Year: 2007

Now that’s a funny ad.

Fall doesn’t officially start for two more weeks, but I think today heralded the first day of it. The weather is grey and overcast, and only about 60 degrees. Compared with the 90-degree sun two days ago, it feels downright cold.

Even Zack thought a jacket was needed to bounce on the trampoline.

The Xbox Media Center is soooo sweet. I’ve had mine for about six months now, and I absolutely love it. I use it mainly to stream music from my computer– we never drop CD’s into our stereo any more because we have our entire 9,000+ song library right there on the XBMC and can pick any song we want with a few clicks of the remote control.

Of course it also has a ton of other spiffy features, like showing lyrics for any song, downloading album information from the internet, streaming video and TV shows, playing hundreds of old (think 1980’s) video games, displaying the weather forecast, and on and on. The Xbox itself cost me around $60 on eBay, and all of the software is completely free (with many thanks to Chancellor for letting me borrow a few hacker parts). I imagine you can get something equivalent with the Apple TV or some other media center, but those things cost a few hundred bucks.

It also helps to have a 62-inch TV.

Everyone’s familiar with M.C. Escher’s woodcut Relativity:

But check out this awesome Lego version of it:

Today’s Dilbert strip is pretty funny.

“The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content. Only ten years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music. And there’s no clear answer about how to fix that problem.”

— David Geffen

So I sent an e-mail to my friend Shane, and I received this bounce message:

Wow, a GMail account that’s “over quota”? I thought you got something like 1.5 gigabytes of mail storage with GMail… he must get some serious e-mail traffic!

You can’t argue with the math.

It was nine months ago, more or less, that Colorado got slammed with the first of its weekly blizzards. Last winter we had snow on the ground for sixty-plus days straight, with more each weekend.

And now the babies are showing up. Hospitals in the Denver area are reporting a 20% surge in births this month, and expecting more next month (nine months after cabin fever really set in).

It’s like a mini Baby Boomer effect!

It is with deep regret* that I read about the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this morning.

* Just kidding. It was a great day. Long ago I thought John Ashcroft was the worst AG this country could have, but ol’ Alberto proved me wrong. Good riddance.

I was downstairs in my office today, working on some accounting stuff (whee!) and I glanced out the window at our neighbors’ yard. There, waving gently in the breeze and backlit by a brilliant blue sky, was a sunflower.

I grabbed my camera, went outside, and took the shot:

Not too bad! One of these days I might actually become a decent photographer…