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Many people enjoy a nice caramel apple for Halloween. But consider this delicious snack:

Carmel and bacon. (And almonds.) Mmm!

Halloween is almost here, which means it’s time to start shopping for costumes. And if you’re walking down the aisle looking at the various monster masks and fairy princess costumes, I’m sure you’d stop dead when you saw the toilet costume!

Wow. Words fail me.

And not only is the costume itself beyond words, the kid modeling it definitely has some special needs too.

What’s that you say? Little Billy doesn’t want to be a toilet Tuesday night? Well, never fear, because he could always slip into the whoopee cushion costume!

Same kid– and time for his medication, I think.

Also, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if you gave him a big hug. Would you release some kind of deafening, ear-shattering, Armageddon-class fart noise?

I’ve got a dual-monitor setup in my office– two 17″ LCD panels that are super sweet. Having two screens is so much more productive than a single one, and in the year or so I’ve had them I’ve loved using them.

Yesterday I found a killer deal on some new 20″ widescreen LCD displays, and started thinking that if a pair of 17″ers could make me so much more productive, imagine what another three or four inches would do! (Funny, that sounds like those spammy e-mail messages I get daily.)

Anyway, I was looking at the specs and pondering whether it’s worth the expense and whether it would really make things that much better when Laralee walked into the office. I told her what I was thinking, and why I was hesitating, and she immediately said I should buy them.

A bit surprised, I asked why. She said because then I could give my existing LCDs to the kids (each of them have a computer in their room) and lose the hundred-pound CRTs that are on their desks. I thought that was sort of a strange reason, but who am I to argue with a mom who’s looking out for her kids?

So I ordered them, and should have forty inches of computer display sometime next week. Woo hoo!

“Don’t sit on the fence.  You will never fully enjoy what’s on either side.”

— Paul Seamons

Although the solar system is down one planet, there are still some pretty spectacular things to be found out there. Here’s a photo of Saturn, taken by Cassini, with the sun backlighting the rings. It even clearly shows a previously unknown distant ring. Amazing!

The mortgage on my house is through Chase Bank, and today I received a Special New Offer from them. Whee!

They “noticed” that my last payment was delivered in a U.S. Mail envelope. Since every payment I’ve sent them for the past four years was also delivered via U.S. Mail, one wonders why this is such a revelation to them… but apparently it made someone over at Chase sit up and take notice. “Hey,” I’m sure they said, “we need to extend a Special New Offer to this guy!”

So the Special New Offer is an opportunity for me to sign up for their “Chase FastPay” program, wherein my mortgage payments are deducted directly from my bank account. According to their nice personalized letter, this will make my life so much easier, and will also save me money. Well, heck, I’m a sucker for an easier life and saving money, so I skimmed the next few paragraphs.

It turns out there’s a Low Monthly Fee of only $12.00 to enroll in this program. Hmm. I don’t know if they checked the price of stamps at their local post office, but I’d be surprised to find any twelve-dollar stamps around there. One wonders how twelve bucks will be a savings over the thirty-seven cents I normally spend every month, but I’m no financial wizard, and we all know the guys at Chase are. So maybe I’m missing something.

It also occurred to me that an electronic payment would most likely make their processing easier, since they wouldn’t have to open my envelope, pull out the check, open the computer program and enter the account number, enter the amount, and verify that it posted. It seems that they should be paying me to use their FastPay program, although maybe they have Third-World sweatshops staffed by poor children who only cost a few pennies a day for the data entry. Who knows.

So, sadly, I’m going to have to pass on the Special New Offer and continue licking stamps every month. Hey, wait, I don’t even have to lick them any more– isn’t technology great?

Remember those inspirational posters that were so hugely popular in the Nineties? It’s hilarious how even after all these years, they still provide fodder for a near-infinite number of spoofs.

It’s so much fun to live in a world where stuff like this happens:

Any time you hear someone say, “we conducted a variety of tests and figured out it was Jell-O” you know the terrorists have won.

Tom and I went on our annual hiking/backpacking/photography road trip last week, and had a fabulous time in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas and the northern California coastline. Armed with my (relatively) new Panasonic Lumix digital camera, I was able to take much richer pictures than I did with the old Sony Cybershot.

Now I’m going through the photos, adjusting black levels and colors and so on, pulling out the natural hues and pushing them to a much more realistic look. As I mess with various settings, it’s amazing what can be done with a simple digital photograph.

Take, for example, this shot of the eastern side of the Sierras. The rocks are generally grey (granite), the sky is of course blue, and we have some white clouds. Compare the left half of the photo– the raw data from the camera– with the simple black-level adjustment on the right. It’s dramatic.

It’s also interesting to see the things the camera captures but doesn’t necessarily show in the photo. Here’s a shot of a tree near the beach at sunset:

After I took the picture and lowered my camera, I noticed a couple walking along the road. They’re not visible in the raw image, but tweaking the brightness of the image reveals them (along with a trash can and the curb).

Cool stuff. I think I’m getting addicted to this photography thing.

This is just plain cool.