Shithead Goliath ate an unopened can of fish flakes and an unopened can of shrimp pellets that I bought today for the aquariam. Both cans were the large economy size.

Total damage: $13.65.

I bought one of these today at Gander Mountain. There is a little hypodermic needle under the cap.


One shot of air enlarges crawlers and floats them up off the bottom. They look like super crawlers. Fill it with water and inject into freeze-dried bait for quicker reconstitution.

Sheri finally found a watch she liked today at Target for $10. My curiosity was piqued on what kind of company makes a $10 watch. In the tiniest of small print on the back and bottom of the flimsy instruction pamphlet I found it was made by the Advance Watch Company. After a little work I found their website, www.advancegroupinc.com, and found that they also make these brands:

Aqualite
Aquatech
Coca-Cola
Emergency Exit
Field Ranger
Foxy
Freestyle
Gitano
Gloria Vanderbilt
Jaclyn Smith
Kathy Ireland
Kenneth Cole
Mathey Tissot
Mudd
Reaction
Sag Harbor
Sasson
Sesame Street
Sierra Club
Spaulding
Tommy Bahama
Wrangler
X-Games
Xhileration

Advance Watch is based in Warren, Michigan, which is a suburb halfway between Detroit and Troy.

This is a pretty good representation of typical Indian food that you can get in the United States.

Starting at the top, rice with something that looks like corn, but I have not seen corn served in Indian restaurants. Maybe it is chick peas in a gravy. To the right looks like rice pudding for a little sweet. They make wonderful rice pudding. Lots of vanilla. Next looks like spinach and yogurt. The large white pieces are probably chicken. Next is peas and tofu in a spicy tomato gravy. I can not tell what is next to that. Probably potatoes with vegetables. Finally, next to that looks like some pickled vegetables to use as a garnish.

Notice the fork is sitting on a piece of flat bread. It is crispy like a tortilla, but much more delicate. It is made from chick pea flour, but I can not remember the name of the bread. One of my favorites!

You get a fork of rice and then scoop up one of the other things and eat it. I am getting hungry looking at it. It has been a while since we have had Indian food.

What is GIS?

This links to a slide presentation that has been converted to Adobe Acrobat format that gives a good overview of what GIS is.

Knowledge is knowing a street is one way.
Wisdom is still looking in both directions.

This is not a joke. This animal really exists.

I also got Sheri to try a lychee today. It is a fruit that tastes like a Mandarin orange, and has the texture of a very ripe peach. The weird-factor is that it looks like a raw sea scallop. Perfectly white, slippery, and shinny.

This is the most representative picture I could find on the web. Most of the other pictures showed the fruit with it's leathery red skin still on. Like that, it looks like a large raspberry. Very delicious.

As quick as the storm came, it left.

We had two somewhat large culinary events this weekend. First, Sheri does not ever remember trying rhubarb before. I mentioned missing Grandma's stewed rhubarb, and I think that got her curious. She tried it and really liked it.

Secondly, I was eating some stir fried green beans. They were seasoned with fresh garlic and some other good spices, and still had a nice crunch to them. I put one on a fork for Sheri to try. She immediately made a face indicating that she liked it, and then said something like "I like how they are still crunchy." She normally likes all of her vegetables cooked to within an inch of their life. After she said that, and she saw my reaction, she knew what she said and tried to backtrack. But by then it was too late. It was already out there.

We turned the air conditioning back on this morning. It is going to be warm and humid today. The sky is turning very dark right now and I am starting to hear thunder rumbling. It is getting very windy too.

Just as I was typing this it started to rain heavy, and it is sheeting across the backyard.

I bought a 12' fiberglass telescoping tree pruner yesterday at Sears. The crab apple tree in our front yard is touching our bedroom window, and I don't have an extension ladder to reach that high. Even if I did have an extension ladder, there is nothing to lean it on to get those top branches. I sort of got it at half price because I used a Sears gift card that I am pretty sure Shawn gave me when I became his godfather.

Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares™.

I love love love kipper snacks. Up until now about the only choice I had were King Oscar Kipper Snacks. Delicious, but a little costly at $2.10 per tin. I noticed a new brand, Polar, on Meijer's shelf a couple of weeks ago for $1 less. I tried them, and they are just as good, and maybe a little better. The only ingredients are smoked herring and salt. They are a product of Germany.

I am thinking about going back to school for this Certificate Program in Cartography at DePaul.

There are three core classes:

• Computer Cartography
• GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
• Remote Sensing (working with aerial and satellite imagery)

...and then one of several classes about research techniques.

After those four classes, you pick one more class with your advisor that is targeted to your interests and that combine what was learned in the prior classes.

I am also typing up an e-mail to a professor at Northern Illinois University to see if I can get 30 minutes of his time to talk about the field of GIS and geography.

It is kind of exciting to think about changing career directions.

Sheri liked the watch face but didn't like the band, so I took it back today.

The band was one of those stretchy ones and said it was too tight and left marks on her tender wrist.

I just sent out my first resume. Cross your fingers.

I bought this Timex watch for Sheri today at WalMart. She hasn't had a watch for several months now, and no wife of mine is going to go around not knowing what time it is.

She is very fussy about her watches, so if she doesn't like it, I can just take it back tomorrow.

Here is Goliath's latest incision and drainage tubes. He had another lymph node removed from under his chin that had grown to almost the size of an egg. It is being biopsied now for malignancy, but the vet is pretty sure that it is. The stiches and tubes come out on Thursday.

For reference, he is lying on his right side in the picture. My thumb is at the left corner of his mouth. His nose is just out of frame to the left. His left eye is just behind the the palm of my hand.

I ordered five of these mini-extension cords tonight. They are $8.95 for five of them from www.cyberguys.com

BEACH CLIFF Sardines are juvenile Atlantic Herring, or Clupea harengus. These fish travel in huge schools and live in the open ocean, ranging from Greenland to North Carolina. The smallest of these herring are canned as sardines, while larger ones are cut into small steaks and packed as "fish steaks" or filleted to make Fish Steaks.

Meijer had these on sale for $0.50 , so I bought seven tins tonight.

I can't explain it, but FranklinCovey seems like a weird cult to me, and I don't like going into their stores, but they are the closest Faber-Castell retailer, so I guess I will have to make an exception.

I just got off the phone with the vet. He thinks that the egg-sized lump under Goliath's neck is a cancerous lymph node. I am going to drop him off Monday morning to have him cut it out. He is also going to check some other cancer hotspots while he is in there. If it is just this huge lymph node then he thinks he will be fine. If he sees cancer in other areas, then it will be time for Goliath to just live out the rest of his life without too much more medical involvement.

I ordered my swimsuit on-line today for our Florida vacation. It will take a while to be delivered, but here is the picture from the catalog. I will post a picture of me wearing it once it arrives.

I want this Faber-Castell mechanical pencil.

This is a panoramic picture of Sheri's office while she is working. I took it on Wednesday when I was in the city to talk with my career counselor.

It is 32% of the way through July and I have only used 17% of my minutes.

Every cell phone I have ever had has been a corporate phone, so I didn't use it very much for personal use, so watching how many minutes I have used each month is a new thing for me.

I changed my archives from being listed weekly to monthly. The weekly listing just looked too messy and confusing on the page. The problem might be that if you go click on an archived month that it will take forever to load in your browser. This might be a problem for dial-up users, but I don't know. I guess the text will load up quickly. It will just be any images that will take forever. If you are a dial-up user please let me know how long an archived month takes to load, and if you have any problems.

I was up late last night reading Perl for Dummies that I picked up at the library. I think I have a better idea now of how to get started making a more interactive web site. Right now I would be able to have a user fill in one or several fields on a web page, click a button, and then have a program on the server run using those values, and then return program output to the user's screen. The cool thing about that is that the server is doing all of the hard computing, and then just passes the results back to the user's screen.

My goal is to get the server side program to be able to read and write to a database on the server.

Lately, when we make a three quart batch of iced tea in our iced tea maker, we have been putting in six regular tea bags and one Lipton herbal peach flavored tea bag. It gives the tea a very nice and subtle taste. Not overpowering. Just a little extra complexity. Some of the better restaurants we have been to have very lightly flavored iced teas that taste similar to this.

The next teas I want to try in our iced tea are orange, blackberry, and raspberry. I think they would all add a good taste to our iced tea.

This is the extremely small program that an MIT student wrote that will crack the encryption on DVD movies. Amazing.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# 472-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file -> descrambled output on stdout.
# usage: perl -I :::: qrpff
# where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least to most-significant order

s''$/=\2048;while(<>){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb25,_;H=73;O=$b[4]<<9|256|$b[3];Q=Q>>8^(P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))<<17,O=O>>8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O)^S*8^S<<6))<<9,_=(map{U=_%16orE^=R^=110&(S=(unqT,"\xb\ntd\xbz\x14d")[_/16%8]);E^=(72,@z=(64,72,G^=12*(U-2?0:S&17)),H^=_%64?12:0,@z)[_%8]}(16..271))[_]^((D>>=8)+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval

Are you just happy to see me, or is that a...

If I need to remember to do something short-term, I will put something large in one of my pockets. Right now I have a spray can of orange scented air freshener in the right front pocket of my shorts to remind me that I have the glue gun warming up while I continue to do other things around the house.

I once left the glue gun plugged in and unused for several hours before I remembered it. The nozzle was all black and clogged up. After picking out what I could, I forced a couple of glue sticks through it until a little black lump that was hiding up inside finally flowed out.

If you get annoyed with pop-up ads and windows on your computer, you should try the new Google Toolbar 2.0. It has worked great for me. I have not had one pop-up ad make its way through since I installed it. Your cursor changes for a second and you hear a little click every time it kills a pop-up ad.

There are also a number of other useful features the toolbar has that would make it worthy to download on their own, but the free pop-up blocker makes it indispensable.

Just click on the link above, and then click the button at the bottom of the page. Very easy and quick.

This page has the winners for the best Chicago hot dogs.

We bought a 10 quart stainless steel Fagor pressure cooker Thursday night. Sheri requested my potato salad and barbeque pork for Independence day, but I didn't want to boil a big pot of potatoes for 20 minutes with the air conditioning on, and the temperature and humidity what it has been. So with that as an excuse I could justify buying it.

It works great! Five minutes and almost three pounds of potatoes were cooked perfectly. Almost all of the heat stays in the pressure cooker, so the kitchen temperature barely increased (I didn’t even break a sweat). Almost no steam was released while it was cooking, so the humidity stayed out of the house. When it was done cooking, just dump all the steaming water down the drain.

The old fashioned pressure cookers have a weight that sits on top of the steam escape pipe. When the pressure gets to about 15 pounds per square inch, the it pushes the weight up, steam escapes, and the weight drops back down, and the process repeats. The weight wiggles back and forth with a lot of steam escaping.

The newer models are spring controlled and are more accurate, and therefore release less steam, and you don't need to add as much water as you did with the older models.

The only problem is that the model we got didn't come with anything to keep the food off the bottom of the pot, so the potatoes on the bottom got a little browned and stuck. We stopped at Meijer's and bought a collapsible steamer insert with little ½" legs on the bottom. This will keep food from sitting directly on the bottom of the pot.

We are trying to decide what to cook in it for tomorrow night. You can cook a pot roast with all of the vegetables in just 25 minutes!

I originally was looking for a Presto pressure cooker. That's what I grew up with, but it looks like the two big pressure cooker makers now are Fagor and T-Fal. Farberware also just released their first pressure cooker, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

We have never been to The Patio barbecue restaurant, but they are opening one very near to us. Besides Famous Dave's, we have not had very good barbecue in Chicagoland, so we are hoping that this place will be good.

Mom went to Grand Rapids for a week to help Tim and Lisa settle in. Below is a dispatch she sent out today:

Hi Everyone!

I'm really enjoying my visit in Grand Rapids. The weather has been perfect and so has Shawn (well almost)!

We've done a few things around the house. Went with Lisa to sign up for doctors, vet, get Dauber's license, etc. Tim and Lisa also spent 1 1/2 hours in line waiting to get car and driver's licenses!

Just got back from the first visit to their neighborhood pool. Really a nice facility. It was the first time also that Shawn has been in water deeper than the bathtub and he loved it. Had to bribe him to come home. I'm hoping we'll get to go back a few more times before I head back to Toledo.

Ted is coming up on Monday the 9th for a visit and to take me back to Toledo. Right now there's a good chance that Shawn and Lisa will also be coming back as she tentatively has a meeting in Toledo on the 10th. It's going to be really, really tough to say goodbye after being with them for so long. Maybe they'll want to hire me as a permanent Nanny! But even though I have enjoyed myself here, it has only made me realize more that Brad, my first born, is still my favorite child.

Have a great 4th!

I always thought that Ray Manzarek of the Doors (top) and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones (bottom) were similar. Both were the quiet reserved types in their band, but were influential and had an understated style and class.

I regret that I did not see Jim Morrison's grave when I had the chance in Paris.

I wanted to (needed to) get to bed early, but I drank too much iced tea late in the evening. grrrrrr.....

When you go to my fotolog.net page, the picture in the middle is the latest picture I have posted. The small pictures on the left side are previous pictures I have posted. (There is nothing there now because I have only posted one picture.) The small pictures on the right side of teh screen are links to other people's fotologs that I found interesting. I was a little confused at first.

I just read the terms of use on fotolog.net, and because I am a free user, I can only upload one picture per day. If I become a paid member and pay $5 per month, I can post six pictures per day.

So, you will see at the most one picture per day from me.

I joined a new site called fotolog.net. Whereas in blogger.com I have mostly my words with a few pictures, in fotolog.com I will have mostly pictures with a few words.

I will try to post a picture a day; sometimes more, sometimes less.

The link to my fotolog is www.fotolog.net/im2xlt. I also put a link in the right hand column of this blog so you can easily check up on the fotolog.net site.

fotolog.net makes it a lot easier to post pictures than it is in blogger, and because of that you will probably see a lot more pictures from me in the future.

Enjoy!