Wow! Cool. My friend Cara from South Africa is here on visit! This is great. It's been almost six years since we here in the States have seen her (well, I saw her two years ago). She's only here for a very short time to aquire some sort of credit so she can be allowed to teach English in Taiwan. Yes, she's off to Taiwan for a year to teach them how to speak English. English with a bit of an accent -- how cool to imagine a bunch of Taiwanese walking around speaking English with a South African accent! Anyway, she's been here for a week and has a week left and I hope to get to see her next week for a day or two, maybe go snowboarding, to the art galleries, whatever... she's got a busy schedule.

Got an email from a friend the other day (Anita) saying we should gather and celebrate her birthday, the end of football season (ok whatever) and her engagement. Zoinks. Wasn't expecting that one. But in reviewing the situation, I guess they've been dating for quite a while so it shouldn't have been a surprise. Perhaps I'm just sensitive to it all since almost all of my friends are now married and/or having children, as my single friend Dan has pointed out. Ugh. This is not a bad thing, though, just not something that I currently identify with or completely desire. And there is some level of disconnect with those formerly single friends now that their priorities have changed -- the conversation centers around children or the attention is on the children or the trials of trying to have children or there is no conversation due to the boisterous activities of children... ** sigh **

A cool little story about catching a thief: Mac Thief Caught Thanks To Applescript & Timbuktu

A message from a new Mac-using friend:
"OK, I was sold on Macs for a total of four days. Now my CD-ROM doesn't work. I loaded a disc and the computer didn't recognize that there was a disc present. I hit eject and it won't open. I was able to hold the eject button down and pull the tray out and retrieve the disc but it still won't open or recognize any thing I put in. Grrrrrrr!"
I'm sure there is a logical explanation... like maybe a little kid stuck peanut butter in there? Probably not. But I want his experience to be a very good one and I offered assistance. Hopefully it is just a minor case of OE (operator error) due to inexperience.

Yesterday I went out to Hyland snowboarding with my neighbor Andy. Andy is 8 1/2 years old... a good, smart kid who just started in the sport and really likes it. His mom had a set of free passes and invited me to go boarding with Andy and I couldn't pass it up. The weather was perfect, mid 20's and growing warmer all day, and the snow was in good condition. This was also my first time out this year - sad, eh? Usually I go far more often. Anyway, he took lessons before we really had much snow so I don't think he got the best instruction/experience, but he improved rapidly yesterday. The tow rope took at least an hour of trials alone, but he got it and was zipping down the hills pretty good by the time we called it quits. I wouldn't have thought that just hanging out with a kid learning to board could be such a workout... whew... it was.

Nate and Renee had their wedding on Saturday and the whole gang was there to celebrate. It was a great time (dining, drinking, dancing) and the reception/dinner party was at the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul. This is a cool place! It literally is a series of caves that was once a mine for sandstone (to make glass) and then was the hangout of choice for gangsters back in the day (Dillinger, Ma Barker, Babyface Nelson, etc) and is rumored to be haunted. I have heard they also grow mushrooms there. Part of it is now a sort of nightclub available for party rental and a fun place to have a gathering. Congrats Nate and Renee!

Ok, I'm fairly new to the life of a home-owner and I was reading yesterday about how to save money by structuring your payments differently than the default of one payment each month for the next thirty years, so I did some rough calculations based on what I'd discovered. Wow. No wonder they don't tell you this stuff! This is like finding a buried treasure. Ok, follow me here:
Due to the way interest and such is calculated, if you make 2 payments each month instead of one large payment, you'll save one whole payment each year*. Nice savings. Now, you'll knock your home loan from 30 years down to about 20! Amazing. Imagine saving yourself TEN YEARS of payments just by dealing with the hassle of two payments per month instead of one. I have to run this by somebody better skilled at math to verify the savings, but it jives with what I was reading and what others have claimed (co-workers, friends, etc). Go make those payments and save yourself some dough!
* Ok, you are actually making an extra payment (instead of 12 payments you are making 26 - two more than 12x2) but it goes to your principal instead of interest thus giving you your savings.

Last minute discovery: Ralph Nader was in town tonight, on a book tour at a local Barnes & Noble for his new tome "Crash!ng The Party: How to tell the Truth and still run for President" and the place was jam-packed with people and supporters of all ages and sizes. It was quite difficult to hear him speak but everybody was quiet and well-behaved and he was entertaining and spot-on as usual. I even got a signed copy of his book: "To Jeremy, For Justice. Ralph Nader." Thanks, Ralph. You rock. Can't wait to read it!

Just found out today that for the last six years my employer has not put any money into my pension fund. Nothing. Zip. I am 'missing' almost $20,000 due to their error. You can imagine how I might feel about this, especially since I would have been 100% vested one year ago. Now, well, now I have nothing. No pension fund, no vesting, no tax write-offs, etc. They have the pension enrollment paperwork that I filled out in April of '96 and all this time they never found anything amiss. Wow. This is a huge screw up. I'm no expert on financial matters and I never noticed anything wrong (in fact, I rarely open my paychecks as I have electronic deposit and I verify payment online) but somebody besides me should have noticed something in the past six years. Somebody at work or at the Union office. But nobody noticed a darn thing. Thankfully, I talked to an attorney today and was informed that I can (basically) easily 'get back to where I should be' through legal means if no arrangement can be made. Whew.

Cool! There will be twelve new Wallace and Gromit films (each about 1 minute in length) coming online this year, each featuring one of Wallace's fantastic inventions. Their new feature movie, "The Great Vegetable Plot", won't be finished for a few more years. Bummer. At least we'll have these mini-films to get us by.

Ok, here's what happened -- in trying to figure out how to make Radio post to MovableType I had misconfigured the blogger bridge preferences and then attempted to post an article. I then fixed the prefs, posted another article and it tried to update the prior posting and generated an error. It kept doing this, even though it did not show me that initial post. I found it in the "ManilaBloggerBridgeData.root" file and removed it. I think it should now work properly.

I should be out running instead of messing with Radio->MT blogger support, eh?

I got my photo prints today from the iPhoto order I submitted last week and I am both pleasantly surprised and a bit disappointed. The prints straight from the HP 318 digital camera look stunning. Great color, great quality, dang near as good as regular 35mm prints. Wow. The prints from my scanner (scanned from 4x6 prints) got grainy. They were saved as native Photoshop files and then brought into iPhoto and ordered prints. I am guessing they get converted to JPEG format somewhere in there and thus degrading my images. Not too great. I'll have to try a few more...

South African Cave Near Stilbaai Yields Up World's Oldest Artwork -- about 70,000 years old. These two pieces of engraved red ochre are on display at the Iziko-SA Museum in Cape Town. They have been reqested for the The Met in NY. Read the article for more info.

After playing around with the new iPhoto software from Apple, I have to say that I like it quite a bit. It is still a bit rough around the edges (it is a 1.0 release) but it has great potential and I'm guessing they'll sell a ton of computers just so people can get their 'free' software (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iDVD). I even went ahead and ordered physical photographic prints via iPhoto and was impressed when they had been printed and shipped in less than 12 hours after submitting them! They are on the way to me now and I am really excited to see how they look. Some were scanned in on my flatbed scanner and some were taken with a friend's HP 318 digital camera.

Apple introduced their new iMac today and it is a winner -- a G4 chip at 700 or 800 Mhz (damn near top of the line), a 15" flat panel LCD on a 360-degree arm, the option of the SuperDrive (DVD burner), and priced at about half of what this technology cost a few months ago. Amazing little machine. Now if this is their low-end at 800 Mhz, how can they justify selling their towers at the high-end at 867 Mhz?? Look for updated tower systems in the near future is my guess. They also released what appears to be a particularly brilliant piece of software -- iPhoto. It does for pictures what iMovie does for video or, more accurately, what iTunes does for MP3 files. And it's FREE. Wowza.

The other day whilst I was waiting for my film to get developed I thought I'd wander on over to DSW Shoe Factory (or whatever it is called) as I had heard that they carried a lot of shoes at good prices. Wow. It exceeded my expectations and I saw several pairs that I thought would be fun to wear.
Ok, I guess I can understand why my girlfriend has 40,000 pairs of shoes (or is it 40?).

Do your Foreign Film Poll Results match up to this list? How many have you seen?