Author Archives: brad

If you have Flash and some patience, go check out Honda’s new commercial. They claim there were no special effects involved, but I don’t know if I believe that. Even so, it made me think of The Incredible Machine, which has to rank in my top ten video games of all time. Now there’s a list I should work on…

The best part is that end of the page, the author starts to sound the way I sound at work: Because so many people are infected with the Klez virus and don’t know it, I’ve been getting over 20 megabytes of emails a day. Each Klez-virus email is 127K or larger. I really wish people would scan their systems and stop using crappy unpatched Microsoft Products. Right on, man.

Forgot to mention that Jen and I went to see Matrix Reloaded on Friday. I give it five stars out of five. It was better than the first movie, which was excellent in its own right. It was violent, but so well choreographed that the fighting was like poetry. There were a few plot twists I was expecting (but that Jen didn’t see coming), but I have to admist that the ending caught me by surprise. I’m starting to subscribe to Dave Hyatt’s Matrix-within-a-Matrix view.

For what it’s worth, the chase scene was probably the best car chase I’ve ever seen in a movie. And just before the chase, I liked the subtle explanation of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Listen for the silver bullet reference.

Read Day Two here.
Read Day One here.

This was Sunday, our first full day at the beach house. Right away, it was determined that, for reasons best left unknown, my mother is no longer allowed to cook bacon for large groups of people. On a completely unrelated note, we also discovered that Mary Anne is pretty much a drop-in replacement for my Grandma, who no longer feels up to making the trip. With either one around, no one goes hungry, and no dish goes unwashed.

Mary Anne quickly discovered, and was compelled to announce, that Jen and I take long showers. My response was pretty much, “Yeah, well.” I figure I pay for my water and I pay to have it heated, so I’ll stay in there all day if I feel like it. And for the record, Jen takes longer showers than I do.

Clair, Mary Anne, Grace, Jen, and I decided to take a day trip. We started out by visiting the North Carolina Aquarium. It wasn’t as fancy as some, but it was nice, and it was inexpensive. Grace had a great time.

Then we took in the Elizabethan Gardens, once we actually found them. It took awhile, but it was okay, because I was driving the VUE and thoroughly enjoying it. The gardens were lovely. The best part was Grace’s constant search for water fountain. We passed one by and she took a quick drink, but wasn’t satisfied. From then on, she was convinced that we were near one.

We almost didn’t get lunch. We spent the entire drive from Roanoke back to Corolla being passive aggressive; nobody would say where they wanted to eat. So we just kept driving and getting hungrier and hungrier. Finally, we found a place in Duck called the Duck Deli. It was really good. Excellent barbecue sauce. One the way back, we also stopped at Nags Head Hammocks, where I almost fell asleep in one of their demo units.

We got back the beach house and got into the hot tub, or as Grace liked to call it, the hot pool.

After dinner, we made some s’mores on the grill and watched the first half of Bandits.

Stay tuned for Day Four and more pictures.

We have a visitor with us this week. She’s the two-year-old daughter of our church’s youth leaders (who are also good friends of ours). They’re up in Hershey with our youth group and some other kids for this year’s Creation East festival. So she’ll be with us until Sunday. Should be interesting.

The first thing I found when I came home was Grace and our guest sitting on Grace’s bed. Grace was reading to her, which is funny since Grace can’t read. But was paging through a book and telling her the story. My first thought was, “I should be taping this.” My second thought was, “This is going to work out fine. They’re getting along great.” Then Grace saw me, hopped off her bed, marched up to me, and said, “Daddy, guess what? She’s hogging the bed!”

You can guess what my third thought was.

Truth be told, it’s an interesting experiment for us, since we’re looking into adoption and/or fostering.

Guess I was wrong about those screen shots after all. Man, do I want a G5. But, like Will, I can’t live with a desktop machine.

iChat AV is pretty cool. Dave and I were testing it out today while he was at one of the elementary schools rebuilding a server. He had a question, ampoule and rather than using up both of our cell minutes, decease he “rang me” on iChat for an audio chat. It worked great. Check out this MacOSXHints article for tips on improving the audio quality.

Safari 1.0 was released today. Congratulations to Dave Hyatt and his team for making the best browser out there. I started using Safari full-time shortly after it was released, and it’s been getting better and better ever since.

Redesign underway… Do not adjust your browser… I’m liking it so far.

A split second in the Life of God.

I think the Panther pics are fake. At first, I got all excited to see the secret screenshots, but upon further examination, something seemed… off. Then I read this post on Slashdot, which was a reprint of MacRumors forum post. The kicker: Second, the “% Nice” uses a , to seperate the decimals, not a . like the rest of the %’s. That’s a big one. Also, the comments about the lettering on the Mail screenshot are spot on. The lettering is all wrong.

Fakes. That’s my take.

But I guess we’ll know for sure on Monday.