Bronner Burgess
For those who don’t know it, Rick Burgess (of Rick and Bubba fame) lost his 2-year-old son, William Bronner, this past Saturday.
His commentary at the memorial service is available on the show’s website (direct link here in case it gets moved from the homepage EDIT: bad link; now available on YouTube [parts 1, 2 and 3]), and is well worth a listen through if your particular world schema doesn’t close your mind to straight-up evangelical preaching. It’s a message of hope and strength and peace in the face of brutal sadness and bitter despair, and one that a whole lot of people heard (and are still hearing). Many of them, like Lynn and me, will be motivated by words born of true faith. Others, including those who don’t believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, will be dumbstruck, consternated and possibly offended. But maybe a few will even come to know Him through this tragedy.
Rick is accepting prayers at prayers@rickandbubba.com.
I'm sick of it, and I'm not going to take it anymore!
- I’m not going to stress about title capitalization anymore. I instinctively know those rules of English grammar that make sense, but I’ve gotten sick of having to look up the rules of proper titling every time I write a post (or use short titles to avoid looking up said rules), so from now on I’m just going to use sentence caps.
- I’m absolutely sick and tired of spam, and I’m going to try to find ways to use reCAPTCHA to help avoid some of it. I’m trying out the WordPress plugin for comments here, and then I’m also toying with a home-grown, in-your-face email filter for unknown senders. Of course, common wisdom on the topic says not only will it not work, but it’ll also likely piss off some of my legitimate contacts to boot. Well, whatever. I have to keep them stirred up about me.
Anyway, there’s lots of important stuff to post, but I haven’t felt like messing with it for a couple of weeks. Hopefully will get to that soon…
Yummy Vegan Snacks
My cholesterol-conscious boss, whose wife recently convinced him to go on a completely vegan diet, read somewhere that eating half a raw onion a day could significantly increase HDL levels.
So? Yesterday I caught him nibbling on a big, fat wedge of raw white onion smeared with peanut butter.
Yum.
The Wages of Sin: $45
I got my more expensive plan at pair Networks cancelled this week, but as I’ve previously complained, it was too late to avoid a whopping fee for being a few hundred megabytes over my disk quota. It really irritated me that a 20% overage over a span of 15 days would cost me 300% of my monthly service price, and I thought about trying to argue it down or shift some blame or refuse to pay the outrageous fine or whatever. But then, when I finally got around to cleaning out my rented FS, I came across a forgotten .rar file (rarchive?) that, had it not been sitting there, would have saved me a big fine.
The culprit? An episode of 24 that I had downloaded and for whatever reason stuck out there on my web host.
$45 is steep for a fine, I guess, but I’m getting off cheap if that’s my only penalty for all the software and media thefts I committed over the years. And it’s a better wage than death.
Shut Down Again
The good news is that I no longer have to be bothered with the distraction of reading my personal email at work.
I especially like the strongly-worded verbiage that makes clear my importance to the company.
The 2008 List – Installment One
UPDATE: the 2008 list has been broken out into its very own page…
Big Carter (as in, not my son-to-be, but rather the fully-growed’n with whom I’m sometimes known to hang) told me that if I posted some top-10 lists my blawg would get all crazy busy with folks who like things like that, and that I would forever be remembered as a cultural icon and not just the guy who egged a bunch of his school-mates 20 years ago for no apparent reason.
He’s usually wrong about that kind of stuff, though, and I’m not going to listen to him. So instead of spewing my top 10 favorite things about 2007 (most of which I would have probably made up anyway), I’m just going to forget about last year and start a new happy/sad list to weigh this new one. I’ll probably lose interest in it eventually, but my plan right now is to keep adding to it until, next December 31st, I’ll have clear evidence of whether 2008 was really worth the hassle. Why? Cause I’m all about hope and expectation, that’s why. A sad 2008 would make me hopeful for a happy 2009, and that would make me happy. A happy 2008 would make me expect a happy 2009, and that would also make me happy. Not being able to remember much about 2008 would make me sad, though, and I probably won’t be able to remember what I don’t write down.
Happies in 2008:
- Our good friends Carter and Adeline helped us celebrate New Year’s Eve, and were still there making us laugh for the first hour or so of 2008.
- My unborn son turned head-down right on schedule, and is still a healthy and active little person. Lynn and I have gained new insights into his behavior, and are more amazed than ever that we’ve been blessed with such a miracle.
- I didn’t have to look for a job during the slimmest time of the year for choices of technical openings.
Sads in 2008:
- I was sick on our 12th anniversary and caused us to delay our romantic dinner out. I really hated doing that to Lynn, and it was a much worse feeling than the crappy whateverits running their course through my sickly body.
- While I was moving my stuff to the cheaper plan of theirs I just signed up for, Pair Networks charged me an outrageous overusage fee for disk space. It was affordable, but getting fined 3 times what I pay in a month for service for my first ever infraction just made me absolutely nutsy.
I guess the happies outweigh the sads by a pretty good margin right now. I’ll just hope that trend lasts!
UPDATE: the 2008 list has been broken out into its very own page…
Moving on Down
I’m switching my websites from Pair Networks‘ standard platform to their new pairLite service. I won’t be giving up much, but it’ll be about half as expensive for me and I won’t feel so guilty maintaining my web toys after Lynn quits her job to stay home with little Carter.
So, during the migration process, stuff might disappear for a while… but I’m keeping all my domains and junk, so everything should be back just like it was (or will appear to be, anyway) pretty soon.
Announcing: Carter Mills Beauchamp-Simmons
Lynn and I had our followup ultrasound this morning, and had some suspicions validated about our unborn baby:
- He’s very active
- He’s very healthy
- He’s very male
Big Ol' Greasy Bag of Goodness
My aunt and uncle in D.C. introduced Lynn and me to Five Guys a couple of years ago, and it instantly became our favorite hamburger place in the whole wide world. I think at the time there were only a few stores in and around the D.C./Virginia area, so we didn’t have many opportunities to eat there. Fortunately for us (and I mean ALL of us) the business has really taken off on Space Shuttle Franchisefrenzy, and their footprint has expanded like crazy in recent times. So now we have a Five Guys here, with three more scheduled to open around town.
Anyway, I was afraid that a franchise location might just be a poor copy of the original: maybe the atmosphere wouldn’t be what I remembered; or maybe they wouldn’t be as generous with the fries; or–and this was the worst possibility–maybe my fond memories would just turn out to be unrealistic fabrications generated from all my aunt’s and uncle’s hype about mediocre food, proving once and for all that there’s no greener grass anywhere. Yeah, that would have been bad.
As it turns out, there wasn’t a thing to worry about, and tonight Lynn and I had the best burgers we’ve tasted since last Christmas. It’s rare that we find common ground in this area (she likes fatty, greasy meat and I prefer lean beef), but we’re in 100% agreement on this one. In fact, I’m prepared to sacrifice any future diet plans I might have otherwise had if that’s what it takes to ensure their survival here.
Go. See for yourself. And take me with you. I’ve almost finished digesting my bacon jalapeño cheeseburger, so I’m ready to get back in there. Hooah!
Synopsis of Project One
I found this on my laptop tonight, and realized that one reason nobody cares about Project One is because they don’t know anything about it. And another is because they’re dweebs.
—
Seven hundred years after the near-destruction of the human race by an ancient but unknown enemy, the opportunity to travel back through time and witness the invasion first-hand presents itself to the government of the New Earth Colonies. After much preparation, a small group of observers is assembled and sent back to the year 1931, just months before the catastrophe is to occur.
The book actually begins with the arrival of one agent, Samuel Foote, who quickly tires of the mundane chores with which he has been tasked and begins to search for glory and meaning on his own. A combination of drive and inexperience leads him through a series of mishaps and harrowing adventures wherein he forms a tenuous relationship with the Mafia, becomes entangled with a foreign assassination attempt, accidentally saves the Earth from its intended doom and ultimately embodies the very hero whose legend was passed to him as a child and whose exploits caused him to join the observation team in the first place.
Though originally tasked only with the detached observation of the conflict, the team have rewritten history and become obligated to defend the planet from a secondary attack just weeks after the first was supposed to have struck. Conjoined with unlikely allies, the special agents fight the swarm of well-armed alien invaders alongside mobsters, U.S. National Guardsmen, Foreign Legionnaires and Native Americans. Successfully turning back the assault, the observers return to an unsure future but leave behind the troublesome Sam Foote and his battle-bonded friends, the very people for whom the adventure has just begun.