So I sent an e-mail to my friend Shane, and I received this bounce message:Wow, a GMail account that's "over quota"? I thought you got something like 1.5 gigabytes of mail storage with GMail... he must get some serious e-mail traffic!

You can't argue with the math.

It was nine months ago, more or less, that Colorado got slammed with the first of its weekly blizzards. Last winter we had snow on the ground for sixty-plus days straight, with more each weekend.

And now the babies are showing up. Hospitals in the Denver area are reporting a 20% surge in births this month, and expecting more next month (nine months after cabin fever really set in).

It's like a mini Baby Boomer effect!

It is with deep regret* that I read about the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this morning.



* Just kidding. It was a great day. Long ago I thought John Ashcroft was the worst AG this country could have, but ol' Alberto proved me wrong. Good riddance.

I was downstairs in my office today, working on some accounting stuff (whee!) and I glanced out the window at our neighbors' yard. There, waving gently in the breeze and backlit by a brilliant blue sky, was a sunflower.

I grabbed my camera, went outside, and took the shot:



Not too bad! One of these days I might actually become a decent photographer...

Remember back in the 80's, when hair was big and girls wore leg-warmers and Nancy Reagan "just said no"? As I can remember, that's about when our country embarked on the long and perilous journey called The War on Drugs.

It is almost (but not quite) as meaningless and silly as The War on Terror, since you can't really fight a "war" if you don't have an "enemy". Drugs are a product, and since they're always in the underground markets (like the terrorists, hmm?) you can't go around shooting them or whatever.

But no matter. Our government, along with the United Nations and several other brave countries, declared The War on Drugs and promised that in 20 years, worldwide illicit drug use would be all but eradicated. At the very least, it would be in a steep and steady decline.

Here we are, roughly 20 years later. How's The War going? Here's a nice summary from a New York Times article on the opium production of Afghanistan:Whee! It sounds like things are going swimmingly. Not only is drug use not in decline, it's pretty much been climbing steadily for these past two decades. The $600 million (yes, million) we pump into Afghanistan alone to control the drug trade seems to be so ineffective that one wonders exactly what that money is supposed to do. Never mind the tens of billions of dollars we've spent in other countries-- and within our own country, of course-- to little or no effect.

When, oh when, will these smooth-talking Congresspeople realize that you can't throw a bunch of money and resources at a problem that's not tangible? Like The War on Terror, this is a fight we can never, ever win.

From an AP article today:How do I get in on this fabulous reconstruction gravy train?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

-- Douglas Adams

I really like the transparent console windows I run on my desktop, especially when they're combined with interesting background images. Here's an example of a spiffy background I snagged on Flickr.

Hah! Some farmers in rural Massachusetts did a little creative mowing a few months ago, a satellite captured the field on one of its mapping passes, and now anyone can read their message by poking around Google Maps and looking at the satellite imagery.

Yesterday the Baltimore Orioles were playing the Texas Rangers and pulled ahead in the first few innings to lead 3-0.

The Rangers decided to turn up the heat or something, because starting in the fourth inning they exploded-- eventually scoring a total of 30 (yes, 30) runs. The rout included a grand slam by Travis Metcalf, who had been called up from triple-A ball that very day (that's got to make you feel good when you finally make it to The Show).

Despite such a performance, Texas remains in last place.

Tonight I was driving back from Denver just before midnight, and there was a spectacular lightning show in the northern sky. Storm clouds were towering into the sky, and the lightning was threading through them providing some amazing pink and orange backlights to the clouds. The flashes were almost constant-- every few seconds another cloud would burst with light.

I pulled off the interstate and took a dark country road a little way, so I was in a really dark area and could watch the show. I had my pocket camera with me, but unfortunately it doesn't have the flexibility of my other camera so I couldn't really capture the sky. I ended up with a bunch of pictures like this:



Oh well. It was still a fantastic display.

When Laralee and I first got married and moved into our townhouse, we received a "welcome to your new home" package with a bunch of random coupons. One of them was for a free plant at Home Depot. It wasn't just any plant-- as I recall, we could only select from the "$5 or less" plants or something.

But I chose a little palm plant, because as a kid I'd had one (until Kari accidentally killed it). This little guy was about three inches high. I named him Herbie.

Now, eleven years later, Herbie is an enormous plant that dominates the corner of our living room. He's at least three feet high and probably four feet across, and constantly shooting out new branches and leaves.



Someday I hope Herbie grows as big as the palm my grandma had-- it was at least six feet tall.

"The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority."

-- Ralph Sockman

Today was the summer ultimate league tournament in Boulder. We couldn't have asked for better weather: lots of sun, no wind, no rain. We played some really great games and fell just short of the finals, taking home third place overall.



The season was fantastic, and this was a really fun team. I'm bummed that the season is over, but looking forward to next year. And of course I'll still be playing pickup games twice a week well into the fall, so I'll continue getting my dose of the world's greatest sport.

It was bound to happen sooner or later: the RIAA is now the defendant in a class-action lawsuit. Charges include:

negligence

fraud

misrepresentation

racketeering

corruption

abuse of the legal process

malicious prosecution

intention to inflict emotional distress

computer fraud

computer abuse

trespass

invasion of privacy

libel

slander

deceptive business practices

misuse of copyright laws

civil conspiracy

Whew! Here's hoping they get a good old-fashioned kick in the head. Their shenanigans have gone on long enough.

Happy birthday to the compact disc. It's 25 years old today.

It's amazing that it's not only lasted this long (in an age where technologic obsolescence is a pretty quick game) but that it's spawned so many other technologies based upon it: the CD-ROM and associated writeable media, the DVD and it's associated media, and in fact the entire digital music revolution.

The big question: what's the next technology that will have such staying power?

The world of finance will always confuse me. I just saw this headline:So, if I read that right, our entire capitalist economy depends on Wal-Mart and Home Depot.

May heaven help us.

This weekend we went up to Winter Park and crashed at Ryan's place, which was an absolute blast. At one point we were playing a rousing game of Pit and screaming so loud that everyone who was watching Bugs Bunny in the next room had to turn on the subtitles because they couldn't hear Yosemite Sam blasting Bugs with a cannon or whatever.

The alpine slide was a hoot, although Zack tended to go a bit slow and caused traffic jams on the way down. Notice Tony (in the white shirt) looking like he's about to fall right out of his sled from boredom.



However, Zack picked up the zip a bit by doing flips while attached to bungee cords thirty feet above the ground:



Not to be outdone, Alex and Kyra hopped in and did flips of their own.




And of course we couldn't skip the full 18-hole miniature golf course:



There were, of course, some really tough shots that required intense concentration. Much like the Masters'.



All in all it was a terrific time, with only minor sunburns all around.

I think Scott Adams pretty much summed up the presidential candidates' talking points...

Last night we went camping.

In our backyard.

It's something I've wanted to do for a while, and I finally got around to actually organizing it. We invited all of the neighborhood kids to spend the night in the yard. They could bring sleeping bags, blankets, tents, whatever. There was even talk of sleeping on the trampoline.

We borrowed one of those portable fire pits (just a big shallow metal bowl) and lit up a little bonfire. The neighbors came over and we roasted marshmallows and chatted while a dozen kids ran screaming around the yard with flashlights.

Around 10:00 the adults headed home to their nice comfy beds, and around 11:00 Laralee went upstairs to her comfy bed. I unrolled my sleeping bag in the grass and slept under the stars with the kids camped out nearby.

It was really cool.

So what's the deal with LinkedIn?



About three years ago I heard about it, created an account, and had an old friend of mine invite me to be in his "network". I accepted, and that was pretty much the end of it.

Now, in the past two weeks I've received-- no kidding-- five different invitations from friends all over the country. It's like all of a sudden everyone has decided that it's the bomb, and we're all setting up our networks.

I guess it makes me look more popular, whee!

Today Congress overwhelmingly approved a $460 billion budget for the Department of Defense. That doesn't include any money for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, so one can only imagine how much bigger that number will be next month when Congress votes on funding for the wars.

I'm currently reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, which is a fascinating book about today's rapidly-advancing growth of technology and how it will profoundly affect our society and our lives in the next few decades. He has compelling arguments, and what I find most interesting is the fact that as technology blows past barriers of economics and national boundaries, things like $460 billion for national "defense" will seem quaint and backward. At least that's my hope... because it's a shame our country feels it necessary to spend such vast resources on such petty things.

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

-- Albert Einstein

Tonight we had a bit of fun baking... mmm...

It's gratifying that pouring tens of billions of dollars into Iraq every month is having such positive effects. From an AP article today:Wow. So Iraqis have no power, no running water, no waste treatment, and their government is collapsing.

But wait! It's time for our fearless leader to step into the fray with decisive leadership:Well, stick me in an oil pipeline and blow me up, that's a shrewd and brilliant move by Bush. I'm sure the Iraqi leadership didn't think of trying to preserve their government.

I predict a solemn address from Bush to the American people, urging us to "stay the course" and remember that "the surge is working" and how wonderful the Iraqi democracy is turning out to be. He'll probably throw in a few remarks about "terrists" and how they're ruining all of his plans.

When, oh when, will those in command see that it's just not working?

Warning: super geeky entry

For the last five or six years, my operating system has been Jinux-- a custom build of Linux that I designed and created from scratch. No, I didn't write the software, but I did write hundreds of compile scripts, a package management program, initialization software, and everything else you'd need to compile and install a full working Linux desktop or server. It was a marvelous thing. I used it on dozens of servers and a handful of desktops, and basically every hour of every work day was spent using Jinux software I'd built.

Over time, however, the mainstream Linux distributions have been getting nicer, easier to use, and (most importantly) easier to manage. Gone are the days of doing manual updates to software because of security alerts sent to e-mail lists. Now it's all automated, with nice alerts when you login that tell you it's time to upgrade such-and-such. Since I'd been spending the past five or six years looking at the web pages and FTP sites for hundreds of programs to see if there were updates, it was very tempting to be lazy and let someone else worry about that for me.

Well, I finally gave in and fired up a copy of Kubuntu to give it a test drive. The installer was very simple, asking just a handful of questions before doing its thing and giving me a nice desktop. The package manager was easy to use (although I had to learn a few new commands) and the updater is awesome, giving me an unobtrusive icon to let me know it's time to get some new goodies. Here's a list of today's updates:



After a few weeks I decided to see if Kubuntu could do what I really need-- not only the nice slick KDE desktop I've been enjoying for years, but also the heavy-duty server environment necessary to run the hundreds of web sites and thousands of e-mail accounts I manage in my business. It took a few more weeks to configure everything just right, but I managed to get Kubuntu looking and acting just like my traditional Jinux systems. I'm one of those guys who has serious customizations for everything I do: years upon years of shell aliases and desktop preferences and icons and backgrounds and everything else that makes up a computing environment. I didn't want to lose any of that, and in the end I didn't need to.

All in all the transition was successful, and I've been happily using Kubuntu for about a month. I still run Jinux on my servers-- the next big step is converting all of them. It's no small task to rebuild servers in a production environment without losing any data, dropping a web site or e-mail offline for even a few minutes, and having it all completely transparent to my customers. But I think it can be done, and all that remains is working out the details.

So to the folks over at Ubuntu, here's a big thanks from a happy customer. It's sad in a way to bid farewell to my home-grown solution that's served me so well for all these years, but times change. I can still smile in a smug sort of way knowing that I haven't used a Windows computer for at least a month now. Who says Linux isn't ready for the big time?

One of the (many) things I enjoy about Colorado is how it gets nice and cool in the evenings, so even on the hottest of summer days-- like those in late July and early August-- we can open the windows at night and listen to the cool breeze blowing through the house.

We've been putting box fans in the bedroom windows to help the breeze a bit, and after a few years of talking about it, finally decided to spring for a ceiling fan in the master bedroom. It's got a peaked ceiling, making it a little more difficult, but this week we finally took the plunge. Now we have a nice quiet fan circling above the bed, keeping the bedroom nice and cool and eliminating the noisy ten-year-old box fan.

It's only a matter of time, I suspect, before the kids ask for their own ceiling fans. Hmm.