Jeez, has it really been two weeks? Man have I been lazy about the blog. Well, here is a “last two week” update:
ZDog has a job! He will be working for ING in Des Moines. Sounds like a job he will like, at least initially. I have heard him say “It doesn’t sound so mundane as other jobs I interviewed for”. We (the family) have gone over to scout out apartments and he has his now. We have even moved some of his larger items there already. He gets his phone hooked up and power transferred this week. He starts Monday, August 4. He still has lots to put away and much to rearrange in the apartment, but he will have his evenings free to do that. He seems pretty fired up about it. As it turns out the apartment is only a few blocks from his grandma’s; he also has college friends in the area so he should be OK. Maybe I won’t worry about him too much now. Or maybe I will!
Breezomatic got a new tattoo. She got her first a few weeks after she turned 18; it is a small elephant on the top of her foot. Her new tattoo is HUGE! It is a 6″ sun in between her shoulder blades. WOW! I can’t say it is what I expected; she had been talking about getting one for a while, but not like this. That being said, it really is a nice tattoo; very intricate and colorful. She is getting it at a lower cost and then attending some kind of body art conventions with the tattoo artist; makes the cost about 25% of what it normally costs. Still, it is SO BIG! Oh well, her body, right?
KC and I are planning some things for later this year, after the kids are out of the house (Breezomatic at college, Zach on his own) but many things are still up in the air. We’ll see what happens with all this.
And now, time to fix supper: grilled chicken breast, baked potatoes on the grill, and maybe some green beans. See you at the supper table!

Yet another reason to like Mozilla: customizability.
Not only can I change what buttons are on the tool bar (like the dreaded Internet Exploder), but I can change the way the buttons look, their color, their background, their foreground, etc. It’s called a skin and without any add-ons (IE 5.x has some add-on skin programs) I can download skins from many places and install them. Heck, if I want to, Mozilla has an add-on that allows me to create a skin; it’s called XULMaker. My personal favorite is DeskMod, where you can get skins, wallpapers, heck - anything for your desktop. Right now my skin is called Noia. I like it because the color is nice and the icons are 3D without being obnoxious. To get more skins all I have to do is download one from DeskMod and choose to install it. Even easy for the Mac-impaired learners out there! By the way, the process is the same if I have Mozilla in Windows, Linux, Unix, OSX (on the Mac) or any other platform.
One more thing I can customize easily is the throbber. Yeah, I know it’s kind of a silly name. It is the icon in the upper right corner that animates while the browser renders your page. In the Internet Exploder, the default install animates between a spinning globe and a lower case e. Yes, you can change this, but you have to construct two bitmap pictures (256 colors only!) that are a specific width; to animate, you make your bitmap have pictures change slightly as they cycle vertically, kind of like a filmstrip. In Mozilla, you change the contents of one file, then add 2 other files. One is an animated GIF (to be shown while rendering), the other a static GIF (to be shown when rendering is complete). It took me 5 minutes to find the animated GIF I wanted (a spinning basketball) and extract the first frame for the static GIF and then change the file. Again it’s the same on all platforms, just like the skins.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - WOW! What a story; what effects; what a movie! The basic ideas are classic ones: a damsel in distress to be saved;a damned crew to be released from their curse; a tireless man of the law hunting down outlaws.
The main character is Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) who is the one-time captain of the Black Pearl. Captain Sparrow embodies all that we stereotypically associate with pirates: bad teeth, blackened eyes, love of rum, and a scoundrel. However, you could say the main character is Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), the sole survivor of a ship attacked by the Black Pearl. It is his life, or rather his blood, that will save the crew of the Black Pearl from eternal damnation. Their fates are intertwined when Sparrow happens into the port where Turner works as a blacksmith. There are some really great one-liners in the movie, but most of them are in the trailer. That is not to say the entire movie is predictable or that it is filled with plot twists. It does draw a nice balance between the two. Enough predictability that one can watch it and kind of know what is going to happen next, but there are a few surprises in the mix.
This is one of the movies that draws on the actors abilities more so than the action and/or CG action. Unlike many of the movies out today that gather so much at the box office, there actually WAS acting going on. For my money, Johnny Depp is the most underrated actor of our time. He has yet to turn in a bad performance and many times outshines the cast and even the script. Orlando Bloom turns in a solid performance as well; you may remember him as Legolas in the Lord of the Rings movies. He is gaining my respect with his acting abilities with each movie I see him in. Geoffrey Rush plays Barbossa and has flashes of brilliance. Barbossa is the one-time first mate of Sparrow who leads a mutiny against Sparrow some time before the movie actually takes place. Kiera Knightly plays the damsel in distress, Elizabeth Swann. She also has her moments (You like pain? Try wearing a corset!) but has a good performance overall.
The effects in this movie were amazing. Not just the effects of swordfights and hand-to-hand combat, either. The moonlight showed the crew of the Black Pearl for what they were: rotting flesh on skeletons, damned souls cursed to live without death. The great effects came into play during many of the fight scenes when skeletons were fighting men; some of the time in the moonlight the skeletons were fighting, but when they came into the shadows these skeletons became like men. Much detail went into this as a fight scene towards the end of the movie had many such movements between moonlight and shadow. Also the effect that no matter where the Black Pearl was sailing, it had a mist about it.
All in all this was an enjoyable movie. Rated PG-13, if there were swearing in it I didn’t hear it. It was rated this for the violence. A very enjoyable two hours plus spent. I rate it an 8 out of 10.

My favorite newsletter is Lockergnome Daily, a daily (duh!) newsletter that has so many tips and tricks as well as cool software downloads that it is simply one of the best. It is kind of geeky but not to the point that it is hard for anyone to read; I recommend it for beginners as well as advanced computer users. It is published by Chris Pirillo (the Lockergnome) who is from our great state of Iowa.
That being said, the latest issue had an interesting feature: a Gnomie (a reader of the Lockergnome newsletters) by the name of Lance Feldman had a list of “Indispensible Freeware”. Now not all of you know what freeware is. Freeware is software that a programmer or group of programmers wrote and released either the source code or the program itself for all to use for free. When the source code is released with the software it is often called open source.
I liked the feature so much I thought I’d put in my two cents worth, so here is my list of Indispensible Freeware (I use some at work and some at home):

Acrobat Reader - You absolutely have to have this in order to view the many PDF documents on web pages.
Ad Aware - Easy to use and effective spyware removal tool. You can’t have too much protection from spyware.
AVG Antivirus - A very nice FREE antivirus package. I get updates each week automatically and scan my hard drive nightly for viruses. As good as Norton or McAfee but not as intrusive or expensive.
CDex - Yeah, I want to get my CD songs into my computer, no matter what the RIAA says. This is the tool I use.
ConTEXT - A text editor. I use this for scripting languages like AutoIt or batch files because it does syntax highlighting. I can even run the compiler for AutoIt from a configurable tool bar button.
Context Edit - You can get in and really edit the context (right click) menu for any file type effectively with this tool. This was originally written by a contributor to PC Magazine.
EditPad Lite - Probably the best freeware text editor. It will open binary text files like Notepad does (I haven’t found ANY other text editor that does as good a job at this including UltraEdit, NoteTab or ConTEXT).
FileZilla - This is an FTP client. I use it to transfer my web pages from my PC to my web server. Also I have used it to download files from the internet. Easy to use 2-pane interface, much like WS_FTP.
Inno Setup - Creates setup wizards with little effort. I use it mainly at work to create distributable packages to automatically install or update software or data files. Much easier to use than Installshield.
IrfanView - Simply the best file viewer available. Not only can you view graphics files (as it was originally intended) but you can view any movie file that you have the codec for, flash files and text files. You can even do simple operations and graphics conversions with it. You can also create a slide show screen saver with it.
Lister - Views ANY file type and shows the hex coding. Sometimes when a file has an incorrect extension you don’t know how to open it. This can give you a clue.
Mozilla - Yeah, the entire suite. I use the browser, and mail. I just upgraded to 1.4 and it doesn’t do the calendar yet, but as soon as the calendar is on there I will upgrade that also. Heck, I even have the “blog this” add-on.
OpenOffice - Why spend hundreds on Microsoft Office? OpenOffice lets you do just about anything MS Office does.
Power Archiver - This is shareware now, but I have the last freeware version, Power Archiver 2001. (I imagine if you did a search on the web you could find it on someone’s site) It works like Winzip and can do all the things Winzip does. I have yet to see it fail to open ANY archive I have come across.
RegCleaner - Why open RegEdit when I can use RegCleaner? It has an easy to use interface and is a very powerful registry editing and cleaning tool.
Resource Hacker - Check out the resources of any file: icons, bitmaps, messages, etc. You can even safely and easily edit those resources.
SFX Maker - Integrates with Power Archiver to create self extracting archives. Gives you a graphical interface to the process of creating a selft extractor and easy control over all processes. Even lets you create messages to preceed or follow your extractor.
TClock - Nice little clock add-on that also allows me to skin the start button and task bar.
TightVNC - I get called all the time by friends and family to work on their computer. If they can connect to the web, I can use TightVNC to remotely control and fix their computer woes. It also has Linux and Mac versions!
Winamp - How else can you listen to music on your computer? Hey, also stick with version 2 - version 3 is a dog!
XNews - I read about four newsgroups regularly and check in on a few dozen others. This is a very nice tool to allow me to do this easily.

Now that you know this, I’ll just bet that you are going to go out and get ALL of this software!

Kobe accused? Man, this is so out of character for him. I mean really, what have you heard about Kobe off the floor? He doesn’t have an arrest record (like that thug Alan Iverson) or isn’t prone to stupid comments (are ya listening John Rocker?). He is a crowd pleaser when it comes to his on-court game; he sometimes is absolutely spectacular and other times is simply well above average. He has a lot of endorsement deals and has a photogenic smile, much like Michael Jordan.

I, for one, am going to wait out the news and not jump to any conclusions. However, his history has shown that this is NOT something he would do. (Of course we know that history is not admissible as evidence in a court case - it would bias the jury!)

Just got back from Des Moines. Went to visit Helen, KC’s mom (yes, I know, there are a lot of mother-in-law jokes, but Helen doesn’t fit them) It was her birthday July 5 and we decided to go over to visit. We went out for supper at Colton’s Steak House with one of KC’s brothers and his family - all in all an enjoyable evening. Got up this morning and went to church with Helen at her home church, the Windsor Heights United Methodist Church. Went to breakfast at one of my favorite places to eat breakfast - HyVee. Yeah, I know, it’s a grocery store and not a restaurant. But it’s my kind of place; not too fancy — just good food at a very reasonable price: 3 eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast for $3.49.
All in all an enjoyable weekend, except for the two and a half hour drive from Muscatine to Des Moines.

Another nugget from the Busy Mom Blog. Check it out: today’s cool word is Phoon. Soon coming to this blog: phoons!