Note:  Found this unfinished draft from 10/2007 - decided to finish it up.

I am not an expert in the field of automotive repair.  Not an idiot, but not an expert. 

Some car repairs in my life that, while I believe were legitimate, could have been completely made-up and totally imaginary by the mechanics who performed the work.

• Camshaft sensor shatters in my 1986 Riviera, Fall 1996.
• Clock Spring Fails, 1998 Grand Cherokee TSi, Spring 2002
• Unremembered Transfer Case problem, 1998 Grand Cherokee TSi, Spring 2004 (most likely candidate)
• Power Steering Rack & Pinion replacement suggested by mechanic for 1986 Riviera, Spring 1996, estimated cost:  $600.  declined by me, a poor college student.  paid $40 for diagnostic charge.  Power steering worked perfectly from there on out.
• Approximately 50% of the times I have paid for brake jobs, it is totally possible I didn’t need them.  All cars.

Alright, so that wasn’t as interesting of an idea as I thought it was in October.  But a post is a post is a post.

I have to go and move the island now.  Jacob told me so.

Saturday morning, West Des Moines, Iowa. Two weeks ago. Freezing cold. What better thing to do with our time than to take a ride in a fire truck? One of the things I truly do love about living in my hometown is that for all its burbness, West Des Moines still has a functioning small town living inside it. One of the things that best illustrates that is the annual opening day parade for girl’s softball.

It goes something like this; Take about two hundred girls, aged 5-13. Put them on fire trucks, in pickup trucks, on trailers, on whatever open mode of transportation you can find. Before the parade, train these girls to throw things. HARD. Then, the morning of the parade, give each of them a few hundred pieces of cheap (read: hard) candy to throw.

Next - drive these two hundred Candy Assassins through your community in parade formation, complete with police traffic direction. Line the streets with children, the elderly, parents, grandparents, dogs, cats, and wildebeasts. Instruct your Sweet-Toothed Ninjas to throw the candy at said onlookers.

Here’s the thing. When these girls throw candy, they THROW candy. Not a toss . . .not underhanded. This is a throw your kid out at first base throw. Ouch. Favorite candy-throwing moment? Candy thrown INTO the open window of a parked cop car.

Parade winds down through town .. . .and it was COLD on that fire truck. The morning concludes with the opening ceremony, where you find out that these crack sweetchuckers belong to organized softball teams. Teams with vicious, ruthless names like Ponies, Bunnies, Ladybugs, Wallabies, and Koala Bears. So softball season is upon us, though the weather hasn’t made it feel like it yet. We’re up a league this year. Team names are a bit better. We’re the Bulldogs. But we’re purple. Vicious purple bulldogs. Here’s a shot of the post-ceremony group shot (mine is circled. way to elbow your way to the front, Alli!)

Today is my birthday. In case you haven’t made it to the store yet for my gift, I thought I might tell you that there is only one thing I want for my birthday. A dancing walrus.

Sometime back in around 1987 or so, I remember being in an Earth Science class at Stilwell Junior High School. We were in the unit on energy. The gist of the message we were being taught was something like “we’re running out of oil, and soon other countries will need it too. This will be a big problem in about twenty years or so.” The fix? Solar energy, wind power, hydroelectric, electric cars. Oh, and Mr. Fusion.

That was fourth or fifth period. In sixth period, we’d head upstairs to social studies. In that class (or maybe it was four years later in 12th grade Government class, but it makes a better story this way, so deal with it) we talked about how we were taking on such a large national debt that we would never be able to pay it off, and this would cause lots of problems in about twenty years or so.

Here we are. Earth Day 2008. Incidentally, Earth Day also falls on another major day you should have on your calendar, Ryan’s BIrthday Eve. Funny thing. Between those two lessons from Junior High, what little information I absorbed from Sociology 134 at Iowa State in the fall of 1992, and the Environmental Studies class I took when I thought I wanted a double major, pretty much anything anyone ever told me about where things were headed has come to fruition.

This is why I am not surprised that I paid $3.35 a gallon for gas yesterday. This is why I’m not going to be all that surprised when the state of things looks worse five years from now than it does today.

What will surprise me? If people take a look around, realize the downhill slope we’re on, and decide to make significant changes to their behavior before we hit the bottom of that slope.

Happy Earth Day to you.

I’m no tech blogger. But I am a gadget geek, and I am the guy that everyone I know calls when they need advice or tech help, so I’ll take a little bit of lead and decide I can write down an intelligent thought about the tech world.

I am a recent convert to the Cult of Mac. I love my Macbook Pro. It relaxes me to use it. In fact, I’m actually also very happy that I don’t use a Mac every day at work - because it maintains a separation between my day job and the rest of my computational life.

Last year for Christmas, my wife did something wonderful. She had saved money she’d been making here and there, planning to buy herself an iPod touch. Then, as a complete surprise to me, she proceeded to use her own money and buy ME an iPod touch. I cried.

Now, fast-forward four months. I still can’t keep my hands off of it. If you’re not aware, the iPod Touch and iPhone have a web browser in them called Safari. It’s the same browser that is on my Mac (or maybe even your PC). With one glaring exception. It doesn’t have support for Adobe Flash. This renders a lot of the fun things you can do on the web un-do-able, and therefore un-fun. Youtube runs flash, though, and you do get Youtube on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

So I was thinking one night about the question of; Why doesn’t Apple allow flash on the iPod Touch and iPhone? There has been lots of speculation about battery life and processing power and user experience that I’ve read. Here’s the thing, though, and this looks so obvious to me, even though I can’t seem to find anyone else saying it. If Apple puts full support for flash on the iPod Touch/iPhone version of Safari, they’re going do something that they have avoided, seemingly at all costs recently. Putting flash on an iPod Touch or iPhone would cannibalize sales of T.V. shows from the iTunes Store, especially now that NBC and FOX are putting their content on hulu, ABC has their own player, and I guess CBS is probably doing something for the Jericho types as well.

That’s my best attempt at a salient tech-blog entry. I could be wrong, but I’m sticking with my theory.

Found on the hitch on Matt Johnson’s palatial Jeep Grand Cherokee (oh, how I miss mine). No, in case you’re wondering, I will never tire of finding my last name on products, signs, and other parts of my world. I have to find some amusement somewhere, don’t I?

Yeah. Its been a month. I suck. Nobody’s reading anyway, so what does it matter?

If you’ve been paying attention to this space for awhile, you may recall the story of the Prodigal Camera, or the story of Prodigal Camera 2.

This post marks the end of the journey of our faithful Prodigal Camera, also known as a Powershot S230.

My kids like to take pictures. So Carson took our camera a few weeks ago, and was walking around the house taking pictures. I let him use the Prodigal Camera, because its the backup. Makes sense, huh? So he took this picture;

Nice. Composition not the greatest, but not bad for a six year old. Everyone’s a critic, right? Next up, he took this photo:

I’m all for abstract art, but I’m guessing that one wasn’t intentional. So yeah. The Prodigal Camera died. For the benefit of Google, my S230 experienced CCD Image Sensor Failure. I was about to pitch it, realizing that it had a good run, when I did a little research, I found out that there was a recall on that model of camera, because they tended to fail and start taking pictures like the one shown above. Canon’s response? They’ll fix it, regardless of purchase date or warranty status.

So I cross my fingers and email Canon. They say “heck yeah, send it in!” (in so many words)

So I cross my fingers and send the Prodigal Camera in to Canon for repair. A week later, a package arrives at my house. Alas, the Prodigal Camera did not return to his waiting father this time. That would have been alright, but Canon did me one better - they send me a brand-spanking-refurbished SD700 camera - a camera that is about 5 years newer than the one I sent back, a camera that is 7 megapixels instead of 3.2, and generally a newer, nicer version of what I sent in.

So I’m pretty happy. Especially when you consider this: in 2001, we purchased a Powershot S110 camera (2.1 megapixel) from Best Buy, along with the product replacement plan. In 2002, the latch broke on the compact flash compartment. Best Buy, instead of replacing it, gives us a Powershot S230 (3.2 MP, the Prodigal Camera). Then in 2008, we have the Canon replacement with the SD700. I’ve somehow managed to parlay a camera purchased in 2001 that would be pretty out of date into a fairly nice camera even by today’s gadget-obsessed standards.

So that’s why I am pretty happy with Canon this month.

Your moment of internet awesomeness for the month:

You may recall that we became dog owners again a couple of months ago. Sophie is really a wonderful dog. However, in the midst of the doldrums of winter, there were a couple weeks where it was cold enough that, truth be told, we weren’t very good dog owners. We didn’t really go outside much, walk her much, etc. We hid in our man-cave and burned firewood mostly. The thing is, Sophie got a bit bored after a bit.

Having two daughters, and not being obsessively against the idea, we have had, over the course of the last eight or so years, a number of Barbie dolls in our home. If you’ve never lived with Barbie and her posse, there’s something about them that you don’t find out from the packaging. Namely, they are nudists. That, or my daughters compulsively remove their clothing. Initially, we as parents tried to keep them clothed, but eventually they wore us down, and we let them go nude.

An aside - I just realized that this post is going to pull in all kinds of strange google traffic based on the text of that last paragraph.)

So anyway, Sophie got a bit bored. We began to find the occasional Barbie doll with a missing hand or two. Minor inconvenience at first. Soon, though, a pattern emerged. The dog was only interested in the hands and feet of the dolls.

This creates, for the three year old, as you might imagine, a somewhat disturbing sight. Her “beautiful” dolls are now horribly disfigured by a beast that would be approximately equal in relative scale to the Cloverfield monster.

The interesting thing is, she didn’t seem as disturbed by it as you’d expect. She kept dressing (and undressing) them, paying no real attention to the fact that they lacked appendages. Strange juxtapositions appeared in our family room. How do four Barbies take a ride in their plastic Corvette when there isn’t a hand to hold the wheel among them, or a single one of them with the required two feet to operate the pedals?

Barbie is a brave soul. It takes a lot to keep carrying on with life without hands, feed, forearms, or even clothing, for that matter.

Why is it that some culinary dishes seem to have a set meat that pairs with them? Here is a list of dishes I’d like to see come to popularity (though, I’ll not be eating them. Unless everyone else agrees its tasty)

• Pork Strogonoff
• Beef Tetrazinni
• Sweet and Sour Veal
• Cashew Sirloin
• Pork Parmesan