Tommy remarked that driving into the San Elijo Hills town center is like driving into the Truman Show. Everything looks brand new, and it appears out of nowhere. When he said this two years ago this was definitely the case. Out of the chaparral wilderness sprang a spring surrounded by a well-manicured lawn. That same fountain that welcomes the thirsty traveler also calls to the budding geocacher.

This is now the closest geocache to my home. It’s also a great geocache to introduce friends in the area to the sport. This was a quick “cache ‘n dash.” I stood back a bit and let my Spencer and Jamie do most of the hunting. Their reaction to the caching experience: excitement with a desire for more!

It has been at least a year since Krissy and I first decided that we wanted to draft a mission statement for ourselves and for our future family members. It’s amazing how quickly time passes when something difficult has no deadline. We worked on this for a long time. We must have written a total of ten pages worth of things that were good and that we wanted. We then condensed all of those ideas down to the principles upon which they rested. We found it difficult to achieve a balance between the specific and the general. I was thinking too much about rules at the beginning, making up a long list of dos and don’ts. I don’t know how we did it, but we eventually settled on this wording. What made it easier to call it finished was our realization that this is only a first draft. Version 1.0 is bound to have a few bugs and I’m confident that there will be a version 1.1 in the not too distant future.

We were reluctant to hang this up when we were finished. This document represents the ideal, and once it was on the wall it somehow gained a greater place of importance for us. We couldn’t do certain things anymore because we had agreed to the mission of the Family now. Scripture reading needed to come before television. That’s what the document on the wall said should happen. What we always knew we should do is now there in black and white reminding us. We still aren’t perfect and I don’t plan on getting there any time soon, but at least I have a better idea of how to get closer to that goal.

Mission statements aren’t for everyone and they are certainly going to be different from family to family based on individual strengths and weaknesses. If you are interested in creating one with your family there are several resources available. If you decide to do this or if you have done this already let me know how it went in the comments.

Let’s face it. I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle and I eat as if I were a linebacker. I was the kind of guy who lost weight on his mission because that was the most exercise I’d ever gotten in my life. I like food. I don’t like exercise. My hobbies include reading, playing video games, and programming. Geocaching is good, but that’s not even close to enough exercise to do me much good. Since getting married I’ve taken to eating two servings worth of everything Krissy and I cook. When I went to see the doctor for a physical his exact words were: “You don’t smoke. You don’t drink alcohol or coffee. You don’t lead a risky lifestyle. Nope… weight will be your nemesis.

My cholesterol is too high and I need to lose weight. Krissy and I attended a class this evening aimed at educating unhealthy people about healthy eating habits specifically geared toward lowering high cholesterol levels. We were given a charge to document all of our food intake in a week and to then compare that to our goals and see where we might improve. They gave us a sheet of paper upon which to track our eating habits. There was no way I was going to let things go on paper where the information would languish in uselessness. When we returned home I immediately set out looking for Free Software to track my food intake and my progress over the next few months.

The first thing I found was Gnutrition. This software looked promising at first. It includes information from the FDA on over five thousand different foods and allows one to track progress and plan meals. Unfortunately the most recent release of the software was in 2001 and I couldn’t even get it to compile. I found a few other applications for nutritional information, but none of them allowed tracking of eating habits, which was what I really wanted.

When I first thought about using my geek talents to get healthy I thought that there ought to be a website that would allow me to keep track of these things no matter where I was so I could hop online and update it. I thought that something like a “Google Diet” sounded like a good idea. I guess I wasn’t the only one that thought that might be a good idea. In searching for Free Software I found a free website called FitDay. FitDay is a free online nutrition and exercise tracking system. It allows setting goals and seeing how much fat, calories, and nutrients are being ingested.

As far as exercise goes, I am a complete novice. I have no clue where to start, what to do, or how long to do it for. For people like me RunFatBoy.net was created. The site’s not quite done yet, but it looks like it’s just what I need to get started and to get my stomach to stop spilling out over my pants.

Getting in shape and healthy may not be fun, but it can be just as geeky as you want it to be. And if you’re me then that’s very geeky indeed.

I have had my share of problems with companies and institutions calling multiple times in a day trying to get ahold of either me or my wife, but this voting season has been the worst yet. Tomorrow is the primary election in California and I have received nearly eight telephone calls so far today with pre-recorded messages from well-known supporters of candidates and candidates themselves urging me to vote for one or the other or this way or that on a proposition.

Will it ever stop?

Of course it will stop. Sometime around June 7th when the election is over. The best part of all this is that I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I’ve already mailed in my ballot. Of course, I dislike the volume of messages I’ve received so much that I wish I could have my ballot back just so I could vote against these old-school spammers.

The National Do Not Call Registry has been a success for me and my family. We have received almost no unsolicited calls since then except for the political advertisements preceding this election. You see, the politicians that drafted this bill made a nice exception for themselves making it impossible to penalize them for telemarketing. “It’s not covered because it’s not a sales call” they say. How is it not a sales call? All they are doing is trying to sell themselves and their friends.

I did a little research and found that they are most likely calling all the numbers that are registered with their political party. I am going to have to re-register and put some bogus number on there if I’m ever going to get this to stop. I can try to track down all the organizations that are using that number to boost their candidates’ numbers and ask them to please stop calling, but they are in no way obligated to do so and there are just so many that it’s not worth it.

We need a new law against this behavior. I would love to just vote against everyone who is doing this, but that is often impractical. The best candidate in most important regards is rarely the one who is not advertised through telephone solicitations. In some categories I have received calls backing all of the candidates that are running. Then what am I supposed to do? Not voting is out of the question. I have no obvious recourse available.

I can only hope that they don’t get ahold of my email address.

Free for Windows XP users, that is. Skype is software that allows voice to be carried over the internet between two or more participants in a phone-like setting. In other words, it lets you talk to people as if you were talking to them on the phone, but lets you do it for free over the internet to anywhere in the world for free. Skype is released for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux and all three can talk to one another. The video features, however are still in beta and are only available for Windows XP.

Krissy’s brother and his family recently moved to Georgia, so we decided we would try to keep in touch using the new video capabilities in Skype. The audio quality is excellent, but with the limitations in bandwidth imposed by our asynchronous broadband we can only really communicate with the bandwidth of a palty sixty Kilobytes per second. The video quality is less than stellar, and we have experienced dropouts that required us to manually reconnect. The dropouts were probably not Skype related, however.

I am looking forward to using the Linux version when it comes out to talk to them from our place, but I really doubt if we can maintain a three-way video connection with only thirty Kilobytes per second transfer rates. I don’t even know if Skype’s software supports more than two parties using video at once.

While it’s less than perfect and nowhere near as good as being in the same room with your family, it’s still better than talking without video at all, especially for the younger ones that can’t yet really talk a lot. At least they get to see their family and learn who they are even if it’s just the grown-ups talking.

Krissy wanted to make something for her father for his birthday. We read a quote on the refridgerator at a friend’s house and we thought Krissy’s dad might get a kick out of it. We decided to buy a cheap frame to put the quote in and then have Krissy cover the frame in duct tape to match the quote. The quote reads:

Duct tape is like The Force — it has a Light Side and a Dark Side and it binds the Universe together.

It took quite a few tries to get the tape to look how we wanted it to, but in the end it all paid off. I wouldn’t be surprized to see these frames showing up on store shelves sometime soon.

To the spammer who spoofed my email address as the from address in countless spam emails that he sent, I would just like to say, “Thank You!” I now have the pleasure of receiving hundreds of returned mail messages in my inbox daily. I also get to hear from some mail systems that your message was “Considered UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL” and that “Delivery of the email was stopped!” I have learned that my new name will be Jaime Jones, and that I apparently have some sort of presentations that outline a deal that only has 24 hours left in which to respond.

I also learned that Henry Hill only accepts messages from senders he approves. This is sad to see. I wonder how many other spammers have this guy’s address. He decided to implement this simply because there was too much spam coming in his inbox. Now my good email address (but not really my good name) is on those spam messages.

I gather that this was retaliation for my participation in Blue Security’s Blue Frog undertaking to fight spam. Blue Frog was designed to automatically send requests to companies whose products were being promoted in spam asking that they stop. Many spammers complied and stopped spamming members of Blue Frog. Then one spammer got mad and decided to fight back. He knocked out a large portion of the internet in the process. He also started sending spam to suspected Blue Frog users in droves. As a final attack upon some of us there was an attack on our good names by making it look like we were sending spam ourselves. Blue Security was forced to shut down but they opened up their source code as a final hope of one day overcoming this scourge.

Work is underway in planning an open source distributed network built upon the foundation Blue Security laid. But until that time arrives I apologize to anyone who may receive an offer they never asked for with my email address attached.

My last final was today. My linguistics teacher threw us a bit of a curve ball. He told us that half of the final would deal with morphology. What he didn’t tell us was that all of the questions would be in reference to a sample of African American Vernacular English. In answering one of the questions I wrote the following in response to the question: Does Katrina use only the uninflected form of the verb be? I answered with the following sentence:

No, she say “I’m,” “it’s,” and others.

Just before I turned it in I noticed and added an s at the end of say. Reading and writing sentences in AAVE for an hour started to influence my writing. That’s something that I never would have expected.

My Mom called me tonight with a question: how much does it cost to get a legal copy of Windows on my computer? She bought a computer from a guy who builds them for people out of his house. He apparently didn’t inform her that part of the cost-savings in this PC was due to the unpaid Windows Tax.

She is not eligible for an upgrade version and she does not have money to spend on software. I have used Slackware Linux for about three years on all of my machines. She trusts my judgement, and so she asked me what she needed to do to try Linux. I sent her a torrent to download the latest Ubuntu Live CD and told her how she can “test drive” Linux without having to lose any of her settings she’s got now.

She hasn’t had a chance to try it out yet, but she sounds interested. Assessing her needs, Ubuntu seems like a nice fit. I may have to customize it a bit for her so she can watch divx movies and listen to MP3s, but I think she will be happy with her new OS. I’ll update with more information as to how she likes it and what the shortcomings might be.

I often opt for the self checkout counter at the local grocery store when I’m purchasing less than five items. There are very few people who actually use these machines and avoiding the line gets me out of the store in less than thirty seconds. They could use some work, but all in all they are well implemented. Tonight they were even better than usual.

I was only getting two items. A small can of diced chilies and some Reese’s candy thing that Krissy spotted next to the checkout counter. Krissy chided me for paying with a credit card even though the total was less than three dollars. As I reached down to get the receipt I noticed a dollar bill sitting in the change dispensing are of the machine. There was no one anywhere near the machine when we approached it. There was a man that came up behind us to check out after us. I took the money and casually walked away as though it were my change and as though nothing were amiss.

Krissy was not pleased with what I had done. I feel that there is nothing wrong in taking loose cash that is not accompanied by any identifying information. I wouldn’t touch a wallet, but if I learned anything from my days working as an usher at the movie theater it’s this: all cash is fair game. If I had turned the cash in, I would just be lining the pockets of whomever was lucky enough to be working there tonight. No one can ever claim cash as theirs, because they can’t identify it in any meaningful way. This didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics. It was almost brand new.

Krissy still wasn’t satisfied, so I promised her that I would donate my one dollar to some worthy cause.

I suggested the Human Fund.