Enjoying Some Cultural Commentary

Switchfoot is a great band, and I finally got my hands on their "Oh, Gravity!" release. Thought I'd share the lyrics from one of their songs. They always have these great commentaries on life and priorities, and I found this song especially relevant considering the season we just emerged from (which, as of late, has more a mindset of Claus than Christ). These lyrics are the compliments of lyricsmania.com (no, I didn't feel like typing them out myself!).

American Dream
by Switchfoot

When success is equated with excess
The ambition for excess wrecks us
When top of the mind becomes the bottom line
When success is equated with excess

If you’re time ain’t be nothing for money
I start to feel really bad for you honey
Maybe honey put you’re money where your mouth’s been running
If you’re time ain’t be nothing but money

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

When success is equated with excess
When we’re fighting for the beamer, the lexus
As the heart and soul breathing the company goals
Where success is equated with excess

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

Cause baby’s always talkin ‘bout a ring
And talk has always been the cheapest thing
Is it true would you do what I want you to
If I show up with the right amount of bling?

Like a puppet on a monetary string
Maybe we’ve been caught singing
red, white, blue, and green
But that ain’t my America,
That ain’t my American dream

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

I'm a Dad...again!

okay, so if you haven't heard, I'm gonna be a dad - again! Yep, my wonderful wife is pregnant. Before you ask, yes we know what causes that...and, no, we weren't "trying" - but I guess we weren't "not trying" hard enough...

Anyways, today I was picking up us an illustrious and delicious meal "to-go" on the way home. Tranlsation: McDonald's for dinner, baby! Being pregnant, my wife, of course, does not order in her usual manner, so I write her order down before getting to McDonald's. Well, even though I wrote it down, I forgot to get her the apple pies she so desired. Big mistake. Never screw up a pregnant woman's desert order.

Never fear, though. I have an unusually gracious and forgiving wife, so I am still alive, head and limbs intact.

She will be getting the apple pies for an afternoon snack tomorrow.

This time, I won't forget...I hope...

Semester is over!

wow, this semester is over! Man alive, it's been crazy....

But I just finished my last exam and presently I'm glorying in the joy of being done for a few weeks. Actually, next week I dust off the Hebrew books because I was finally able to fit Exegesis and Syntax into my schedule. I think I need to "remember" all my vocabulary...

aaaannnnd, I also signed up for Christian Philosophy with Bruce Little. I've heard he's an incredible teacher - but he'll blow your socks off.

I'm insane, that's all there is to it.....

I'm gonna be doing philosophy papers for one class and then most likely an exegesis or two for another....how crazy am I?

Mythbusters idea!

okay, I've finally submitted an idea to the Mythbusters forum, and, if I understand things correctly, the more popular a post is, the more likely they are to address it on the show. So, if you've got the time, create a login and then post in the forum with your thoughts on the myth. Just note, I had to use Windows Explorer to access the login/registration information because they've got it set up with a new-fangled Flash Player 9 thing. So if you're running Firefox, it may not recognize the login stuff. That was a major pain! But after that, the posting was pretty simple.

Here's the post address: http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/6761919888/m/9771993739

What's up with "48 Hours"?

okay, I know nothing about this show except that my loves it and it's about real life mysteries. But where does the name come from? It's called "48 Hours", but it is only a one hour long show, and the events it covers seem to have taken more than 48 hours to happen.

Was it only filmed in 48 hours? It doesn't look like it... so what's up with the name?

long time....sorry....

yeah, I know it's been awhile since I've blogged on here... sorry. Things have been crazy. The semester started and I've been pretty much overwhelmed between working roughly 45 hours a week, doing school, and keeping my family a priority over top of that.

I'm not complaining, mind you - just informing you my life has been super busy.

I just finished mid-terms and then went to beach with my wife, son, and mother-in-law. I know most people would try to avoid that like the plague, but we all had a marvelous time, and Barbara got to spend extra time with her grandson while we got some free babysitting. Yeah, good times were had by all!

And now Keaton is crawling everywhere and starting to pull himself up! Insane! And sometimes it's almost like he's trying to talk to us...mainly through this "raspberry" language, where he's going, "thsb-thsb-thsb-thsb" funny, but hard for us to understand.

Most recently we got a gate to keep him out of the kitchen, and now he's trying to pull himself up to his feet on it...from the other side of the gate, on his level, he looks like a little convict behind bars. A cute little convict...

another free office suite?!

crazy news, just found out that IBM has released a FREE office suite, basically it's own version of OpenOffice. I found out about it here, but you can check the Lotus Symphony out here.

check your health insurance.....quick!!!

Okay, so I've been checking into my company's health insurance. Since I'm aware of how health insurance providers can be infamously finicky about doling out dough to pay for stuff, I thought I'd try and work through as much of the small print as I could.

And I found something interesting. Medical aid recieved because of an "act of war" whether "declared or undeclared" is not covered by this health plan. What?! How unpatriotic is that?!

Here's the rub, though. A friend mentioned that this line of exceptions were probably added after 9/11. Why? Because so many people probably had to file insurance claims after that event. Why? Well, probably because they got hurt because of an "undeclared" act of war.

Here's my question, are health insurance providers here to help us get decent health care, or are they in it for the money? That may seem to be a flippant question, but it's answer will largely determine their direction and their decisions.

So, um, I'd grab the latest copy of my health insurance coverage, if I were you, and check out some of that smaller print.

awesome practical joke

Okay folks, I don't know if this is the best practical joke I've ever seen, but it ranks up there with the top ones. check it out here.

awesome add-ons for firefox...

Had a friend tell me about an awesome add-on for Firefox, called Bookburro. Basically what it does is if it detects that the page you are viewing has a book in it (or is about a book), it pops up a little thingy in the upper left-hand corner of the page which you can click on. When you click on it, a little menu drops down searching for and then listing the prices of the book on different websites (you can indicate which ones). Pretty awesome, huh? Get it at bookburro.org.

Oh, and note that you will have to give the site permission to install it in firefox - just follow the instructions on the little thingy that pops down at the top of your browser.

Here's a list of all the other Firefox Add-ons I use and love:

Download Statusbar - this is just a better way of managing your downloads than Firefox's native way.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer - This is especially awesome if you use Firefox on multiple computers. Just install it in each Firefox installation and it will synch up your bookmarks and links bar whenever you use 'em. Prett snazzy, huh?!

Random Theme Switcher - Okay, this is just because I enjoy different themes and am too lazy to switch 'em myself. Pretty much it just randomly chooses a theme every time you start up Firefox. I enjoy it because I never know what Firefox is gonna look like! (it keeps things interesting...)

Google Notebook - I just enjoy this for collecting random stuff from all over the web. I've also used it for some research for school projects.

MediaPlayerConnectivity - this is primarily to play streamed media in Ubuntu, but it does give you more control over what your browser does with media links on a page (and more options).

Colorful Tabs - really the most simple concept, but really awesome. basically this just makes your different tabs different colors, and you can assign specific colors to specific sites if you want to.

So there ya go - my favorite add-ons for Firefox. Let me know if there are any you suggest!

man - the cross-eyed reader

Interesting article about the latest research into how we read. I just think it's interesting that our eyes don't focus on the same letters, but on different letters and our brains fuse the 'image' of the two views together into one view.

So my question is, does the man with the lazy eye actually get more of the big picture because he doesn't have such a narrow focus as the rest of us? ;-)

interesting new movie from Pixar...

So, we just got back from a great weekend at my parents place and I'm trying to distract Keaton until Terra's ready to feed him and put him to bed. Some times I do this by showing him trailers on Quicktime's trailer portion of their website. I found this one, which looks like Pixar is actually going to take on a sci-fi themed movie.

I can't wait to see how this turns out!

Kiddie Camo

So my wife and I decided to start letting our son sleep through the night. You know, let him cry it out if he woke up - because he's getting to that age where kids need to learn to "self-soothe." (He's four months old...).

Well, the first night we did this my wife also decided to get him out of his sleep positioner. It was a little too much for him, and in the end us. So my wife did a little more research and decided we could let him cry it out, but we'll keep him in the swaddler (as well as the sleep positioner) for present.

That worked decent, but we both realized that since he is a little long for his age (97+ percentile on the height - way to go son!) the swaddler was becoming more and more like a restrictive kilt. I kinda thought he looked a little like a mer-man...

So we decided to finally do away with the swaddler as well as the sleep positioner - hey we figured long as we were changing stuff on him, might as well do a bunch at once! The first night things got a little interesting. My wife had found some pretty cute "sleepers" (as they're called), I think he looks perfectly manly in 'em myself. The ones she chose for that night was yellow with black stripes.

Now our crib is black - and thusly has black "bars" going up the sides (no it doesn't remind me of a jail at all...), and she had happened to have put a yellow cover on the mattress. We had taken off the bumpers because we didn't want him to suffocate himself if he rolled over and stuck his face in 'em.

This being our first child, before we go to bed, my wife is watching him sleep, worrying just a little. She motions me to come in and look at him because he's doing something cute. Well I go in there, and the lights are out like they're supposed to be, with a little night-lite on. Well, it's so stinking dark it took me a minute to find my child in his crib. And when I did find him, I couldn't figure out why it was so stinking hard to make out where his head and rear end were - when I realized he was in Camo! He was wearing a yellow sleeper with black stripes in a crib with yellow sheets and black 'bars' coming up the sides. It was stinkin' hard to make him out!

So kiddie camo...yeah...let me advise all parents out there to put their children in clothes or 'jammies that CLASH with their sleeping arrangement, that way there are no questions about where the bedding ends and the child begins!

Internet phone fun...

Well, here I am scratching my head trying to figure out how I can cut my bills each month. Finances are more than tight as of late... But I had the brainstorm that we could get a single cell phone to share between Terra and I, and then maybe switch to having a home phone with DSL for internet - in switching the three around, we might actually be able to save around $50 a month!

The first disappointment was that Embarq (our local phone and DSL provider) would hand us a bill of approximately $65 a month (some friends who have Embarq let us know about this). I was almost hoping to be able to use AT&T, but they would have to run a cable to our house and all that fun stuff - though the cool part was if it worked we could combine all our internet, home phone and cell phone into one bill.

Then I remembered that voip providers (that would be internet phone service providers) usually charge around $15 to $20 a month. I could keep our present high speed hook-up and add home phone for just a little bit more. Disappointment. Time Warner voip service costs $30 a month - ridiculous!

But then I remembered Vonage - weren't they supposed to be cheaper? I checked 'em out. Yes they were cheaper, but they had all these taxes and extra charges. Could I go cheaper yet? Actually, yes. So now I'm weighing basically three voip providers: vonage, itel, and voip.com.

Yeah, if anyone out there knows anything about these, feel free to let me know!

More iPhone mania

I think i am actually more fascinated with the iPhone's impact on our society than in the actual iPhone (mainly because I'm extremely eager to see and play with the linux/open source equivalent which will come out in the next year or so...).

So I ran across and article on PC World which had all these random, crazy stories related to the iPhone. Check it out here.

And then there is this iPhone bill:



yeah, crazy stuff, huh?!

The Duck-tape Seamstress

Okay, almost. See, at CarQuest you can't wear pants with holes in 'em (go figure). Alas, all mine do have holes because of the various and sundry parts I've had to load and move around. And we can't afford for me to buy new pants every couple of weeks. In addition, neither myself or my wife do patching...

So I've had to go another route: Duck-tape. Yep that's right, duck-tape. I put it on the inside (sticky side facing out), and on the khaki-colored pants I have it almost blends in. Though a little of the sticky stuff got on the wrong side of the tape and sticks to me when I sit down. Luckily, I don't really sit at my job...

And duck-tape actually will stay in place through a wash. In fact, the gooey glue (that's kinda fun, saying "gooey glue" over and over again...alas I digress...) almost begins to bond with the cloth after a few washes.

Almost as good as a real patch...

Life philosophy...hmm...

A friend on facebook posed a "question" about my life's philosophy (actually, she just wanted to get everyone's, but you can't answer with everyone's, only yours...because, well...this rabbit trail just went over a cliff....).

so I wrote in response: Pursue God and everything else falls into perspective (and eventually into place as well); and patience, though a virtue, can be a long time in coming - so learn to live where you are now and let God deal with bringing your tomorrow to where you are today.

not too bad, I think. And, at least at the moment, it seems to describe where I am right now.

New favorite show!

Well, okay, it's not my new all-time favorite show. But last week, while we were at the beach and actually had access to cable channels I discovered this show called Dogfights on the History channel. Of course, when I first told my wife about it, she thought it was about dogs fighting - yeah, not so much.

Actually it's all about airplane dogfights in the different wars. Very fascinating. I've always been fascinated about flying and all that, and they do a really good job of explaining some of the physics involved, as well as comparing the various aircraft. Though the CG recreations are a little cheesey - they're actually not that bad. If you're into that sort of stuff, I highly recommend it!

Gotta love them crabs!!!!

So we went to the beach this past week. Great times. We also went crabbing - and I got this shot:



Note that I wasn't using the zoom function on the camera when I took that!

My wife...jealous?!

Yeah, so I think my wife might be jealous...and I better watch out, because she does read this blog... But yeah, I think she's a little jealous of me - only a little, mind you. You see, the past two years we've used Sprint for our cell phone service (yeah, I'm sorry too...). Being the wise husband I am (knowing how rough I am on phones...) I got the insurance. And I also got my second new phone on yesterday (second, not counting the original phone). Not that it's any different (other than this one is red, just as the first replacement was, because they didn't have the black like what I originally had - which wouldn't be so bad, except she got the red one so we could tell ours apart).

And now, I think she's a little jealous that I'm on my third new phone in two years, and she's still on her first one. Just a little, mind you...

(I love you, honey! ;-)