Year: 2008

Mmm… I finally got out on my bike today, after several months of it sitting in the garage getting rusty. The weather was pretty nice (50ish) and I had a dentist appointment across town, so I pumped up the tires, hopped on, and enjoyed the ride.

Well, this is a new one for me. I’m building a web application that presents a form entirely in Japanese.

The funny thing is that I have no idea what these fields say, and I can only hope that the first Japanese guy to come to the site and use the form doesn’t laugh his head off or get offended because I messed up a verb tense or something and insulted his ancestors.

I took a fun picture of my new Google lava lamp warming up:

President Bush is now down to a 19% approval rating.

What’s most incredible about that is the fact that if I picked five random people on the street, one of them would actually think Bush is doing a good job!

Behold the power of the internet… already there are hundreds of eclipse photos on Flickr. Here’s one that’s a bit fuzzy, but I liked the wispy icy clouds:

And here’s one that was actually taken last year but is an impressive shot:

It’s amazing how nature is so beautiful at times.

Sadly, tonight’s lunar eclipse was marred by cloud cover. Around 8:30 the clouds cleared a bit, leaving some wispy ones floating around the moon, and I was able to take a few pictures.

It’s always cool to see the moon turn red (apparently a result of sunlight refracting through Earth’s atmosphere) and even cooler to see the curve of Earth’s shadow. The photo doesn’t really do it justice, but I enjoyed the sight anyway.

I’m listening to Joga’s “Dam Dariram”, which is a song included on Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2 and has a great beat. The lyrics aren’t too bad:

But then you get to the refrain:

Whoa. I guess they couldn’t think of any words so they sort of threw together a bunch of syllables that sounded catchy.

Mmm… today marked my return to ultimate for the year. I haven’t played since November (when the weather was amazing) due to weather, trips, work, illness, and general laziness. So I hit the field today, along with a dozen other guys who also haven’t played for three months, and we had a good time in the (relatively) warm weather.

Of course it reminded me how out of shape I’ve become during the course of the winter…

Here’s a cool photo from our trip to Idaho a couple of weeks ago. There were some pretty serious blizzards in northern Utah, but on the day we drove through the area it was a beautiful (but cold) sunny day.

Zack and Alex have been asking for months if we can play “that game with the little figures”. They’re talking about Axis and Allies, of course, which has a gazillion miniature tanks and fighters and battleships. So today, at long last, we pulled out the game and played it as sort of a birthday party for me.

I warned them that a full game of A&A takes about five or six hours, so most likely they would get bored pretty quickly. Also, it’s fairly complicated and probably not really intended for a six-year-old. But we pressed forward, spent about forty minutes sorting the pieces and setting up the board, and then started playing.

They lasted two turns and were ready to call it quits and go outside to jump on the trampoline. Honestly, that’s about one turn more than I expected.

So I guess we won’t be playing A&A any time soon, although one of these days they’ll be old enough (and patient enough) and we’ll have a good time.