Author: cosmo

Zack’s friends have been playing Dungeons and Dragons with him lately. It’s kind of funny because he comes home after a six-hour marathon gaming session and tells me all about the excitement: “So we opened the door and there was a group of orcs and I cast a level-ten spell of orc-slaying and took out their leader with my Sword of Magical Stuff (+5 against orc leaders) and then we found the mystical Orb of Seeing Things and…”

So for Christmas I gave Zack my ancient collection of D&D manuals:

These are vintage early-80’s books that have been gathering dust in our crawlspace for a while. I remember buying them and reading about all of the rules, abilities, monsters, and so forth. But then Dirk’s mom decided that he couldn’t play D&D because it promoted satanism and killing people with swords. We ended up playing Star Frontiers instead, which is basically a science-fiction version of D&D where you kill people with laser blasters instead. Oh well.

I’m glad these books will finally go to good use.

A few weeks ago I shipped my entire collection of old photo negatives to a company called ScanCafe. Today they were returned safe and sound, along with four DVD’s packed with the high-resolution digital scans of those photos. There are 4,044 in all.

I’m just poking around right now, but in the next few days I’ll probably sit down with the kids and we’ll walk through all of these on the bigscreen (our TV can show photos from our collection). I’m sure it’ll be an absolute riot as we remember some hilarious moments. Heck, moments aside, it’s just funny to see how my friends and I looked twenty years ago.

I’ll probably post some of them here in the coming days, partly to share stories but partly to embarrass anyone else in the pictures who happens to read this blog.

Yep, this pretty much sums up professional sports.

Props to VectorBelly

For reasons beyond my ken, Brian and James have been talking for weeks about having a grand chicken-nugget-eating competition. James insisted that a real man would be able to down sixty nuggets at a sitting.

Today, finally, was the day. They went to McDonald’s (purveyor of the finest nuggets) and each bought a box of sixty nuggets. The cashier handed Brian a slip of paper and told him next time he could call ahead for an order like this.

Back at the office, they went to work. They both managed to put down thirty-some nuggets before deciding sixty was a bit too ambitious. Brian finally managed to polish off forty, but James had to call it quits after a mere thirty-one.

Real men, indeed.

I received an error email from Ben’s development machine, where he’s doing some work for a client. In the email I can see his computer’s hostname, vinz_clortho. I didn’t know what that meant, but a quick internet search revealed that Vinz Clortho is the Keymaster of Gozer, and the alter-ego of Louis Tully.

Now it all makes sense. Ben has proven once again that he’s the king of obscure cultural references.

Brent and I stopped by a client’s office today to talk briefly about a little project they have. We dropped off a Zing lava lamp as a token of goodwill.

The women working there literally shrieked with delight. They were ecstatic about it, and kept going on and on about how this was the “best schwag ever!”

It’s fun to give a nice little marketing gimmick (Brent’s idea) that makes people so excited. Then again, these lava lamps are pretty cool… I have one on my desk.

One of my resolutions this year is to get up earlier. Laralee and the kids are all up and going by 7:00 every morning, and I would tend to sleep until 8:30 and then roll into the office by 9:00 or a little later. I’ve always enjoyed staying up late and sleeping in, but I felt a little guilty snoozing for more than an hour after everyone else was already at school.

So this year I’ve decided to be in bed by midnight and up at 7:00 at least four days a week (I get one day to sleep in). Last night I was engrossed in some research and ended up staying up until about 1:00am. Not surprisingly, this morning I decided to make it my sleep-in day. I finally rolled out of bed around 8:30. But I felt pretty groggy, and didn’t have the usual energy I’ve felt the past few weeks as I’ve been rising at 7:00.

Clearly I ended up with roughly the same amount of sleep, but the late start was kind of a drag. I hate to admit it to myself, but I may be slowly turning into a morning person. No, not one of those people who rises with the sun and dances about, talking about what a beautiful day it is and insisting that everyone else be up with the birds as well. But still, perhaps there’s something to getting an early start on the day and going to bed at a reasonable time and not 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

We’ll see how this turns out…

Udi’s is one of our clients, and as part of their buyout and business shift, they’re renaming the company. They’ve invited “vendors and friends” to help with the renaming effort, so I just received an email invitation to a web site where they’re asking for suggestions.

There’s a $1,000 party for the person who suggests the winning name. The rules say this:

“Enter early and often and YOU just might be the one who renames Udi’s.”

My diabolical brain thinks “Hmm, it’s just an HTML form. I could write a script that submits thousands of random names. That would overwhelm the rest of the competition, and greatly increase the likelihood that I’d win!”

I’m convinced that rock bands and startup companies just use random name generators that combine two dictionary words.

face + book
linked + in
green + day
smashing + pumpkins
etc.

Why not Udi’s?

Heh heh heh.

It’s official– as of this year, all of our kids are responsible for their own laundry. Zack was doing his first load in the washer the other day and he told Laralee to take a picture of him.

He was so proud. Now it’ll be interesting to see whether he manages to actually do his laundry weekly. He’s the kid who would go for a week without showering if he could…

Tonight we headed up to UNC to watch Kyra play in an honor band. There were about a hundred students selected from 18 high schools in northern Colorado, and they did a great job.

There’s my girl, the floutist: