Category Archives: General

General

An iPod for Fathers Day

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Fathers Day PresentFor Fathers Day, Jonna got me a 20 gigabyte iPod. I wasn’t really sure I wanted one, because about five years ago she got me a Rio Lyra and I never used it. Part of this was because you had to install a card reader, and the software to use it and I was running Linux. The second part was that you really couldn’t fit that much in 128 meg.

Tom the Architect and Keith the Team Lead both have them and love them though. So I have been thinking about it … I just wasn’t sure I wanted to make the investment in something I might not use.

Well, this iPod is something. I’ve got every Steve Vai song I own on this puppy along with most of the other significant stuff that I listen to on a regular basis. I spent all day yesterday just pulling songs from my CD collection onto the iPod. As it stands right now, I still have 16 gig free.

This thing is freakin’ awesome.

Now I just need time to listen to all of it. What I really need is something that hooks it up in the car. I can’t tell you how many CD’s I have lying around from being in the car. Even worse, much of my time yesterday was just figuring out what CD was where, as nothing was in the correct case due to switching CD’s while driving. For me at least, if they have something that can actually hook one of these things to the car, it will make for a much safer driving experience, and much less car cleaning when we want to take the top down in the Jeep on the weekends.

BTW … thanks to Tom the Architect for answering Jonna’s questions during the “research phase”.

Finally, thanks honey for the gift. I love it, and I love you.

Steve Dahl Analyzes the FTC Ban on Kevin Trudeau

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For those of you who have seen the latest Kevin Trudeau infomercial where he claims to have a cure for cancer, Chicago Radio personality Steve Dahl has posted his analysis of how Kevin can be out selling products on TV again, despite the FTC ban against him.

For those of you who don’t remember Kevin, he was the Mega-Memory guy on TV back in the 90’s.

All I know is I bought the book back then, read it, and still have to ‘do the math’ to figure out how old I am.

Kelsi Graduates from 8th Grade

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Graduation - Kelsi

Photo by rbieber

Dad snuck up to take a picture of her as she was sitting with the other graduates after receiving her diploma.

Kelsi graduated from 8th grade last night. I have posted pictures in the photo album. If you are family or friends and have a Flickr account, you’ll see more pictures logged in. If you are a family member or friend and don’t have a Flickr account, let me know and I’ll invite you in.

While I’m extremely proud of my daughter for hitting this milestone in her life, I am also feeling a little old. I have a high-schooler now.

Congratulations Kelsi!

Abandoned Baby Rabbits

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Baby Rabbits
Abandoned Baby Rabbits

Originally uploaded by rbieber.

A mother rabbit left her babies in the yard on Wednesday or Thursday night. Apparently there were about seven of them, but they scattered as Jonna and the kids went out to do yard work this morning.

I, of course, made them take pictures of the rabbits they were able to round up before they set them free in out in the brush in the back yard (per the advice of Animal Control). Now, enough of that. We’re off to Revenge of the Sith.

New Site Theme

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I’m continuing to muck about with themes, because I’ve suddenly gotten tired of the way the site looks lately, which can be surprisingly unmotivating. The latest theme is a customized version of Mallow.

The theme is based on Kubrick for WordPress, but looks much nicer. We’ll see how long I keep this one. One thing I do like about it is the rollover menus at the top, which allows me to put some of the important areas right up top where they can be found easily. The first thing to go up there are the SVK Tutorials, which are getting quite a bit of traffic now that SVK has gone 1.0.

The header image is a subset of a picture of the sun setting over Holland that I found on Flickr. I just thought it looked really cool and worked well with the themes color scheme.

One thing notably missing are the Google Ads. I just can’t find a nice place to put them, so they’re being removed.

BenedictXVI.com

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I ran across this story about Rogers Cadenhead, the guy who nabbed the benedictXVI.com domain name shortly before the new pope was named.

The first thing I noticed about the story was that, while it was news to me, it was dated April 20, 2005. I seem to be a little behind.

Reading his blog entries for the past week is very entertaining and a little enlightening. It’s pretty unbelievable how the press jump on things like this and how persistant they can be to get the story.

The cool thing about it is that after everyone assumed this guy was up to no good by registering all these domain names, he winds up only wanting to keep the domain names from porn sites and now is trying to contact the vatican to donate it – for a small price. He’s making some very simple demands for the turn over of the name. Demand number three is the one I found most amusing:

Complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.

Its refreshing to see someone with a sense of humor finally get their 15 minutes of fame — and I don’t think that complete absolution is that much to ask …

Until the Vatican responds, he is using the domain name to publicize Modest Needs, an organization he describes as a “charitable e-bay”.

CNN.com – Blog-linked firings prompt calls for better policies – Mar 6, 2005

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Through slashdot, I found an article on CNN.com this morning called Blog-linked firings prompt calls for better policies.

It’s an interesting read about the conflict that can occur between blogging and your job, covering people who get fired for things they’ve written because of inadvertantly “violating security” or just plain saying the wrong thing. It also explains that the first amendment does not mean you can just say anything you want, nor protect you from being fired for something you say. The main point of the amendment is to prevent government from restricting speech.