All About Bentley

Last week we were expecting a huge snow storm. It gave us the cold shoulder. We just got a bunch of rain. But this morning, when we have about a 40% chance for rain, it's snowing like crazy. This is insane. And of course we have plans this morning. We never do much on Saturday, usually just sit around the house being bored. So today we made plans to go to the movies...and it's snowing. Not that a little snow will keep us from the movies, but Deborah and I, since college, have found ourselves out in the snow just about everytime we see a flake. And its not on purpose, just works out that way. But I would love to sit here on the couch and just watch the snow. Instead we're running around getting the kids fed so we can hit the movies. Deborah, Shelbie and Zane are going to see "Happily Never After". Tanner and I are going to see "Epic Movie". They start around the same time and end 10 minutes apart. The movie starts at 10:30, so I'm guessing with the...

I recently got a new laptop at work and am supposed to be returning the old one some time. But before I did I thought I'd play with Ubuntu. Last night i took the Ubuntu installation CD that I created about 3 weeks ago, threw it in the old laptop, started it up, and bam, it's done. Now I'm sitting on my couch, connected wirelessly to the internet, and I did virtually no configuration. The only thing I had to do was go to the network settings, select that I had a wireless network, and put its name in. Bam, I'm online. It was awesome. I use RedHat Linux at work for about 99% of what I do, but it's all at the server level, not from a true end-user standpoint, so I'm not real familiar with the user side of things....surfing the web, checking email, word processing, that sort of thing. I'm anxious to see what all I can do with this. Another thing I found interesting was that for about the last year, my laptop, running XP, would not keep the system date and time ...

About once or twice a month I get to stay up late doing some testing for work. Tonight/this morning is just such an occasion. For the most part I stay busy getting things setup, monitoring the test, stopping and restarting things, but eventually, once everything is running, I'm free to sit back and simply watch my computer screen and make sure nothing looks out of the ordinary. It can be quite boring. So, what I often do is swivel 90 degrees counter-clockwise to my desktop PC and watch a movie. This morning I didn't feel like going the movie route and opted to fire up the WinTV. Its a gamble at this time of day to find anything worth watching on TV. It's mostly just news and infomercials. But TVLand has rescued me this morning. I'm watching "Green Acres". That silly Mr. Douglas farming in his suit and tie just cracks me up.

Today is my birthday. My day started off great, with my wife and kids hoping up in bed with me with home-made cards and signs and a hostess Ding Dong with a candle in it. I don't have any big plans today even though I took the day off of work. I was planning on just puttering around the house alone but with the recent ice storm, school is out today so my wife and kids are home which is very cool. But, last night, not knowing school was going to be out yet, I rescheduled a date with the life insurance man for today thinking I wouldn't have anything better to do. So now instead of making plans with my wife and kids I have to wait for him to come over. I could reschedule but he's a close family friend and I don't want to keep rescheduling him, he might think I'm just putting him off. We'll be having big meal out somewhere today, but I haven't decided when or where. But it won't be The Cracker Barrel . This year, if I have any memories of my birthday meal, I...

Ok this is a little late. This is us on Christmas Eve. Our Christmas Eve is about as big as Christmas day at our house. It's just the 5 of on Christmas Eve us but we already have quite a bit of tradition, and a lot of food. Deborahs parents and sister came on Christmas day to help ward off the post Christmas blues. Worked pretty well. The kids got lots of fun stuff from Santa.

Well kids, I have a very special Christmas gift for you this year. I'm going to take my many years of experience in peaking at my Christmas presents, and share it with you. Today's lesson is how to unwrap and re-wrap a present without getting caught. Before we start lets go over some good tips: It's best to do this kind of work at night, when everyone is asleep. It's also a good rule to only do one or two presents a night. You will also need to have some supplies: 1. A knife or pair of scissors that can make a fine cut. And since kids aren't supposed to handle knives, I take no responsibility for the outcome of any actions that were a result of reading this document. 2. You need some scotch tape. Preferably tape matching whats on your present Ok now on to the sneakiness: Pick out the present(s) you want to snoop and move them near the front of the tree before you go to bed. After everyone is asleep, get up and take the present to another room, like the bathroom, wh...

Well after 7 years of the Dodge Grand Caravan, we decided it was having too many problems so we bought a Toyota Sienna

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This year for my birthday, I decided that I wanted the family to go to "The Cracker Barrel". Nothing fancy, just a good filling meal. I've eaten there many times and never had much to comment on in regards to anything customer service related. This day was different though. After taking our order we never saw our waitress again. We were able to flag down some of the other waitresses and get what we needed but it was a bad experience. I could have talked to the manager but it was my birthday and I wasn't in the mood for getting all worked up. Sometimes when I get fired up I go a little too far. So basically, I just payed for my meal and let it go. But I couldn't let it go, it was festering inside of me. Finally about 2 months ago (my birthday was 10 months ago) I sent an email to their corporate office. I had an email response within about 1 day and the particular location that I visited had their manager call me a few days later. He talked to me about my experienc...

Last year (2005) I conducted a little experiment with my email. I let every bit of junk email or "spam" go into a spam folder so I could see how much junk email I got in one year. The number at the end of the year was over 10,000 messages. I was now curious to see how 2006 would turn out, with the amount of spam growing all the time. Well we are now in November and I'd noticed lately how little spam I've received. The number is hovering around 2700. Where did all the spam go? I find it hard to believe that the amount of spam in the world is decreasing, so I started to do a little investigating. Didn't take long to find that my ISP has taken the attack on spam to a new level. While my spam settings are set to mark spam as such, and go ahead and deliver it to me, they have taken it upon themselves to throw it into a spam folder on their server, one that is accessed through their "Web Mail" interface. And it gets deleted after 2 weeks. I had 19 pages of spa...

Line Rider - beta by * fsk on deviant ART

This morning my youngest son had a soccer game so the whole family loaded up in the van and headed out. About half way there, while in the left lane, with a car next to me in the right, I see something on the ground right in front of us. I realize what it is immediately but it's too late to hit the brakes and its not possible to swerve into the other lane. I would have been going too fast to get in the other lane in time anyway. And the "it" in question, was a big bucket of roofing nails that had fallen out of someone's trucks, and spilled all over the left lane. It was obvious what had happened because the bucket was lying in the left turn lane. Someone made a left turn, and their bucket of nails didn't. Anyway, I immediately feel nauseous as I drive over them, and am haunted by the words I recall saying to a group of co-workers a few days ago, "I've never had a flat before". All of a sudden I see how my day is going to shape up. I'm going to ha...

I came across this blog entry just now. How cool, it will perform face recognition and tell you what celebrities you resemble. So I tried it. I decided not to post my full results as they did in their post, but I will mention 2 of my celebrity look-alikes. One, Mark Hamill . Cool, Luke Skywalker. Ok, well known, not super handsome or anything but I wasn't trying to kid myself. Celebrity number 2 that I'll mention, and this was quite insulting; former First Lady Barbara Bush. I don't know who should be more insulted, her or me. Anyway, check their website out for yourself at http://www.myheritage.com (Update 5 minutes later) Ok to add insult to injury this stupid application is quite accurate. I uploaded a picture of Brad Pitt and it matched him to himself with 97% accuracy. It also matched him to Topher Grace, Goran Visnjic, Nicolas Cage, David Boreanaz and Matt LeBlanc among others, and my point being here is that if you are a handsome man, you are likely to resemble othe...

I'm up. Its 2:27am. I'm doing some testing for work. Things we can't do during the day. Super secret things that only qualified technicians such as myself can do. Or a monkey. Basically I'm pushing a button and then sitting back looking at some different screens. It's kind of like watching TV really, so I guess I am qualified. While not looking at the super highly technical screens I'm also spending time trying to beat my own record at "Monkey Kick Off" . Its good to have goals in life. I wonder if this is frowned upon. I'm working right now, but at the same time, I'm at home. And I won't be going into the office for a regular work day, so this counts for my 8 hour day. I will justify it by saying that because of the off hours I am allowed some perks. An additional perk that I may also take advantage of here in a few minutes is a big bowl of Frosted Flakes. No they're not on Phase 1, but neither am I.