where everything else is made · this morning i walked in the kitchen while thomas was reading the tag on his lunch bag. he looked up and asked, "daddy, why does everything say it's made in china?"

where dreams are made · while tucking taylor in tonight i crawled under his covers with him. when we pulled the covers down around us, shutting out all the light, he said, "daddy, we can make dreams in here." i wasn't sure i understood. when i asked him what he meant, he said, "daddy, it's like when you close your eyes, so now we can make dreams."

monsters, inc. · we took the boys to see monsters, inc. today. another great movie by pixar and disney. of the cgi children's movies i've seen over the past year, this one tops the list. the voice casting was superb, boo was an adorable character, the cgi is some of the best i've seen, the story was enjoyable, and i found myself laughing outloud more than i would have thought. a must see, especially if you have kids!

leonids · ritina and the boys and i got up about 4 am this morning, bundled up, took our sleeping bags out to the middle of a large dark field, and watched the leonid meteor shower for about an hour and a half. a once in a lifetime chance and the weather was crystal clear. it was spectacular. i've never seen anything like it, and probably never will again. sharing it with my family made it one of the best ninety minutes of my life.

amazon's free shipping costs only $50 · say what? i was reading this post by dawn at a.lifeuncommon.org when i received a marketing email from amazon.com directing me to this offer. what irony. i consider this a deceptive practice by amazon.com, not to mention the unacceptable follow up service (read dawn's post).

trip the light fantastic · if you use a windows pc and have tired of the interface, check out talisman 2 at lighttek software. i tried v1 a while back and was quite impressed. i uninstalled it because it had some problems, but v2 appears rock solid and considerably enhanced. it's not just a skinable interface, you can customize everything about your desktop interface, not to mention that it's scriptable and now sports a plugin architecture. if you can imagine an interface for your desktop, you can create it with talisman. i'm impressed.

crankmeister · if you're a mountain biker, this video at sram is guaranteed to leave you laughing.

let us not forget · i know the freedom i have in this country was paid for with blood and sacrifice. my grandfather fought in world war ii, but i have never lost anyone to a war. though i have not experienced your grief, i can only imagine it, my heart goes out today to those of you who have. i will not forget your sons and daughters, your husbands and wives, your mothers and fathers. i honor you all, not only on this memorial day, but every day that i and my family live free because of you.

amistad · started watching this two nights ago and just finished it. this is a superb telling of a story about the tragedy of human slavery and how the issue found itself in the supreme court of the united states in the mid-nineteenth century. i know little of the actual history here, but what resources i have been able to uncover in an hour's research would seem to support that the facts as presented are generally and historically accurate. it's a refreshingly intelligent and literate work, part courtroom drama and part human drama, well-balanced and without the typical excesses of melodrama that other recent historical movies have fallen prey to. a new entry into my five-star movie list!

taylor's first soccer season · taylor's first soccer season ended today. as with most everything taylor does, he had a blast. i put some pictures in the photo gallery of a few shots taken during the season, and of my attempt to get a picture of him today with his trophy (you'll understand when you see the pictures).

who are "they"? · i catch a lot of grief from friends and family for asking this question whenever the ubiquitous "they" is referenced as a source. as in, "you know, they say that...", or "i heard they just found out...", and so on. "they" are not a credible source, and i'm likely to give about as much attention to something "they" say as i am an argument that the earth is flat.

this journal entry was prompted by this article on fox. this goes way beyond "they". here's a "scientist" who falsified his data and as a result legislation was enacted and millions in cash and resources are being wasted. would i have accepted this scientific data as a source? not until someone else reproduced it, no way. science is repeatable and verifiable. taking action on the basis of unverified results is foolish. i'm not a cynic, but a healthy dose of skepticism here by our country's lawmakers could have prevented the waste of millions and perhaps billions of dollars of industry and taxpayer money.

yes, there are some things i do take on faith, but god said them and put them all in one book. outside of that, even god himself expressed the importance of verifying everything: "test everything, hold on to that which is good" (1 th. 5:21). a more literal translation of "test everything" is "examine and scrutinize everything in complete detail". anything that doesn't hold up, including everything from the stuff "they" say to mr. arnold's falsified data, should be tossed aside.

oh, my favorite answer to "who are 'they'?"

"oh, you know, doctors and scientists."

oh, of course. the doctors and the scientists. well why didn't you just say so in the first place? those guys have so much more credibility than "they" do.

donate your spare cpu cycles · believe it or not, most of the time your computer is doing nothing, literally. if power is supplied to your computer, then it must continually execute instructions. if you're not telling it what to do (browse the web, read email, etc.) then what's it doing? this is oversimplified, but basically your computer is spinning its wheels in something called the "idle" process. if you have windows nt or 2000, do a ctrl-alt-del (or right-click on the task bar) and bring up the task manager. you will notice that the idle process probably accounts for using 95% or more of the cpu cycles that have been available since you started your machine. in a nutshell, this means that most of the computing power of your machine is simply wasted.

there are things that you can do with that wasted computing time, and one of those is to add your machine to a distributed computing network. a distributed computing network is essentially a collection of machines that are all cooperatively participating in some sort of computation. until this year i tended to shy away from these projects, but a few months ago i decided to give it a try when i learned about the cancer research project being run by united devices.

i've been donating the spare cpu time of two machines for a couple of months now, and i believe the united devices projects are very well run and their software is very stable. if you've ever thought of participating in a distributed computing project, i encourage you to follow the link above and check this one out. if this is a new idea to you, you should follow the link above and learn more. you'd be amazed at the difference your one pc can make!

as an added final bonus, when the ud agent is running as a screen saver, it makes your machine look really cool ... :)

memento · brad loaned the movie memento to me a couple weeks ago and i finally got around to watching it. i give it three out five stars. the concept is interesting and somewhat original, but the story was a bit lacking and slow at times. still, the ending/beginning is classic.

boom! · that's what i heard about ten minutes ago when the power went out. sounded like a transformer blew somewhere in the neighborhood. my ups backups will only keep my equipment running for an hour or so. sure is a beautiful day. looks like a mountain bike ride just became part of today's schedule!

the greed and stupidity of humankind · i am continually amazed by both. this article at msnbc reads like a case study. how does greed become so great that one is willing to exploit the fears of others for financial gain? on the other hand, those who fall prey to such schemes deserve the reward they receive for failing to perform even minimal research. a long time ago someone wise once said, "a fool and his money are soon parted..." despite our technology, humanity hasn't advanced much in a couple thousand years.

tweety joins the family · after a five week demonstration of responsibility, thomas finally has a bird. there are a couple of pictures in the photo gallery. i must say that thomas surprised me on this one. the capability of a seven-year-old to be responsible and to persevere is greater than i thought.
five weeks ago thomas had a bit of money saved up and decided he wanted a bird. i told him i felt he was too young. i raised a bird growing up---family dog ended up eating it, sad story for another time---and so i'm familiar with the care and effort required. i tried to impress upon him the seriousness of being responsible for another living thing. though i'm a parent, i haven't forgotten what it was like to be a child, and his reaction was predictable and understandable. he believed himself to be capable of this responsibility.

after failing to convince him that he needed to wait until he was a bit older, we finally struck a deal. i offered to give him some responsibilities, which, if he could fulfill for one month, would convince me he would be capable of caring for a bird. i decided to give him the responsibility of feeding and watering honey and coco. not a tremendous responsibility, but an important one that would have to be attended to on a daily basis. he wasn't happy about it, but of course he agreed.

it took five weeks instead of four, but thomas proved himself. he learned some things along the way, like responsibilities don't go away when you're tired or you feel bad, but his determination was considerable and i'm very proud of him. around the third week he told me one night that being responsible for something made him feel good inside, and i began to believe he understood. i had planned to ask him to continue taking care of the dogs even after he had his bird, but this past week he offered to do this of his own accord.

free.aol.com · even if you don't want it! if you're an ie user, you'll definitely want to read this post at evhead and brad's followup.

added a changelog to the site · i wanted to be able to track changes to the site, so i added a changelog. what better use of a blog?

did you get here from movable type? · if you don't know me personally then you probably linked here from movabletype.org. welcome. for those interested, nearly the entire site is powered by movable type now. about the only thing not in movable type content management is the photo galleries, but they soon will be. the photo albums are data-driven, and i'm working to move the content and generation of the data files to movable type. at that point i'll be able to support comments on each individual photo! cool. even the menu at the right is controlled by movable type. the menu is created by a javascript program, but the program is created from a movable type blog and template. kudos to ben and mena trott! excellent work. i look forward to what this tool can become!