Thirty-Six

Becky is down on the Vineyard this weekend with her parents and brother, working on the house. I’m up in Beverly, as I am playing on the worship team in church this Sunday. So what did I do with all my free time today?

I woke up at 6:30 to get to Filene’s at 7:30 so I could be one of the first 300 people there, and receive a $15 gift card. I was, and I did. I also brought along a 15%-off coupon. I bought some new shirts and slacks. (Yesterday morning before work, Becky and I had also been to Filene’s to each get a $15 gift card – on that occasion, I bought a new pair of jeans for $9.99) I went home.

I put away the new clothes. I started cleaning the house. I got rid of all the computer junk boxes that have been sitting around. I collected everything trash-like and took it outside. I collected everything recyclable and put it in the recycling bin. I put things away where possible, and put things in neat piles where putting away was not possible. I went out.

I took four large bags of clothes and two large bags of shoes to the Salvation Army in Salem. I had lunch at Taco Bell. I checked out the new Target in Salem, and bought a pack of CD-RW’s. I went home.

I cleaned up all the cobwebs. I vacuumed all the floors. I washed all of the dishes. I went out.

I went to the gym and did 40 minutes on the elliptical trainer. I went home.

I got a shower, cleaned up, replied to a few emails, and started this blog entry.

Whew.

I’m taking the rest of the night off. Ciao!

poison ivy comes a’creepin around. If anyone else knows that song leave me a message!

But seriously, I am being attacked by a bout of Poison ivy. It is in and around the crease behind my right knee. Yep. it’s that bad. Luckily I have the luxury of sitting at home all day with my leg up taking care if it!

Now that I don’t have to get up and go to work everyday I have had a much easier time getting myself to the gym. I go to the gym to compensate for my sedentary, computer loving, job-searching life. Why then, if I am looking for an active, energizing workout at the gym, do I actively seek out the closest parking space to the door? Why does the thought of walking across the parking lot make me cringe?

Techie warning… the next few paragraphs will be filled with techie stuff, so feel free to skip ahead a bit. 🙂

I’ve been experimenting with code this week. I’ve switched the PCS Photo blog over to use PHP, and in the process learned a lot about PHP and how it interacts with MySQL. It’s kind of a refreshing change from the Perl coding I do all day. Perl and PHP are similar enough that moving code from one to the other is not too difficult. There were a few Perl-isms I had to correct, such as the fact that PHP doesn’t have “my” variables, or that PHP uses “elseif” instead of “elsif”. PHP also doesn’t seem to allow conditionals tacked to the end of statements. For example, in Perl you can write:

ccc|
print “The value is $value” if $value;
|ccc

And the print statement will only execute if $value is defined. In PHP, you must do:

ccc|
if ($value) {
print “The value is $value”;
}
|ccc

The latter may be a bit easier to understand, but the former definitely saves time and coding space if you don’t want to build a whole “if” structure around a simple line of code.

I’ve also done more tweaking of our website code. I think I may just ditch the archive link altogether… it was interesting to learn how to make it, but from the research I’ve done, the Weekly and Category archives aren’t terribly popular in terms of number of hits. We will still keep the individual entry archives around, since they’re pretty useful for when Google comes by to spider our site.

Anyway, enough of the techie part. Last night, I went to the “Mars Night” the ***Museum of Science|http://www.mos.org/*** was holding.

BOY was it crowded. I got there at 7:15-ish. There was a line from the lobby all the way down the ticket lines almost to the garage to pick up tickets for the free planetarium shows. By the time I reached the part of the line where they were handing out the tickets, they were already giving out tickets for the 10:30 show!!

So knowing I would have to be there a while, I also bought a ticket for the 8:00 Omni show, “Top Speed,” which was only $5. Top Speed was actually very entertaining, it followed four people through their journeys in the realm of speed – an Olympic sprinter, a mountain biker, a race car driver, and an automobile engineer designing a new, faster, better-handling SUV. It was narrated by Tim Allen, who was actually not too annoying.

After the Omni show, I headed up to the rooftop for the “star party”. Unfortunately, the sky around Boston was rather cloudy, so Mars only peeked out every once in a while. There were hundreds of people up there, and they all cheered loudly whenever the clouds moved enough for Mars to show up. 🙂 There were 10 different telescopes set up around the perimeter of the roof, but unfortunately there was a line of about 100 people at each one of them… so I looked around at the night skyline for a while and then went back inside.

Inside at the end of the Red Wing, there was a guy giving demos of a miniature Mars rover radio controlled vehicle. It was really nothing more than a kids’ toy, but it was still fun to watch all of the kids playing around with it. I even learned a few things myself. 🙂

Finally, I got in line for the 10:30 Planetarium show on Mars, only to find out that everything had been moved back, and this was actually the line for the 10:00 show! The 10:30 show was going to be at 11:00…. I was just about to leave the line, but a woman said that I could have her husband’s ticket, since he couldn’t make it for some reason. So I went in to the show. I’ve always liked planetarium shows, and this one was just as good as the others I’ve seen at the MoS, very educational. The seats in there are very comfy, too… 😉

It would have been cool to see Mars through the telescopes, but the planetarium show was definitely more than worth the price I paid for it. 🙂

So that was last night… tonight, I’ve got to get the apartment whipped back in to shape before Becky gets back from the Vineyard (If you’re reading this – it’s really not that bad!!). 🙂 I’m looking forward to this 3-day weekend. We’ll be heading up to Townsend for some R&R and family time. Should be nice to see everyone.

I’m selling my old Rio 500 mp3 player on eBay. It has 64 megs of storage, which allows it to hold about one CD’s worth of music. It is still in great condition, and it’s a great choice if you’re looking for a basic portable mp3 player. We’d probably still be using it if we didn’t have an ***iPod|http://www.apple.com/ipod/***. If you’re interested, ***check out the auction|http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3041748065&category=15061&rd=1***.

Be on the lookout for more auctions, as we will soon be selling off more electronic gear which we simply no longer have a use for.

Last weekend, we forgot to mention, was my grandfather’s 80th birthday. So Becky and I took a weekend trip down to Schuylkill Haven, PA. Of course the camera came along too, and ***here are the pictures|http://gallery.prwdot.org/poppop_80th***. It was great to see all the Keefer family we hadn’t seen since our wedding, and even some who weren’t able to be at the wedding.

I’ve recently finished Peter F. Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction part 1. Overall the book was quite good. From the reviews I’ve read, his writing style gets better in the coming books. At times the story flow jumped back and forth between characters, which was somewhat interesting at first, but it did become confusing as to what was the current point of view. There was lots of really cool science fiction, though, and that’s what I like. 🙂

I just took another of those silly internet quizzes… the results are as follows.

Coming to you live with all the news that’s fit to blog.

Newsbriefs from other blogs:

* Will has been lighting em’ up, packing em’ down, and getting his eyeballs sliced, diced, and burned. Sounds like fun? Check out his blog.

* Mike is trying out some new blogging technology, and recently got a job so that he can buy more music. 😉

* Jackie is up in Massachusetts.

* The Holts recently overhauled their website.

* The Oregon Extension ’99 blog is picking up steam, with new arrivals checking in regularly.

Now, back to Wood-news.

Yesterday, Becky and I took a trip down to Hyannis to see Jeremy’s new apartment. We had dinner with him and Angela, which was very nice, and we went to an ice cream place afterwards that I last visited when I was, well… younger. Can’t remember exactly when, but definitely at some point before I had my driver’s license. 🙂

Friday night, Becky and I went out to dinner at (the recently renamed) Vinny T’s of Boston, browsed (the recently remodeled) A.C. Moore, and watched (the recently released) Bend It Like Beckham at (the recently overpriced) Hollywood Hits. (Note – the prices on that website aren’t at all accurate, unfortunately)

My current read is Peter F. Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction: Part 1 – the first in a galaxy-spanning series of science fiction novels. It’s been a while since I have dug into a real hard-science-fiction novel, so it’s very refreshing. I also recently finished the dark and bizarre, but good, Perdido Street Station. If you’re into bizarre races, crisis theory, and dystopian steampunk weird fiction…. check it out. 😉

And now, to finish the laundry. Ta-ta!

I know it’s been a while… Here’s some things that have been happening. I had a wonderful time in Oregon. We went to some old haunts of mine at the Oregon Extension and I got to do quite a bit of exploring and sight seeing with my good friend Jackie Way. Pictures of our whole trip are found here

Since we’ve been back we have had the Wood/Carter family and Jenn Bresnan visiting. We have lots of fun with them during the week. The Wood/Carter congency departed on Saturday Morning while Jenn stayed till this morning. With Jenn we went out to Gloucester to the Seaport Festival. Highlights of the day? We made a kite and Jenn and I got tattoos… oh. HENNA tattoos. he he

We had a lazy Sunday afternoon picnic at Bradley-Palmer State Forest in Hamilton, MA. The pics don’t even begin to show how beautiful it was today!