Lots of you are probably wondering what to get me for Christmas. Okay, not lots, probably very few. As my good deed for Christmas, I'm putting my Amazon Wishlist out there for your amusement or shopping pleasure.

If you're not using it already, this is worth checking out: Firefox. Firefox is a free browser created by a consortium of programmers that works great, has better functionality that Internet Explorer and best of all IS NOT A MICROSOFT PRODUCT. One of the best features about it is the tabbed browsing feature, which lets you have multiple sessions going concurrently in the same window.

A9 is a search engine worth looking at. It's all about how it formats the output - allowing you to select various columns against your search criteria: Movies, Music, Books, Images, etc. If you use the toolbar, Amazon.com gives you a discount on your purchases. Not a bad deal.

This article about worship struck me this morning:

Jesus says I cannot worship two gods, that I will hate the one and love the other. Since I really do want God to be God in my life, I need to smash these singing and doing worlds together. I need to seriously look at where my love-caused action towards other things supplants my love-caused action toward God … and I probably need to break out in song a little more often.

On the list of annoying things: Watching a television show while Emily has the remote. She's learned how to use Tivo's pause function and she pauses it every few seconds to look at what's on TV or tell you about what she just saw or what the characters just said. Her favorite show right now is Zoboomafoo. She starts the show off by doing a crazy dance she's made up and then pauses it every few seconds for the rest of the show. Should I be proud that my three year old is proficient with the remote, or are we just letting her watch waaaay too much tv. I'm guessing the second.

Why you can't leave a three year old unattended for 30 seconds:

Nate's cub scout pack did the second part of a can drive today. Last week the kids left bags for people to fill up with canned food on people's doors and this week they were collecting them as people left them on their porch. Nate, his friend Trevor and I went out this morning to go collect the food. As we went around, we couldn't find any bags out there. Nate was in disbelief, asking "Dad, don't people care about the poor?" We began going door-to-door asking for cans. They would go up to the door, dressed in their cub scout uniforms and Nate would go through their spiel: "Hi we're with the cub scouts collecting cans of food for poor people. Would you like to help poor people?" How could you say no to that? It turned out that the reason no cans were out in our neighborhood is because another cub scout group came through our neighborhood accidently and picked up our cans.

Here's a picture of me almost, but not actually hang gliding. At least I have a picture of me not really doing it.

Great story on choosing life over convience.

Today is Spiro Agnew's birthday. Interestingly enough, you can rearrange the letters of his name to spell Grow a Penis

This is really cool. My friend (who happens to also be my trainer) Kirk Vickers was selected by Mens Journal Magazine as one of the top 100 trainers in the country, as stated in this article. He is one of the only two trainers in the state of Michigan who got this recognition. The votes came from other fitness professionals, Doctors, Physical Therapists and other trainers. If you don't know Kirk, he used to be the head trainer for the Detroit Red Wings and now owns his own gym, Triad Performance Training Center where he trains schmoes like me as well as professional athletes. I think it would be important for Kirk that everyone know that I can bench press more than him. Frankly, it probably should have made the article.

I went out to Torrey Pines to go hang gliding this afternoon. It's a world famous glideport (is that a real word?) by the Torrey Pines golf course. It's right on the ocean and is based at on a huge cliff hundreds of feet high. I was in the tandem harness, ready to go off the cliff when suddenly the wind died down. It never picked up, and I didn't get to go. Next time.

I was in a Starbucks today in San Diego that had a pay-for-use bathroom today. I had to borrow a quarter to use it. Just as I got ready to plop it in (the quarter), a starbucks Barista saved the day and handed me a quarter.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to try and keep my internal clock square, and I'm beat, it's only 5:30. I fly out tomorrow. First class both ways. Gotta love it. Additionally, I'm gold (almost diamond) in the Hilton chain. Gold gets me all sorts of perks when I check in, like a fruit basket waiting in my room, free room service breakfasts, etc. Diamond has the nice perk of being able to walk into any Hilton hotel anywhere and get a room, regardless of whether they're booked or not. They'll actually bump someone for you to get you a room.

I'm teaching in two weeks at Crossroads. I'm looking forward to it. We're doing a series based on the movie Saved, looking at some of the concepts from the movie.


I started reading the book Fearless Faith by John Fischer. A friend of mine, Ken Buck, had been harping on me to read this for a long time now, telling me it would help me articulate some my frustration towards the christian subculture out there. He reams out everything from Christian radio, music, books, movies - you name it. It's a good book for the most part, a few things I don't agree with so far, but I'm still processing what he's saying.

We lost pretty severely last night in Dodgeball. I think we only won a 2 or 3 games out of 9, butwe had a great time doing it. We've gotten to know the other teams pretty well, so the trash talking and sidline conversations keep things interesting, not to mention the side bets that go on to spice things up. We hung out at Ted's afterwards to watch Monday night football and complain about how bad our arms hurt us. I know I'm whining here, but my arm is pretty much numb by the end of the game. It's the equivalent of pitching a 9 inning game, I think (since i've never really played baseball in my life), but it hurts.... A lot. Our team is on average 10 years older than all of the other teams so we're hurting pretty bad by the third game.

For the past couple of weeks I've been using allofmp3.com to download music. It's very different from the other download services for a couple of reasons:
1. There's no copy protection on the music, so you can load it anywhere you want.
2. You can download it in any format and quality that you want.
3. It charges by the Mb for music. Where most music services charge $1 per song, songs here run from $.02 - $.05 depending on their size. You end up paying about $.50 per album as opposed to $10.
4. This site has every album or artist in the world on it.

I was a little skeptical to give my credit card to a russian site at first, but from everything I've read and experienced, it's trustyworthy. Apparetly, because of Russian Copyright laws, they can offer music from all artists and labels. They have an amazing collection of music out there. I haven't found anything they DON'T have yet.

Here's a review on the service that provides a good overview and other referenes. You can download the client software here.

I've got a delimma. I've always mocked the "My child was student of the month" bumper stickers. I'm not a big fan of bumper stickers in general, really. My daughter Madeline came running into my office this afteroon sharing with me that she was selected as her school's student of the month, showing me her certificate, the letter and what else, but a student of the month bumper sticker. She told me I could even put it on my car. Thinking quickly, I told her I wanted to put it some place EVEN MORE special than my car. Thankfully, she thought my office would be even better. I'm a bad parent, huh?

Nate and I went to see The Incredibles last night. It was phenomenal!
I've got to agree with Kevin Smith, who said it's the best Super Hero movie EVER MADE. Not only were the graphics, down to the last strand of hair amazing, but the plot was great and it was almost 2 hours long! There's a great article about the movie from a geek's perspective on Slashdot. Nate and I have been playing the video game on PS2, which is a lot of fun as well. Samuel L. Jackson is cool in just about any role he plays, let alone a super hero,

Two more reasons I love being a dad:
My three year old Emily fell asleep today on the couch while holding a large dill pickle in her hand. Cathie found her asleep and took the pickle form her. Emily woke up and told my wife "I'm going to fall back asleep with a pickle and see if it disappears again."

I came up to bed the other night and found that my 6 year old daughter Madeline had left a note by my bedside that read: "Keep this with you. I love you dad and I will never stop. Remember the fun times we have. Just a reminder. Madeline"

I voted. One successful approach I've had in past years is to vote for the most whacked out parties for University of Michigan's board of trustees. I picked the Natural Law party and the Green Party. Eventually, I hope their political ideology will trickle down into the football team.

We played Dodgeball last night. Had a couple guys from the neighborhood come to the game, which is ultimately how I was hoping it would go. We're not good, but we're not in last place. We're a bunch of old guy, relative to the other teams. We start off throwing strong, and by about the 4th game (we play a total of 12 or so), our arms are rubber while everyone else is still hurling the ball at us with full strength. My arm and shoulder was dying by the end of this. Wasn't there a time I could beat the snot out of my body and not suffer any ramifications?

Cathie and I watched a new show on MTV called You've got a friend. The basic premise is this:
A person agrees to be paired up with an actor for 48 hours who poses to be their friend. This "friend" can order you to do anything, and typically does. Anything from making them dump their girlfriend, quit their job or eat a booger. If the person refueses once during that time, they lose. If they successfully complete the 48 hours, they get $15,000. The guy they pick to be the friend has an amazing ability to know exactly which buttons to push on others, how to spot the weaknesses and go after them with gusto. I think I've found a great job. Pushing people's buttons and getting paid for it!