The Incredibles Movie Poster This past weekend, I went to The Incredibles with my sister, Janna. Wow! At times I forgot completely that I was watching an animated movie, the action was so well done and the story so perfect. I liken it to my experience watching Spiderman 2, which I also loved. Pixar's done it again! This movie is intense, clean, exiting, the art and design beautiful (I loved the ending credits -- at least until the projector shut down early before they'd completed!), the story well-written, the characters believable and likable, even lovable. This is a must see movie!

Jack-o-Man the Snow-o-Lantern Saturday afternoon, before hordes of trick-or-treaters came through the neighborhood where my parents reside in Hurricane, my father and I, on a whim, hopped into his truck and drove up the road heading toward Kolob. It was a brisk, cool, clear day.

...By the time we were finished, it was dark, so we lit a candle and Jack-O was alive!

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Lightning in St. George, UtahLast night (or rather, very early this morning, Wednesday morning) a thunderstorm rolled through St. George. The booming thunder woke me up. I grabbed my digital camera and tried to figure out how to set the shutter speed to a super-slow setting so I could try to capture some of the lightning displays going on above. I was clueless, and had to quickly download the camera's instruction manual before I knew how to do it.

So there I was at 3:00 AM, sitting on my porch with my camera, sitting directly on the concrete, using the sole plastic chair there as a make-shift tripod to stabilize the camera for some 10-15 second exposures. I pointed, clicked, pointed, clicked, on and on, capturing a large number of totally black pictures. Once or twice I got lucky.

My very first lightning pictures! No, the image included in this post is nothing astounding, but it's one of my very first.

Ecstatic, I came back inside while the storm continued westward towards Hurricane where my parents reside (where, they tell me, it wakened them as well).

Lighning is as beautiful as it is dangerous. I can understand Benjamin Franklin's fascination.

No, this isn't about an insecticide spray, but about a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. This web site is hosted on a FreeBSD server that has four 120 gigabyte hard drives in it. The data is stored in a RAID 5 array, which means that if...

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I'm passionate about music, good music. Probably it's because music so easily affects me, and can quickly and deeply move the very core of my being. Last September I mentioned a song from BYU Singers' Songs of the Soul album and how powerful it was.

This weekend, I let iTunes randomly play tracks from my collection (many of my CDs are archived on my computer's hard drive so I can listen to hours and hours of music while I work) and one of my favorite numbers from the aforementioned CD played, Water Night...

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Since this past weekend, I've tinkered a bit using one of Google's Gmail e-mail accounts to see what all the hype was about. They've got some good ideas, but it's nothing revolutionary. Their mail filters for auto-labeling have a looooong way to go before they're truly useful. I'll stick with Thunderbird for now as my main mail client, which at least has some useful filters for auto-cagegorizing my mail (and I get a TON) as well as having a pretty-good SPAM filter (for the stuff that makes it past my first tier of defence, InfoWest's Postini filtering).

Hopefully my several "feedback" messages to Google won't fall on deaf ears and they'll make Gmail actually useful. If they do, I'll switch all my mailing list mail to Gmail and continue using my existing e-mail addresses as I do now for real stuff.

'Tis late (or rather very early in the morning now), so I'll keep it short. I've been tinkering with getting my DVD library inventoried on the web. It's at http://www.adg.us/dvdlib/ for now, in beta mode. I still need to get check-in/check-out stuff working so I can keep track of who has borrowed what. Other than that, it seems to be working fine. It's much easier than typing the information in a single big flat file like I used to do. I can even scan the barcode from the DVD with my CueCat (I had to port a perl decoder I wrote a long time ago to PHP) directly into the database, and it will automatically query the public UPC database at http://www.upcdatabase.com/ to find the DVD title. Perhaps I'll add automatic searching of Amazon.com next.

Good night!

Okay, it's just after 8:00 PM, the sun will be setting soon. I'm going to take a walk. See ya later. (8:07 PM is my departure time.) More when I get back...

I'm back! It's now 9:18 PM. That makes the walk just over an hour, and that fits with my estimation of about three-and-a-half to four miles walking distance.

It was very pleasant! The air had cooled a bit, so it was almost the perfect late springtime evening temperature. Flowers in various yards I passed were in bloom. Along one yard, tall oleander bushes were covered in white, dark red, and pink blossoms, and the air was fragrant. Normally I don't consider oleander to be an attractive plant, but I must admit this evening, in the fading light, these were beautiful.

I need to do this again. At first, my foot injury from December was a bit sore, but after I warmed up, it didn't bother me at all.

This is just a quick note to say how much I love Gustav Holst as a composer, in particular, how much I enjoy Frederick Fennel & The Cleveland Symphonic Winds' rendition of the Chaconne from Holst's First Suite in E Flat. I love the sound of the brass in particular, but the entire ensemble as a whole is marvelous too. It's pure, distilled joy. Yummy!

I'm annoyed and frustrated at Sprint PCS.

You see, I use a Sprint cell phone for work, but text messages/pages don't seem to be working for my phone like they should. This is a problem because I need to be alerted when there's a networking problem.

So what did I do...

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