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This is a first. I have a conference call with one of my clients tomorrow, and they want to talk about restructuring their web site. To prepare for the call they sent a document with scans of their “wireframes”:

And then a video that shows the meeting where they discussed all of this. The video is an hour long and includes riveting scenes like this:

Basically I’m supposed to watch the meeting to “get some context” prior to the call. Hoo boy.

On Saturday we went to a Cub Scout fundraiser and bid on an air hockey table someone had donated to be auctioned. We bid $5, the recommended minimum, and waited for others to bid up the price. No one did. I felt kind of bad getting a nice air hockey table for five bucks, so I told Kyra we should outbid ourselves at $25. She wrote it on the bid sheet and we waited again. Still no one.

So, hey, we ended up with a $25 air hockey table. It’s great fun. Of course it takes up a bunch of space in the basement, but it’s worth it.

Today I hosted my first-ever LAN party. For a couple of years I’ve been playing Warzone 2100, occasionally with Alex and Zack, and decided to ask some friends if they’d be interested in a game or two. I took a bunch of spare hardware I had, wired it all together in the basement, and we had everything we needed. Four of them came over and we spent the afternoon building super-tanks and planning pincer strategies and whatnot.

Good times.

For Laralee’s birthday I bought her what any loving husband would.

Two tubes of caulk.

(No, I’m not kidding. She loved them.)

One day in 1994 I was driving around and looked over at the passenger seat, where I had a box of all my CD’s. Yes, back in the old days people actually bought silvery plastic discs with music on them. I had hundreds. At an average cost of maybe $15 apiece, a couple hundred of them in one box added up to perhaps two or three thousand dollars.

My thought, driving around that day, was that the box of CD’s on my passenger seat was worth more than my car itself. It was a 1982 Nissan 200SX, bought for $1,200 from a Turkish exchange student who was moving back home after the semester.

Fast forward to today, when I had a similar thought. I had lunch with my friend Lewis, who (coincidentally) I met sometime around 1994. He now works for Cisco and had some spare hardware that he offered to me because he knows I could use it in my hosting business. I gratefully accepted and was happy to buy him lunch in exchange for roughly $15,000 worth of network gear.

Driving back home today, I reflected on the fact that the box of electronics in my trunk was worth (almost) as much as my 2008 Honda Civic. Funny.

Sunny and 65 in mid-February… I love Colorado!

What a great day to get out and play some ultimate. Too bad I haven’t played for three weeks, so I’m woefully out of shape…

Last night we bought a new rat for Kyra, to replace the late Bella, who died a few weeks ago.

Her name is Roxy (don’t ask; I don’t know). She’s a skittish little girl, but the joy she’s already brought Kyra makes it worthwhile.

It’s fascinating to watch our Congressmen in action as they debate the crippling $1.5 trillion dollar budget deficit this year, and how to effectively deal with it. Their plan? Harsh cuts across all government programs* which will slash a grand total of– wait for it– $61 billion from the budget.

* Except defense spending, of course. And Social Security, of course. No one cuts those budgets.

Don’t get me wrong: $61 billion is a lot of cash, and certainly a good start. But doing the math, it’s a hair over four percent of the total annual deficit. They’re going to haggle and wrangle and give long speeches and tell the voters they’re working hard to “reign in” government spending, and after a month of theatrics, even if they get the absolute maximum they’re asking for– which they almost certainly won’t– they’re going to shave off a measly four percent.

There’s something very very wrong with our budget and our government in general, and this kind of stupid “budget cutting” isn’t helping a bit.

Argh.

“There’s enough pork in the defense budget to make a bacon replica of the Hoover Dam.”

— Slashdot discussion about the budget deficit

How’s this for a creative idea: someone came up with an iPhone app that allows Catholics to confess their sins. Why trudge all the way down to church to sit in the booth and tell all to your priest, when you can do it right on your phone?

The Vatican promptly came out with their position on the whole thing. A spokesman said:

So much for that million-dollar idea…