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Dan Price's LiveJournal
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Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 |
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11:09 pm
Mood: |
Wedding Date Set | |
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Jamie and I met on 12/1/2001 through Yahoo Personals. She started dating another guy instead (yeah, rocky start) but less than a month later we were all sharing an apartment. In 2003 they moved out and I couldn't afford the rent myself so I moved back home with my parents. On 1/30/2004 I got my current job and over the course of the next two years, Jamie became single and we started hanging out a lot more. In 2006 we moved back in together and in 2007 we bought a house. On Dec 21, 2008, I put a ring on her finger, but we didn't set a wedding date right away. In a form of protest for marriage equality, we agreed it would be unfair to receive the tax benefits of being married when same-sex couples could not. We were thrilled when New York State legalized same-sex marriage, but a same-sex couple still wouldn't receive tax benefits until their marriage is recognized by federal law. However, we now feel that with the momentum for marriage equality moving in the right direction, and being unable to afford our protest any longer, it is time to make our union official. On Dec 21, 2011, at 4:00 PM, Jamie and I will be married by a Justice of the Peace at city hall in a very informal ceremony attended only by our immediate, local family. |
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Friday, November 11th, 2011 |
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11:11 pm
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111111111111 | |
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Since I missed the first one today, Happy 11/11/11 11:11:11 PM! |
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Friday, July 29th, 2011 |
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11:46 pm
Mood: |
ESL Air Show 2011 | |
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I finally edited together all the video and stills I shot at the air show 2 weekends ago. |
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Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 |
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1:02 pm
Mood: |
Do you know about the tornado? | |
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I was just out for a walk around the block at work and a random guy on the sidewalk asked me if I know about the tornado. Uh... Is that code for something, like waving your foot under a restroom stall? Fortunately, "No, where?" didn't seem to be the response he was looking for. |
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Friday, July 15th, 2011 |
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12:35 pm
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Renaissance Hymn | |
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http://youtu.be/maQMd1Y79NQ |
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Sunday, July 3rd, 2011 |
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5:48 pm
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Treasure Lake Fireworks | |
Another spectacular show this year!
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Sunday, June 19th, 2011 |
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12:12 am
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My First 5K | |
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I ran in the Airport 5K and finished in 30:55. Not bad for my first one! Jamie improved on her time, too. The most traumatic part was parking. There was no information at all on the web site about that, and no signage for people coming from the south. But after I spoke to a traffic cop he pointed at a huge electronic sign back where we came from, facing the other way so we couldn't see it, so we turned around and followed that. And it turns out there were shuttles to take us across the street to the hangar, too, which was nice, but again, totally unannounced. Also the results aren't posted on the site yet. |
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Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 |
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11:26 pm
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Hole in the Wall | |
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Today while I was at work our basement walk-out door became a hole in the wall. But that's ok... the foundation was built up in its place and the above-grade portion is boarded up for now. Eventually it will have an egress window installed (per code) and the stairs outside will be filled in. All part of the plan to fix the poor design that led to our recent flooding issues. Also on the agenda is a new roof. No date set for that work to start yet. Ah, home ownership. In other news, I went for a run outside today for the first time in like... ever. Jamie had mapped out a 5K course around our neighborhood, so I ran that because she had the treadmill tied up tonight. But also, I wanted to see if I'm ready to run outside yet because the Airport 5K is this weekend and I'm thinking about signing up. (Jamie already is.) Anyway, I ran it in about 36 minutes, but that includes walking around the house for a minute at the end to check out the mason's work. |
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Friday, April 22nd, 2011 |
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1:00 pm
Mood: |
suck | |
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I decided the flooding downstairs wasn't going to evaporate on its own fast enough, so last night I was up 'til 12:40 with the shop vac, sucking water out of the carpet. (Jamie said I was vacuuming for like... 8 hours.) It worked a lot better than I expected though; I must have dumped at least 5 gallons overall. But now the whole house smells like ass. At least I got a good workout, moving the exercise bike, treadmill, chair and piano so I could vacuum under them. |
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Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 |
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12:55 pm
Mood: |
boom | |
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Crazy thunderstorms last night... Constant lightning for an hour or more, one must've struck within 200 ft. Rain was heavy too, flooding through our basement door from the inadequately-drained outdoor stairwell. Who engineereed that, anyway? I love a good storm, but I wish it coudld've passed through earlier in the day instead of waking us up at 2AM, kicking off our power long enough to reset clocks and PCs, and staying noisy for another 2 hours so I couldn't fall back asleep. |
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Sunday, December 26th, 2010 |
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11:41 pm
Mood: |
Christmas 2010 | |
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Today was Christmas with my family at my brother's house. From my brother out near Saratoga, NY, I got a "Peppermint Pig", apparently some old tradition from there. From my parents, I got this cute little tree ornament.. tree... ornament.... From my sister, I got a bonsai tree. Looks like it needs a bit of work. I don't think it's in very good hands. :) It even came with a book, "Bonsai 101 Essential Tips"... I read the whole thing, but it leaves a lot to the imagination, of which I apparently have none. A lot of it apparently relies on basic gardening knowledge, too. Again, not me. We also got a whole bunch of food: 2 bottles of wine, 1 jar of Texas salsa, 1 jar of homemade salsa, corn chips, 1 jar of homemade grape jelly, and a bag of assorted fudge, cookies and peppermint bark. Friday was Christmas at Jamie's sister's house. Her parents got me a multi-ratchet wrench that looks like a phone, and her sister got me a $25 gift card to Regal Cinemas. From there, Jamie, her parents and I met up at my parents' for traditional lasagna dinner before going to evening mass. Back at our house, I let her open her gift from me a few hours early: an Amazon Kindle 3G. Jamie's gift to me should be shipped to me at work Monday: some parts for me to rebuild my PC. I ordered the main guts of it myself, and that should arrive Tuesday. |
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Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 |
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11:43 pm
Mood: |
Cat Farewell | |
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After months of consideration, Jamie and I decided to take Tobey and Lina back to Lollypop Farm today, with a $150 donation. We hope they'll be adopted together into a new family who can give them the love and attention they need. This morning at around 8 AM was the last I saw them, as I gave them both a goodbye kiss on the head before I left for work.  |
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Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 |
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9:45 am
Mood: |
Best Sig Ever | |
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"Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow." From CountBrass @ Slashdot |
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Sunday, October 31st, 2010 |
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12:02 pm
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Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear | |
We were there. :) The crowd was huge and tightly packed... Going anywhere required weaving through people like red blood cells trying to pass through capillaries, so once we found a spot with no smokers around us (seriously, people?) and a somewhat decent view of a video screen, we stood in that spot the whole time. Here's a 360° panorama from our location:  (This was well before noon, so it wasn't fully packed yet... You can still see some grass!) The rally opened with a few too many songs by "The Roots", then finally things started happening. Of course you can't attract a crowd of hundreds of thousands and not let the boys from MythBusters have a little fun. So Adam and Jamie go on stage and tried some experiments with the crowd. The first few just involved doing "the wave" in various ways. Here was our view of the wave that started at the stage and propagated west: They also tried having the crowd make different sounds like laughing, crying, doing "cheek pops", all cued by the video screens. That part seemed less exciting, at least from our location. Another idea they had was apparently to try to trigger an earthquake... They set up a seismometer and tried to get the entire crowd to jump up and land on the ground at the same time to see how big of an impact all that "meat" could make. But I think someone failed to inform them that the video screens weren't all in sync with each other. They were delayed to match the speed of sound coming from the stage, so using them to synchronize the jump didn't really work. The seismometer picked up a rumble, but probably nothing like it could've been if it was truly synchronized. I think Adam said we hit the ground with a force "about 100 times more powerful than a minor car crash." :) After the MythBusters were done with their fun, finally Jon Stewart came out to huge applause, followed shortly by Stephen Colbert, who had supposedly been hiding deep underground below the stage because he was fearful that nobody had shown up for the rally. They showed a video feed of him on the screens, shirtless in a dark place like a Chilean miner. When Jon finally talked him into coming to the surface, Stephen slowly ascended up through the stage in a rescue pod. A few more celebrities were involved later on, including Ozzy Osbourne and Sam Waterston. But a little before 2pm they gave the stage to some musical act we didn't recognize, and we decided to leave early so we could beat the crowd onto the metro and get on the road to Massanutten, VA, where we're spending the rest of this week on vacation. |
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Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 |
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7:48 pm
Mood: |
Good evening, officer! Wait, what? | |
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So, we're relaxing at home after work and a police officer knocks on our door... and hands us an accident report because somebody destroyed our mailbox. Ok, maybe normally that wouldn't be so bad to deal with. Home insurance probably covers it, I'd guess? It would probably just take some phone calls and some time to get things worked out. But in our case, we're leaving town on Friday for over a week, so time is in short supply. To make matters more complicated, our mailbox was actually mounted on a post shared with our neighbor, in their yard across the street. So in that case, whose post was it? For that matter, do residents ever "own" the post or does the post office? That's always been a confusing concept to me. Well on the bright side at least we don't need to tell the post office to hold our mail while we're on vacation... they'll probably figure that out on their own when they try to deliver tomorrow's mail! |
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Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 |
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7:36 pm
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Road Trip YouTube Contest | |
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Hmm... I don't think I'm gonna make it to the top by tomorrow. hg56959: 10,143 views fizhy37: 6,617 views janaedowney: 2,927 views NinjaPeter7: 2,812 views thwack318: 2,581 views |
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Thursday, September 16th, 2010 |
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7:19 am
Mood: |
Dream Journal | |
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It's been a long time since I've had such a vivid and memorable dream that made no sense, so I thought it was worth an entry. It seemed to bet set in high school, and the earliest part I remember was being in band practice. The director told us all to open up one of several books in our folders to a piece titled "Millennium". (I'm not even sure if such a thing exists, but if it does, my brain isn't familiar with it so there's no meaning there.) However, many students in the band soon found that the 3 to 4 pages that would have contained that music, alphabetically by title, were ripped out of their copies of the book. So were mine. And during a bunch of frustrated discussion like "who would do such a thing?" I noticed that the band director's copy was missing its pages, too. In the back of my (dream world) mind I was thinking... "Wait, so, you wanted us to rehearse something you clearly haven't even tried to lay eyes on, since you didn't know your pages were missing?" Next part I remember, I was walking down the halls of the school with a bunch of other students, probably from the band, and we were teasing each other about birthdays from the perspective of who is older, and one of them told me something like "well since you'll die later, your body will continue its gravitational pull on the oceans for a longer time than mine", which makes no sense at all, but whatever. I don't think it was anyone I had respect for. :) Apparently the discussion was so heated that they had all stopped moving, but I actually had somewhere to be so I broke free and walked away from them. I passed some sort of teacher walking the other way towards the crowd as he gave me a look and pointed as if to ask, "what's going on back there?" I just shrugged and said, "I dunno, talking about death or something," and kept walking. As I turned one corner of the hall, I encountered two students who were trying to throw some kind of contraband to each other across the hallway, and somehow I immediately recognized what they were doing and had no desire to interfere, so my automatic behavior was to crawl on the ground to pass between them so I wouldn't obstruct their trajectory. Further down the hall, I noticed a student who had just received from another student what appeared to be some kind of drug-laced English muffins. They clearly had something pink injected into them. As if a student carrying a pack of English muffins will be less suspicious than the drug itself? Plus, I can't imagine it's a very tasty combination, even though I have no clue what the drug was supposed to be, but I imagined it tasting like cough syrup. As I turned a corner to head up some stairs, I saw Jon Stewart coming down them muttering something like, "oh, my poor broken heart." I guess he was supposed to be one of the teachers there. Another teacher seemed to be consoling him, and I asked what was wrong. She just gestured up the stairs to the higher floor. Up there I saw someone who was supposed to be Jon's wife. Although I'm not sure what Jon's real wife looks like, this person looked something like Kirsten Gillibrand to my waking mind, but in my dream I just recognized her as Jon's wife. Clearly she had just done something to upset him. Maybe they had a fight. It's difficult to describe the configuration of this staircase, but somehow between Jon at the lower level and his wife on the floor above, there was a landing or something with a ledge at the height of window sill that was just big enough for a sculpture that I recognized to hold special meaning for Jon and his wife. It was some kind of puzzle made up of about 20 large pieces, and its completion was supposed to symbolize their love for each other (I know, cheesy). I don't recall anything about the overall finished shape of it, but I decided I had to remind her of it and make her rethink whatever she had just done to Jon, by taking a piece out of the puzzle and giving it to her. However, this puzzle was also somewhat like a game of Jenga. Taking the piece out would be difficult without the rest of it falling. Sure enough, one of the larger pieces fell out from above the one I tried to remove. It appeared be only a surface piece though, and not one that goes all the way through for structural support. As I tried to put the piece back, suddenly the whole thing became snow-covered. I guess I wasn't in the school anymore. I was still trying to pound it into place and wipe the snow off of it when the alarm went off. Weird, right? |
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 |
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6:57 am
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Jon Schmidt's "Road Trip" YouTube Video Contest | |
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Help me get the most views by Sept 30 so I can win $100 and a complete set of music books or CDs! (Try not to check out the other videos more than once, or you're not helping me. ;) ) I'd probably choose the music books, to replace my bulging folder full of printed PDFs. I could also choose free concert tickets, but I'd have to travel far to see him, otherwise I'd have already gone. |
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Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 |
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6:22 pm
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Introducing Clyde | |
We have a bearded dragon now. :)   |
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Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 |
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10:40 pm
Mood: |
Grill Obtained | |
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We decided on the Uniflame grill, and picked that up from Walmart today. As I was unpacking it, I noticed a lot of black dust in one area of the box, and then found that one of the front corners of the main grill body looked like it had been dropped and slid along pavement or something that scraped the paint off and deformed that corner such that I doubt any of the machine screw holes would line up for assembly. So we packed it back up and went back to Walmart to exchange it. Fortunately that was rather painless, and the second one we got didn't have any problems. But in the directions for assembly I noticed a paragraph at the top saying "Do not return this item to the store where you purchased it. Call this toll-free number for assistance." Hey, nice location for that message, in the assembly directions that were packed inside the part that was damaged. I even consciously looked for a message like that before we returned the damaged grill, because we see it so often in product packaging these days. Usually there's a sign printed in bright red right on top as you open the box with "STOP" signs on it or something, but not in this case. Oh well. If we had called the number I'm sure it would have taken weeks to resolve the issue anyway. By exchanging it at Walmart we got it resolved in an hour. We still need to get a propane tank for it. We thought we'd pick one up at a convenience store near our house, only to find that they don't have the propane exchange cage outside that we thought we had remembered seeing. So we tried another gas station a little further away, same deal. WTF? We could swear we'd both seen propane tank exchange cages outside someplace around here that we go to semi-regularly. I guess we'll try Lowe's or something. We're going to check there for grilling utensils anyway. For now, our grill is all assembled out on the patio with its cover on it. Maybe this coming week we'll get to try it out, as the weather is supposed to be nice. |
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Saturday, May 15th, 2010 |
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5:07 pm
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Grill Search | |
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We really want to get a grill this year. (Sorry George, your Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine just isn't versatile enough.) I saw a recent Consumer Reports magazine at work that reviewed gas grills and listed the Char-Broil Red Patio as a "Best Buy", and it's around the price we're looking to pay, but unfortunately it's only available via Home Depot online and it's sold out. Yesterday we were out and decided to stop by Lowes to check out their grills, but we were underwhelmed. The most attractive option was their basic-looking Grill Master 4-Burner Gas Grill with no official name or model number that we could find (on the store display). I decided to look up reviews for it online, and as expected, nobody has anything good to say. That brought me to the About.com listings of Top 10 Gas Grills in various price ranges. After reading a few reviews, I started to notice a pattern. First, the grammatical errors and typos seemed consistent throughout every article. Sure enough, the entire grilling section of About.com is apparently written by one guy named Derrick Riches. And second, Derrick clearly thinks that any grill sold for under $1000 is complete and utter crap. Why did he even make lists for the top 10 grills under that price if he can't recommend a single one of them? He even says that some models "should serve you for a couple of years". What does he do to grills to make them die so quickly? Run them 4 hours a day within the spray of salty seawater? So that site is useless in my search. I don't want the opinion of one guy who is so lofted by the industry that he's out of touch with the everyday consumer's needs. I want to see general reviews of customer satisfaction. Today we looked at grills at Sears, Home Depot and Walmart. Sears had a Kenmore model that is winning with us. Home Depot has a Char-Broil RED model that also looks nice, if we're willing to push our budget up to $400. Walmart's selection was lower quality than the other stores, but we did write down one model of UniFlame to check out online. I think we're sold on the importance of thick, cast-iron, porcelain-covered grates. So many of the low-priced grills have cheap grates that are really just thin metal pressed into a shape that looks thick from the top but is hollow underneath. Maybe we'll figure out what we want someday before the end of summer. :) |
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Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 |
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9:53 pm
Mood: |
Me being a smartass... | |
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YouTube spam from episodeman82: Heya,How long have you been a youtuber? you vids seem very entertaining. Mabye your just not promoteing you vids good that y they arent gettin noticed as much as they shud be. I got a link to a video that has great tip on getting notice and getting a feature on youtube, you should check it out if you want to get ur vids noticed alot more. heres the link: http://www.movieswar.com/youtube-featur You have to do sum small survey b4 they let u watch it but its only a short 1. Take care Davie My reply: Hello. How long have you been a promotional writer? Your goal seems very simple. Maybe your failure to use respectable writing skills is the reason your messages aren't as effective as they should be. I have a link to a site that has great tips on improving the quality of your writing. You should check it out if you want better responses to your marketing efforts. Here's the link: http://www.grammarbook.com/ They also want you to buy their book but it's only $10.17. Regards thwack318 |
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Sunday, May 9th, 2010 |
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8:29 pm
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Emery Cat Learning Curve | |
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So, we were grocery shopping at Wegmans yesterday and noticed a shelf full of Emery Cat boards. I've been so tempted to buy one when I've seen the ads on TV, because our cats are terrible about clawing everything. Tobey claws every vertical wooden surface he can find and we're always yelling at him. So we threw an Emery Cat in our shopping cart and gave it a shot. I think the cats need an instruction manual though... This morning the bell on the toy was already gone. Less than 24 hours! I reattached it tightly with some metal wire. Also, notice in the video how the bottom inch or two of the feathery toy is just a solid rod at one point... I think that's because Lina had it half-way down her esophagus. The catnip made her a little crazy. They've been ignoring it most of today though. Apparently I failed to notice they had both written "SLEEP" across this entire day on their calendar. |
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Saturday, May 8th, 2010 |
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7:02 pm
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Overdue Update | |
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I no longer have bragging rights for having four living grandparents. My mom's dad ("PopPop" to me) had been having heart problems lately and passed away Thursday afternoon in his Idaho home with his loving wife and family by his side, including my mom who had just flown in that day. I'm grateful that I got to see him last summer when we drove out for the family gathering. That's not the reason I decided to post this long-overdue update, but it would seem wrong to post anything else without mentioning that. Today we braved the high winds to go out for lunch at Red Robin and go looking for some velcro and a sewing kit to attempt a repair job on our gazebo. In storage over the winter, the elastic tie-backs for the side panels just disintegrated like a dried-out rubber band. In the high winds today, everything's getting tossed around too much with the panels closed and acting like sails (even though all four corners of the frame are tied down tight to the deck railing) so we wanted to open them up, but that means we need to replace the broken tie-backs or else they'll just blow all over the place. So we're hoping some velcro straps will do the trick. Earlier in the week the weather was nice so we could enjoy a nice cookout dinner under the gazebo. Jamie made some super-healthy and delicious faux potato salad (using cauliflower) and cooked up some buffalo chicken sausage on the George Foreman grill. (Yeah, we don't have a real grill yet.) Jamie has been doing really well with her weight loss, and I'm proud of her for that. Although lately she started playing WoW again. ;) But at least she's not letting it interfere with her weight loss goals, so I can't criticize. I started using Google Chrome lately. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but FireFox was just pissing me off lately. It sometimes takes 40 seconds to launch. WTF? Chrome just pops right up like it's already running (maybe it is?). Besides, this. But, I have to wonder, why is there no Google Toolbar for Chrome? I miss search term highlighting and seeking. In other computing news, I think I need a bigger hard drive. HD video files from my camera just eat everything up, and I hate deleting things. I'm a digital hoarder... "What if I want that clip of snow falling in the field behind our house someday?" (And it turns out I used that in this at 1:48, so I'm glad I kept it!) A particularly bad case of that lately involved several hundred frames of fractal animations that were rendered to 4GB worth of transparent PNGs. Unfortunately I can't find any way to encode those into a video format that maintains transparency, so there's no way to compress that 4GB. I ended up burning the files to a DVD. But if I get a bigger internal hard drive, that means I also need a bigger backup drive. I currently backup my important files (including HD videos) to an external hard drive, which right now is already full because I put some things only on that drive if I care less about having a backup of it than I do about having free space on my internal drive. So this gets the proverbial ball rolling and eventually I realize I just need an entirely new computer because this one is 5 years old. But I can't afford that right now. So, what, just 2 new hard drives? My mobo can raid them... Then I could dedicate those drives to space-eating stuff like the HD videos and free up space on my system drive without needing to reinstall. That might be a doable plan. *steps out / steps back in* I just went out to put a cinder block over the base of one corner of the gazebo frame that kept kicking out at an angle in the wind. Hopefully that'll hold it. I also located an end cap that popped out of a corner of the frame of the upper canopy that came loose. Well, now we're going to the grocery store, so that'll have to be the end of this update. I can't think of anything else anyway. |
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5:13 pm
Mood: |
Good thing I'm not an identity thief... | |
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Chase mailed me a credit card offer, but when I opened the envelope, I found two offers inside... one for a neighbor down the street. I'll be a good person and shred it, but this makes me wonder, how many people have received my offers? And how many of those people are bad people? |
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