With Jeff and Leeann visiting, we've been having fun and have added a
new pumpkin to the lineup, just in time for Halloween.
October 2004 Archives
I've found a fun way to
Carve pumpkins faster!
This seems to have become a pumpkin-blog temporarily hasn't it.
Hmm. Maybe there's a good reason I often use the online nick
"pumpkin".
It's gotta be my scariest pumpkin yet!
While Michael and Autumn were here a couple weekends ago we had so
much great food, Cuban, Middle Eastern, and on and on. Check out this
giant Pita! We're so glad you guys could visit, it was a blast.
I remember being obsessed with the designs on pumpkins for many Halloweens now, but this is the first time I've attempted to use a template rather than just winging it with a knife. I used one of the Homestarrunner pumpakin stencils and it turned out pretty well!
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| Check it out! (Warning: bad Strongbad impression following) |
| "No, seriously, check it out!". |
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And here's the pumpkin I carved this afternoon! The next one's going
to be a homestarrunner pumpkin..
We went and carved some pumpkins at the Wasongolos today, 8 pumpkins
in total and quite a chaotic afternoon with the twins running around
and throwing pumpkins too. Fun!
This blurry picture captures the experience just about perfectly!
Thought I'd slap together some very random things I had hanging around my bookmarks:
Thetastates is a site with some mp3 mixtapes that are interesting. Strindberg and Helium is a strange, yet funny flash cartoon. Essential Perl is a good, short description on how to learn the Perl programming language. Here is a decent site describing regular expressions (for programming). Source Navigator is an interesting tool for looking at sourcecode in some visual ways, certina things can be answered much easier by this code than other ways I have found. Neato. In the same vein, Kdevelop is a good development environment for Unix I've been meaning to play around with in my "spare time". Firefox is a great browser which I use nearly all the time now!
Digital cameras are fun, you can post all kind of useless pictures to
a webpage almost instantly! Anyway, I came home a tad early today to
work at home and realized when I stood back from the desk for a minute and realized what a life we lead.. computers everywhere and 3 of them on the desk
at the same time! Wireless internet so we can be lazy and not even
plug in a cord or sit at the desk to compute. We make most of our
phone calls from a cell phone, use google to lookup phone numbers, and
use email as a primary correspondance method between friends.
It even goes further than that, the computer is our primary source of
entertainment (well when I'm not drinking beers or hanging out with
friends). When I've got a minute inbetween fiddle practice and cooking
fancy meals I often turn to the web for a quick laugh at
homestarrunner.com or the latest Jon Stewart video clip, TV doesn't
enter my thought process at all (although all computer screens in the
house are larger than our TV.. see below).
Interesting what a world we live in. And this would seem to be the
first "blog-like" post I've actually made on this blog. Good thing I'm
doing some darts with my guy-friends tonight over beers, I need a
break from all this thinking...
Buy.com finally (finally!!) came through and we got the camera. First,
I must encourage you not to use buy.com, we have had a couple very bad
experiences if any order involves trying to contact service.. there
aren't any humans working there that we have found. Must be a buncha
robots.
And here is a photograph of our plant in our bedroom, Tuwilla. Tuwilla
needs a larger pot, but is otherwise a very happy plant. We decided
that instead of getting a dog, for now we have a houseplant.
My friend Mike has a nice blog I thought I'd post, he's a crazy, smart, and fun guy (all at the same time!
Rebecca visited Boone this weekend and Mom & Dad got to meet Hugo,
Becca & Jeff's new puppy! It sounds like he was quite the center of
attention, what a cute puppy.
Notice how big he looks in Becca's arms, that's going to be one big doggy!
I just found out about a neat new feature over at Google.. a new SMS (cell-phone message system) interface for those of us too cheap to pay for web-access on our phones. Nearly every phone has a SMS feature.. although some providers charge for it. I know for T-Mobile it is $.05 a message, but AT&T has free incoming messages I think. In any case it's probably cheaper than calling 411 which can cost from $1 - $1.50 (if you're good at google queries) .
It looks easy, you send one message to google and 1-3 sms messages
reply with the answer in a minute. I haven't tested it yet, but looks
neat. Check out the tips sheet too, for stuffing into your wallet.
Lots of happenings on the volcano communications today, I just got an email at work about a webpage indicating the actual reports and status of the activity.
With all the hubbub about volcanic activity I found some neat live seismographs on the web. Here is the
main page to find at the new & old graphs. Here is a page with a seismograph from the dome this afternoon: Dome seismograph.
Wow, the web is cool! It's like armchair geology..
Mt. St. Helens has erupted for the first time since 1980 and we could see it from Portland, although it was rather small. I didn't personally see it, but a bunch of my co-workers climbed the stairs to the 5th floor where you could see it from the stairwell at work. Apparently they (whoever "they" is) expect to see more eruptions before it is "done" but they aren't expecting anything big.
We've been chatting about volcanoes in the hallway this afternoon, but it's kind of interesting to be near a phenomena like this. Or at least a safe distance away anyway. Neato.
