Yeah, go for it...

This goes along with Ambers theme that "everything [I] do is rediculous". I'm the guy lying down.

My work here is done...

Finally. The whole reason we chose to have the boy in the first place.

His first time doing the whole lawn by himself.

$.50 well spent.





Thanks for the mower Todd/Dad. It's great.

Another misplaed call

Previous incident.

Elizabeth this is **** **** calling.

Elizabeth I don't know why you're being so stubborn..um...and why you think that I should be ashamed of myself. You're the one that told the lie, not me.

Now, I am trying to get a payoff and you've been ordered by the court to get that payoff. I keep calling in, there's still a password on your account. They will not give me a payoff.

You are hurting yourself! Because I am not making another payment on that account. You're gonna go thirty days over due, sixty days past due... and it's your own credit you're destroying not mine. Because the judge ordered you to give me a payoff...I have the money to pay it off and you will not allow me to pay it off. So you are hurting just yourself.

I suggest you call in the city and you authorize me to get a payoff, or get one to me. It's up to you because you're just...sinking your own boat.

And I'm...I'm going to the Judge today, I'm going before him...to tell him that you are in contempt. And you'll be lucky if he doesn't pick you up on a warrant and bring you in and ask you why you haven't done what he told you to do. <click>

In the time of the chimpanzee...

...jack was a monkey.  Once again, I'm not sure how this will work since I'm submitting it via email. 

A few shots from Master Jacksons dance thingy at his school.  The one with his arms spread out happened at the climax of "Also sprach Zarathustra".  It was an homage to a scene from 2001 (which I found strange for a 1st grade class), but cute nonethe. 

Area hero saves dog...

Not the best photo, I know.  I took it this morning from my car, stalker style.  I even got a few looks from passers-by, which was awesome.  I'm posting this via email as well, to see how it works.

I was scooting to work the other day and I saw this dog walking on the freeway overpass in American Fork.  I thought "That dude is in the wrong place."  I swung around and caught up to him, and he seemed really glad to see me.  Ran right up to me and huddled close.  After calling the Humane Society and giving them the tag number, I got the owners phone number.  I called, and they came to retrieve their dog.  They were relieved to have found him.  To quote Gordon (the owner):  "We're retired, and he's all we have left."   He described where they lived, so I was able to drive over there this morning and find it (again...stalker style.)  There was my little dog buddy hanging out. 

I've never liked dogs really, but this experience has softened me a bit.  Maybe I won't hate it if Blackson has a dog after all. 

Blogger (google) drops the ball...

You may notice that in my last post the photo layout is broken. I think I can fix it manually, but I shouldn't have to. For nearly 5 days now users of blogger.com's FTP or SFTP publishing feature (we publish our weblogs to our own domains via ftp, rather than using whatever.blogspot.com) have been unable to publish photos, and publishing text has been spotty.

There is some pretty heated public outcry on blogger.com's help forum here.

Blogger.com (owned and operated by google) remains frustratingly silent about this. So much so that ftp publishers are starting to leave blogger for other weblog services (like wordpress). I don't post very much lately, so I tend to take a wait-and-see stance here. But I admit, this problem is lasting too long, and googles absolute silence approaches infuriating.

My personal belief is that blogger no longer wants to support ftp as a mode of publishing. Blogger.com offers some pretty great features for embedding photos and videos and they offer a wide variety of cool layout features. Nearly all of these are not available to those of us who use ftp publishing. I'm ok with that. I'm running my weblog on my own simple apache server in my basement. The weblogs hosted on blogspot run on googles servers which support all those neat advanced features. I think Google is tired of providing a dumbed-down version of their software and is hoping we'll all just go away. And I will, if that's how it's going to be.

Hey Google, either give us an ETA for a fix here, or give us our walking papers and maybe some tips on migrating. You're not making any friends staying silent.

Legos...

I've been working on a bit of macro photography (if you can call this that), and I got one that I like. There is room for improvement, but I like where it's going. I've been getting help from this forum.

J has been building the coolest stuff lately. He and I think it would be fun to have largish prints of these types of shots in his room. A 12x18 of this looks pretty cool. Anyone remember that reflections project that got rejected? Pictures of legos. :)

Plus, I think this would make a neat photo book after 50 or 100 of them. What kid wouldn't love to see his old lego creations after 20 years?



55mm, ISO 400 1/8 @ f/32

..this bird had flown

Working late last night, I received a call from my wife saying that there was a bird in my room. I scooted home and sure enough, there she was. Flapping around like she owned the place. It was pretty harmless and obviously scared so it didn't take long to get it out. I'm glad it was in the bedroom too, instead of flying around the whole house. It was actually a fun and hilarious time getting it to leave. Me with my scooter helmet and head lamp on flapping a blanket around to get the bird to find the open window.

We wondered where it came from, but quickly found out. See below.

It's favorite perch. Anywhere on the fan. It would land on one of the blades, and would hang on while I spun it around. Fun.

This perch was more precarious. Note the cameo from the red tree photo from Kansas.

On the rabbit ear, messin up my reception.

So we found this in the morning. Before I took this picture, the bird was there in the nest. Look closely and you can see 2 eggs. Yep, it's not just a bird, it's a bird family. Where is this nest you ask?

On the front door! My wife opened it last night to fix some wind related turbulence, and when she came back the bird was in. It looks like we brought it in outselves. Ho!

Anyway, funny right?

"...And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown."

Warning: Mouse picture included

Caught this guy at work. Peanut butter always does the job.

We think he was a bachelor.

It's kinda sad, actually.

Server back up, but crippled...

Hi everyone.

Just letting you know that my server is back up after having been hacked. But it's just barely up. Static web sites will work, but anything else won't work quite yet. That means almost all other sites are still hosed. Don't worry, the recovery effort is still underway. It should only be a few more days. Hang in there.

800 cute little dogs on the wall...

Sorry...it's pretty random...but I couldn't pass this one up. This is quite possibly the most interesting news story I've ever read in my life. Ever.

My son wants a dog, and asks regularly. After reading this, I'm feeling lucky that he doesn't continually ask for hundreds of dogs.

Here is a story about a triple-wide-trailer house in AZ where police found 800 small dogs and 87 parrots living with an elderly couple. Think about that. 800 dogs. 800. My word. Read the article. There were even some dogs giving birth while being rescued.

Just to give you an idea of how many dogs that is, here are 800 small dog images (and 87 parrots).