Category Archives: uncategorized

This. Is. Awesome.

From the article:

Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of “The Simpsons” fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art. Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.

Found link via Slashdot.

I wonder if they have any sugar-free Squishees…

I’ve never been much of a cat person.

Not to mention that Grace and I are both allergic.

So why did I let Grace get one?

Because Grace needs something to take care of, something that she can be responsible for.

And because I’m a pushover. You can see how the cat walks all over me already.

I do have to admit that she’s pretty cute. Fiesty, though. She keeps hunting my feet, and she’s a pretty good hunter.

Her name? Well, since we already have Jack, we decided to call her Jill. I also suggested Diane, as well as The Beanstalk, but nobody liked those ideas.

Tomorrow will be one week since she arrived and I have to say, so far, so good. My allergies are under control (thank you, Zyrtec) and Grace’s seem to be okay as well. Jen, of course, loves having a cat; she’s been pestering me to get one for years.

In the end, I’m still a dog person. Why? Let me put it this way. I remember watching a show on PBS a year or so in which some guy was showing people how to train their dogs. None of his techniques worked on my mutt, of course, but it was still interesting. He summed up how I feel about dogs by saying that dogs are the only animals that always choose to be with people. He also pointed out that you never hear of a cat spending the night with a lost child to keep it warm, but you do hear that kind of thing about dogs sometimes.

He also referred to a Native American legend about dogs:

Native American spirituality has an honored place for our canine companions. One legend says that Dog made a conscious choice to link their lives to humankind. The legend says that as the ‘door’ to the spirit realm began to close to humankind, Dog lept through to live alongside humans. And because of this singular devotion and sacrifice, Native American spirituality has since revered the dog.

I recently acquired a free exercise bike, so I’ve been working out a couple times a week lately. It’s really helping me feel better, not to mention helping me get into better shape.

Of course, the most important component of the workout is the workout mix. If you’re doing a 30 minute workout, don’t worry. I’ve got you covered

Rock on.

On Sunday my next door neighbor ended her months-long battle with Leukemia. May she rest in peace. If you have a spare moment, please pray for her husband and their three children. Some help is already lined up for them, but they’ll all they can get.

Everybody’s buzzing about the iPhone. I read last night that in Manhattan, lines are already forming at the AT&T store, four days ahead of the iPhone’s launch.

It does seem pretty cool. I’m very happy with my RAZR, but I could definitely see taking advantage of some features the iPhone offers, like real Internet and email. Even Jen was wowed when she watched the Calamari iPhone commercial: “OK, that was cool. That’s the way things are supposed to work.” Indeed.

But, as cool as it is, I can’t justify the price tag. Sure, the iPhone itself is a couple hundred bucks, which is a one-time purchase. But I figured there was no way I could afford the plan to support the data costs.

Until Apple posted this. I gotta say, those are some pretty tempting plans.

Sample:

1. Be clear when you direct your subordinates. Yell in a really deep, powerful voice to drive it home. (A New Hope, boarding the rebel ship at the beginning of the film.)

From the very start of Episode IV, Vader is a man who is direct about what he wants. When he tells his commander to tear the rebel ship apart to find the plans, there is no mistaking what he wants. It’s a pattern he continues throughout the saga. Nebulous, vague, non-committal; these words do not describe Vader.

Moderately amusing. Full article here.

Following up last week’s post on How Not To Design A Website, we bring you How Not To Make A PowerPoint by Don McMillan:

Good stuff.

I stumbled across a great article by Josiah Cole called 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website. Aside from the obvious (not to mention tired) suggestions like avoiding the blink tag, purchase Josiah really hits home with some great advice. A couple samples:
8. If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007
10. If you use music on your site make sure the user can stop it, and it BETTER NOT start on page load without the user requesting it
11. Text navigations are better than images
17. If you’re delivering video, it better not ask the user which bandwidth or version of video they’d like.

Good stuff. Recommended reading.

Wow, no. No, not really. Not at all. It’s astonishingly wrong.

Today I played paintball for the first time. Never played before. Heck, I’ve never even shot a gun before, except for my old BB gun.

One word review: wow.

Optional second word: ouch.

The paintball outing was with my church’s men’s group and was organized by my friend Steve. In all, fourteen of us went to Revolution Paintball today.

I have to confess that I was pretty nervous, especially never having played before. I paid my fee, grabbed my gun and mask, and picked up my standard issue 500 rounds of paint.

Wow, I thought. That’s a lot of paint. 500 shots?

I went outside to get my gear ready, and I decided to check out the paintballs themselves. They felt hard. Really hard. The guys who had played before had told me that it hurts when you get hit, but I figured it would just sting a bit. But man, that paintball felt hard to enough to hurt quite a bit.

And as it turned out, they do hurt when they hit you.

The first hit I took was to the ring finger of my right hand. I did as instructed. I raised my arms, shouted, “I’m out!”, and left the field. It really throbbed at first, but it went numb pretty quickly, so I stopped noticing and got myself cleaned up for the next game. I was surprised to see my finger start to bleed in a half dozen places, though.

For those first two games, we were playing in a field called D-Day. It was pretty cool, but it was tough to defend the lower ground, so after two games, we went to the speedball field.

We played three games on the speedball field. In the first two, I went out pretty quickly, but in the third, I managed to hold my ground for a while. I also learned just how quickly those paintball guns can fire. Wow, they can really lay down the paint.

Then we decided to play fortress. This was pretty cool. One team was in the fortress and couldn’t leave, while the team was outside the fortress and couldn’t enter. The teams really had to have some strategy and work together for that one. Defending the fortress turned out to be much easier than we expected, and trying to eleminate the guys inside turned out to be really difficult. When I was inside, somebody managed to get a paintball through a crack in the wood, right into my chest.

After that, we took a short break, during which Bill, my friend and pastor, bought a case of 2000 rounds. Not just regular paintballs, mind you. Evil paintball. Seriously: that was the brand name. It’s really weird to see your pastor purchase a box of Evil.

Then we headed for a field they called Big Woods. That was a lot of fun, and I finally started to hit my stride with my first confirmed kill elimination. After a few games on that field, we broke for lunch.

After lunch, we played the jungle scenario, but we didn’t like that one as much. It was too big and there was too much brush. It made it hard to navigate and hard to get around. There was a lot of action, though. Owen shot me, and I shot Owen and approximately the same time. Before that, I shot Steve, and just before that, Steve shot Adam. The problem was that we were all on the same team.

So we headed back to Big Woods, where our ref asked if she could play, too. She asked if we were interested doing the Presidential Assassination scenario, where she plays the president, one team protects her, and the other team tries to shoot her.

At that point, I looked at her and said, “How often do you get shot in this job?”

She laughed and said, “Oh, four or five times a day.”

My team failed to shoot the president. We also failed to prevent her from being shot when we switched sides.

This was the game where I took my biggest beating. I was shot in the head. With an evil paintball. Fired by Bill, my friend and pastor. Man, did it hurt. As I raised my arms and yelled “I’m out!”, I took a shot from behind in each shoulder. These are wonderful friends I have. 🙂

We wrapped with a couple games of speedball, mostly just to get rid of the remaining paint.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. It’s hard not to feel like Rambo when you’re slogging through the weeds, carrying your gun, trying to stay low and out of sight, trying to identify and shoot anything that moves.

The downside? Well, I’m pretty sore, and I have quite a few bruises, but not nearly as many as some of the guys (Tim, I’m looking in your direction). And I have a nasty welt on the side of my head. Otherwise, I feel pretty good. It was a blast.