Easter Funny

I’m not sure if my dad will appreciate this story now, but it’s been many years so I think I can safely tell the story without too much embarrassment.

Michelle likes to hide Easter eggs. Even though we’re fully grown and don’t have any kids around in need of such amusement, every Easter she will trundle off out of the conversation and activity that goes with getting together during the holidays and hide little chocolate Easter eggs. She picked this little tradition up from my mother who used to hide Easter eggs until we were all well into our late teens and insisted that everybody go searching for them.

Usually, Michelle gets creative enough that not all the eggs are found by the end of our Easter get togethers and she just leaves the rest to be found by whomever hosted the event over the next couple of weeks.

One year, while at my father’s place, she decided to hide an egg in the pocket of a pair of shorts that were hanging up on the hook of the bathroom door. Not surprisingly, this particular egg was not found before the day was out and she forgot all about it.

A couple of days later we received a call from my father. He has a nice pool / jacuzzi combination at his condo and he likes to swim daily and alternate between the cool pool and the hot jacuzzi. I think you know where I’m going with this…

Unfortunately, Michelle hadn’t recognized those shorts for what they really were, his swim trunks.

It might have been just a little bit of a shock or surprise for my father, but on that particular day my father was chatting with some of the other condo tenants in the jacuzzi when he happened to stand up and notice that there was a trail running down his leg. Not knowing what was going on, he quickly made his exit and went to the locker room to investigate.

The mystery was solved when he found the remains of the foil wrapping used on the Easter eggs in his mesh pocket. Needless to say he’d been finding eggs in socks, shoes, drawers etc. for the past couple of days, so it was quickly obvious where this chocolate trail began.

Michelle continues to hide eggs every year, but she’s a little more discriminating about where they end up. But every year at Easter we have a little chuckle over dad’s apparent post-Easter incontinence. 😉

New Birdbath!

Just picked up a new birdbath from Stone World Garden Decor in Cumming, GA. Thankfully, it came in two pieces ’cause it’s a lot heavier than it looks!

To give you a sense of it’s size, the diameter of the dish is about 2 feet and it stands about 18 inches off the ground. Our last (plastic) bird bath was impaled by a large branch Excalibur style. Unfortunately Mich removed the branch before I could get a shot of it ’cause it looked pretty bizzarre. No such fate is likely to befall this "mini behemoth".

Just started using Vonage – The Broadband Phone Company

Decided to try Voice over IP (VOIP) and have selected Vonage as my carrier.

So far, I must say that I’m pretty impressed. Everything I’ve wanted to configure so far is configurable and the line quality is much better than I expected.
I was on the phone yesterday while downloading some really large books from Audible.com for my iPod and could see the book downloads slow down but there was no perceptible degradation in the voice conversation.

The router they sent me was a Linksys RT31P2. I tried and tried to set it up so that it was outside of my current network (between my DSL modem and my Wireless router) as described in Vonage’s site. But eventually I had to concede that I really was making this more complicated than I needed to.

I checked out Broadband reports to see if they could shed some light on the configuration changes needed to make my current router not the gateway to the internet. But eventually needed to contact Vonage Tech support to get their advice on it. After all, they must face this issue dozens of times per day. Even though their website is loaded with useful information, it didn’t cover this little issue.

The Vonage guy was obviously in India – definitely the trend for CSRs these days but I was still surprised at how thick his accent was. It took a couple of tries to understand what he was saying. He assured me that I could put my new router inside my network and not have any ill effects due to bandwidth contention. He said if there were any bandwidth issues I could call back and we’d work them out.

It was definitely an easier solution than I was trying to implement and so far so good.

Universities Reject Nosy Applicants

One of the e-publications that I receive is from EDUCAUSE. They were just reporting on the 153-odd business school applicants who were no longer being considered for admission because they had used a hacker’s instructions to gain access to the university admission records to see if they’d been accepted or not.

Some of the rejectees are whining now and claiming a “lapse in judgement” and similar excuses. As far as I can tell, one thing we need less of is unethical business people. Kudos to the universities for their stance!

Jekyll Island Day Trip

Marc and PlaneJust posted some pictures from our day trip to Jekyll island back in October. For some reason I thought I had already done this.

We landed at the Jekyll Island Airport which is non-towered and used our cell phone to call the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and they sent a van right over to pick us up.

We rented some bicycles from them, nothing spiffy, just single gear coaster-brake bikes that took a little getting used to, and did a pleasant cycle of the north end of the island.

The trip was partly for a getaway and partly to flex my wings by doing a longer flight in the Diamond DA-20 two seater aircraft. This is a new plane and is a delight to fly. I wish it had more cargo-carrying capacity so I could realistically look at it for a flight up to Canada, but everything’s a trade-off in aviation.

For this reason I expect that any serious trekking will be done in something like the venerable Piper Warrior II workhorse.

By the way, I’ve been to Hilton Head Island (just North of Jekyll Island) a couple of times and found it to be fairly cold and uninviting. It is very obvious that the locals don’t really want you there and they take pains to ensure that you know this. The beaches are largely inaccessible unless you are staying at one of the resorts or unless you know someone locally who can point you in the right direction.

A big exception were the local Hilton Head airport FBO folks at the Carolina Air Center they were great and if I ever do visit Hilton Head again it will be almost solely on the strength of their efforts.

Pentium vs. Athlon (2004)

I’ve always had difficulty trying to compare AMD vs Intel chips. Recently the folks on Screensavers on "TechTV" have been raving that AMD is now the way to go bang-for-your-buck-wise.

I think the best you can hope for is to check out some of the known review sites (CNET, ZDNET, etc.) and see if they have anything that can help.

I did a quick search on Google and got the hits below.

I’ll tell you that *I’m* expecting to make the move to a tablet PC when the time comes to replace my laptop.

http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7586-0.html?forumID=68&threadID=88745&messageID=1015733
http://www.gen-x-pc.com/compxpp4asd.htm
http://www.techspot.com/vb/archive/index/t-10275.html

Reusing Classics for new commercials

Michael Geoghegan commented recently on how distasteful it is when older films are used to shill new products.This referring to the Pepsi ad using scenes from Spartacus intertwined with some modern scenes featuring the "sugar water".

Certainly nobody agrees with him more than my wife, Fred Astaire fan extraordinaire, when she first saw him dancing with a vacuum cleaner (Dirt Devil) back in the 1997 Super bowl ad melee.

I’m of two minds on this topic. On the one hand it seems rather callous to take something that isvirtually an icon in our society and to seemingly trivialize it to try to gain a few more points of market share. But on the other hand, done well, these ads can be quite entertaining. Much in the same way as a satire or parody.

I think the folks who are most offended by these ads are those who are closest to the original icon. My wife loves all things Fred Astaire and woe be the person who speaks unkindly of him in her presence. Similarly, Michael is obviously passionate about the movie "Spartacus" (indeed passionate about anything well-done in the cinema sphere) so I can see see where he’d find it almost offensive to (mis)use the work in this way.

I have to say that, while I did find the Dirt-Devil ad to be somewhat cheesy and non-impressive, I rather enjoyed the "Spartacus" commercial. Having never seen the movie "Spartacus" before I don’t attach as much significance to it as I do to Mr. Astaire and his dancing abilities.

I am familiar with the Spartacus story, however. And I must say that that brief scene in the Pepsi ad piqued my interest. I’ve decided, based on the strength of the ad alone, to go give the move a look-see. Also, I wonder how many kids out there may be similarly inspired to seek out this icon of a bygone (for them) era. Michael is not old by my standards – I have over 3 years on him – and this movie predates even me. But the teens and twenty somethings of today have likely never even heard of that film much less seen more of it than they were exposed to in the ad.

BTW, I have been listening to Michael’s podcast "Reel Reviews". If you like films and want to listen to a well-crafted and thoughtfully executed commentary on both old and new films I urge you to check it out from his website.