months. Recently I had a trip to SoCal and managed to take an evening to go back to the Los Angeles Temple, where I was sealed to my parents in 1979. To my knowledge, I hadn't been back since. Just prior to that, I also drove over to Santa Monica and found the house my grandparents lived in until I was 12 or so. The home is nearly completed obscured by landscaping now. Absolutely amazing neighborhood, though. It's within walking distance of the beach, right up on the hill above the Santa Monica Pier. Serious bucks...

When I was a kid, my parents taught me in the ways of the force by having me scoop dog poop and mow the lawn on our hilly yard. I hated it. No, I loathed it. Now as I raise my own kids, and though we don't have any animals, it's fun to pass down the tortuous activities. A month or so ago I decided Amy was old enough to learn how to check, start, and run the mower. At first it was fun for her, new activity and all. I had her help me push the mower around the yard, and she enjoyed helping her dad out. Shortly after that I informed her that it was her turn to mow the front yard all by herself. Insert weeping, wailing, and general girl drama. However, after a tough 20-30 minutes, she got it done. Since then, I've had her do it a couple more times, and though the wailing and drama always precede the work, Amy has really stepped up to get it done. It's made me proud of her. Pushing that no-frills mower around our not-flat yard isn't easy. I'm sure it'...

We're having all sorts of interesting home-related things right now, it seems. A couple weeks ago Jo told me to "come here" while she was in the other room in the basement. It was one of those "come here now" kind of inflections, so I complied immediately. I went over and saw a nice fresh hole in one of our window wells. The wells are 5 feet deep or so, so this was surprise. We definitely had an uninvited guest who was a digger. We stood there long enough to even have a welcome-to-the Kline-zoo experience through the glass by watching Mr Digger come up to dump some of this dirt. I think he even smiled at me faintly. My enemy was visible. Jo looked it up online and found that it was most likely a mole (did I get that right?) We went over to Home Depot and observed a plethora of rodent-killing options (who would have known?) I settled on the pyrotechnic approach and bought gopher-bombs. After all, fire is the answer to many of life's toughest proble...

And now from our sponsor, a lesson in karma. A couple weekends ago, I found out at church that we were being asked to go up to the girls' youth camp in Wyoming and cut and move timber affected by the beetle kill. It takes nearly 2 hours to get up there. I have to admit I wasn't happy about losing my whole Saturday for the service activity, but I was planning on going. As the weekend drew near, the weather got very sour, and so did my attitude. I murmured. By Friday night, it was pouring in Colorado-Spring style. A short detour: Amy is definitely her father's child. When I ask her to do something, she often comes up with ways to flat out tell me no, or to--in my words--dilly dally her way around to get her way. This has been status quo for some time. Routinely I will send her to bed only to have her still milling around 30 minutes later doing some terribly important task. As a dad, that gives me material to launch into her. End detour. That Friday night at about 1...

I recently switched my broadband data service to Verizon and go a MiFi 2200 . This is quite a neat little device. Instead of just giving your Internet from anywhere on your computer, it also acts as a WiFi hotspot and allows you to connect up to 5 other devices wirelessly, with no config. So for me, that means that iPad, iPod Touch, etc can all be connected to the Internet without having to pay for data service for each device. The device is about the size of a deck of cards (sans card box), and runs for about 4 hours per charge. When you have it plugged into your PC, it acts like a normal USB-style data card and tethers for Internet access to your PC only. When you unplug it, the wireless access point lights up and you can connect yourself and 4 friends. The wireless mode has lots of settings that allow you to be secure, etc. Here's the interesting side note (honestly, only if you're me, but I needed a place to write this down). You can only charge this thing via the s...

{This post was updated in May 2011 with things I've learned over the last year.} Our family recently joined the Apple revolution (a few years late, we know). Jolayne got an iPod Touch (basically an iPhone without the phone part). I got a nano and iPhone, and there's an iPad in transit somewhere for me. With all this iHappiness, I knew we'd need to find a way to watch movies on these intrepid little devices. I managed to get it done just in time before our Disney trip a few weeks ago. Let me say, having movies on the iDevices sure makes long flights more fun. The amazing thing to me is that because of the hardware decoders built into the devices, it takes very little battery to watch a movie. A full-length movie watch on my iPhone takes less than 15% of the battery. Not bad at all. Once you've converted them, the movies can also be streamed via AppleTV (or equivalent) and watched on your main TV as well, so it's a great single format to do everything in. Afte...

This is what my hot wife wears to vacuum the house. Nice 2 1/2 inch heels. Goes ever so nicely with the sweats.

I really enjoy living in Colorado. Most of the things we deal with here are great. Some are not so great. A few are downright annoying. Let's focus on the latter tonight. Last night, at their insistence, I took the kids for the first bike ride of the season. We rode on pathways over to the 'tree park' and then road dirt roads over to another neighborhood. Nothing too crazy--except my inability to get the clipless pedal thing, so I wound up falling twice more to the laughs of my children; no respect! As we got back home from our 3 or 4 mile jaunt (I don't have my cycling computer hooked up yet on the new bike), I could tell I was getting a flat (this is the first real ride I've taken on this bike, mind you.) That yielded some not-so-pleasant grumbling on my part because I knew what was coming next. The goatheads were out of control! If you haven't spent time in CO, you likely aren't familiar with these insidious little torture tools. We should pack...

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of this old disease. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim. It's pronounced "Gonna re-elect 'em." The disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior involving putting your cranium up your rectum. Many victims contracted it in 2008 and many more in 2009...but now most people, after having been infected for the past 1-2 years, are starting to realize how destructive this sickness is. It's sad because Gonorrhea Lectim is easily cured with a new drug just coming on the market called Votemout, (proncounced "Vote 'em out"). You take the first dose in 2010 and the second dose in 2012 and simply don't engage in such behavior again; otherwise, it could become permanent and eventually wipe out all life as we know it. Several states are already on top of this, like Virginia and New Jersey, and apparently now Massachusetts, with many more seeing the ...

Hi, I'm back! I've struggled with time or content for some time now, but I think I finally have a good post tonight. For a long time, our home alarm system has been unused because I didn't have it monitored. When we first installed it ourselves years ago, I had it go to my pager whenever it would go off, and my insurance company agreed that it was "monitored" and gave me the homeowners-insurance discount. Cool. Didn't have to pay the $30/month to ADT or anything. But then I joined the 21st century and got rid of my pager, and I really didn't want it calling my cell phone because it would just look like a call from home; no big deal. So we didn't arm it for a long time. Recently, I got to thinking about getting rid of my landline, or at least moving it to VOIP to get cheaper long distance, but I wasn't comfortable doing that because the alarm needed a line to call on in case of emergency. So I started looking around for newer technologies, a...

Most of you won't care about this one bit, and I have little that's good to blog about these days, but after updating to Windows 7 there's one nagging issue that I just finally figured out and need to document somewhere. I like to share files between all my machines at home. I backup data on one machine to another, and I keep all my downloaded files centrally. When we upgraded to Win 7, my mapped drives to administrative shares (C$, D$) broke. I searched high and low to find out why, and it appears to have something to do with Homegroup usage and increased security, blah blah blah. Finally, I found a registry update to fix the whole thing: How to access Administrative shares in Windows 7. I rarely use network shares on my computers. Ok, I have a few setup for the family to use if they need to copy something from one computer to another and a share for our network storage. Other than that I have always favored using admintrative shares. These don’t show up in network ...