Author: cosmo

Every boy who was a kid in the mid-80’s loved the movie Red Dawn. I mean, Patrick Swayze! So I was amused to see there was a remake of it last year, and I’ve been thinking about seeing it now that it’s been released on DVD. However, the reviews of it are almost universally bad. The one that really caught my eye was this:

Now that’s an image! Maybe I’ll pass on this one…

Josh brought in a little two-seater couch for his office today. He’s making everyone jealous. Now we all want to go into his office to “ask a quick question” or something, just looking for an excuse to enjoy the couch.

I have a bunch of little Lego minifigs on my desk in the basement. I especially like King Arthur, complete with the Holy Grail.

I also enjoy my little Star Wars heads: Admiral “It’s a Trap!” Ackbar, Darth Vader, and of course a stormtrooper.

Yesterday we had our Zing “company offsite” meeting… at the top of Peak 7 at Breckenridge.

The weather was just about perfect, it wasn’t too crowded, and we had a fabulous time.

Brent and James are excited about a lift ride

As usual, we had to wait for the snowboarders to strap up

This would be a sweet view out of the bedroom…

Laralee was pulled over by the police twice today. That’s pretty funny.

The first time, she was driving without license plates. In truth, she’d just been to the DMV to register our newest car and she had the plates on the passenger seat. She was driving home so she could install them on the car, since she didn’t bring a screwdriver with her. Of course the car was legal, so after a bit of explanation the cop let her go.

The second time, she was driving the same car (with plates now!) and taking Zack to gymnastics. She was running a little behind, and there were two cars waiting at a stoplight to turn left ahead of her. She wanted to go straight, and there was a right-turn lane so she veered into it– without signaling, of course– and sped past the cars. It was dark so she didn’t notice the police car right behind her. Fortunately the cop was in a charitable mood, so she let Laralee off with a warning.

I don’t know how many speeding tickets I’ve had in my life– maybe a dozen. Laralee probably speeds more than I do, and she has one to her name. I’m pretty sure women get warnings more often than men…

It’s getting to be that time of year again: tax time. That means I have to set up a Windows system, since the H&R Block software I use will only run on Windows. Oh joy.

Rather than “waste” a computer on an operating system I use once a year for taxes, I set up a virtual machine and installed Windows 7. I created a virtual disk of 25GB, thinking that would be plenty of space for the operating system and the handful of software packages I’ll need to install.

Boy, was I wrong.

Holy freaking crap. This is nothing more than Windows 7, Firefox, Chrome, and TaxCut. I’m pretty sure the latter three take less than 100MB combined, meaning the Windows 7 operating system requires over 19GB of space all by itself. What in the world…?

I guess I’m just spoiled by my Linux systems. The OS itself takes 40MB (I just checked my system) and even a fully-loaded system with all of the software I use in my daily work is less than 5GB.

Maybe I should go back to Windows XP for this; apparently TaxCut runs there too. Ugh.

I’m downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader (yeah, I know) and I was amused to see they provide download estimates…

… for people using 56k modems. Wow, thanks Adobe, for telling me what I might expect if I was using technology from 1994!

Also, who on earth has a T1 line any more? Back in the day they were the bomb because they offered 1.5Mbps symmetric speeds (they also cost about $1,000 a month), but these days my phone can move data faster than that.

For some reason I find macro photography to be fascinating. There are so many everyday things that take on new life when examined up close.

For example, my stack of Galaxy, Nexus, and HTC phone:

Screens

Or my alarm clock:

910

How about the inflatable exercise disc used to develop better balance:

Pips

Finally, pieces of a puzzle I’m building:

Joined

For reasons beyond my ken, Zack sat down and drew some sketches in a little notebook. They were entitled, “How to Be a Better Person”.

I love how “watch bad things” features a television show called The Bad Word Show. But my favorite part of being bad is probably “pass bad gas”. Ahh, potty humor.