I watched the State Game with the World Championship Detroit Piston's Chauncey Billups.

We all went over to Ted's to watch Michigan State play UNC in the final four on Saturday night. The first half was great, State went into the locker room up by 5. The second half - not so good. In more ways than one. During the halfitme we started watching some of our favorite scenes from the movie Old School, and then things went south. During the wedding scene, Brad made a funny comment about one of the other guy's (who will remain nameless) chances of being in a wedding, and the next thing you know, Brad was being tossed around like a rag doll, all in fun. Next thing you know, this is happening:

Not good. He didn't get up for a while. When he finally did, this is what had happened (note the differences in the shoulder):

We suggested that he slam his shoulder into the wall like Mel Gibson did in Lethal Weapon, but he wasn't up for it. After the game, Brad headed to the emergency room to get it taken look at. He ended up with a Grade 3 Acromioclavicular Joint Separation. That's not good. He's going in for surgery on Monday.

It's even worse if it happens to you when you're 51. Way worse if you're looking forward to a big season of riding behind your brand new mastercraft Wakeboarding boat:

This is a cool flash app that allows you to browse Flickr image search results as a hyperbolic tree.

Fortune magazine's eighth annual "Global Most Admired Companies" survey put Xerox No. 2 in the "computers" industry category, behind only IBM. Xerox achieved an overall score of 6.98, up from its 2004 score of 6.75 and No. 4 ranking:

To compile the lists, the Hay Group, a management-consulting firm, surveyed more than 10,000 directors, executives, and managers at 357 companies around the world, in one of 30 industries. Each respondent was asked to rank the other companies in his or her industry on nine attributes -- innovation, use of corporate assets, globalness, quality of management, employee talent, financial soundness, long-term investment value, social responsibility, and quality of products and services -- on a scale of 1 to 10.

I've just updated my blog roll with a few new blogs for your linking pleasure.

I've just updated my blog roll with a few new blogs for your linking pleasure.

Over the past 4 months or so, I've been working through Dallas Willard's book, The Divine Conspiracy. Every day, I'm struck by something in this book. The stuff that it's teaching is affecting me at a really core level of how I think about my faith, my world and what it means to live in the Kingdom of God. I read something today that flipped on end something I've always thought about 1 Corinthian 13, the chapter in the bible that gives us this huge, all encompassing definition of what love is. When I read this, I always felt like I need to strive towards all of these great qualities to be a loving person. Here's what I read:

People usually read this and are taught to read it, as telling them to be patient, kind, free of jealousy and so on - just as they read Jesus' Discourse (sermon on the mount referred to earlier in the book) as telling them to not call others fools, not look on a woman to lost, not to swear, to go the second mile, and so forth. But Paul is plainly saying - look at his words - that it is love that does these things, not us, and that what we are to do is to "pursue love" (1 Cor 14:1). As we "catch" love, we then find that these things are after all actually being done by us. These things, these godly actions and behaviors, are the result of dwelling in love. We have become the kind of person who is patient, kind, free of jealousy, and so on. Paul's message is exactly the same as Jesus' message.

This was probably perfectly clear to everyone else, but it struck me.

I got up at 5 to go to the gym, giving my self plenty of time since it was about 5 miles from the hotel. It was a beautiful drive, going along the St. Charles River, watching the rowing crews, right through Harvard Square - all as the sun came up. Would have been better if I didn't get lost again. I finally made it to the gym and back. I need a freakin GPS system. A friend of mine, Mack, has a GPS (can't remember which one) system that ties via bluetooth into his Treo 650 phone, so all of his maps and directions are displayed on his phone, as he's driving. The maps can be stored on your SD memory card. I'll put this one in the "nice to have" category, unlike the Treo 650, which is in the must-have-to-be-happy category. Like Will, I'm considering switching over to Sprint now that they've got some of the bugs ironed out of the 650. Yesterday's WSJ had an article talking about the different cell carriers and the number of complaints per user. Verizon had about 1/4 the complaints of all of the other carriers.

I was up at 4:30 this morning to fly out to Boston. Boston's my favorite city, but I hate having to drive there. I try and take a taxi, subway or train whenever I can. I found my way out to the customer site without too much of a problem, but it took me about 90 minutes to travel the 5 miles to my hotel. Needless to say i was horribly lost most of the time, with almost no maps. I finally asked for directions about 85 minutes into it. I checked into my hotel, the Doubletree in Boston, and they upgraded me to this pimped out two story suite on the top floor, complete with vaulted ceilings. Not sure I really need two floors. I can jump onto the couch from the upper floor.

I'm crashing early, and there's nothing on TV. I'm bored enough to watch American Idol. Never seen the show before, never wanted to. I quickly switched to watch MSU women's basketball. Not sure which is worse. I should probably just go to bed.

Project 311's Blitzfest web site is up. We're putting on this event for about 5,000 people, 75 bands, 7 stages, professional skate team. It'll be huge. E-mail me if you want to help out. We need about 300 volunteers.

We had a great Easter weekend overlaid with great basketball. On Friday night after our Good Friday service, Will, Brad, Jim and Joe came over to watch the game. What great basketball! I loved seeing us beat Duke. I know lots of Duke fans, and it was a pleasure seeing them lose. Mike Thompson gave me the run-down earlier in the day on why Duke would win, and why all of the analysts were wrong, and posessed by Satan. I gave Mike a call on Saturday morning about 7:30 to tell him he was wrong.

On Saturday, Nate, Will and I headed out to my parents to help them in phase 1 of their move. It was one of the hardest moves I've done, and it was only 2 rooms of their house. We moved stuff from their basement and garage, filling up a whole moving truck. Will, Dad, Jon, Nate, Matthew and I made hundreds of trips up the stairs, while my brother Dan "oversaw" the move. He's always been good at packing. I got back around 2 , napped, dyed Easter Eggs and hung out with Cathie, watching the movie Garden State. I loved it. Great Soundtrack.

Easter Sunday is one of two days out of the year that I don't wear jeans or shorts to church. The girls love getting all dressed up, and this Easter was no exception. We did pictures afterwards and Cathie cooked a huge dinner. Will, Brad, Joe, Jim, Mark and I watched the baseketball game while my two girls danced around in their cheerleading outfits, cheering, making signs and serving us drinks. It was such an intense game to watch! We went into two overtimes because of Will. With ten seconds left, I saw the players all locking arms so I figured that we should do the same. We all did, except for Will. I let him know ahead of time if we lost, it was his fault. Needless to say he locked arms at the end of the second overtime.

I thought this was fun to watch. It's a slideshow of different people's computer desktops.

Another useless but amusing site. This will take your text and create ASCII banner text out of it.

This is kind of a cool application called MusicBrainz Tagger. You can run it against your music library and it will look up missing MP3 tags based on the acoustic signature of a song. I'll let you know how it works.

Thanks to Will for this. If you know Mark Butler, this is a video of him a few years ago. Very funny.

They found my luggage! When I think about it, as much as I travel, I've never lost my luggage. Of course, I normally don't check it, but that's beside the point.

It's been one of those days. I was up at 4:45 to catch a flight, didn't get bumped to first class, and almost missed my next flight because this one was late. From there, they lost my luggage and based on the Low Tire Pressure indicator I had on my way to the airport Monday, I'm looking forward to changing a flat tire. One of those days. If only I had a time machine....

I want one of these!

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? Read about it here.

I was flipping through channels in my hotel room last night, and there on PBS was John Tesh. He was playing a concert at Red Rocks. It was called"Worship with John Tesh at Red Rocks". John doesn't sing at all, he just plays the keyboards. It was like a car accident - you know you shouldn't watch, but you do.

We've had the same person baby-sit for us over the past 6 years and she's become a part of our family. I'll refer to her here as Margret - I'm not naming names, because there are a lot of baby-sitter pimpers out there. You know who you are. The type of people who get a name and then start using that person, and making them unavailable when I need them. You know who you are.

My girls look forward to her coming like they look forward to anyone in my family coming over. She watched the kids Saturday night for us and an hour before, they were watching for her at the window. Emily told me I should go pick her up. I told her that Margret had a car and I didn't need to, and Emily explained that if I picked her up, she'd be there sooner. It's such a great feeling to know you have babysitters who care so much about your kids, and really like them. Nate dug her boyfriend, because he plays video games. I asked her if they should get married, and he didn't think so. He said that her boyfriend should marry another babysitter, who also plays video games with him, so they'll both be able to play video games with him. Okay, kinda tunnel vision, but hey, he's 8.

I'm traveling on and off over the next couple of weeks. Houston, Boston, Kansas City and Cinncinati.

Cathie and I sat down this weekend and put together a list of everything that needed to be done in our house to get it ready to sell. We have a really big list. I'm outsourcing most of it to a friend.

Take this Typing Test and report your score. I scored 120 WPM on three different tries.

Cathie's parents took the kids for the weekend, and we appreciated every minute of it! With a whole bunch of peripheral craziness going on with friends of ours, we'd been putting a lot of energy into everything but our relationship. This weekend gave us 3 days to accomplish nothing but spend time together and reconnect. It was great. We had a good balance of hanging out together and getting out of the house and doing some fun stuff with friends.

On Friday night, we had our big vision night for Project 311. We had about 50 people there to hear the vision of where we're going with this and gave them the opportunity to sign on as part of the team. After that, Cathie, myself, Ted, Brad and Will went out for dinner. We went to Gus O'Connor's in Novi. The atmosphere is great, just like an Irish pub, but the food blew. Will
has been to Ireland and made the mistake of thinking he was back there. The waitress was taking our drink order and Will ordered "a Pint." I looked at him strangely and asked "a pint of what?" to which he responded knowingly, "oh, they'll know." A second later the waitress looked strangely at him and asked him, "a pint of what?" Will had to explain that in Ireland, you just have to say "a pint" and they know you want a pint of Guinness. I kindly reminded Will that he's in Novi. I think he appreciated the feedback....and me laughing about it the rest of the night.

On Saturday, we slept in and went out to breakfast around noon. We started off by heading out for drinks at a resturant/gay-bar in Royal Oak called Pronto. Half of the place is a gay-bar, the other half is a resturant, and an apparent favorite in the Royal Oak gay-community. Our waiter was pretty flamboyent and pretty hilarious. When we walked in the door, I found the above sign to be pretty funny... "We may not be Irish, but we speak gaylic".

We went out to Tony and Tina's Wedding that night out in Sterling Heights. The idea itself was cool, but the execution sucked. Tickets were $70/each and they had peopled packed in this place like sardines, to the point that you couldn't move or get out of your seat... or see very well. In spite of that, there were times that you forgot you were at a show and not an actual wedding. The bridal party would mingle, get into fights, cut in line at the bar and dance. There was even a chubby little 12 year old as part of the thing getting blitzed on hampagne and doing funny stuff as part of the show. The best part of the night was hanging out with Justin and Lori, the other stuff was just icing on the cake. We've all been in the middle of some junk going on with some mutual friends and it was nice to have a break where we didn't have to talk about that stuff and could just kick-back and have fun.

Emily was sick with the stomach flu last week. She came down and announced that she'd put a band-aid on her belly-button because her belly was sick and that would make it feel better. Remember when you were a kid and band-aids could heal all? Emily is famous for almost always having 3 or 4 band-aids on her at any given time.

My HD TiVo had been acting wacky for the past few days. I talked to Tech Support and they had lots of dumb suggestions as to why it was periodically freezing up. They wanted me to reset it and delete all my shows to see if that would fix it. The tech support gal asked me if there was anything important I needed to watch. I responded that it was TV, so in the big scheme of things, it wasn't life or death stuff, but I didn't want to nuke it. She responded that I should take a day or so, watch whatever I need, and then we could try it. I'm not sure if she knew I was joking when I told her I'd try and take a week off of work to get caught up on my TV. Anyways.

Last night as we were watching Survivor, I was on my last straw. I finally said, "Next time it freezes, I'm going downstairs to get my other Tivo (which I'd taped it on) and we'll watch that." It froze. I jumped up, went two steps, and it came back on. I sat down. It froze again. I jumped up, went two steps to the same spot, again it came back on. Few minutes later, it froze. I stomped on the ground, it came back on. Turns out, I had a loose power cord. Working fine now.

Cool Technology
This is a new (for me) application I've been messing around with called Desktop Sidebar. It gives you a lot of desktop funcitonality on the side of your screen - I've got a stock ticker, weather, clock performance status and pictures all going on at once. Great for an ADD guy looking for reasons to be distracted. It hasn't passed the three week test yet, but I like it so far. If I'm still using it after three weeks, I'll let you know.

Here's a list of some apps you've gotta have:
1. Firefox - Better internet browser than Internet Explorer. Say goodbye to spyware.
2. Bloglines - A much better way to read blogs, this is a free web site that gives you a single source to view all of the blogs that you're reading, telling you automatically which ones have been updated.
3. Microsoft's Antispyware application - They wrote the buggy code that gets infected, makes sense that they're giving away the application to clean it up.
4. X1 - The greatest desktop search engine ever. This is worth the $75. Google's desktop search is nice for casual use, but X1 is good enough to make me look smart. It can instantly search across my 10GB e-mail archival and 30GB of documents. Makes it nice when I'm on a conference call and someone brings up either a name or a subject that I have no idea about, and I can instantly pull up all of the reference info I need. Only downside is that it doesn't support Microsoft OneNote content.
5. Picasa - The best photo album, sharing and viewing software on the market, and it's free as part of Google's push to own the digital content space. This app blows away Mac's much touted iPhoto software.
6. Anapod Explorer - iTunes lets you hook up one and only one computer to your iPod. This app lets you control, access and manage your iPod repository from a secondary computer.

Cathie and I took the kids to go see the movie Because of Winn-Dixie last night. What a great movie! The movie deals with the daughter of the local preacher, she's new in town with no friends. She meets a dog, and in turn learns about community and and connections to others as she comes to understand her past, especially her mom. It's a tear-jerker in parts, maybe it's just stuff going on with friends of ours that made it especially poignant. The amazing part was that Dave Matthews was in this movie playing a slow guitar playing vagrant. It's a good role for him. He fit really naturally into it. I was try to explain to Nate how much my friend Jason loves Dave Matthews. I came up with this, "If that man were a woman, Jason would've probably married him instead of Jess."

Cathie and I were playing the game "find the weirdest item on eBay". We'd take turns searching on goofy things, each trying to top the other. These were at the top of the list:
1. Used Lotion
2. This:

3. This:

I posted this earlier without providing the link. Here's the post with the link.

This is a great article that captures a lot of why guys play video games at the deepest level. It's not just about shooting things or zoning out, it's about something a lot deeper. My wife may think I'm just rationalizing here, but I think this article is dead on.

BananaBunker® pretty much says it all. Purchase one for just $5.00 or 5 for $20. This is the perfect companion to that dumb bannana hanger you received for your wedding but didn't really want.

Watch this... John Stewart talks about Blogging....

Sony has announced their 2005 consumer electronics product line, and they've got some cool stuff coming out. I'm a huge fan of Sony components across the board. I've never gone wrong with their stuff (well, ok, I did go wrong with a DVD player that died after a year). Sony is normally cutting edge at a good price with tremendous longevity.

My workouts have become fairly monotonous so I've decided to try a this new power-lifting routine out of Men's Journal. I'm hurting after day one. If it doesn't help me physically, the humility that I'll gain by doing an exercise like this will be great:

I guess the joke's on me. A while back,I thought it would be funny to correspond with one of those "I'm a long lost relative trying to get a lot of money out of my country" SPAM e-mail guys. It went back and forth for a while as I played the idiot, and I thought it was a load of fun. Apparently, I've now been put on the "Big Fat Suckers" list, because I receive about 5 of these e-mails a day, none of which my spam filter catch. Yahoo's filter normally catches 99% of everything, so these are just that much more annoying - yet slightly creative.

We're going to see Tony and Tina's Wedding on Saturday with our friends Justin and Lori. It's a dinner theatre, kind of. Your a guest at an Italian wedding. The wedding is interactive and going on all around you as you have dinner. It's supposed to be a great time. Cathie's parents were kind enough to take the kids for the weekend! They're taking all three of the kids to the circus on Saturday while their there.

I was out with a 24 hour stomach flu yesterday. Madeline and I both woke up with it. I'd been joking with a friend that with all of the busyness, I'd need to take a day off work to get caught up. Guess I got my wish. I got a chance to catch up on about 10 hours worth of TV yesterday. The sad thing is, I actually feel like I accomplished something.

Will and I watched the movie Kaena: The Prophecy. The movie is all Computer Generated Animation and the images and textures are just amazing in this flick. It looked phenomenal on my HDTV. The plot is so-so, but it's got some big names in it: Kirstin Dunst, Angelica Houston and Richard Harris.

This is akward. I was at a grand opening event for a customer last week with a couple of co-workers. Apparently, I came out of the bathroom with part of my shirt hanging out of my zipper. My friends were kind enough to tell me after they snapped a quick camera phone picture.

Interesting article comparing cheap PC's vs. the Mini Mac.

If you're using Firefox as your browser, check out the new the new GoogleSugget Extension for Firefox. It integrates in Google's latest functionality for suggesting searches.

Here's a picture of my niece/nephew to be, Special K:

The fact that you can't make out any distinguishing sex characteristics doesn't mean that it's not a boy... Remember, this is Jon's son.

I saw this while driving down the road. We pulled up along side the car and saw a big white guy driving it.

As a Christmas gift, my parents took the whole family to Frankenmuth for a night at the Bavarian Inn. If you've never been to Frankenmuth, you're lucky. Seriously though, if you like German stuff, and towns that pretend to be in Germany, than this is the place for you. The Bavarian Inn is a huge hotel done up like a German Chalet, complete with a staff dressed like Germans (sans the Nazi garb) except with huge swimming pools, a minature golf course and a giant arcade.

We arrived Saturday afternoon and the guys took the kids down to the pool while the women went shopping at a nearby outlet. Keeping track of 8 kids in a large pool, when there a million other kids around is always fun. At one point, we had to walk through the arcade to get to a pool at the other end of the hotel. We lost every kid at one point or another on that 100 yard journey.


We celebrated both my Mom and Nate's birthday that night. The girls had put together a photo album for my Mom and she loved it. At one point, her jaw dropped and she stared at me. I racked my brain to figure out what I'd just done or said that was offensive and I came up blank. She started yelling and hugged my brother Jon and his wife Beth. They'd put a page in the photo album that shared that they are pregnant! We were all really excited about the new baby, and are conflicted as to how to pay Jon back for all the damage he's inflicted on our children. How do we do this, without permanently scarring the child and annoying Beth?



At every event, my Mom wants to make sure we've got some kind of group picture for her grandkids. This one was no exception... Fun to the end. The trip was a nice getaway and a fun chance for us all to hang out. It's amazing how well we all get along. We have so much fun together. We laughed so much during this time, and even with 8 (soon to be 10) grandkids, my parents make sure that each of the kids gets one-on-one time with them and feel important to them. You can check out the the rest of the pictures here.

This is big news... I got a mac mini last week. My original excuse for buying this was after I got fed up with constantly having to hear constant complaining about our family computer dying. The thing would get chock full of spyware no matter how I tried to lock it down and I figured a mac would be the answer.
When I got it home, I hooked it up to my HDTV and I'm never disconnecting it. The panoramic display and picture quality is phenomenal. It looks so good. Will and I spent the Friday night just drooling over this thing and geeking out over it. I've got it hooked into my home stereo and home network with access to all of our family pictures, all of our family video and and my MP3 library. I've got the bluetooth keyboard hooked up to this and a wireless trackball, so I can control it from the couch. The mini is so small, and so quiet, you don't even know it's there. It's about 2"x5"x5".

So far, I was able to go with everything out of the box software-wise. My only complaint is that Apple's iPhoto software falls far short of Picasa. All of the networking and integration with my Windows network and printing worked flawlessly out of the box. Just last night, I downloaded the last episode of 24 that was "accidently" erased and we watched it in High Definition over the network full screen on my 52 inch display, and the mac never missed a beat. The performance on this thing is amazing. I went with the low-end system for $499 - 256MB of memory, 40GB Disk, 1.25GHz processor and I can't believe the performance of this thing. It does video so smoothly and effortlessly, all while I've got audio and other things happening in the background.

The only gap I see with this is that I can't do any kind of digital audio output. I want to be able to use it as a DVD player with my home entertainment system, but I need to find some kind of USB/Firewire device that allows me to connect digitally to my stereo system. It's gotta be out there, I just haven't found it yet.

On Wednesday down in Texas, we headed out to the local Dog Track after finishing up with the customer. It was $.50 hot dog and beer night, which brings out the best in people. The place was barren except for hardcore gamblers. We had no idea what we were doing and picked most of the dogs from either the tip sheet or by which one pooped when they paraded the dogs out on the track. Makes sense, right? The lighter the dog, the faster they run? I ended up talking to this older woman with no teeth trying to get some help on picking the dogs. She had a table full of paperwork laid out in front of her. She said she was there every night and spends about 2 - 3 hours a day reviewing the information BEFORE getting there. Wow. Somehow a very large woman with a gold tooth latched onto our group and kept following us around.

I'm in Galveston, TX until tomorrow. Galveston is an island outside of Houston, right on the Gulf. It's been covered in fog for the three days that I've been here. Apparently, this is pretty common. A friend of mine, Chris, explained to me that this is their version of lake affect snow. Normally the winds blow form the south off the coast, but in the winter, the water’s cooler and when it blows in over the warmer land, you get fog. Normally it burns off by 10 and it gets hot. When it’s moderately cool, it stays around for days. You're smarter for knowing all that now.

I got a new understanding of how people might look at Christianity by talking to an Apple Computer rep. Will and I were wandering around CompUSA, really just browsing. We went over to the Apple section to check out the new mini computers and found out that they're hard to get a hold of. We asked why production always seemed to be an issue with Apple products. The guy proceeded to go on a rant, explaining to us the genius of Steve Jobs, why Mac Mini's will rule the world, the genius of Apple's marketing and their far superior product. We just wanted to find out where to get a Mac mini.

There are a ton of great parallels here in terms of how some people choose to share their faith with others. Granted, much of what the apple guy said was true. Technologically, Mac's are a good, stable technology, the Mac OSX operating system is technologically superior to Microsoft Windows and has a much more intuitive, sexy and usable interface. Furthermore Steve Jobs is a genius and Apple's production capabilities suck. All that being said, I didn't want to fight with the guy, just understand where I could find a mac. Funny thing, Apple actually hires people that they term apple evangelists to promote their vision and show people the way, the truth and the life as far as Steve Jobs is concerned.

I'm pretty excited about one of my favorite books, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy being made into a movie. If you haven't read this trilogy by the late Douglas Adams, you won't understand that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. What's the question?

Rock and Roll Fonts. Cool site.

It was a beautiful day in Boston. I had lunch at the oldest resturant in the world, and one of my favorite Oyster resturants. The Union Oyster House is in downtown, near Quicy Market and Faneuil Hall. It's the oldest resturant in America and it's great. I sat next to the booth where JFK used to come and hang out. Like all of Boston, it's got such great history. The sales rep I was with took me on the Good Will Hunting tour. We went by the bar they hung out at in the movie, the community college where Robin Williams worked, some of the MIT buildings and a few other places. I fly out tomorrow morning bright and early. I had to change my flights around at the last minute, so I'm just hoping I get upgraded. I lost my ATM card at some point, so I was scrambling to figure out how to get enough cash for a cab back to the airport. The subway from here requires 3 different line changes, and at 5:30 AM and under pressure to get to the airport, I'm pretty confident I'll get lost and miss my flight.

I always wondered about this loophole in traveling that makes all the background checks pretty much useless. Guess I'm not the only one to have noticed it.

The Westminster Dog Show is on... For whatever reason, I end up in hotel rooms when this thing's on... And I'm embarassed to say I actually watch it.

If you use Google, check out this Google Cheat Sheet.

I'm in Boston for a couple of days, staying over in Cambridge, right next door to the infamous MIT. I have a beautiful view from my hotel room, on the 25th floor, overlooking the Bay and the Boston skyline. This camera-phone picture doesn't quite capture it. Boston is probably my favorite city, even in the winter time. I worked on a project out here a 5 or 6 years ago over the course of about a year and I got to know the area pretty well, especially the resturants. I'm here until Thursday, flying out to Kansas City and then back to Texas. Next week I'm spending time between New York and Texas.

Great article entitled Fiscally Blond on Xerox's CEO Anne Mulcahy, (pictured above next to me) about her success and the fact that she's beat out rival HP CEO Carly Fiorina. Having worked under 3 CEO's at Xerox, Anne is a phenomenal leader, very inspiring and is in the process of pulling off a Lee Ioccoca size turn-around at Xerox.

Let me tell you about my friend Will. Here's what happened: More so than usual, I tried to setup a very romantic date for Valentine's day for my wife and I. I'd started thinking about it a few weeks ago and put a fair amount of thought into what we were doing, coordinated it, and suprised her with all of the different parts of it. The baby-sitter couldn't be here until 5:30, so I called up Will to see if he could fill in from 5 - 5:30. Will's helped out with all of my kids since they were babies, heck, he's 'Uncle Will' to them, but my three kids can occasionally be pretty overwhelming for anyone, let alone a bachelor. At the last minute, my sitter had an emergency come up where she couldn't baby-sit. What does Will do? He takes one for the team! He babysits my kids from 5 - 9:30, including feeding them dinner and bedtime. That is way more than a friend.... That's a brother.

With me in Florida, Cathie was home all week doing the single mom gig. Madeline wrote this note for her on her own that I thought was great:
Dear Mom,
Thanks for your hard work around the house. Love Madeline. P.S. I apprecheat it. I Love You.

This was followed two days later by the following note attached to her door:
Nobody is allowed in my room except dad. I might run away and never come back so I hope you feel sorry Mom.

Girls. Wow. I honestly believe that my friend Bob has it easier with his five boys than I do with two daughters.

My Tivo Season Pass List. What's yours?

1. 24
2. Alias
3. Desparate Housewives
4. Nip/Tuck
5. The Simpsons
6. The Surreal Life
7. True Life
8. Made
   
9. Lost
10. Saturday Night Live
11. The Apprentice
12. Scrubs
13. The Daily Show with John Stewart
14. Best Week Ever
15. Arrested Development
16. Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica
17. Tilt
18. The Simple Life: Interns
19. Distraction
20. Zoboomafoo
21. The Soup
22. Justice League Unlimited

Google's new mapping service is very cool. It's completely interactive as opposed to most web based mapping systems which make you click and refresh the map each time. This one has a great interface and looks nice and integrates well with their new local search capability.

Down in Key West, we were sitting down next to this guy, Silverman. He's one of those human statues who stand on the corners collecting money to have your picture taken with him. We talked for a while, found out he's a mime who came over from Hungary eight years ago. He trained formally as a mime for ten years and when he came over, he learned from a guy who was gold. He wanted to be original, so he went silver. He said it takes him about 5 minutes to get the makeup off at night.

I got back today from a trip down to Florida with four other guys. The trip was in honor of a good friend's 50th birthday. We'd originally planned to go to Vegas last year, but figured it might not be the best place for the group of us. Ted ended up getting a good deal on a couple of condos for a week down in West Palm Beach and combined with $166 airfare, we couldn't resist.

We flew down Tuesday morning, into West Palm Beach, getting there around noon. It was sunny and 80. When you think Florida, you think pools and gorgeous women sunning themselves by the pool, right? Not in West Palm Beach. We were the youngest people by 40 years. No kidding.

We headed down to the Marina and checked out the fishing. 80 Degrees and no wind is great temperature for hanging out by the pool, but it stinks for deep sea fishing. We ended up pushing our fishing plans out to Friday and decided we'd head down to Key West instead.

We rented two convertibles, hopped in the car and hit the road with no plans or lodging in mind. It's about a 4 - 5 hour drive down to Key West and it's one of the prettiest drives I've ever seen. We stopped on the way down to look into Tarpin fishing. Tarpin fishing are these gigantic carp type fish that are supposed to be fun to catch, just not eat. At the marina, people were feeding these huge fish. They'd jump out of the water and take it from your hand, if you were dumb enough to let them. We to Key West in time for the sunset, which was awesome. To set the tone for Key West, as soon as pulled into Key West, we got out of our car to see the two women in the car next to us making out. About 30 minutes prior to sunset, everyone in town seems to migrate to the pier to watch it. My wife put us all under suspicion based on the fact that we rented convertibles, watched sunsets and headed to Key West together. This picture really says it all (Note the Hard Rock gift bags... Who still goes to a Hard Rock Cafe to buy t-shirts??)

We went bar hopping in Key West, hitting all of the famous spots, including The Hog's Breath Saloon, Sloppy Joe's and Captain Tony's. I'd always wanted to check out Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, but in real life, it's pretty disappointing. Talking to one of the bartenders at Captain Tony's, he explained that Jimmy Buffett owns the building and gets all of the revenue from the store, which makes a fortune, and just leases the space and franchise rights to the bar. The bar is more of a shrine to Jimmy Buffett - with lots of pictures, articles and music playing.

Captain Tony's was great. I'd heard of it by listening to Jimmy Buffet's songs. Apparently, it's one of the semi-local hangouts down there, a little off the beaten bath of the main Duvall Street area. At one point, Buffett actually helped Captain Tony run for Mayor, and he won. The next morning we got up, had breakfast and went to some of the landmarks, like the Southern-most point in the US, walked the streets and then headed back North to West Palm Beach.

On the way back, we stopped in Fort Lauderdale for dinner and to people-watch. We called it an early night with our fishing trip the next morning.

Here's what I learned about deep sea fishing - the better the weather, the worse the fishing. Based on that, Friday was set to be great. A big cold front had moved down from the north creating huge winds, cold weather and big waves. We went out into waves that were anywhere from 6 to 10 feet out a couple miles from shore. Even on a 60 foot boat, those are huge. When we'd be in the trough of a wave we weren't able to see over it at times. The pictures I took didn't capture how huge they were and how they threw the boat around. For the captain and first mate, I'm sure they weren't that bad, but for us, we were pretty sure this was the perfect storm. We'd have huge waves come crashing over the boat as we were fishing. In between fishing, we'd stare at the horizons and try not to throw up from sea-sickness. If I took my eyes off the horizons for a second, I felt like ralphing. From my last experience, I learned that once you break the seal, you're hosed for the rest of the trip, so I held it in and made it through the whole trip without chumming the waters.

We were out to catch sailfish, which are beautiful to see and a great fight. We each took turns as the fish would strike. Ted caught 2 Mahi Mahi, Brad caught a 45lb King Mackrel and Will and I each caught Sailfish. The Sailfish struck at the same time and Will and I were simultaneously fighting our fish. It took about 20 minutes of fighting to pull it in. I have the image locked in my brain forever of both Will and I's Sailfishes launching out of the water simultaneous as we fought them. We let the sailfish go, but brought the other fish back to eat. We grilled the Mahi Mahi that night and it was the best fish I've ever eaten. We brought the Mackrel back home with us for my neighbor to smoke for us. Apparently when they're that big, they only taste good smoked or grilled. We've got a lot of it. Let me know if you want any.

For our final night, the five of us ended up having to share a single room for the final night. We played poker to see who slept on the beds and who slept on the floor. I won for the pull-out bed. It was the worst night sleep I've ever had in my life. Will's snoring is unlike anything you've ever heard in your life. At one point I was just chucking stuff within reach at him to shut him up. At any given time, at least two guys were snoring to the point that you couldn't sleep through it. We got up, headed to the airport and I got back today at 3.

You can check out most of the trip pictures here. (Temporarily Down)

I just found out last night that I made President's Club at my company. This is a huge deal, and something I've hoped to be selected for over the past 5 years. The year's trip is a cruise on the Radisson Seven Seas Navigator. From what I've read, it's a private luxury cruise ship and that's amazing. My company does these things up right, so I can't wait. Now Cathie and I just have to find help watching the kids.

A friend at church had asked me a bunch of times to write another article for our church newsletter. I waited, and waited, and waited and she kept extending the deadline for me, until it was pretty much printed. I finally submitted the article to Carole, and figured for giggles, I'd submit it to Relevant Magazine for the fun of it. Relevant is my home page, and I happened to see an article synopsis in the articles section with a quote that kinda sounded like something I'd written. Sure enough, they published it. You can read the article here.

What kind of world championship team can't cover the spread? Stinkin Patriots.

Cathie's parents took us to go see the musical Movin Out last night at the Wharton Center in East Lansing. I really had no idea what to expect. I guess I just assumed it was a musical just like Rent or Les Mis. Nope. It was different than anything I'd ever seen before. It was really a modern ballet set to Billy Joel's music. I really liked it, but it was just so different. There were virtually no props on the stage, just the characters doing some very intese music while a guy above the stage (who sounded just like Billy Joel) sang the music. Almost more of a concert. Whoever created the concept basically took a bunch of Billy Joel songs, loosely tied them together into a story, and whallah, you have moving out. I'm pretty sure I could have done the same thing - just not the coreography. There's no speaking in this at all - just dance. There was one scene was the friends Eddie, Tony and James get in an argument. How do they resolve it? Dance, of course. They're plieting and Pirouetting around the stage, throwing each other around in dance. It reminded me of how I resolve conflict with my friends.

We had our first board meeting for Project 311 last night. Project 311 is a non-profit ministry whose desire is to simply love and support students and youth pastors. The Ministry is built around John 3:11: This is the message we have heard from the beginning... We should love one another. It's not about competing with youth ministries, but to support the local church, which we believe is the hope of hte world. We want to teach students how to love each other and especially how to love the unlovable. The ultimate vision is to ignite an urgency in students to love God passionatley and to love others selfllessly. We're going to accomplish all of this through the creation of events (conferences, concerts and camps), resources (books, magazines, web sites, video, music, etc) and reinforcement through communities, support and networks.

It's an amazing vision that has been mapped out in tremendous detail and vision and is moving at a very fast pace. It's built on a network of youth pastors in the metro-detroit area that extends to resources across the country. One of our first large events is coming up in early July called Blitzfest. It'll be a huge festival, held out here in the South Lyon/New Hudson area at a large park. It's geared as a positive event for kids in the area and a fun event for youth groups to come to and hang out. It's being down put on in conjuncion with the City of South Loon and should be huge.

The board that I'm a part of is a great one - very diverse in background - two youth pastors, an attorneys, an entrepeneur, a real estate broker, two finance guy, and me - 8 of us all together. There's this common thread of having worked in youth ministry roles in a significant way, with a common passion of junior high youth ministry - makes the group equally odd. This is really the first board I've been a part of, so I'm looking forward to learning how this works. My passions for seeing junior high kids reached and tought out to reach out to their friends along with Youth Pastors and their spouses connected and supported connect well with this ministry. I'm excited to begin this whole thing and see where it goes.

Ok, ok. I know this is wrong, but I secretly admire the genius of this kid for what he did:

A 16-year-old student has been charged with a misdemeanor for rigging a keystroke-recording device onto a teacher's computer. School district police received a tip from students that the boy was trying to sell answers to final exams. The District Attorney's Office has charged the teen with breach of computer information, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and up to 180 days in jail. This sort of thing has happened before. The problem is so pervasive that the GRE board has switched from computers back to paper and pencil.

I thought this was a cool iPod accessory. It lets you hook your digital camera into your iPod and offload your pictures while traveling. No more bringing extra memory cards or a laptop. I guess you'd have to have a camera with a lot of MPs to justify this, as a 1GB Compact Flash card costs less than the device. This would work if I were touring Europe, which I'm not anytime soon.

Good travel advice in this artcle from Fodors on packing a suitecase:

I've had a few people (including my Mom) complain that they have problems reading my blog because they're forced to scroll back and forth, left to right, to read an entry. I use the Firefox browser and it works fine. Not sure how it looks for Mac people. I've tried everything to modify the template to work better on IE. Couldn't do it. If anyone can, let me know.

Jon sent me this link and I've been amusing myself all day with it. Click on a line from Napoleon Dynamite and it plays it. I'm really not sure why I think this movie is so funny, but these lines have stuck in my head after watching it a couple of times and I giggle like a school-girl when I hear them.

This is cool to the point of being creepy. Google's got a new search feature in beta that will suggest searches as you type. You gotta check this out.

Netflix wants to save your marriage. Netflix is an online DVD rental service I've subscribed to for 4 or 5 years. You create a list of your movies online and they ship them to you, three at a time. When you're done, you drop it back in the included mailer, and they send you the next movie on the list. No late fees. 2 day turn-around time. I love it.

Now they allow you to create multiple queues and designate how many movies each can have at time. No more do I have to hear Cathie complain about my movie selection. She can make her own list and get new ones as she watches them. She gets 1 of the three, I get two.

Jason sent me this link and I literally almost wet myself watching this. Someone took the song "Baby Got Back" and made a video called "Baby Got Book" about loving the bible.

Joe pointed me to this posting for a Senior Pastor position for a nearby church that I found funny. Po-Mo-Noel (as his friends call him) qualifies. Repeatedly.

You probably connect with today's culture if your iPod is part of your wardrobe, if your play lists include U2, Black-Eyed Peas, Moby, and Coldplay, if your library shelf contains N.T. Wright, Leonard Sweet, Bill Easum, Jim Collins, John Grisham and John Steinbeck, if your DVD collection goes beyond Disney to Cohen brothers, Oliver Stone, and Mel Gibson; and if you can successfully order at Starbucks without tripping over your tongue or holding up the line. (NAME WITHHELD Community Church is seeking a subversive teacher/communicator and team player who can connect with the inquirer, as well as the seasoned Christ-follower and who accurately and passionately exegetes Scripture and culture. This catalytic leader must guide the ongoing theological and cultural dialogue while exploring different approaches to ministry. Five years experience in an emergent church would be ideal as well as a master's degree and/or seminary training. Please send resume accompanied with DVD of a RECENT speaking engagement to...

A cool free tool for sharing large files called Dropload.com. It lets you upload files for one other person to download. Good way to go if you don't have your own FTP site. Files have to be 100MB or less.

I thought this was a cool idea... Creating a huge collage of pictures, called a Life Poster. Instructions how are here.

Buck called me today to share this prolific bumper sticker with me:
"Try JESUS. If you don't like him, the DEVIL will always take you back."

I thought this was an interesting photo essay from Time Magazine on the top 25 Most Influential Evangelicals. I didn't see Jesus anywhere... but the guy who sold 19 million copies of his book was #1. What about the guy who wrote Prayer of Jabez?

These comments are silly in light of the post Jason Shinn put out here. Jason actually wasted a whole entry once ranting about the fact that he's not cynical. In my opinion, that's the equivalent my creating an entry about how I hate technology.

I had a fun weekend, but it was too much in too little time. Madeline went down to Cedar Pointe's new Castaway Bay indoor water park Friday night and Cathie went out with friends, so I got to watch Barie Prince and the Pauper with Emily and after she went to bed, Nate and I had a guys night. We watched guy movies (Indiana Jones and the Temple of doom) ate guy food (Hungry Howies Pizza and Cinnamon Bread Sticks - which the girls don't like, so it's part of our guy's night to order them), we drank guy drinks (for Nate this means Mountain Dew or any other caffinated pop) and did guy stuff (video games). We were going to go midnight sledding, but it was 2 degrees out.

On Saturday afternoon, I bummed around not doing much productive, except reading a new book Riptide by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Late Saturday afternoon, four friends from work road-tripped down to a suprise birthday party in The Flats in Cleveland for a friend's suprise birthdy. It seemed like a great idea when we planned this to hang out for a while and drive back that same night. Bad idea. The party took place at The Dive Bar in The Flats and was a blast. We left about midnight and hit snow on the way back. I was hurtin bad the next day. After church, instead of kicking back and relaxing, I got it in my head that Cathie and I should remove wallpaper. Man I hate doing that. It was a border in our kitchen and was tedious and painful. After that, I took a well-deserved (in my own mind) nap.

I'm heading down to New Orleans tomorrow for work. My travel just-so-happens to concide with Marti Gras. In between meetings, we're going to a couple of the parades. My hotel is right off of Bourbon Street and the sales rep I'm working with is a local down there and a great person. Should be fun... I mean a lot of work.

A buddy of mine sent me these pictures that a friend of his took out west. He said that the lion had been stalking them for the better part of the morning on the way out to a hunt. They were pretty sure it was after one of the dogs. The cat ambushed them, and the mule tossed its rider and went into attack (defense) mode, the horses scattered and shots were fired but no one was sure if they hit the cat or not. He said that the battle was decently long, and it wasn't until it was almost over that one of the guys started snapping pics. The mule finally stomped the cougar to death after biting and throwing it around like a rag doll. The dogs wouldn't even come close until the mule settled down.

Click on the picture to see rest of these.

If you google the name Brad Jeffrey you that this picture of Pastor Brad and Sue Jeffrey. My friend, also named Brad was thrilled with this and the amazing similarities in their hair styles. Clearly a mullett.

I heard a great story from a guy, Dave, while on a conference call today. Last year, Dave was traveling for work and got into his hotel room late. He walked in, set his suitcase down and headed into the bathroom to get ready for bed. He unpacked his stuff into the closet and came into the other part of the room to go to bed, partially undressed. He gets ready to climb into bed and finds another guy already laying in the bed. The guys sees him, screams and tackles Dave. Akward. I laughed really hard when I heard this.

If you've got an iPod, or if you're only using iTunes, you need to check out Podcasting. Podcasting allows you to subscribe to an audio show the same way you can subscribe to a blog for feeds. The application downloads the updated shows on a scheduled basis, loads them into iTunes and in turn syncs them up to your iPod. There are some great shows out there - everything from DJ'd music shows to talk radio. I've been listening to a show called Geek News Central which is basically a nerd, talking about technology for 30 minutes or so. It's great stuff.

You first need to download the Podcasting software here. You then need to subscribe to feeds from one of these aggregation sites: PodcastBunker.com or PodcastAlley.com. You can learn more about postcasting on this FAQ.

If you're not using the firefox browser yet, you should be. It's a free web browser that you can use instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It's an open source application, meaning it was created by a bunch of programmers that came together to make the world a better place, and don't make a penny off of it. It doesn't have all of the holes that Internet Explorer has and it has a ton of great extensions that can be added to it to customize and add functionality.
Here are the extensions I've added in so far.

• Clone Window - Let's you duplicate the window or tab that you're currently viewing, complete with content and browse history.
• Spellbound - Adds spell check functionality to your text.
• A9 Toolbar - Provides A9 search capability in the browser
• ForecastFox - Inline weather forecast, giving a three day forecast in the bottom of your browser toolbar.
• Yahoo Companion - Integrates in with my e-mail and yahoo portal functionality
• Bloglines - Let's me easily add blogs into my bloglines.com RSS reader account.
• Stock Ticker - Shows my stocks in a ticker at the bottom of my browser window.

You can find a million more at this firefox extensions site.

I thought this was cool . Amazon's new search engine, A9.com has new yellow pages capabilities. Nothing new and revolutionary in that, except for how they've implemented it, which they call Block View. Check this out:

The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,” which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.

The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.

Will and I just got done watching the movie Troy, based on Homer's Iliad. A little long, but not bad. There was a character in the movie that thought the world revolved around him. Everyone he ever fought kicked the crap out of him.. He talked a big game, but when it came time to fight he ran. Ironically, his name is Paris.

My favorite line from Condoleeza Rice's confirmation hearing, as she reminisced about the good old days in the state department:

"Back when people were still using Wang's in certain parts of the state department. Not that there was anything wrong with Wangs."

I think she's referring to the computer brand.

Paris Hilton's blackberry got hacked. Not a huge deal, until you read the quote from Paris:

"It became obvious to her what was going on," says the source. "She was pretty upset about it. It's one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy."

Article: Hacker reads Paris Hilton's e-mail

I've been using bloglines as a web-based RSS/Blog reading client and so far, so good. I'd been using the product pluck for a while which is a thick client that essentially did the same thing, only it only worked with Internet Explorer, which I don't use anymore. Bloglines has firefox browser integration and a good interface. If people are using bad RSS XML templates (Noel), then the feeds don't come across correctly, otherwise, it works great.

This has potential. Google has released their new video search engine:

Google Video is a new product that enables you to search an index of transcripts from recent TV programs. It's just an early-stage beta product at this point; you'll only see stills and text snippets from shows that match your search terms, and you can only search shows from a few channels, dating back to December, 2004, when we started compiling the index. But we'll be steadily improving Google Video in the months to come, so as they say in the TV biz, stay tuned.

PETA will hate this, but it's amusing for about 2 minutes. My best score is 297.

I sat down at the dinner table tonight and Nate pet our dog Riley and asked "Why's she all wet." Cathie laughed and explained that Emily had locked Riley in our downstairs bathroom and proceeded to give her a "bath". Thing is - our downstairs bathroom doesn't have a bathtub. Cathie explained that she used toilet paper and toilet water to rub Riley down. For some reason, Riley hasn't liked being around Emily lately. Not sure why.

Is it over before it really got started? Jason started his blog up two weeks ago, and its already been dormant for a week. Is it dead? How long between posts before I nuke it from my blog roll?

The final chapter in our flooded basement saga..... The insurance company came through, we got our check, we got our carpeting ordered and they're coming to put it in. Meanwhile, we live in chaos with the contents of our whole basement spread throughout our house and me trying to find a place the house to work that's comfortable and not freezing cold, like my currently cement basement.