Digging through some of my old bookmarks (figure I'd start off the year right) I found an interview with David Russell. Really good read even if you're not completely addicted to classical guitar. I think this was one of the first places I read about memorizing pieces starting with the end first. Interesting. Someday I'll have to try. Still working on getting the material down that I already know.

Great Tone Article

Good article an tone production on the classical guitar. Bottom line is it doesn't matter how fast you can play if it doesn't sound good in the first place.

• http://www.michaelchapdelaine.com/great_tone.html

Emacs vs Vi? Old news. I still use both, but regularly use Emacs for my programming and general compositions. It would rule if they could make Emacs key bindings for Word or OpenOffice. It's hard to even get around in those programs! As usual I don't really have a point. Sitting here eating a yummy cinnamon roll and reading my RSS feeds. Ran across the Artist module for Emacs. Looks to be a really cool way to make text diagrams. Yet another "thing to try". Add it to the list!

Do you like apples? No Josh, I don't like apples.

• Instead check out some clementines. Perfect sweet goodness packed with vitamin C. Here I sit with none, which is why I'm thinking about them. Did we add that to the grocery list?

According to wikipedia we eat a type of California clementine that are only good November through January. So we'd all better eat up while we can. Soon we'll be back to oranges. The horror.

It's a very interesting topic. Since the days I worked at Net Perceptions I have wondered what will the future hold for advertisers? As we gain more control over what is put in front of us (1000's of cable/satellite channels, VCR/Tivo, the Internet) how will mass marketing change? Will giant marketing agencies still be effective? Will targeted campaigns become the norm? It will be curious to see how it goes. In that vein ''The Economy of Unbundled Advertising'' is a very interesting read.

Something lighthearted for a Friday.

• In Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons Why You Should Date a Geek

Some valid reasons.

The only thing I've heard on the radio for the last week - Snoopy is leaving the Mall of America! They lead the news with it, every radio station is talking about it - Am I completely missing something? Is that the reason some people travel to the Mega Mall? I won't believe it even if it's true.

• Here's the deal. They are going to rename Camp Snoopy because they lost their lease on using Peanuts character likenesses. It still doesn't register. This is important? Do I live in the same world with everyone else? Wait! - don't answer that.

MoinMoin 1.5 was released yestreday. I went ahead and blasted it out on my server. A little hasty probably, but always fun. This release includes many cool features including a GUI editor for page creation. There will be a few problems I'm sure - I'll get them worked out. Eventually.

After many months of waiting Kate and I finally have the chance to meet Sam! He was born January 13th (Yes, Friday the 13th) at about 9:43am. Mom and baby are doing awesome. Dad is still trying to figure out what happened. I took a few pictures and put them here. I'm sure I'll have more to say once this all really sinks in.

Just wanted to say thanks for all the comments! It was really great to hear from everbody. Kate and I have been having a blast getting to know our little guy. I'm getting back to work, or trying my best to do so. Pretty tough after having such a nice break. Grandma Sergent is here helping for a while, but next week we'll be flying solo. No license required.

• Because I'm so into work I found some interesting links for things that have happened and folks that were born on January 13th.
  • BBC On this day
  • NY Times on this day
  • Wikipedia on this day

I'll get around to posting more pictures. Getting everything organized and getting into the new routine. It's all good

Couldn't leave things alone. Always have to break things. I found this theme on the main MoinMoin site and couldn't resist giving it a try. The change is definitely not permanent. (changes rarely are) The only problem is that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is a giant pile of poop! I get really tired of trying to figure out why IE will not follow standards that all other browsers are able to handle just fine. Luckily for me my site is opposite from what most people are likely to experience in terms of which browsers are most likely to be viewing this page - Firefox normally dominates. So, if you're not using a browser other than Internet Explorer here's your chance to step out of the box. Here are a couple of free browsers that rule. Give them a shot and stop endangering your own computer by using Internet Exploder.

• http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ - Firefox is the best browser in my opinion. Blocks pop-ups. Has a great rendering engine. Plenty fast.
• http://www.opera.com/ - Opera is a great browser that has only improved over the years. Back in the day it was most noted for being incredibly fast. I have begun to use Opera once in a while for fun and it is still a great product.

Wired has an article about Western Union sending it's last telegram. Pretty crazy to think about. They say that form of communication is gone, but I disagree. If we really think about it the internet as we know it just a series of signals being carried around by wires. It was just way ahead of it's time, and a little slower. I wonder how fast the fastest Morse coder could tap out a message in bits per second? So if a fast Morse coder could knock out about 4 bleeps per second would that be about 4 bits per second? And the line on which my server resides kicks out about 800,000 bps? We've come quite a ways.

Christmas this year brought some excellent tunage - Tuners! My old tuner was a BOSS-OLDMODEL I've had since I was in college. That would be the early nineties for those keeping track. Holding it together with duct tape for the last few years was getting really old. Due to my own lack of manual dexterity and the hardness of our aptly named hardwood floors the old tuner was on it's last legs. Being that I am one of the luckiest people in the world I received not one, but two tuners as gifts for Christmas. The first is the ultra cool Intellitouch tuner. This tuner does not use a microphone. Instead it clamps on the head of the guitar in order to detect the vibration. Perfect for classical guitar, and it works incredibly well detecting even the slightest of vibrations. The display has a back-light and is very clear making it simple to read. It is easy to understand why this tuner would be perfect for live performance situations. No need to worry about ambient noise while tuning up. The other tuner is the super sleek Korg CA30. It is a more traditional microphone based tuner. I guess my exposure to tuners has been limited, or at least dated, because the microphone in this tuner is superb. Great for a super quick tune-up. The digital needle display gives the feel of looking at a real needle without any worry of parallax. The only real feature lacking in this tuner is a back light. No biggie, the display is so clear that it is easy to read in almost any light. Both are great tuners - and I now have one for each guitar. Or perhaps for upstairs and the main floor? Tough decisions to be made.

Looks like they enabled the Google Talk interface on my Gmail account. It's pretty darn slick what they can do with web applications these days. In my book not running an extra application just for instant messaging is a big bonus. Don't need to worry about having software installed, simply need access to the Internets and a web browser - all is well with the world. Look at contact Dana for my Gmail information if you want to chat. See you online!

We all kind of imagined it was happening, but for some reason I didn't think it was actually happening. Turns out that Netflix does throttle users that are considered high traffic. According to [this Wired article] that means you'll need to watch and send back more than 11 or 12 movies a month. So they went from saying No throttling taking place to saying it would bankrupt us. I don't really mind that they slow down shipments to high traffic customers - it costs $0.78 in postage per DVD - I wish they hadn't originally advertised it as Unlimited. That seems pretty slimy.

Secondary DNS can be a tricky service to maintain in this day and age. At least for an individual user. What's that? You don't know what DNS is? Well it's time to educate yourself. Head over to SBC's Internet terms page and have a read. Actually, it has a good little this is the Internet section followed by a glossary with a size-able section on Domain Name Service. Good stuff everyone should at least have a working knowledge of - that is if you're using the Internet. Good, now you are probably wondering who is running your secondary DNS Dana? That's a great question. Usually us geeks band together and help each other out. Josh has kindly been my secondary for years. The past few months it's become hard. We're jostling Internet Service Providers and replacing hardware. It gets tough to keep things rolling right. In comes XName.Org to save the day. For free they provide secondary DNS. Or in my case tertiary DNS. Three times the fun! For commercial entities they ask for a donation, but nothing required. I'm still not sure why all the big registrars don't offer this as a service, or provide it free for customers? Seems like it would be super easy and would put one of the majors ahead in the game. What a weird business model - being a domain registrar. Don't know much about that.

• Tangent terminated

Guess what I'm trying to say is that XName.Org is pretty sweet. Nice of them to provide such a service.

In case you didn't know it is now a federal crime to annoy people anonymously using the Internet. Supposedly this includes mail, so would that include all that spam I get? It sure annoys me. Luckily I don't run this site anonymously. I'm sure it is annoying for quite a few people.

Being addicted to wiki's I have been using a personal set up of MoinMoin to track many of the things I do on a daily basis. While it is excellent for my organization, it can quickly get out of hand. For example: I've been saving links of things I mean to go back and research with great vigor. However, as we all know life usually has other plans for us. Those links then sit there - forever. They are search-able. I could find them again. But it makes for a few really ugly pages of Web Wanderings and Research Items. Instead of plunking them all on one page, I'm thinking of making a daily entry like the one below. Extant Wanderings meaning not lost or destroyed. My thinking is this - if I do ever go back and want to look at any of this stuff there will be a possibility the context will help me out. It's also fun to share what we are all into at any given time. Most of the things I end up looking at are the result of friends and family sending me links. Several times over in fact. Now that I think about it - if anyone sends me the Dr. Phil test again I will come over to your house and beat you with Jeremy's sack of doorknobs.

• Joel on Software write up on the usage of unicode in writing programs. Some excellent background as well.
• http://www.aarongreenguitars.com/ - Appears to be an excellent luthier. A few interesting writings on his page.
• http://www.kirkpatrickguitar.com/ carries http://jcjonesguitars.netfirms.com/ guitars which look to be very interesting. I would love to try one out whenever I get back to Maryland again. Love his site and some of the information on guitar building he provides. Kirk Patrick guitar is not that far away from Cryogas, Inc. world headquarters! Should be easy to visit whenever we get back that way again.
• http://www.protopage.com/ - cool idea. Don't like someone else holding all my data. Super impressive what JavaScript can do these days.
• Fast food ice dirtier than toilet water. Is that disgusting or what?

• Zaya Ruzo guitar strings are amazingly cheap. I don't think I'll try them any time soon, it's just funny.
• New version if iTerm released. It's been a really long time. Will have to give it a shot.
• Original lute music of Bach. Would be interesting to look at a few some time.
• Google Pages is a web creator thing. Still seems super buggy.
• VisiBone has reference cards for JavaScript, HTML, CSS and more.

Brother Tom pointed this one out at dinner the other right. This Greenskeepers video is set to scenes from The Silence of the Lambs. It's pretty weird and spooky at the same time. Made me laugh. Can get stuck in your head too. Check it out by either going to this underground film link or by hitting this Google search.

The title says it all and the article can be read on the Star Tribune site here. The number one experience? That's right! Schells Boch Fest. There are quite a few pictures of that event lurking on this web site. Need to hit some of those other events. Excellent stuff for the todo list of life.

Posted some stuff on Minneapolis Craig's list. I seem to remember somebody telling me there were all sorts of rules for things you could and couldn't do, but for the life of me I didn't read any such thing on their site. It could have just been a sesame chicken induced dream. If that was you please drop me a note.

I can't leave well enough alone. I have to keep messing with stuff. Yes. This is true. Eventually I will settle on a look for this whole deal. I'm liking this theme better, and with a little tweaking it will be perfect. Sorry for all the mix-ups. Hopefully everyone can embrace change.

ps - I posted some new Pictures

Was just going through and cleaning out some old notes on the computer. Ran across some stuff dealing with the Sedition Act of 1798. Must have been really mad about the latest PATRIOT Act shenanigans because, in my mind, they appear to be very similar. In that regard I'm not sure if it's really sad we have not learned any thing in 200 years or happy to know it will be thrown out in a few years time if history is to repeat itself. Here's a nice excerpt from the Sedition Act: That if any person shall write, print, utter. Or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government ... blah blah ... shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years. Seems pretty silly doesn't it? Hopefully we'll be thinking the same of the patriot act some day. Here are some fun ways the PATRIOT Act has been abused.

• Patriot Act Abuses and Misuses Abound
• Outside the Act
• FBI Intelligence Violations

Back to cleaning up and cleaning out.

Here's a good one for a middle-of-the-week laugh. Some great new annotations to the governments new warning signage. Some of the stop and think ones are my favorite.

• What's new in Python 2.5. Good to remember because I always complain that I don't know what changed from one version to the next. Now I have no excuse, so I'll find something else to complain about.

This morning was Sam's big baptism! He got smeared with some oil and splashed with some water. He took it all very well. Actually he smiled the whole time. He's a pretty funny little guy. A lot of family was in attendance. Check out the pictures for some good laughs. There's some keepers in there.

A few odd balls for today. Been gathering dust.

• Bach's method of transcription is a very interesting article if you are into writing music and especially if you are into baroque style music (Bach in particular)
• Stanley Yates wrote a really nice article on cross string trills. Since I've been hitting a few of the tougher Bach suites lately I should be practicing these with a renewed vigor. Okay, at least giving it a shot. They can come in handy.
• Tuscany Publications Online is an odd little collection of some interesting sheet music.
• Al Carruth article on acoustics is a great read for those of us nutty people into construction of classical guitars.
• Home built guitar chair. Instead of paying several hundreds for the commercial version this guy did it himself. Looks great!

Sometime way back in the old days - around 2001 or so - I started writing the Python Picture Database. It was a really fun little project and it taught me a lot about web programming, python, and databases. I had grand plans for the little program, but alas, life has different ideas for my time usage. This is the official announcement for the end of life for the never released picture database. As it stands Dave is the only remaining user. Fear not! I'll help you export all the pictures and funny captions to import into a system of your choice. My database had over 430 pictures dating back to 2000. The process of going through them has been rather enjoyable. Kind of like pulling out old photo albums and strolling down memory lane. If you're curious we'll be using Gallery2 parser on this site. Go to Pictures and check it out. I'll continue adding the old pictures as I have time. It's not too difficult, but figuring out how to split them into groupings is a bit of a challenge. A fun challenge. As usual there will more than likely be some bugs to work out. The way things are with computers. Should be used to it by now.

Feels like home again. I'm in the process of completely breaking the other theme I had running. Figure I'll turn this one back one for the duration. Funny thing is, when I enabled this theme again it kind of struck me as simply cool. Simple. Cool. I like that. We'll see what happens. What I really need is to get on a workstation with Internet Exploder of all things. It really does some strange things with cascading style sheets that I cannot seem to get my head around. Here's to giving it the old college try at least.

And thus begins the second week. For those that don't know I left the giant corporate world of Thomson for the excitement and fast paced challenges of Knowledge Front. Having a ton of fun getting back into getting things done. This is going to be a blast! Typical, I just took a peek at the version of my resume I have posted here. Hasn't been updated in about 7 years. Add that to the list of things to do...

A little endurance paid off. I finally managed to get all my photos uploaded in one fashion or another. Check out the Pictures page for all the chaos. It's a little like going through old photo albums. A couple of the miscellaneous pages get a little carried away and take quite a while to load. That's life. On my list of things to do some winter day is the great scanning project. Take a bunch of our old vacation pictures and some of the bigger life events and scan them in. Maybe I'll have Sam work on that one.

Tom and Marlo popped over last night for a most excellent evening. Some good chops on the grill, a great salad by Kate. The dining highlight of the evening was easily the two new flavors of Ben and Jerry's. My favorite of the two (and possible new all time favorite) was Vermonty Python. Coffee liqueur ice cream with a chocolate cookie crumb swirl & fudge cows. Ouch! The other flavor was called Neopolitan Dynamite and contains Cherry GarciaÂ® and Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice creams, side by side. Good, but not quite on the same level as the Vermonty Python. Not sure I've ever tried a Ben and Jerry's flavor I didn't like.

Can't remember exactly where I saw this. On NPR's site somewhere I believe. Steven Colbert of the Colbert report was the voice of Ace on the Saturday Night Live animated skits Ace & Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo. It's confirmed by his IMDB posting. The guy cracks me up.

For the better part of the last 6 years I have been an extremely satisfied and loyal user of the Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2. This little keyboard has been with me through thick and thin. I can only imagine the number of lines I've coded with the little guy. On Tuesday the Control key (which you'll note is in the correct position - where most people think the caps lock should go) began to stick. And worse - the stick happens not on the way up, but on the way down. Nothing more infuriating than a key that refuses to be pressed. So little keyboard, I give you retirement. You shall be placed in The Sergents data center on the console of the server where you shall remain the rest of your days. You were with me when I learned Python. You followed me in my struggles with php. You endured my heavy handed attempts at Java. You sat patiently as I cursed XML. Windows, Linux, or OS X - it didn't matter to this little keyboard. Rest well.

Ever since working on Apple's OS X I've used Firefox. The thing that killed me was the tab focus never seemed to work right. You know - in web forms hitting tab takes the focus to the next input field. In some situations this seemed to work okay, but for others the focus would zoom off to the location bar at the top. Poop! None of this I tell you! I depend on this stuff every day, and I hate touching my mouse (actually trackball, but who really cares)! I swear I had tried searching before or Google before and failed. This time was different however. I ran into this article on how to change the tabfocus in Firefox. It's only been a day, but what a lifesaver. The little things can make a big difference sometimes. This is one of those times.

Seems recently I've been taking a ton of pictures with my mobile phone. I don't pretend to be a good photographer by any means. That doesn't make it any less fun to snap away, even with one of the crappy cameras embedded in our mobile phones. Is it possible to take interesting shots with these little cameras? My last day at Thomson I snapped this shot over the top of my car as I was leaving. What a gorgeuos day!

All my years of geeking out and using PDA's - lets see, I've had Palm I, Palm III x 2, and an iPaq - I've never been able to go beyond using them as electronic calendars. Probably my own deficiency. In the end I've settled for the old fashioned Lab Book. They are going to have to work very hard in order to replace the feel and effortlessness of pencil and paper. If you're like me then you'll have to check out a lot of the tips and tricks for better organization through our old analog devices. Here are a few of the better sites in my bookmarks.

• Hipster PDA on 43Folders
• Is anything better than paper?

Has anyone been able to use a PDA for what they were designed for?

Fridays are a great time to discuss coffee. There's just something about coming to work on a day like today. Clear air. End of the week. Anticipation of weekend activities. Sit back with a cup of joe and knock out some work. Last week Jason posted an article on his blog Strangeloop called - Jonesin' for a cup. There are some intriguing links in there, but that's maybe because I'm very gullable open minded

This last weekend Dave, Olivia, and Max all blew into town from the windy city. A grand time ensued. Some of it was captured in Pictures. Dave had his own take on things which can be viewed on his website located here. Quite an array of little guys running around, or being carried around in one case. Fun times!

I'm pretty lucky to have friends that find all the cool stuff for me. And come to think of it, I must be super lucky because they send me stuff I actually care about. Well, most of the time.¹ It's like my own personal RSS feed to the universe. Maybe I should be paying them? How about this - you are all invited over for a beer at an unspecified date in the future. Or rather, stop over whenever - I have beer. Even, I'll pay you for the beer you picked up on the way over. What was I talking about? Oh yeah - Cool links people keep sending me.

• Scientists triple your ability to rock out. Cool new intrument and some talk on math and music. Not too deep, which is good for my feeble mind.²
• Chainless bicycles. Some high tech for the common man. Would love to try one of the bikes out just to see how different it feels. Great idea.³
• The show. Can't describe Ze's show, it's a must see. Not selling it very well I know. All I'm saying is - if you don't want to watch it fine, but you're seriously missing out.⁴

• 1 Kurt
• 2 Jason
• 3 Jeremy
• 4 Marty

It's that time of the year again. Every day seems to be packed with activities. It's a lot of fun to see family and friends, so I can't complain too much. Maybe just a little though I managed to upload some new pictures of Sam eating. He is such a smiley guy it's hard not to take pictures. I'm also attaching an experimental mobile phone picture.

• Using The GIMP I followed one of their tutorials and made this little picture that kind of looks like a painting or drawing. If I had a lot more time and a little more patience I could have made look more like a painting. That may be a project for a better picture some day.
  • Graphics programs are so powerful these days I shudder to think what someone could do that actually has a clue.

For those of us that live any where near this mess that is called Highway 62 it might be fun to know that there is a Wikipedia entry for the darn thing. They even have the latest news on when the reconstruction of the Crosstown Commons is supposed to commence. Here's a hint. Every summer since we have lived here! 1998 Also, in a silly attempt to outwit everyone our governor came up with a really cool plan - Have the construction companies build the new highway first and in return the state would promise to pay them later. Yeah, that was going to work really well because everyone knows how good governments are at paying their bills. Ask any small business person. And for the not-so-serieux; Have you ever wondered what ear wax is made of? Click on that and then you'll know. Bleh! but interesting.

I live in terminal windows. All day, every day. Luckily for me OS X comes with a built in terminal program that is actually quite excellent. The only problem in my book is the lack of tabs. The older I get the less tolerance I have for a cluttered desktop. Enter iTerm. It has it all - tabs, transparency (if you're into that type of thing), pretty colors. Makes rxvt look like a 5.25" floppy drive. What's better than a great Terminal? A great font in a great terminal. It's a never ending quest however. Right now I'm stuck on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. I can't remember where I found it, but I'm pretty sure it's one of the free fonts packaged with some (all?) of the Linux distributions. Nice fixed width font. Now that I think about it - maybe it's time for a change.

Got some new specs this weekend. A little bit of an experiment. No, nothing too crazy. The frames are almost identical to my old ones, maybe even more comfortable. Time will tell. The big change is with the lenses. Went with the Transitions lenses this time. From their site

• Transitions Lenses are photochromic lenses that are clear until dangerous UV rays are present. Outdoors, the brighter the sun, the darker Transitions Lenses become. They turn as dark as sunglasses by automatically adjusting their level of darkness based upon the amount of UV radiation.

I wanted to get these the last time around, but people convinced me otherwise. From the Optometrist to the person at Lens Crafters, they all said "They won't get dark enough" "They won't work in your car" "You won't like them". To my thinking they are just trying to sell more glasses. Granted, having a pair of sunglasses in the car is a good thing, but it still felt like I was getting the runaround. This time I wasn't having any of it. Who knows. They may be right. If they were right it's more than likely I'll post something about it down the road. However, no news is good news.

Did you know about the devil's interval? The Devil's Music article over at the BBC definitely qualifies as a fun Friday fact. Just don't go right home to the piano and start banging some tritones! From the article: In the Middle Ages when people were ignorant and scared - funny how those two things always seem to go together.

Kate and I went and picked up a fabulous Hamilton Beach BrewStation Deluxe from Kohls a couple of weeks ago. Our old Krups finally gave out. This is a bit of an experiment because there's no carafe. Just stick a coffee cup under the dispenser and out comes your fresh coffee! Bravo! The little thing seems to make a pretty good tasting cup of joe. It even has a timer! Cripes! Jumped right into the late 70's with that one. So add this to the recent product reviews. So far the Brewstation deluxe is a winner.

Seems like about this time every year my internet connection develops narcolepsy. For once it does not seem to be the fault of my cable modem, but instead the Vonage phone router/adapter/bridge/thing. My best guess is that something is happening out on the internet to take that bad boy down (over and over). Because it's frozen when I get to it I can't see the logs, so I don't know for sure. Frozen might not be the best term either. Lets just say it's inaccessible. What to do, what to do? Currently the hookup goes cable modem -> phone -> bridge to server. Originally did it that way because of some perceived quality of service I might be gaining. At this point I'm more inclined to believe that's bologna. Tonight I'll be putting the phone behind the server. Hopefully that will at least keep the internet connection up for those needing mail and web services. Or maybe it will at least reveal the real problem.

Check out Super typhoon loke out in the pacific. 150 mph sustained winds and 50 foot waves. Poor little Wake Island is only 21 feet above sea level at it's highest point. The island was evacuated, so no need to worry about the peoples. It's hard to imagine what it will look like when everyone gets back? Probably have to boat back out there since there is no way to know what damage will have been done to the runway. Might have to name the next album Submergible Atolls.

Has anyone else noticed the cell phones in movies lately? Even in recent films it seems as if some of the cell phones are already out dated. Go back to the mid 90's or even late 90's and the cell phones look like bricks. Go back a little farther and they look like suitcases (see Lethal Weapon 1987). It used to be that I could tell when I movie was made by looking at the cars. Sometimes even the everyday technologies like coffee makers and watches. I'm sure there are those that can tell the exact season of the exact year by looking at fashion, but that's definitely not me. Not even close. So take a look at those mobile phones. Especially those movies that are supposed to occur in the future some time. Look at these closely, they crack me up. Nice vision of the future - a machine that can predict what's going to happen, but they are still wearing goofy little head sets and carrying around salami sized phones. Way to think outside the box. Again, no point. Just noticing.

It's been a crazy week and I don't have enough puissance to dig up my own fun Friday fact, so I'll rob one from Dave via Jeremy. The Origin of the WOM - Write Only Memory It's good to see there are companies out there that have at least some sense of humor. It is unbelievable how fast this memory was for it's day. You could write bits to it with amazing speed! Always good for a Friday laugh.

Catching up might be overstating the matter. Keeping up is more like it. I have been extremely poor at taking pictures lately, and when I have managed to snap off a few shots they have not appeared quickly on this web site. Today we rectify the situation!

• Miscellaneous Sam pictures are sure to brighten the dullest of days.
• State Fair summary. Ice cream for little people - cheese curds for the big ones.
• Professional pictures of Sam taken by Engler Images Photography. He's our favorite family photographer. There are some super shots in there and some blackmail material for when he's older. If I've still got this web site up in some fashion he might be in trouble. There is a good chance of that, but by then I'll probably be on some home spun version of python 7.8 parsing XHTRVL. Man, that will be cool.

Just to keep a funny picture rolling on the front page here's one of Sam wearing his new winter hat.

Couldn't resist posting something today. It's been a busy few weeks! I have to admit I never really thought about using fish like miners used canaries once upon a time. It's a clever way to detect toxins in the water at much lower levels than would potentially hurt humans. Get some computers involved to monitor the fish and blam! Instant cheap and effective early warning system. No more wondering if terrorists are poisoning water supplies. Good thinking. Update -- 2006-10-06 14:01:10
My link appears to be broken - here's a new one to the ever reliable CNN When a fish becomes a canary

Been traveling and working - not a lot of time for posting. Hope everyone is having a great Halloween! Here's a picture of Sam in his lion outfit.

In efforts to reduce costs and become a little more hassle free I've been investigating many different VPS (Virtual Private Server) solutions. If you are reading this post it means DNS has propagated and you are connected to the new server. Congratulations! To date the only piece of the puzzle in place is this web site. All mail and other goodies are still as they were. Need to get in touch with all the friends I host and figure out how this is going to work going forward. Still a bit of work to be completed on my part. Hopefully things will change for the better. We will no longer have all the space in the world to make a mess of things, so it will force us all to be tidy with our workplace. Watch for updates!

The big switch over is going to be Sunday, November 12th. This is the official unofficial announcement. I know it's a little short on notice, but I'm fairly confident we will be able to handle the change just fine. There are only minor changes needed to settings in e-mail clients. I put some directions up on the NewMailSetup page. Hopefully they are helpful. There is also a little blurb about how web based e-mail will change. I haven't had a ton of time to test this. One of those things that is hard to test until things actually change. I will move all existing the mail over. It's not really moving as much as copying, so no matter what happens mail will have a backup. If things start to look really bad, like the mid-term elections for Republicans, we have the option to put everything back the way it was. Here's hoping for a smooth run. The SiteNavigation page has also been updated with some information for those that are hosted on thesergents.net.

With much pain and gnashing of fingers we have completed the migration of my old server to the new VPS. Still have a few wrinkles to work on (sorry Dave) and for the most part everyone still needs to get their mail reconfigured. Hint: look at NewMailSetup Hoping to have most of everything hopping by the end of the day. Here's to hopping!

But I can't. I've found a two really cool and totally complete wastes of time. First is the Line Rider. A fun toy where you draw lines, then a little guy on a sled tries to survive riding them. Just by clicking on the link you can kiss 30 minutes goodbye. Check out a few of the videos of some more the more complex ones here. After that go take the tone test and rate your musical skills. Well, not really musical skills. It was originally designed as a test for the music memory of tone deaf people. Turns out their music memory works just fine. Weird, but fun. So that was about 36 minutes of your life you'll never get back.

Sam got his hairs cut yesterday. Pictures available at First Haircut. We took the video camera, but haven't had time for post production on that bit. To hold everyone over I found an old movie of Sam clapping. Funny to see him so small not that long ago.

Always enjoy packing my own lunch, but need some things to try. Here are some of the things I'm thinking of along with some of the standands. This site had some really good ideas for different things to pack for lunch. Among the ones I was thinking of:

• Spread a tortilla with cream cheese, sprinkle with chopped raw vegetables, and roll up. Cut into 1-inch (2 cm) slices and pack in a plastic container. Or do the same thing with peanut butter and banana or jam.
• Everyone loves pasta salad. Pack the dressing in a separate container to add at lunchtime.
• Make a mini-submarine sandwich out of a hot dog bun, some sliced meats and cheeses and shredded lettuce (hot peppers? olives?). If you really want to go all the way, pack a small container of salad dressing to pour over the fillings at lunchtime.
• Spread a tortilla with refried beans, and sprinkle with shredded cheese. Fold in the sides, roll up, and wrap in plastic. Send along a container of shredded lettuce, and some salsa. Or make a chicken taco instead. Spread some salsa on the tortilla, top with shredded, cooked chicken, and shredded lettuce. Fold up and wrap.

Based on these ideas and some of my normal lunch eating habits I'm going to try and come up with a basic supplies list. The things we would need to make any of this on a regular basis.

googleffffffffd12cb4f7

Using Django I was able to screw things up in record time. And by that I mean rewrite my site yet again. In mere minutes I went from a fully functioning site to this haphazardly thrown together piece of emu manure. Like most things I do it is at least functional if not ugly. RSS feeds and site maps are not yet available. I went ahead and moved all my pictures off to their own space.
Pictures are located at http://media.thesergents.net/pictures/
Movies will be at http://media.thesergents.net/movies/. But they are not there yet.
This site took me about 10 minutes to set up in Django, but trying to import the old site from MoinMoin took the bulk of the time. What a pain. At first I was crazy about the idea of a wiki, but as time grew on it became cumbersome. My once great dream of having all this data available at the drop of a hat was just an illusion. Should have just stuck with html from the beginning. My bad. It's all a learning process, right?
And it continues
There were many things that prompted this. Hope to elaborate on that more later. For now hang in there. Enjoy the changes. Watch the pain ensue.

The best way to get a hold of us is email. Should we see if you can figure this out?

Dana: dana AT thesergents DOT net
Kate: kate AT thesergents DOT net

All the old stuff is still around. The site index has a list of all pages on the site. Someday I will get searching working - either through Google or make something myself. I got really bored with trying to fix up and split up the terrible markup than MoinMoin left behind. For the time being the old web log stuff is all in a few pages.

1. WebLogArchive/2002/ - Update - this has been imported
2. WebLogArchive/2003/ - Update - this has been imported as well
3. WebLogArchive/2004/ - Import complete
4. WebLogArchive/2005/ - Import in progress
5. WebLogArchive/2006/ - Import in progress

Ugly I know, but that's the way it is while I get things figured out.

mod-python and apache are not getting along on top of things. Have some stuff to figure out.

It's just come to my attention that Safari hates my web site. More specifically my menu. If you are one of the people using Safari - there should be a menu on the left. You probably saw it blink on the screen for about 0.3 seconds before the browser decided that it wasn't important enough to display.

Been using the Yahoo! UI Library for most of these wizbang features. For the most part it's been flawless, but there are a few browser compatibility issues lurking about. I'm sure for a javascript guru it's elementary. For me it's more of a chore to hunt down what's actually happening. Add it to the list.