Baby Chaos – 12.03.2003

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 312003
 

I somehow missed this Baby Chaos posting. I’d been having trouble reaching their site lately and finally tried a different URL. The real.blumenthal.com subdomain seems to be broken. I think the combination of expressions in the third picture on the top row is priceless.

The Wife took a bunch of pictures yesterday in another installment of Baby Chaos and The Boy participated since he doesn’t have school until next week. I’ll probably get them up tomorrow or Friday. Also, stay tuned for my first annual New Year’s Resolution/Past Year Reflections post which should appear sometime between now and Monday. Nothing like a good cliffhanger to keep my readership of three engaged.

 Posted by on December 31, 2003 at 6:44 pm

Open letter to guy at Powerhouse gym last night

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 312003
 

Dear obnoxious asshat,

People on television cannot hear you when you shout at them.

People at the gym can hear you, but aren’t interested in your play-by-play of the Holiday Bowl.

People at the gym also aren’t interested in your cell phone conversations.

Signed,

The annoyed guy with misfortune of picking the elliptical machine next to you

Note to self: Don’t ever forget headphones again. Ever.

 Posted by on December 31, 2003 at 6:34 pm

TV Party, indeed

 Entertainment  No Responses »
Dec 302003
 

This story (via Slashdot) is all the evidence I need of how poorly things are going for Rollins. I suppose I should reserve judgement until we find out what’s actually on the album, but given Shatner’s last foray into music, can we really expect anything other than comedy? BTW, the album is out of print, but if you really must hear it (and everyone needs to at least once in their lifetime), you can still get the two most well-known covers on this. What would we do without Rhino to preserve such classics? I’m fairly certain that I know someone with the original CD. I think I’ll borrow it from him and rip it. Those that are interested can email me and get access to the mp3s. Or you can probably find it on one of the P2P networks, but that would be wrong.

 Posted by on December 30, 2003 at 11:34 pm

Xmas photos

 Family  No Responses »
Dec 292003
 

I decided to go ahead and create an album rather than updating the picture of the week, so go check out the photos (friends and family) section for Xmas in Dallas highlights. I’ll update the picture of the week as soon as I have some new material. I’ve also got video from Xmas morning, but I might not get that posted until next Sunday.

 Posted by on December 29, 2003 at 6:24 am

Cornu-copius

 Family  No Responses »
Dec 272003
 

We’re heading home today from my parents in Dallas. We celebrated my sister’s birthday yesterday with lunch at Big Bowl. I’d been wanting to get back there since eating at the Chicago location back in March. Everyone dug it and they actually have a pretty decent kids menu. Hopefully, they’ll open an Austin location at some point.

The Boy made out like a bandit. The consensus cool gift is Bullz-Eye-Ball. We’ve all been playing it in an attempt to outdo each other’s score. I’ve got the highest in all of the games, of course. The Boy does suprisingly well at it. He also got a Transformers Unicron, a Playskool Millenium Falcon, a Go-Bots Hauler Bot, a Yoda Lightsaber, a Don’t Break the Ice game and a Lego NBA 1-on-1 set among other things. Lala scored a Little People Farm, a Parents cell phone, a color See and Say, and a Leapfrog Phonics Radio and some clothes. The Wife got a new bathrobe, a subscription to Dwell magazine, Kill Bill soundtrack CD, and the new Alicia Keys CD. I got 100 Suns, What Remains, El Mariachi (Special Edition), and SpongeBob SquarePants – The Complete 1st Season. We’ll be lucky to get all of this stuff packed into the rental car and back home. I’ll post some pictures later tonight or tomorrow, depending on how the trip home goes.

 Posted by on December 27, 2003 at 8:30 pm

Quick comment on state and local political stuff

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 182003
 

I attended the EFF Austin roundtable on eVoting Tuesday night. Stepan summarizes most of what went on and I added a comment. The bottom line is that many state and local governments have rushed to find a solution to the Florida 2000 election debacle and have in the process made some poor decisions. It’s going to take a little time, but these need to be remedied.

Second, there’s a lot of blogging on the arrest of a Cleburne woman for selling sex toys from her home. I share my fellow Texans dismay at this use of law enforcement resources. I’ve been getting more politically active over the past year or so and I’m going to continue that trend. I sent an e-mail to Eddie Rodriguez, my state rep, to see what I can get him to do on both of these issues. I’m a little green on what it takes for one voter to get some action on state and local government, but I’m hoping he or his staff can help point the way. I’ll keep you posted. I think all of the bloggers mentioned and anyone else who’s disturbed by these two developments should contact their reps as well. With all this blogging, it shouldn’t be too hard to get together a large enough number of people to force changes on both of these issues. I know the second one is kind of minor, but I gotta start somewhere.

 Posted by on December 18, 2003 at 7:43 pm

ROTK and a car resolution

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 182003
 

I managed to get a rental car approved and take my car to the body shop yesterday morning. They were supposed to call me today with an estimate, but I didn’t hear from them. I’ll call tomorrow. I ended up with a Dodge Stratus from Enterprise. The damn thing has a tape player. What is this? 1985?

I got to attend a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++ at lunch and then headed to the Alamo Village for ROTK. The Stroustup lecture was a little underwhelming, but I think it was because the people who were hosting the lecture didn’t give him input on what to include in his one hour talk. All I can say about ROTK is WOW. I must say that I was disappointed with the new ending, but otherwise I was pretty impressed. The battles were totally amazing. I hope Andy Serkis gets a nomination for Supporting Actor this year. I’m sure there’ll be lots of Oscar nods for this installment with speculation running high that it’ll win Best Director or Best Picture. I’d tend to go with director. How cool would it be to be able to refer to the man responsible for Dead Alive as Oscar-winning? Poor Elijah Wood continued to spend most of his time either looking worried or falling in slow motion. I must say that even though I can’t STAND Sean Astin, he did a good job. Shelob was really cool as were the Nazgul. The set design continued to impress, especially the dark and evil places. I was struck by how a lot of the stuff in Heavenly Creatures hinted at the same style that’s seen in ROTK.

 Posted by on December 18, 2003 at 7:11 am

Bad Car-ma

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 152003
 

The 1 or 2 readers of this blog will recall that I’ve railed about senior citizen drivers and how they should have annual mandatory testing to keep their licenses. You’ll find it amusing then that we were hit by an elderly driver on the way home from the grocery store last night. The whole family was in the car and no one was injured. My pristine, never-been-in-an accident, four-and-a-half-year-old, almost paid-off car, however, looks like this. I won’t go into the gory details, but it was clearly the other guy’s fault and he admitted as much at the scene. We also have a witness who gave us his name and phone number. It’s a little odd in that the guy has insurance and driver’s license from Arizona, also lives part of the year here in Austin and was driving a rental car from San Antonio at the time. I get to deal with insurance mess for the rest of the week and Mary gets to play chauffeur for at least today and possibly tomorrow until I can get his insurance company to approve a rental. They still have to get his side of the story. Joy. Happy Birthday to me.

 Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 6:09 pm

Sybil and Pascal 2003

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 092003
 

We just got back from Sybil and Pascal’s annual party. We almost always make it for just a little while. We like going because we get to see people that we really only see once or twice a year other than at this party. It was the usual suspects with a surprise appearance by the Brian Sharples who was the President of IntelliQuest when I worked there. He’s working a couple of different things at the moment, but leaning away from the tech industry for now. We caught up a little, but his daughter was having a meltdown, so he had to bail. I posted some photos from the event, but as with most of the photos around here, you’ll have to be a registered user to see them. As an added bonus, I also posted some black and white photos of Henry that Sybil took the first time he attended in 1999.

 Posted by on December 9, 2003 at 7:16 am

Austin Holiday Cheer

 Austin  No Responses »
Dec 072003
 

The Boy and I got up early yesterday morning and took The Wife’s car in to NTB to take advantage of the road hazard insurance that we purchased. We were out of there in 30 minutes and it didn’t cost us a cent. It turns out that the father of one of the kids in The Boy’s class is the manager of that particular location. We went to Krispy Kreme afterwards. I estimated that 1/2 dozen would be enough for us to have and bring some back to The Wife and LaLa, but The Boy ate 4 doughnuts and we came back empty handed, much to The Wife’s dismay. She and LaLa ended up making it to the Hilary Clinton book signing after all on Friday. She shook Hilary’s hand and they talked briefly about Bill Clinton Namugosa, the baby named after Bill on his visit to Uganda. Unfortunately, they weren’t allowing pictures.

We attended the Capital Tree Lighting and Holiday Sing-a-long last night with the Rihas and the English. We were a little late as my afternoon nap ran long, but we caught a fair number of carols. We tried stopping at Little City after the festivities to get some warm beverages, but they clearly weren’t prepared for the volume of customers. We should’ve forsaken supporting local business for efficiency and gone to The Great Corporate Evil. With Stepan’s assistance, we managed to get a family photo good enough for this year’s holiday cards. I ordered them this morning, so with any luck (and some help from the U.S. Postal Service), people will get them before Xmas.

EDIT (12.08.2003): Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that there are also new pictures of the week from Saturday night.

 Posted by on December 7, 2003 at 8:45 pm
 Older Entries