Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

So I haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. From what I have seen I am either too old or too young to be in the target demographic. Most of the people I know who use it are a couple of years older than me and they think it is pretty sweet. I just don’t see it. But I was watching the A Team the other day and I got to thinking, what would B A Baracus Tweet?

BA got up to work on his van 05:00 AM July 23, 1984

BA loves his van. It’s hella fast. 05:30 AM July 23, 1984

BA has breakfast with the kids. Reminds them to stay in school and listen to they Mamas. 07:00 AM July 23, 1984

BA spots Colonel Decker. Time to warn Hannibal and Faceman. 08:00 AM July 23, 1984

BA finds Faceman. Off to find Hannibal. 08:30 AM July 23, 1984

BA and Faceman find Hannibal. 08:45 AM July 23, 1984

BA, Faceman, and Hannibal outwit Decker. Time to break Murdoch out of the mental hospital. 09:30 AM July 23, 1984

BA don’t want to listen to that crazy fool Murdoch! 10:00 AM July 23, 1984

BA thinks Hannibal is on the Jazz. 10:15 AM July 23, 1984

BA gets ready for next assignment. 10:20 AM July 23, 1984

BA ain’t gettin’ on no plane! 10:25 AM July 23, 1984

BA AIN’T GETTIN’ ON NO PLANE!! 10:27 AM July 23, 1984

BA is waking up in South America. 03:00 PM July 23, 1984

BA is standing guard outside cantina. 03:30 PM July 23, 1984

BA hears Hannibal and Faceman getting beat up. 03:35 PM July 23, 1984

BA is throwing bad guys out the window, over the bar, and into tables. 03:36 PM July 23, 1984

BA is shaking his head. That Hannibal loves the jazz. 03:37 PM July 23, 1984

BA thinks that fool Murdoch is crazy! 03:38 PM July 23, 1984

BA is welding. 04:30 PM July 23, 1984

BA is locked in a room with the rest of the team. 05:00 PM July 23, 1984

BA is making a machine gun and flame thrower out of random bits and pieces he found in the room. 05:10 July 23, 1984

BA and team escape using homemade weaponry. 05:15 PM July 23, 1984

BA throws some more bad guys. 05:20 PM July 23, 1984

BA smiles when the head bad guy surrenders. 05:25 PM July 23, 1984

BA is ready to go home. 05:30 PM July 23, 1984

BA ain’t gettin’ on no plane! 05:45 PM July 23, 1984

BA AIN’T GETTIN’ ON NO PLANE!!! 05:46 PM July 23, 1984

BA wakes up in LA. 11:00 PM July 23, 1984

I was surprised to hear that George Carlin passed away yesterday. He was a very funny man.

Enjoy this NSFW clip. I still cringe inside every time I tell someone to have a nice day even though it has been ingrained in me after years of customer service.

After watching I am Legend I was really bothered by what I perceived as a disconnect between the end of the movie and the rest of the movie. Spoilers after the break. Read more

So I installed Firefox 3 on two computers today. The first is my main Vista desktop. It had one crash after the first launch, but then ran fine the rest of the day. The second is my XP laptop, which I am writing on now. I have had 5 crashes in the last hour and so far am not a happy camper.

Not to focus on the negative, but here are a list of things I don’t like at first glance:

1. All the crashing. Can I have some stability please?

2. The address bar, or whatever they are calling now the magic bar or something. Why can’t it just bring up a list of previously entered websites like before. Don’t try to outsmart me and guess what I might want. So far it has always been wrong.

3. I miss the yellow address bar when on an https secure site. It was a nice visual clue. I know I can hack it to get it back, but that shouldn’t be necesarry.

I’m sure there will be good things I like about Firefox 3 and I will run it awhile longer to give it a chance. But at first glance it is enough to make me go back to Internet Explorer 7 or try another browser. I haven’t used Opera in forever, maybe it’s time to check it out again. Or Flock, which although it’s based on Firefox, is significantly different. I’ll report back my decision. Maybe I will be converted and love version 3, who knows?

Since I couldn’t (and still can’t) find my sandals my Crocs have become my main summer footwear. I wore them all vacation and they are still amazingly comfortable! Another nice benefit compared to my sandals is that they don’t get all funky when they get wet so I can wear them rain or shine or even to the beach in the water. They clean up super easy too, when they got all covered in sand I just stuck them under the faucet and set them out to dry. I am also loving the clog style and may have to get a pair of Birkenstock clogs for those times that Crocs aren’t appropriate.

It was crazy, on vacation it seemed every store had a huge display of Crocs. Even at the supermarket you could buy moc-Crocs called Dawgs. The selection was enormous as well, and maybe because of the competition the prices were a few dollars below normal. It was one of the only things that was cheaper interestingly enough.

While we were on vacation I got to enjoy the home theater set up they had. It was a pretty cool setup. One of the guys brought their XBox and Rock Band. I learned how addictive that game could be. It is actually really fun. The only thing I didn’t like was playing guitar. I think it was because it was so different from actually playing a guitar, it just wasn’t that fun. However I really enjoyed playing bass and singing. The drums were OK too, although that’s not really my strong point apparently. Some songs I was able to keep up with easier than others, it seemed to make a big difference if I had heard the song before. That helped a lot.

I also got to see some movies I had never seen before, I am Legend, Enchanted, and Chicago. I don’t think I had even heard of I am Legend before, but it was a pretty good movie. I don’t know that I’d watch it again, but it was definitely worth seeing. Enchanted was the girls pick. Initially I wasn’t all that interested in seeing it, but it too was worth seeing. It was an interesting twist on the standard princess story. I’m glad to say I liked it since I’m sure the girls will want to watch it again. Chicago was the only movie I’d actually heard of and wanted to see. I like musicals in general and this one was done really well. So really, I’d recommend all three movies.

Isabella and Gillian had their dance recital right before we left for vacation. They were Caribbean Amphibians.

Here is a short video clip from their dress rehearsal. It is not the whole performance, but most of it. Isabella is in the back row on the left corner and Gillian is next to her.

Miss Isabella always surprises me with what clothes she fits into. Care to guess which sister she borrowed these pants from?

If you guessed that they are a pair of Erin’s size 12 month pants you guessed correctly!

The worst part of any vacation, unless that is the point of the vacation, is the road trip. If the main point is to get from point A to point B then I want to do so quickly. Unfortunately that did not work out on the way down. We decided to go in one day rather than two. However, AAA routed us through every small town in WV so between the miles of 30 MPH roads and the many, many bathroom stops the girls needed we wound up being on the road for 15.5 hours. Very exhausting, especially when Erin still got up at her normal time the next day.

We did get to see some interesting things on the road. We went through 2 tunnels, one through a mountain in PA and the other under the water in VA. Coming in past midnight we missed some interesting scenery that we didn’t see until we left. It is very weird coming into an unfamiliar place in the dark of night. Also surprising was that most of the gas stations were closed. Even in small town Fredonia most places are 24/7. so it never even occurred to me that this might be a problem. Crazy.

Aside from the standard roadkill of deer and cats I also saw a turtle, a turkey, and an opossum. There was also one man with a car load of Fail. He apparently took an exit curve too fast and sideswiped the metal barrier. It looked like he totaled his car, as both drivers side wheels were bent at an odd angle not best suited for driving.

We took the return trip in two days, which was much nicer for all of us. We also stayed on major highways which helped. All told the return trip took less than 13 hours so avoiding the crazy AAA route really made a difference.

We did see these weird purple boxes in the trees in PA. A quick search revealed they were to trap the emerald ash borer. We were wondering what they were for, and I guess now we know. It is not very encouraging to see that they have spread to PA from Indiana.

Here’s some pictures from the road:

We just returned from a week in the Outer Banks in North Carolina. What a wonderful vacation! My kind of vacation, we relaxed at the beach or by the pool for most of the week. Once we went to town to explore and go shopping and another day we went to the Wright Brothers Memorial. Otherwise we didn’t go far from ‘home’.

It was weird, most of the houses out there had names. I’ve never seen that before. The place we stayed was called Beach Memories. It was huge with a very nice pool and a short walk to the beach. Of course one good thing about a huge house is being able to split the cost among many people, I think we had 29 family and friends there for the week.

I could probably write quite a bit, but I am tired so will break this up into several vacation-themed postings.
I did upload a bunch of pictures and video to my Flickr site (here’s a direct link to the set). Here’s a map of where we were for reference.