If you haven't been watching The Daily Show with John Stewart's coverage of the Democratic National Convention - Indecision 2004, you need to be.  I can only say that it's really, really, really, really funny - Republican or Democrat.  There's some funny video on the site.

I came across another great application - Picasa, a google company.  It's a free photo manager application that has some very unique features.  It's got the standard stuff - allowing you to pull pictures from digital cameras and edit them.  The cool stuff is that it will poll your computer for new images, categorize them into albums automatically and then present them in timelines and slideshows as well as export them to your Tivo Series 2 DVR.  You can go through a huge collection of pictures, select them, and then either order them or export them for ordering.  It also has integration into blogger.com through the Hello product.   Can't beat the price.

I've been messing with Feedster this week.  It's a data aggregator that lets you pull together feeds from blogs and news into a single site.  There's software to do this, but I like the web based version better.  Most blogs have either an RSS or ATOM feeds that you can connect to.  The upside to using something like feedster is that you don't have to go to multiple sites, checking out what's been updated.

I guess Cathie and I are doing something right raising our kids.  I went in to check on Madeline tonight, and found a letter that Nate had written for her:
Dear Madeline,
I love you very much.  You are the best sister ever.  You relely iproved on your jim nasticks.  You did reley good on your dance resital.  You are the nisist sister ever. 
Love,
Nathan

Sometimes, I wonder how we're doing as parents.  This kind of stuff sure helps.

I'm on vacation all week.  We're doing some day trips during the week, like going to COSI tomorrow.  We're heading up to Silver Lake later this week with the Niemi's.  Today, we went on a family bike ride, which was great, except for some technical difficulties (The pedal on Nate's bike came off in the middle of nowhere, so we had to improvise).  Nate and I went up this afternoon to the coffee shop and played chess this afternoon and then we hung out and did a whole lot of nothing for the rest of the day.

 

I started reading the book If Chins Could Kill : Confessions of a B Movie Actor.  It's the autobiography of Bruce Campbell, the king of B movies.   He's a great story teller - his sarcasm comes through in the characters he plays.  Will loaned me the book after I got done watching Bubba Ho-tep and I've been laughing all the way through.

Yesterday goes down in the books as one of my favorite days this summer. I had high expectations (which are usually resentments waiting to happen) and it met them all. A bunch of us went to Brad's cottage to hang out for the day.  We spent the day riding brad's wave runners, tubing and grilling.  This picture says it all.  This four person tube was one of the highlites.  We'd get four or five people on the tube and then the battle would begin.  The goal was to either hang on for dear life while the driver tried to throw you, or be the last man standing.  In this picture, you see Brad mounting Ted, holding on to his life jacket while ted straight arms me.  Things got ugly.  Biting (Ted and Jess),  pantsing (at one point I was holding on desparately with both hands while someone had yanked my bathing suit down to my ankles) and slapping.  Brad did beer-but chicken on the grill, which was the best chicken i've ever had.  There were over 7 different air-soft guns (guns that shoot plastic bb's really hard and fast) there and during dinner, an all-out battle broke out.  The battle involved Brad and I versus Jason, Will and Ted.  People switched sides many times, but I got hit a lot and wasn't afraid to use innocent by-standers as hostages to save my own butt.  We topped the evening off with a pontoon boat ride at sunset.

I saw I, Robot on Saturday night with Jason and Will. I thought it was a great movie - pretty fast paced, fun to watch. It wasn't one of Will Smith's funnier movies, but it had amazing CG and special effects (which I suppose are really one and the same). I thought it was a great take an the original story.

 TEL AVIV, Israel -- Natasha, a 5-year-old black macaque walks at the Safari Park near Tel Aviv. The young monkey began recently walking exclusively on her hind legs after a stomach ailment nearly killed her, zookeepers said.

I like monkeys.  Especially walking monkeys.

The new season of Crank Yankers just started.  If you've never seen it, it's a show that makes crank calls and uses puppets to act them out.  Sounds odd, I know, but it's great.  It's got some great characters and then lots of guest stars.  The season premiere had Ludacris calling his manager and telling him he wants to change his name to "Peanut Head".  The character in the picture above is Ed - Jason's favorite. 

I'm watching Bubba Ho-tep.  It's a B-Movie staring the king of B-movies, Bruce Campbell about what really happened to Elvis.  It's about an elderly resident in an East Texas rest home, who switched identities with an Elvis impersonator years before his “death”, then missed his chance to switch back. Elvis teams up with Jack, a fellow nursing home resident who thinks that he is actually President John F. Kennedy, and the two valiant old codgers sally forth to battle an evil Egyptian entity who has chosen their long-term care facility as his happy hunting grounds.  I ways always a big fan of Brisco County, Jr.

I did the message in church last sunday.  I've been pretty down about it since.  I didn't dwell on it 24/7, but had a pretty heavy feeling about the whole thing.  I processed it, prayed about it, and let it go as I was heading to the airport on the way to do a presentation in Milwaukee. 
 
I heard from some people that they enjoyed the message I gave, but I didn't.  The content was alright - I was probably a little too broad and not deep enough.  I can deal with that.  Talking with a friend today, I think I figured it out.  I think I judge a lot of the success of the message based on how an audience responds.  I do this with public speaking in my job and at church.  On Sunday, the crowd was flat, I got no response, and I think that really impacted my delivery of the whole message.  It threw me off and I had a tough time recovering.  I'm not sure what to do with that.  I know that God's big enough to work through my imperfections, but I like to have conversational interaction with the audience when I'm speaking.  When they stare blankly at me, I take that as feedback.  Bad feedback.  I'm new at this church teaching thing.  Guess I'll figure it out as I go.
 
I just found out I'm teaching in August.  Something I have no clue what to do with.  Has to do with the road of faith.  There's a great section on faith in Blue Like Jazz that likes faith to Penguin Sex.  Maybe I'll talk about Penguin Sex. 

I just finished Blue Like Jazz - Non religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality.  This is one of the only books that Noel has told me I need to go buy.  I did and I love it.  It's one of the best books I've read in a long time.  It's written in a very conversational way, with some great stories wedged in.  I'm not sure how to describe what exactly it's about, though, but it made me think about a lot of the ways I look at the world and myself.   He talks a lot about his life in college, his friends, and the way they treat each other.  He's got a really fun collection of friends - one of those guys that seems like he'd be a great guy to sit down and talk with.  As I was reading the book, I kept thinking that my mother-in-law would really really like the book.  Not sure why that came to mind, but I was laughing at stuff I in this that I thought she would laugh at.

Crummy day - but at least I don't have cancer.  I got up around 5 (front desk forgot my wake-up call) and took a shuttle to the airport.  I got there in time for my 7AM flight, but it broke.  I go from getting in at 9AM EST to 12:40 PM EST.  I can deal with that.  Not great, but not horrible.  That flight then gets delayed.  They ship me 500 miles west to go east.  I fly to Minneapolis and catch a flight to Detroit, getting me in around 3.  At least I was in first class.  Apparently some guy threw up all over himself back in coach. 

I've been in Milwaukee since Sunday and I've learned a couple of things.
#1 - I don't like German food.  We've eaten at two different German resturants - both of them fairly renound, and both blew.  Comon - who eats Saurkraut Strudel?  Nasty. 
#2 - Milwaukee means "City by the River".  I learned this from my cab driver today.  My new resolution is to start trying to interact in some small way with the people i come into contact with when I travel.  I started talking to the people sitting next to me and my cabbies.  My cab driver on Sunday tried to convert me to Islam.  The one today was from Nigeria.  He's been here for 28 years and learned the meaning of hte word "Milwaukee" from a book about Jeffrey Dahmer.  Why did he read the book you ask?  He used to manage the building that Jeffrey Dahmer rented a room in and for some reason that book described the origin of the word.
 
Went to the casino tonight.  Won $325 in blackjack.  I've got a 7AM flight and a 5AM wake up call.  I'm home tomorrow and I'm on vacation next week.

I made it back from rochester, ny today without incident.  I passed the exam and I'm now a certified green belt candidate.   Yee-haw!  I'd booked an earlier flight today and got out on before the Blue Angels started their practice.  There's an airshow in Rochester this weekend and they shut down the airport for a couple of hours to allow them to practice, cancelling and screwing up a whole bunch of flights.  Most of the people in my class are probably still in Rochester right now.
 
As I was walking through the airport today, I heard the announcer come on and say "Will Ivan Gay, Ivan Gay please come to Gate 69".  This of course sounded like "I've been gay".  No idea if it was real, but it was funny.

These Wedding Announcements are real and hilarious.

One more day to go. Hopefully I can take my Green Belt certificiation exam this evening and have it done with. That's right, I said Green Belt. The Six Sigma methodology ranks the various levels of expertise by belt-level. Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt. There's all the funky sociological hierarchy to go with it. The master black belts push around the black belts, and they in turn like to tell the green belts what to do.

I heard two great stories today:
One of the guys in our training is staying at the same hotel I'm at. He walked into his room last night and found a rabbit sitting in the middle of his room. Pause for a second, how strange would that be? Anyways, he tried to shoo it out, but it kept hiding in the room. He woke up this morning, and there it was again. He took a towel and tried to open the door and move it out of the room.

One of my co-workers families just got back from Huntington Beach, CA where they camped near the beach. The kids earned money throughout the week burying dead seals on the beach. The DNR guys would pay them $10 for each dead seal they buried in the sand. Go figure.

I started reading Blue Like Jazz last week on Noel's insistence. I don't think Noel has ever "insisted" I read a book. He was right on this one. Reminds me a lot of Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies. Lots of loosely connected stories and thoughts on faith. A little more serious than David Sedaris, but it definately has a lighter side to it.