May 2006 Archives
Wow.
How would it be to get left for dead at 8700m on the north face of Mt. Everest and live to tell the tale? Lincoln Hall was rescued a day after losing consciousness and being left on the slope by his team.
Last year, on the way to hike the Naomi Peak Wilderness and Cache National Forest in northern Utah, Brooklynne and I listened to the audio version of Eiger Dreams. That made me really wish I had gone ice climbing more than once while I lived in Montana, but I think I'll leave Everest to the crazies. Anyway, if you want to read story and keep up with developments, mounteverest.net is a good place to start.
I've added some new pictures from this weekend to our new photo gallery. Check them out.
GMU awarded its first PhD in History to Andrew Yarrow last weekend. I'm counting on this guy to establish a good reputation for our school between now and 2009, when I expect to finish up and join the real job market. Good luck buddy, and congradulations! I'm really quite jealous!
This weekend, the Dodgers will begin a road trip by playing a three-game series against the Washington Nationals. Brooklynne and I will be going to all three games with my family. It will be the first mini-vacation with the parents and all three kids and spouses. That's a fun landmark.
On a less-than-happy note, Eric Gagne will not be back for the series this weekend. Brooklynne became a Dodger fan during Gagne's amazing season a couple years ago, and we're both big fans (although I admit that I really wanted the Dodgers to trade him when he was consistantly putting up 5.00+ ERAs as a starter). We were hoping he would finish his rehab in time to appear this weekend, 
but it looks more like Thursday against the Phillies will be his probable return date.
People always ask me how the Dodgers are doing this year, and I say the jury's still out. They struggled early with a bunch of injuries to key players, but now they are the hottest team in baseball (they've won 15 of their last 18 and they're on a 7 game winning streak) and they are currently the highest scoring team in the Majors. So, it could be really fun this weekend. They are still a half game out of first in the NL West, though.
In other sports news, I've been thinking about what kind of daughter I want to raise. Maybe one kind of like Danica Patrick? I'll be pulling for her this weekend if rain doesn't delay the Indy 500.
I have been playing with a new toy. It's called StreetPrint and it is a tool for easily publishing scholarly digital archives. Although there are a few small details I think need improvement, I really admire these folks for their goals and their business model (open source but respectful of intellectual property rights, collaborative, self-critical, etc.) and I will probably use StreetPrint for professional purposes some day. For now, I'm learning to customize the tool by using it to power a personal photo gallery. I've only put up one partial album (6 images), but I'm still in the experimental stage. Check it out and tell me what you think. Then look forward to an updated stylesheet and many more images including the much-anticipated pictures from my brother's wedding!
For a great example of what other people are doing with StreetPrint, check out
this site or
this site or
this site or
this site.
Brooklynne and I went to Barnes and Noble last night and spent a couple hours looking through baby books. We picked two--I chose The Wonder of Girls: Understanding the Hidden Nature of Our Daughters; Brooklynne chose Baby Girls: An Owner's Manual. We'll swop when we're done and we'll share any good tid bits along the way.
Its official--child X is really child XX, because it's a girl! Brooklynne's comments were that now she can plan to decorate in purple, and that tomorrow I had to start saving up for a wedding. Let's focus on braces and college first. Really, this news is bitter-sweet for me. I had secretly thought that a daughter would be fun (I thought the same about a son), but I had also had two visions that the child was a boy. So while I'm excited about the prospects of coaching softball and terrorizing teenage boys, I'm also sad about my apparent lack of prophetic skillz. I was warned in the first vision not to tell anyone that it was a boy, and I totally ignored that direction, so maybe this is payback. Anyway, I can't wait to hold our little girl and put her in a Bettis jersey with a pink bow.
You may need windows media player to get this, but in case you're wondering, here's a little video from Burly's Blog that kind of sums up our experiences with the pregnancy so far.
On another note, we've had alot of people ask us about what her name is going to be, and we're not really sure. We've got a couple of middle names picked out (both family names), but we're not sure about the first name. So here's your chance... give us your top three favorite names and your top three worst names, and we'll add them to our list of posibilities. But no promises!
As you guys know, the blog experiences waves of spam, and in the past, I've deleted spam as it appears, until it just gets to be too much, and then I shut off the comments for a while, and when I turn it back on, the spam has generally subsided because the spam robots have noticed that I'm not accepting comments anymore, and they move on to harass other innocent people. Well, I've recently learned that Moveable Type has a feature that allows me to approve commenters before their comments appear on the site. Once you've been approved the first time, then all of your following comments will be accepted. The advantage of this approach (as opposed to a function like the word recognition/validation tool common on blogger etc.) is that a commenter only has to be approved once.
Well, this solves the problem of not wanting offensive spam to appear on the site even temporarily, but I still have to delete the pending, unapproved comments regularly, which is a headache I'm willing to deal with in order to keep the comments open 100% of the time.
However, the spam robots are apparently not coded to recognize when their spam is not accepted or actually appearing on the site, so they just keep sending me bogus comments (I suppose this is where the blogger strategy works better).
There's one spammer that is particularly regular in its attacks. Everyday I get four spam comments over a four minute period, one comment per minute, always posted to my entry of October 26, 2005. This has been going on for more than a week now.
But today I waited in ambush until the first comment came in and then quickly closed the comments while I published this entry. I decided that although I believe strongly in not restricting comments, a few minutes might be worth it to rid myself of this constant annoyance.
Anyway, thanks for all of the comments and sorry if you wanted to comment and could not temporarily (especially Amy who I know was posting her last comment as all of this was happening). If you are reading this, then the comments should be back on, and hopefully the spammer has been twarted.
Just click, "continue reading" to see.
Also, I've decided that I have to get Brooklynne to take me to see her family in CO the last week of July. Why? Amerivespa 2006 is in Denver. Maybe we can buy one-way plane tickets, make someone a good deal, and scoot home. I can be Lloyd and she can be Harry.
By the way, I'm done with school. Can you tell?
I just wanted to let all of our friends and family know, that it has finally happened...
Whether you're into scooters or not, here's a great article about "the scooter way." Of course, I disagree with some of the points in the article (like you can't look cool on a scooter--he obviously never saw me on a scooter), but the general idea of the article captures the joy of scooting. Here's the link:
Unfortunately, I'm starting to get spammed alot again, so I've closed the comments temporarily. These things come in waves, so hopefully I'll be able to open the comments again soon. Anyway, until then, feel free to comment as usual--I'll just have to approve the coments before they go up on the site. Sorry!
