Last Friday I turned 41 years old. In some ways 41 is more depressing than 40. Mentally, 40 was a tough age; 41 only serves to remind you that 40 actually happened and that time is still moving forward. Happy birthday. This year’s birthday festivities were broken up into lots of little slices. Thursday (the day before my birthday) I had dinner at Kyle’s Steakhouse with a few of my co-workers. I had the salmon and while it wasn’t as good as it used to be, it was still good. Susan informed the restaurant that it was my birthday and… (read more)

Every year on August 19th I sit down at the computer and try to come up with something interesting to say about my wedding anniversary. This morning while trying to come up with something to write about I opened up the folder on my computer where all our wedding pictures are stored and realized that we have a total of 39 photos from that day. No negatives, just 39 4×6″ prints. Based on that number I’m guessing two 24-shot rolls of film were shot and a few of them were duplicates or didn’t turn out. Of those 39 photos, more… (read more)

If you had asked me last week, the only two reasons I could come up with for having a garage sale would be to get rid of some extra clutter and make a few extra bucks in the process. I had completely forgot about doing one as a fundraiser, which is what Susan (and by proxy, the rest of us) did last weekend. One of the Girl Scout camps that Morgan goes to (and Susan went to — Camp Ekowah) does not have a tornado shelter. Several Girl Scouts banded together to raise the money needed to add a large… (read more)

I spent the week before last in Washington DC for work. I “kind of” flew home on Thursday, attended a wedding on Friday, packed over the weekend and drove to Chicago, where I spent last week. It’s been a long two weeks. The trip to DC began with a flight (yes, flight) to DC through Dallas. While trying to make my connecting flight in Dallas I got turned around and ended up in baggage claim, which forced me to go back through the TSA line a second time. The second time I had already filled my water bottle (and forgot… (read more)

My hotel this week in DC is so far away from work that I’ve been riding the Metro roughly 30 minutes each way. During that time each morning I’ve noticed that most Metro riders fall into one of the eight following categories. 01. SLEEPERS. These people get on and nod off. I’m not sure how they do it, but they do. I spend most of my time on the Metro worrying about (a) getting off at the right stop and (b) worrying about people stabbing me, and sleeping would seem to raise the odds of both. But lots of people… (read more)

A few weeks ago, Susan mentioned that she was going to submit some photographs to ShutterStock. ShutterStock is a website where people can purchase stock photography to use for their websites. You, as the photographer, get 50% of the purchase price. Before being accepted, you must submit 10 photos to ShutterStock and 7 of them must be accepted. For fun this week I decided to dig through some of my old photos, submit them to ShutterStock, and see if I could get accepted. Let’s see how it went! Shot at the Surrey Hills Park. This picture was rejected for the… (read more)

I’m very close to completely converting all of my old physical C64 disks into D64 disk images, a project I started roughly 10 years ago — not that it takes 10 years to convert ~600 floppies into D64 disk images (it only takes a minute or two to do a disk), but there have been a lot of stops and starts. Along the way I’ve used three of four different methods (x1541 cables, the FC5025, the Ultimate 1541, and my current method of choice, the ZoomFloppy) and experimented with several different tools and methods to ensure that I’m getting the… (read more)

Our neighbors, quite selfishly, have placed padlocks on their gates that surround their pool. You cannot lock up water, my friends! You are depriving us, your neighbors, from our right to swim in that pool as we once did while your house was on the market! Mason though, the crafty one that he is, figured out the combination to the padlock. While our neighbors are out of town for the week, Mason managed to get the padlock open. We have been kept dry by the man for too long now. YOUR REIGN OF TYRRANY HAS ENDED! And, while the neighbors… (read more)

I read last night that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Tim Burton’s Batman, released in (obviously) the summer of 1989. I am not a “comic book guy,” but I do remember the movie’s premiere quite well. Superman, the motion picture starring Christopher Reeve, hit theaters in 1978. Not longer after we had Superman battling General Zod in Superman II, Richard Pryor in Superman III, and Nuclear Man in Superman IV. Somewhere in the middle of all that Supergirl fought her way through a terrible film. The popularity of those movies didn’t spawn a ton of other films starring comic… (read more)