This months News and Views (July 2000)
- Friends for the Fourth
July 4th. is always a special holiday for me, since my dad was in the United States Air Force (Yes, that makes me a military brat). And, having the opportunity to travel to places outside these United States, I realize how good we, as U.S. citizens, have it here. My advice to you is to watch Saving Private Ryan, and try to grasp what sacrifices people endured to ensure our freedom.Some good friends from Alabama joined us for the July 4th. festivities, and we were certainly happy to have them as guests. Tammy and Dan and their 2 beautiful daughters drove from Birmingham (OK, technically, it's Alabaster) to join us for the weekend, plus a few days.
So much to do, so little time (And, money). Swimming, sunning, snow cones, shopping, driving range, golfing, fire works, Nintendo, sitting on the deck in the evenings with the tiki torches ablaze talking, and of course, barbecue. I was glad to get back to work, where I could rest up from the festivities!
Anyway, it was great to have their entire family visiting for the July 4th. weekend. I hope we can get together some time in again in the near future (So, Dan, any luck on getting tickets to an Alabama game? Give me a call.)
- Auto snapshot feature for our home page
If you looked closely at the first page, you noticed a new page.
As everyone knows by now, I've got one of those nifty web cams, the Intel PC Camera Pro Pack to be exact. One feature that I've never explored was the ability to send a snap shot taken from the web cam to this home page.
Well, having a few extra minutes one evening while Paula was at the YMCA, I tried the auto snapshot feature of their software. To my surprise, it was incredibly easy to set up. I've set up our web cam to point outside, in our back yard. The software takes a picture of whatever the camera's pointing towards every 5 minutes, and then sends that picture to our home page during certain hours of the day.
One complaint I have about the camera is the somewhat poor quality of the picture. If you check out the auto snapshot page (You can check it out by clicking here) (Or, see the picture to the right), you'll notice that the picture is somewhat grainy and small. But, for what I'm using it for, I guess it's OK. I'm working on clearing up the picture, possibly by using our camcorder, my TV tuner card, and another piece of software. I'll update you next month on any progress.
But, for now, check it out, and tell me what you think. You might catch Micah swinging, Dough Boy chasing a squirrel, the kids playing catch, or something else.
- Paula turned thirty-something this month
Who would guess that Paula's 35 by looking at her these days? If you've seen her lately, you certainly wouldn't believe she's a mother of three, 35 years old, and has been married for over 15 years, but it's all true!
Age has been very kind to Paula. This, combined with losing almost 60 pounds, makes for an incredibly confident, sexy, alluring, and beautiful woman. And, in her stars and stripes bathing suit, well, just believe me when I say "God bless America"!
Anyway, no birthday celebration would be complete with out cards, presents and at least one surprise. The kids, being the computer savvy geeks that they are, printed out a beautiful Pooh banner for their mom.
We pieced it together (We didn't have any banner paper) that evening, and hung it where we knew she would not miss it. Near the coffee pot. Needless to say, she loved the banner the kids had created.
We also made her 2 personal birthday cards, and gave her a present. Since she's gotten on a rigorous exercise schedule, she likes to listen to music.
So, we got her a set of AM/FM headphones that she can listen to while she's exercising, or just laying in the sun catching a few rays.
- The internet of the future
Remember a while back when I talked about NetMeeting, and the internet of the future (This was January 2000's update)? If you don't remember, you can click here to access the information I'm referring to. It's towards the bottom in a paragraph titled My opinion of things to come.
Well, we're now hooked up to the internet via cable modem (The service is called Time Warner Road Runner), and we're now finding more and more uses for the internet. And, our phone line is now free to be used while we're online, without having to purchase a second phone line. There is no dial up connection required, as you're literally always connected to the internet (Of course, as long as your computer is turned on). Just start your browser, and go surfing. All of this, and it's about 20-30 times faster than my previous 56K dial up connection.
The drawbacks? There are a few, and the first is price. While my first 3 months are $25, after that, I'll be paying $50 a month for this service. Secondly, with cable modems (But not DSL), the more people within my neighborhood that subscribe to the Road Runner service, the slower the internet experience will become as the band width gets fully utilized (But, that will require a LOT of people, and is likely to be at least a year down the road).
How fast is my cable modem? I downloaded a file from Oracle that was 327 Mb. Yes, 327 Mega bytes. I downloaded the entire file in one hour, and 15 minutes. I would not have attempted that with my 56K dial up connection. Just take my word for it, it's fast.
- Paula heads to Fairhope, and returns kid less
As our readers with kids can appreciate, any time you can arrange some time with just you and your spouse, you jump at the chance. Well, Paula managed, planned and finagled a way for her and I to spend some time together this month (Thank you Nanny, Rammy, Paw Paw, Jill, etc. etc.). So, we were kid less for over a week, and I must admit, we enjoyed it.
- Unwelcome in my garden
I've got a few tomato plants growing in pots on the deck out back, eight to be exact. Two of which I consider runts (More on that later). They're doing OK, but they really need to be in something more than potting sold and top soil purchased at Wal-Mart.
Anyway, one evening, while sitting on the deck pondering the space time continuum, the implication of metaphysics when applied to the fourth dimension, and the recent advances in neutron research (OK, I was actually thinking about what flavor snow cone I was going to have) I saw something rather strange on one of the tomato plants.
A whitish object, or so it appeared from a distance of about 10 feet, caught my attention. As I investigated more closely, I realized that I had a large caterpillar with hundreds of white eggs clinging to it's body on my tomato plant. It was on one of the runt plants, so I didn't much care.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I found two others, on my good, producing tomato plants, and relocated all three to the runt plant where they are living happily, although one of them abandoned ship, or was devoured by a hungry predator.
But, PETA, fear not, as I did not terminate their lives with extreme prejudice. I allowed them to stay on their natural habitat, where predators will determine their fate (Just curious, am I a natural predator to a caterpillar dining on MY garden?). Actually, to me, PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals!
Sorry, just had to strike out against PETA, as a recent raid on a research laboratory to free mice, lizards, salamanders and other small animals has put promising Alzheimer research back about 3-5 years with the unnecessary destruction of computers, tissue experiments and data that had been collected for several years.
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