"Lock the doors and close the blinds -- we're going for a ride..."

Hi all...  A few things in no particular order...



(a) My Nibbler icon is taking a well-deserved week off. "Shane" has decided to step in for this week in his disco pose to be my avatar.  Wasn't that nice of him?



(Ten points for whoever can identify where Shane comes from...)



(b) Yesterday was my parents' 37-year anniversary. Thirty-seven frickin' years of marriage! Which makes it just about forty years since they started dating. Wow.  I've seen the relationship blossom, and I've seen the low points of it as well. But the impressive thing is -- they've stuck through it and seem to still be having a good time with it. Kudos to them. So far, K and I have been married for 5 1/2 years. I hope we can be even half as happy as they are in 32 1/2  years...



Anyway - my parents decided to go to New Jersey for the weekend.  Virginia may be for lovers, but Jersey is for those who have celebrated the through-and-through of it...



(c) Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post wrote a fascinating column in yesterday's paper. The full story can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50910-2004Jun17.html. I strongly suggest you read it -- especially if you're invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as I am. Krauthammer claims victory for Israel: "While no one was looking, something historic happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost." Pretty profound statement...



(d) Av turns 18 months at the end of June. It's amazing to see him learning so much, and experiencing life around him. And we, too, are learning new things about who he is every moment.



Today, for example, we watched him discover the cover of Depeche Mode's "Blue Monday" as recorded by Orgy. He got funky. Very.  The kid's got a good taste in music...



(e) I've officially stepped up the social ladder a notch -- whereas I used to simply be a nerd, I'm now a nerd with my own GMail account! I used  gmailswap to shamelessly whore out my kid for his infectious laugh and his attempt to say the name "Glen," which I'm sending as an MP3 to our benefactor (Glen) who sent the GMail invite in exchange for this "service." (Even if you don't need a Gmail account, the site is pretty cool - the things people will give for one of these accounts...) The account will belong to Av when he's old enough to use it...



(f) Also from the nerd department: Mozilla rocks. They officially released version 1.7 of their communications suite, and version 0.9 of Firefox, their web browser. For those of you unfamiliar with Mozilla, it's far better than Microsoft's Internet Explorer in that (a) it isn't Microsoft, (b) it's "open source," meaning there's a great deal of community input into the features it has, (c) it's faster, (d) it's more secure, and (e) there's an "extension" (which I'm using now) which works with Mindsay to make blogging much easier. It's also available for Windows AND the Mac AND Linux AND many other flavors of UNIX. Give it a try...



(g) Just watched Reno 911! tonight -- the season premiere encore presentation. Is this not the funniest comedy of the summer season?



(h) One final nerd thing: Slashdot mentioned a transcript of this great lecture about DRM and why it's evil. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the technology that lets you buy music off of iTunes and Napster and will only let you listen to it on a certain number of computers and MP3 players. DRM is also found in the common DVD player. Even if you're not as knowledgeable of the technology, it's a good, entertaining read. Anything which starts with Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! can't be that bad, can it?