Well, I didn’t win that new Miata. I’m not real dis­ap­pointed. As a mat­ter of fact I’m kind of glad I didn’t use up my luck win­ning a silly lit­tle car, I want to save it for Wednes­day. The Power­ball jack­pot is around a hun­dred million.

We went for a lit­tle hike on Sat­ur­day and had planned on get­ting in a short tan­dem ride either yes­ter­day or today, but Sat­ur­day was quite lit­er­ally a washout. The rain really didn’t even quit until after lunch today, so we set­tled for a small walk around our down­town late this after­noon. The sun was low in the sky and the light was incred­i­bly warm in color so I snapped a few pho­tos. One of them is what you see above. Speak­ing of pho­tos, on Saturday’s walk the last image of the Hitch­cock Woods gallery was taken.

The Wiz­ard of Oz is still sit­ting unwatched on the cof­fee table. The other day when we were watch­ing Fan­tas­tic Four at about 10 min­utes into the movie the DVD started act­ing up, the movie froze, then crept along all pix­e­lated, then froze again until I hit the next chap­ter but­ton and then was fine for the rest of the movie. The same thing hap­pened when we watched The Lake House over Christ­mas and if I remem­ber right we had the same issue with The Devil Wears Prada not too long before that. Think­ing maybe there might be some­thing wrong with our DVD player Donna asked me to check it out by watch­ing some­thing and see­ing if it would act up. I chose a movie that was in my mea­ger col­lec­tion that I had started watch­ing part way in on the USA net­work yes­ter­day and didn’t get to fin­ish, TDPM.

Jack Spar­row: I know those can­nons. It’s the Pearl.
Man in Jail: The Black Pearl? I’ve heard sto­ries. She’s been prey­ing on ships and set­tle­ments for near ten years. Never leaves any sur­vivors.
Jack Spar­row: No sur­vivors? Then where do the sto­ries come from, I wonder?

No not the TLC show, but C:\. Haven’t done a good purg­ing in about a year, so I backed up the impor­tant stuff, moved copies of files to another par­ti­tion and for­mat­ted C: Loaded XP back on and then put back the essen­tials: web browsers, email and Ulti­mate MahJong.

I then checked the MS Update site to make sure my oper­at­ing sys­tem is up to date. Yikes, I needed 66 updates total­ing 57Meg. I did rein­stall my OEM ver­sion of XP that was only ser­vice pack 1, maybe I’ll go get SP2 and that’ll put a big dent in the required updates. Down­load 266Meg (good thing I have cable access to the net) and a reboot later I had SP2 loaded. Rechecked the win­dows update site again and guess what? Right, still needed every­one of those updates…

Still have a bunch of soft­ware to reload, but I’ll do that on a as required basis.

Ahhhh, me!

As part of our com­pre­hen­sive retire­ment plan Donna and I play the Power­ball Lot­tery every draw­ing. We will plop down $10 and get a quick pick set of num­bers that are good for the next 5 weeks of Wednes­day and Fri­day drawings.

Let­ting the machine pick the num­bers for us is the best way to go. We used too play some fam­ily birth­days, but never won any­thing so what good are they. Besides, we had more than 6 birth­days to chose from, so we had to leave some num­bers off. Then what would have hap­pened if we were to miss the jack­pot by one num­ber and that one num­ber was one of the omit­ted birth­days. How would we feel towards the per­son who had the birth­day num­ber that was wrong? How would we feel towards the per­son whose birth­day we left off and would have won it for us?

When you go to a Chi­nese restau­rant and you get a for­tune cookie now a days they include a set of “lucky” num­bers for the lot­tery. Well, a cou­ple of years ago I got a for­tune that said, “Finan­cial pros­per­ity is com­ing your way!” See­ing this as a good omen, I tucked it into my wal­let with the inten­tion of giv­ing those num­bers a try, but never got around to it.

Yes­ter­day while chat­ting with a co-worker (Hi, Mark) I men­tioned that see­ing as the Power­ball was up to 180 mil­lion that just maybe I’d go buy an extra shot at the prize. I told him about my lucky num­bers and he asked to see my for­tune slip. I thought he was kid­ding when he wrote them down and said he was going to play them. This morn­ing he told me that he really bought a ticket using those numbers.

Tonight on the way home from get­ting our hair cut I stopped at a quick mart and bought a ticket using the “lucky” num­bers too. Had to. Just imag­ine how I would have felt if he hit with those num­bers that I had been car­ry­ing around in my wal­let for years and never played. That’s right, the only thing left to do at that point would be Seppuku.

I’d teach myself some new tricks — like learn­ing PHP so I culd write Word Press plug-ins.

I’d really like one for the MMC’s new WP based web site. I cre­ated 40-odd users, one for every mem­ber and member’s fam­ily mem­bers and it would be nice to see how many use the site. So far I know of 3 peo­ple besides me who have logged in. One per­son has actu­ally added events (Dave is my hero) and two oth­ers have made com­ments (you have to be logged in to com­ment.) Heck if I can get 8 to 10 peo­ple to use it at least once I might con­sider it a success.

Another thing I’d like to have done is maybe a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the Event Cal­en­dar. Right now there are two options for dis­play­ing events, a) they can appear on the front page or b) they can only be viewed on the Event cat­e­gory archive page. I have the site set now so that the events do not appear on the front page, keep­ing it free for other stuff. But I would like the event to pop onto the front page (maybe as a sticky at the top) a week prior to the event and then stay there until the day after the event.

If not for my wife prac­ti­cally drag­ging me out of the house for the mile long walk around our neigh­bor­hood, my only foray out­side would have been to the end of the dri­ve­way to pickup the Sun­day paper. I spent most of the day on one end of the couch lis­ten­ing to RP and read­ing Prime Wit­ness by Steve Mar­tini. I have read sev­eral of his books and enjoy the whole lawyer — mur­der trial — twist in the end books he writes.

While pok­ing around the authors web site I dis­cov­ered a cou­ple of his books I hadn’t read that I’ll keep my eye out for when pok­ing around the used book stores. One in par­tic­u­lar, his first pub­lished, called The Simeon Cham­ber in which the pro­tag­o­nist is some­one by the name of Samuel J. Bog­a­r­dus will be espe­cially sought after.

I missed it I guess.

Actu­ally noth­ing blog wor­thy hap­pened. Tonight same story, but I can’t skip two nights in a row, so you’ll just have to suf­fer with some sub-standard post­ing, sorry.

Spent yes­ter­day updat­ing the HHI Condo web site. Await­ing approval before actu­ally upload­ing the files. Noth­ing major, just some new pho­tos that were taken last weekend.

I also worked on a “Best of 2005″ page, by going through all the stuff I posted that year and pick­ing my one favorite post from each month. Some months were leaner than oth­ers, so a cou­ple of the bests are a lit­tle weak. I guess maybe if I changed the for­mat from one per month to just the Top Ten.… Hey, here’s an idea, you go read all 350-odd posts for your­self, leave a com­ment that includes the titles of your favorite 10 and I’ll add it to the side­bar too.

Tonight is the last day of the month and as usual I Pay­Paled some dough to RP thank­ing them for the music. As much as I love Bill’s music pro­gram­ing, some­times I have to stray for a bit so I don’t build up a tol­er­ance towards it. My usual first jump­ing off point is at SKY.fm as they have sev­eral chan­nels that appeal to me and even on the free­loader streams, the inter­rup­tions are min­i­mal. The Reg­gae, Clas­si­cal and the New Age chan­nels are book­marked in my Winamp player. They also offer sev­eral vari­a­tions of Jazz and Oldies, but yes­ter­day I noticed an new one, Clas­sic Rap. Does that mean rap is now just another passé genre and can by filed away with “The 80’s”?