Here’s to Uncle John, who brought us to the wonder that was Cabela’s:
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I found a half-decent photo of him – aren’t you all surprised? (Sorry, it’s an in-joke… anyone in the Keefer clan can attest to John’s photogenicity. (Is that a word?))
I have five Gmail invitations to give out. Let me know if you want one!
I don’t usually go for those mishy, mushy books about God and faith that seem to all be written by women. Due to this prejudice I was wary of the latest book lent to me by Mom, ***Keeping Faith|http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0688177743/worldwidewood-20***.
Despite my doubts, I dug in. And to my surprise, I enjoyed it. The main story,that of a young girl who sees God, is surrounded by the marrital problems between her parents and the media’s obsession with her gift.
I appreciated the unorthodox approaches to the ideas of faith and God and religion. Author Jodi Picoult admits in her preface that she has and may again offend some in the religious world. I found her ideas to be fresh and intriguing, and not at all offensive.
I could not put this book down, but found the end just the teensyist bit unsatisfying. Everything just seemed to fall into place too perfectly and smoothly. But up until then it is a great, “makes me think” type of novel.
One of the reasons that I enjoy watching old ‘ER’ reruns (besides seeing Dr. Greene alive, of course) is that I have the chance to analyze each episode and catching little bits of trivia. For instance, today I discovered that Abby Lockhart (played by Mass native, ***Maura Tierney|http://imdb.com/name/nm0005491/*** has the same birthday as me!
This makes number 2 on my list of fictional characters born on January 10th. Abby joins the club along side of ***Logan Bruno|http://www.scholastic.com/annmartin/bsc/meet/logan.htm*** of “Baby-sitters Club” fame.
The search continues…
I forgot to mention this last week, but prwdot.org has just passed its second anniversary of hosting at Site5.com. I originally signed up on August 15, 2002, after many bad experiences with my previous web host. My experiences with Site5 have been nothing but terrific. Their prices are great, their service is great, their support is great. I couldn’t be happier. Site5 has a very professional and personable staff, which is a rarity in this industry. I ask a lot out of their support personnel, as evidenced by my Site5 support mailbox, which contains 339 messages. These aren’t just common support questions, these are arcane issues that most people would never even encounter, such as setting up procmail in a shared hosting environment, setting up DAV support, custom Perl module installations, etc. They have had no problem responding to and taking care of each and every one of my requests.
You can get their basic account (which is quite a bit beefier than most places’ basic accounts, I must say) for just $6.95/month if you sign an annual contract. It’s $9.95/month if you prefer to go with a month-to-month contract. I currently have their Site4 account, which is just $25.95 for a month-to-month contract that provides 2 gigs of storage space, 60 gigs of bandwidth per month (with bandwidth rollover!), unlimited subdomains, MySQL databases, email accounts, FTP accounts, and more. Check out their site to see what plan is right for you.
Several other users are also happy with Site5, by proxy, since I am hosting them for free under my account:
Will Farnham
Amy Walton
Corey Lowe
Nathan Clark (though I’m not sure if he’s actually using his account any more)
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Happy Birthday!|ppp
I’ve got a long list of things to dump from my brain. If you have time, go on and read them… using the handy Extended Entry feature that I finally got around to implementing (it wasn’t hard).
Continue reading
To the preacher-man:
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Happy Birthday, Mark!
I had to work today 🙁 Because I can park for free at work on Sundays I decided to drive into the city instead of taking the T. This turned out to be a fantastic decision, because it brought me dangerously close to the brand new Krispy Kreme store in Saugus.
Needless to say, I couldn’t just drive by. So I pulled in, got in line, and was fascinated by the donut making machinery. Yup, me and the 6years olds had our faces glued to the window watching.
I was all ready to pay for my one donut when the girls working the line offered me a free one, hot, and just off the glazer. yum, yum, yum.
Now, I don’t think I’d want a Krispy Kreme donut every day, but it sure was good!
Today is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ first ***sales tax holiday|http://www.dor.state.ma.us/forms/SalesTaxHoliday.htm***. Normally we have a 5% sales tax (which really isn’t that bad), but today on items $2500 or less, you don’t have to pay sales tax. A great place to use this would be to purchase something like a new computer. Fortunately, the Apple Store is making this very easy – they will be open for 24 hours today at all three Massachusetts locations. Unfortunately, not only do we not need to buy a new computer, we also don’t have anything else we need to buy. Going shopping today would only motivate us to buy things we don’t need (which, of course, is exactly what the Commonwealth and Commonwealth businesses are hoping for).
That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing I *want*, of course. If you hadn’t noticed already, I’m keeping track of such things in the new ***Stuff Peter Wants|http://prwdot.org/?p=stuff_peter_wants*** page. It’s on the left navbar of our main website.
In more exciting news, we had some folks over last night for a little party to celebrate the 2004 Athens Olympics. There were nine people there, including Becky and I, which is just about as much as our living room can hold. 🙂 We did some Olympic trivia, watched the opening ceremonies, and had lots of food and desserts. Becky made a ***watermelon whale|http://gallery.prwdot.org/craftiness/IMG_8797*** which she filled with fruit salad. There were also various munchies, and several delectable desserts: peanut butter cheesecake with chocolate topping, which Jenn brought, strawberry cake, and ice cream sandwich cake. Recipes are available. if anyone is interested. 🙂
One other thing I missed posting earlier was that I attended the ***BMAC|http://www.bmac.org/*** meeting this Wednesday. You can see the ***photos I took|http://gallery.prwdot.org/bmac_august_04***. The topic of the meeting was “Stump the Chumps”, where people bring in all sorts of Mac problems they are having and try to stump a panel of Mac “chumps”. Many of the questions were beyond arcane, but it is always an interesting study in Geek group dynamics to see all of these people interact. Of course, the free ice cream at the end of the meeting was a nice bonus. 🙂
Can you believe that we are halfway through August? Before you know it, it will be October — which means my birthday (see the aforementioned ***Stuff Peter Wants|http://prwdot.org/?p=stuff_peter_wants*** page), Dad’s birthday, and our second anniversary! 🙂