For Father's Day, Zandra and I went out on a "date night" for the first time in quite a while. It was intended to be a dinner and movie night, but we chose to go see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - meaning we missed dinner because the movie was so long (the official running time is 2:45, but if you do the commercials at the beginning, it's longer).

That said, we weren't disappointed. The script was very well done, and so complex that I can't imagine the screen writers keeping the plots, sub plots, and sub sub plots straight. I was thoroughly baffled about 2 hours into the movie. I'll have to look at things again when it comes out on DVD. And because we got there late, we had to sit closer to the front than we would have liked. Resulting I think in us missing some of the widescreen action (this is one DVD you will want to get in widescreen version). We had a great time and I won't say too much more since I don't like spoiling the plot for those few people who haven't seen it.

But two comments do come to mind: 1 day every 10 years just seems sad. And stay for the ending after the trailer.

Seen on a church announcement board near our house marking the last day of school last Friday:

Students: YIPPEE!
Teachers: WHEW!
Parents: HELP!

Tags: Humor

Arrrgggh...

In our neighborhood, having a sprinkler system is (at least to me) a requirement to keeping your lawn in a condition that won't draw the ire of the Home Owners Association. So it's fine that people have them to water the lawn.

What drove me nuts this morning was someone's sprinkler that was watering a full 90 degrees too far - thus doing an extremely good job of watering the street.

And me as I drove by with the top down on the Mini.

Not only does sprinkling the street waste water, but it presents a hazard (slippery pavement). And annoys me. Time to say something to the HOA.

Tags: Gardening

Happy Birthday Andrew!



What's not shown is the "Busted Balloon Incident". Zandra bought Andrew this huge mylar balloon which also played "Happy Birthday" when you thumped it. It lasted all of 60 seconds in our house as Andrew, totally by accident, walked under the ceiling fan with his new balloon. Ooops.

We did buy him another one today and it's now safely tied up in his bedroom. Away from the ceiling fan.

Tags: Andrew

So tonight, a thread on an email alias at work had me do a speed test on my cable modem. I used the speed test at Speakeasy Networks (my former ISP whom I had to give up because I moved to an area they didn't service). I was a bit surprised. 14729kbps down and 1562kbps up. Wow. Almost 15Mbps/1.5Mbps. This is about twice what I was getting a month ago.

My suspicion is that since Verizon is on the verge of digging up our neighborhood for FIOS, this is Comcast's answer - boost their speed.

While I love the speed, we'll see if the infrastructure stays any more stable. That's been my biggest gripe with Comcast. The intermittent service interruptions....

Tags: Technology

The blog should now be fixed.

Maybe it's because I'm not plugged into the right developer network, but it turns out the problem was an incompatibility "feature" with the new web publishing software I use - RapidWeaver.

The issue was the theme (or the magic that formats the web page so nicely). The new version of the software required some modifications to the theme. Without them, the really odd side effect was that my archive files (the links that allow you to see my previous postings by month) didn't get named correctly. And my blog entries had this text at the top of the posting. Updating a file called Theme.plist in the custom theme seems to have resolved the issue.

So much for transparent upgrades.

Version 3.6.1 of RapidWeaver does seem to be a nice improvement. It appears to be faster and the blog feature is a lot more flexible than in previous versions. I especially like the ability in the RSS Feed to always publish the last 4 or 5 entries. I was annoyed at the beginning of each month when all previous entries got reset. There are some bugs in the new version, but things otherwise seem happy. Hopefully it stays this way.

Tags: Technology

The blog section of my website is not happy. I appear to have either a self-inflicted wound caused by upgrading to a new version of my web publishing software, or I've stumbled on to a bug. So please, no emails. I know about it...I'll post when it's fixed!

Tags: Technology

So every year since getting married, I've tried to have a garden. This year is no different - we have 4 varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, and some various herbs.

Moving to Maryland, it was apparent last year that the soil in our particular area isn't very, um, fruitful (vegetableful?) and last year's tomato crop yielded, maybe about 10 tomatoes.

So this year, I made a number of changes - I moved the tomato garden to the side of the house with more sun, worked a *lot* harder to condition the soil, and mixed in some additional fertilizer to get the plants started.

Something worked. The plants this year are great and I've already got more tomatoes growing on the plants than I harvested all last year.

Pictures as I get a chance.

Tags: Gardening