Kathryn flew to San Diego to visit a friend for a few days, and while she was gone, I rented United 93, the movie about the hijacked 9/11 flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. Over the weekend, Iris pointed to the picture of the airplane on the DVD disc and, recognizing an airplane, innocently asked me “Is that the airplane Mommy is on”? The disturbing juxtaposition surprised me. I laughed, and said, “I hope not!!”
After mentioning this to Chris, he told me about a similar incident:
This morning Eris is in the car on the way to school and she’s like “first I was 1 years old, then 2 years old, then 3 years old, and then I’m gonna die”
I think Eris left out a few steps in her description there.
A couple of days ago, I ran the systeminfo command on one of our production servers because I wanted to know how much memory was being used by the machine. The result:
Total Physical Memory: 4,091 MB
Available Physical Memory: 3,329 MB
Page File: Max Size: 83 MB
Page File: Available: 3,243 MB Page File: In Use: 18,446,744,073,709,548,456 MB
Page File Location(s): c:pagefile.sys
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks a 18,446,744,073,709,548 gigabyte swap file is a bit excessive.
Our trip last week to the Outer Banks was a blast. We had a great time with the McCubbin clan and their extended family. The giant beach house was awesome and not too far from the beach. When you have three toddlers in a house at the same time (four toddlers when the Bromhals visited), it helps to have a large house to spread out some of the chaos. And the chaos was appropriately honored by vacationing with Iris’ friend Eris, namesake of the goddess of chaos.
Visiting and climbing to the top of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. I am still amazed that the lighthouse, consisting of around 1,250,000 bricks, was physically moved intact over a distance of 2870 feet to protect it from the encroaching sea (pics of the relocation effort; here you can see the lighthouse being rolled along).
Chris made some excellent BBQ ribs (and helped me make homemade clam chowder out of leftover clams he cooked up the previous night) and Angel made delicious black-bottomed cupcakes (link to similar recipe). Chris and Angel are important to bring along to any vacation because they are such good cooks. I highly recommend them. Book them for your trip today. But beware; they actually like scrapple and may try to get you to eat some.
Going to the beaches, of course. Flying kites. Flying kites again, but with a video camera attached. Finding crabs. Digging up sand fleas. Watching the kids go nuts. Building sandcastles. Jumping into the water and fighting against the surf. Boogieboarding. Walking to Nag’s Head Pier and watching the fishermen.
Mini-golfing in Nag’s Head.
Visiting the uber-cheesy beach junk shops.
Playing Apples to Apples with everyone at the beach house. And playing some of Chris’ massive assortment of PS2 games (mmm, Guitar Hero).
Visiting the Bromhals, who by sheer coincidence were vacationing the exact same week as us, at their beach house in Nag’s Head. They also came over to our beach house one night to enjoy the big home-prepared seafood dinner buffet. Iris and Meg had a lot of fun catching up with each other. They used to play together quite often when the Bromhals still lived in Roanoke.
Here are some photo highlights:
Iris and Eris enjoying the brief 50 cent ride in front of K-Mart in Kill Devil Hills.
Restaurant with a cool motto. And their food is really good. Great service. We like to eat here for breakfast on our way out of the Outer Banks. While waiting to pay for the meal, I overheard the boss (Bob, presumably) ragging on a waitress for her slowness to pick up two orders of hash browns. “Those hash browns have been there for two hours; what, you wanna serve frozen food?” he exaggerated. We also had the disturbing experience of seeing an old woman enter the restaurant wearing a tacky, oversized nude-colored shirt with a small black bikini top and bottom illustrated upon it. The restaurant also seems to attract the mulleted.
A great smile from Iris on a carousel ride after our ice cream break with the McCubbins at Cold Stone Creamery in Kill Devil Hills.
Eris and Iris enjoying the Elizabethan Gardens.
HULK SMASH TOYS! Especially Thomas the Tank Engine toys. Him think Thomas is creepy.
Iris dragging Eris from the Hatteras lighthouse. They were holding hands and running, but since Iris runs faster, poor Eris got dragged along.
We rode on an airplane tour of the Outer Banks via Barrier Island Aviation. We had so much fun doing this in May that we had to do it again.
Some law of the universe states that any time we drive to the Outer Banks, cheesy truck artwork will appear. I believe it is the same phenomena that attracts mulleted folks to restaurants such as Bob’s Grill. In May we saw the beach batmobile on our way down:
Eris and Iris having fun at mealtime.
Chris shot a cool lens flare effect at the Hatteras lighthouse
The McCubbin clan at Hatteras lighthouse.
Joy (Angel’s sister), Rett (her husband), and Ethan (their son) at the Bodie Island lighthouse.
Great shot of Ethan that Joy and Rett took at the Elizabethan Gardens.
Eris decided her stuffed Totoro needed to be spirited away to the potty.
Nice sunset we were treated to on the drive home at the end of our vacation
And below are the kite-flying videos, whereby I attached my Canon digital camera to the kite string with a dowel and duct tape, put the camera in video mode, hit Record, and sent it flying. The result is a somewhat unstable video but a lot more stable than my previous attempt, in which I had strapped the camera directly to the kite itself (bad idea).
This was the first attempt. I let the kite string out all the way; I’m guessing the kite is at least 300 to 400 feet up. Toward the end, you can see some of the beach houses. Around 27 seconds into the video, there is a weird musical chime sound that repeats later in the video. You can hear kids voices and more chimes at around 1:16 into the video. I did not hear these noises from the ground. The kite is a poor man’s spy camera!
Second attempt. Max altitude at about 1:00 into the video. Wind a-howling.
This attempt yielded an interesting variety of angles. And the camera does a 360 degree flip due to the high wind at around 2:33 into the video.
Bad winds on this day made it hard to get any decent height. Meanwhile, you can see Chris trying to make himself visible on the video. Angel and Eris can be seen nearby. Towards the end of the video, witness the gruesome crash of the kite and camera into the sand. Luckily, the camera survived.
More of the same. *Yawn*! And for some reason, Youtube did a crappy job with the encode.
Oranchak.com’s web logs have interesting info on what search terms people are using in Google and other search engines to get to my site. Last month somebody browsed to my site by searching for this text:
what does a smudge on a window on a skyscrapper mean
Makes me wonder what was going through this person’s mind as he stared at the window smudge with a puzzled look on his face. “Is it a sign? Is somebody trying to contact me? Perhaps it is a message from the FUTURE!”
There are also a surprising number of searches for “sea monster”. I did not know my site was a reference point for such things. And for some reason I get a lot of searches for “i want to be a hulkamaniac”. That phrase very dependably continues to appear in the logs.
Other noteworthy search phrases:
not the smartest peanut in the turd
i get red splotches on my chest and back after showers
The development team I am a part of is scattered across the country. We chat in an IRC channel to keep in touch about our progress, questions, issues, schedules, and whatever else comes to mind. In the IRC channel there is an IRC bot named inky that is used to store occasionally useful snippets of information, such as phone numbers, development server logins, and so forth. But one of its fun features it that it is able to generate random haikus based on phrases that are taught to it by participants in the IRC channel. Here are some highlights:
pelvis and booty
it’s a crazy chicken world
you boinked the undead
what a flippin tool.
I had a bunch of those too
really bites my crank
hey, that fragment sucked
goddamn bill gates and excel
in death’s dream kingdom
she wore blue velvet
never pet a burning dog
rhinoceros? where?
sounds deafen the ear
i’m just thorns without the rose
my skin holds me in
Ah, how it reminds me the good ol’ days when I worked on GOOSE with Jerry.
There was a strong nature-oriented theme this morning. On the way back from dropping Iris off at school, I stopped at Greenbrier Nurseries to pick up a few houseplants, because we need to bring a plant to the school for Iris to take care of to help teach her about responsibility. After snagging the plants, I drove home and saw a box turtle in the middle of the main road of our neighborhood.
Kathryn and I have a habit of stopping whenever we see a turtle in the road while driving. I guess we just can’t bear the thought of flattened turtle meat in the road. And I guess we’re always scouting for easy karma points. So, I pull over and walk over to pick up the turtle, which was headed towards the steep upward embankment on the side of the road. I couldn’t put it on that side, since it would probably just turn around and get back on the road to wait again for other good karma-seekers to snatch it from the jaws of vehicular doom. So I walked it to the other side of the road to place it in the tall grass. The turtle hissed at me as I transported it, as if to say, “You bastard! I spent all morning trying to get to the OTHER side! Who do you think you are???”
Then, when I got home, I saw the dead mouse that Kathryn warned me about on the phone as I was returning home.
Apparantly one of the cats decided to take a drink after killing the mouse, regarding the liquid refreshment as a higher priority to leaving the dead rodent in its mouth. Or the cat, in its sadistic nature, decided to see for its amusement how well a dead or dying rodent can float. Or it was the much less likely scenario of the mouse deciding to do itself in by leaping voluntarily to its watery demise. Thinking along these lines has already convinced me that I need to get out more.
Incidentally, why is it that the only items under the “makeup and personal items” category on this page that are disallowed from checked luggage are “lip gels such as Carmex or Blistex”? Every other cosmetic item is allowed on checked luggage besides Blistex! What is so special about lip ointment??
So it’s OK to check knives and not Blistex? Say what????
The absolute best words to come out of airport security officials are related to “monkey helper” guidelines posted at the bottom of 