Author Archives: Peter

Search and Archive

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You should notice a few additional new features on our site: a blog search engine, a link to our archives, and the ever-popular “permalink” notation on each blog entry.

The search engine can be found towards the bottom left part of the page. You might have to scroll to see it, but we opted to keep it that way as putting it on top of the page caused some of the links to scroll off of the screen. To use it, simply type in whatever you’d like to search for, and hit enter. The screen will refresh and display excerpts from any entries in our blog that match your search word. You will then be able to navigate directly to those entries.

The archive link can be found on the top left part of the page. It will take you to a page that displays different groups of previous blog entries: category-based, date-based, and individual. You can use this to see, for example, all of the entries from October 2002, or all of the entries related to Food.

Finally, the permalink is provided in each entry for the purposes of linking directly to a given entry on our site. So if you would like to mention a specific entry from our blog in your blog, email, IM, or whatever, you can now use our permalink. Easy-peasy!

All of these changes, and many of the other new features that were introduced with our new format, are a direct result of my reading up on ***MovableType|http://www.movabletype.org/***’s feature set and template system. I’ve done a lot more as far as correctly implementing links, using more of MT’s built-in features where I had previously been doing hacks, generally getting more out of the system.

We hope that you enjoy all of these changes, and as always, share any comments with us via the commenting system!

Funny Politics

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I don’t know how many of you read ***Zug|http://www.zug.com/***, one of the sites we link to, but he has recently posted the results of his most hilarious prank yet:

***The Senator Prank|http://www.zug.com/pranks/senator/***

The gist is that John Hargrave wrote a letter to each of the United States’ 100 senators, posing as a 10-year-old boy. He claimed to be working on a government-related project for school, and that the tack he had taken was to ask our senators what their favorite joke was.

You can see the results of the prank at the link above, but to cut to the chase, the results are in, and the funniest Senator was Olympia Snowe (R-ME), while the unfunniest Senator was Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

Enjoy!

Various and Sundry

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Becky and I made some big strides in the new design for the World Wide Wood site this weekend. I’m pretty excited about it… it’s a very different look and feel We have a few bits and pieces to finish up, but the overall design is complete, including a new color scheme and layout. We think you’ll like it.

Saturday night we hung out with my cousin Mark ( of ***Izotope|http://www.izotope.com/*** ). His car gave us detailed computer-navigated directions to ***Taco Bell|http://www.tacobell.com/***, where we had dinner. Speaking of TB, they have this great new feature on their hot sauce packets: little hot-sauce-related quotes. For example: “The road to mediocrity is paved with ketchup packets.” or “Why order hot sauce when you can ask it nicely?” or “Mild: It’s the new ketchup.” (P.S. For anyone who cares, “ketchup” is the preferred spelling, while “catsup” and “catchup” are variants) Becky made a chocolate-cherry cake for dessert, which was beyond excellent. It had a devil’s food cake mix at its core, but did not use the recipe on the box. Becky can post the actual recipe she used, but suffice to say, it rocked. There was a lot left over, so I brought it in to work today. It was quickly devoured. One choice quote from the office crowd: “It’s like cake on crack.” Many thanks to my wonderful wife and her drug lab… err, I mean, kitchen. 🙂

After dinner we partook in ***quality entertainment|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/*** on DVD.

On the Mac front, the update to Mac OS X 10.3.3 was ***recently released|http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosxupdate_10_3_3.html***, and I’ve got that installed on the Pismo and Sawtooth at home. It just keeps getting better.

The Life-Stealer

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It tastes so good that I had to pause in the middle of eating lunch to post this.

Last night Becky made one of my favorite dishes, “tater tot casserole”. I don’t know the exact recipe, but I do know that it involves ground beef, cream of mushroom soup, cheddar cheese soup, and of course… tater tots. We had it for dinner, and there was enough left over for me to bring some in for work today.

I think that eating it has probably taken a couple of weeks off of my life, but oh… it’s worth it. Maybe Becky will be kind enough to post the complete recipe here later tonight.

How is this “OK”?

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As most of you have already heard, Charles McCoy, the prime suspect in the Ohio I-270 sniper shootings was ***arrested in Las Vegas|http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Midwest/03/17/ohio.highway.shootings/index.html***. Meanwhile, his family back home in Ohio has issued this statement, acccording to CNN:

qqq|Charlie, we all love you very, very much, and we are very concerned about your well-being right now. Everything is going to be OK,” said Amy Walton outside the family home.|qqq

How exactly is everything going to be OK for him? What a load of baloney.

On top of all this, it appears that ***Amy|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/*** leads a parallel life back in Ohio. Think of the frequent flier miles! 😉

Radio Survey

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Ok, this is a game almost EVERYBODY can play!

I thought up this little survey whilst driving around the North Shore tonight. All you need in order to participate is a radio with good FM reception and a scan button. Traveling in a car is a perfect place to take the survey, but you could also do it on a stereo at home if you get good reception in there (I only say this because the radios inside our house don’t get as much FM reception as the one in the car). If you don’t have a scan button, you can still participate, but you will need to scan through the stations manually. For the rest of the instructions, I’ll assume you’re using scan.

By the way, if you don’t usually listen to the radio in the car, you can still play. Just tune in to the radio for the purposes of this survey, then you can go back to whatever you normally listen to, or silence, or whatever.

To begin, tune your radio to the FM band, and set it to the lowest station. On my car stereo that’s 87.9. Next, hit the scan button to begin scanning through stations. Each time the radio stops on a station which has an audible, understandable broadcast, count it. If it’s too staticky to understand, don’t count it. At the same time, see if the broadcast is something you wouldn’t mind listening to – a song you like, perhaps, or a favorite talk radio show. If it is likable, keep track of it in a separate count, and try to remember which station, and who/what was being broadcast. But don’t stop the scan to listen, just let the radio keep scanning. When your radio has scanned to the end of the spectrum (107.9 or so), you should have a count of the number of stations which came in audibly, and a count of the programs that you might have actually wanted to listen to.

When you’ve got that, post it in the comments here, along with the name of any programs or songs you would have liked to listen to. Also, please make a note as to what time of day you were listening to the radio, and where you were (going?) at the time.

Oh, and feel free to go back and listen to the good programs, if any.

Old Home, New Website

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I’m sure their website has been around for a while, but just today I discovered that my old hometown newspaper, ***The Mount Vernon News|http://www.mountvernonnews.com/index.html***, has a website… and a pretty decent one at that. They even have an RSS feed! (Though the link isn’t public – you must make an email request to obtain it.) How progressive. Even ***Beverly’s paper|http://www.townonline.com/beverly/*** doesn’t have an RSS feed. Let’s not even talk about the ***Salem paper’s website|http://www.salemnews.com/***.

Nine-Layer Burrito

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Got this from ***Michelle|http://mikao.blogspot.com/*** who got it from ***James|http://www.whatisthis.com/***. I went back to James’ original version for mine.

LAYER ONE
* Name: Peter Ryan Wood
* Birthdate: October 6
* Birthplace: San Diego, California
* Current Location: Beverly, Massachusetts
* Eye Color: Brown
* Hair Color: Brown
* Righty or Lefty: Righty
* Sun Sign: Libra
* Innie or Outtie: Innie

LAYER TWO
* Your heritage: English and Dutch
* The shoes you wore today: Merrell hiking shoes
* Your hair: short, brown (um, is this a repeat?)
* Your eyes: brown (err… already covered this?)
* Your weakness: verbal communication
* Your fears: bugs, spiders, crawly things
* Your perfect pizza: pepperoni and sausage
* One thing you’d like to achieve:

LAYER THREE
* Your most overused phrase on IM: “heh”
* Your first waking thoughts: “gotta get up…”
* The first feature you notice in the opposite sex: smile, or lack thereof
* Your best physical feature: my eyes, I think…
* Your bedtime: 11 p.m.
* Your greatest fear: something bad happening to my family
* Your greatest accomplishment: getting married
* Your most missed memory: Being in Spain

LAYER FOUR
* Pepsi or Coke: Coke
* McDonald’s or Burger King: McDonald’s
* Single or group dates: both
* Adidas or Nike: Nike
* Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea: Lipton
* Chocolate or vanilla: Vanilla
* Cappuccino or coffee: Neither – yuck!!

LAYER FIVE
* Smoke: No.
* Cuss: No.
* Sing: Love to!
* Take a shower everyday: Absolutely
* Have a crush(es): No
* Who are they: n/a
* Do you think you’ve been in love: Yes
* Want to go to college: Been there, done that.
* Like high school: No
* Want to get married: I’ve been married since October 26, 2002
* Believe in yourself: What the heck does this mean, anyway?
* Type with your fingers on the right keys: Yes
* Think you’re attractive: My wife says so, and I believe her!
* Think you’re a health freak: Not at all
* Get along with your parents: Yes
* Play an instrument: I play the cello

LAYER SIX: In the past month, did you…
* Drink alcohol: No, my family has had addiction in the past, thankfully the team at https://firststepbh.com/blog/right-kind-friends/ has helped them out.
* Smoke: No
* Do a drug: No
* Make Out: Yes (with my wife of course!)
* Go on a date: Yes, again, see above
* Eat an entire box of Oreos: No
* Eat sushi: No
* Been on stage: Would you consider the front of a church during a wedding a stage? If so, yes. Otherwise, no.
* Been dumped: No
* Gone skating: Yes
* Made homemade cookies: No
* Been in love: Yes
* Gone skinny dipping: No
* Dyed your hair: No
* Stolen anything: Yes – a couple of kisses! 🙂

LAYER SEVEN: Have you ever…
* Played a game that required removal of clothing: No
* If so, was it mixed company: n/a
* Been trashed or extremely intoxicated: No
* Been caught “doing something”: Yes..something
* Been called a tease: No
* Gotten beaten up: Yes
* Shoplifted: No
* If so, did you get caught: n/a
* Changed who you were to fit in: Never.

LAYER EIGHT
* Age you hope to be married: Already am, was 24 at the time.
* Numbers and Names of Children: n/a
* Describe your Dream Wedding: The one I had! See ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/wedding***.
* How do you want to die: Without pain and in my sleep.
* Where you want to go to college: n/a
* What do you want to be when you grow up: Pretty much what I’m doing now. Programming.
* What country would you most like to visit: Egypt

LAYER NINE
* Number of girls I have kissed: Three
* Number of girlfriends Ive had: Four (you do the math)
* Number of drugs taken illegally: 0
* Number of people I could trust with my life: A bunch
* Number of CDs that I own: a few hundred I think, although I now buy music from ***iTunes|http://www.itunesmusic.com/***.
* Number of piercings: 0
* Number of tattoos: 0
* Number of times my name has appeared in the newspaper: Five or six, dunno.
* Number of scars on my body: Two I think…
* Number of things in my past that I regret: No regrets.

Seventh Trek Connection

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Becky and I enjoy making connections when we watch TV: “Ooh, so and so on this show was on that movie with that person!” Kind of like the degrees of Bacon game, but a bit more free-form.

Anyway, we recently made a connection that we thought we would share:

***Stephen Collins|http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0004834/*** and ***Catherine Hicks|http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0382819/*** star as Rev. and Mrs. Eric Camden on the show ***7th Heaven|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0115083/***.

Here’s the connection: they were both in Star Trek movies!

Catherine starred as Gillian Taylor in the hilarious ***Star Trek IV|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0092007/***, while Stephen starred as Captain/Commander Willard Decker in the unfortunate ***Star Trek: The Motion Picture|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0079945/***… both of which were released well before 7th Heaven made its debut.

Speaking of Trek connections, we also spotted TNG’s ***Commander Data (Brent Spiner)|http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0000653/*** in this week’s new episode of ***Law & Order: Criminal Intent|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0275140/***. He played a nutty psychologist, the husband of the psychiatrist whose lover was killed by their psycho daughter. Always good to see a familiar face. 🙂