Homer Vs. Kidd

Seriously. Look at this place.

You can’t drive south on 95 and not stop here. It’s the stupidist, most unimaginably cheesiest tourist trap in existence. It’s been over 20 years since I’ve been here, and my memories of it have all but faded. I remember it as being like maybe one or two junk stores, but now? It’s more like a small city. A crappy, crappy city, that just doesn’t seem to end. And it looks rundown and dirty. You can tell they never really fix anything, and just paint over it a lot.

They’ve managed to brand everything. South of the Border Motor Inn..

South of the Border Fireworks..

South of the Border geodesic dome?

We didn’t stay long. Although they did have South of the Border branded coffee, which I didn’t try. I can’t imagine it’s any good. Maybe I’ll try it on the way back up.
Waiting for mommy to finish buying SOTB branded junk..

On the SOTB footbridge..

We began our trip to Florida saturday morning. We decided to take 4 days for the trip, first stopping off to visit Anne and Jim in Maryland. I’m glad we did. Call it a combination of a slight cold and maybe a little car sickness: Evangeline opened up and doused me with baby vomit. EVERYWHERE.

The frown was staged though. Puke really doesn’t bother me in the slightest (I got plenty of training in college).

The next day we visited Betsy in Arlington, got some awesome Thai, and we ended up spending the night at a super 8 somewhere in north carolina. Conventional wisdom dictates that the super 8 chain is a complete dump that should be avoided, but we took a chance and tried it anyway, and this place is really nice, complete with pool and decent wifi.

Tommorow: South of the border!

This weekend I took a trip to Ikea to get a new desk for my new home office I’m building. The desktop is glass, and was very heavy, so I needed to go to special full service furniture pickup universe to get it. I get in line, and prepare to wait my 7 minutes plus one additional minute per line. Over the sitting area they have a monitor with the active pick numbers on display.

The application looked strange. Tacky colors, sloppy layout, a really unpolished look. Upon closer inspection, it turns out they just use Microsoft Excel to display active pick numbers! They actually physically type in each active number in a cell, and when the order is filled, someone highlights the cell, and deletes the data. I couldn’t believe it.

I know Ikea is known for their frugality, but using excel to track workflow is just stupid, for too many reasons to count.

Every whif of documentation I’ve pored through told me that the only way the iMac can support screen spanning (having multiple monitors act like one giant desktop) is if you use crazy dangerous firmware hacks that can potentially brick your computer, void the warranty, and cause the sky to fall. Tonight, I plugged in my new 22″ widescreen Acer monitor, setup the display, and well…

It works out of the box, no changes required. As proof, I submit this picture of super-maximized iPhoto.

For the record, my model is a circa late 2006 iMac, 2.16ghz, Ati Radeon X1600. And the screen spanning works AMAZING. Completely flawless.

We started Evangeline on solids at about 5 months, and it took about 3 weeks for her to really understand what was going on.

Now that she’s got the hang of it, feedin’ time is about the best time of the day.

Ok, um, that’s not food..

If we didn’t send you out a christmas card this year, don’t fret.. Here’s the picture we used…

This year we took a trip to a local Christmas tree farm and cut our own tree. This is a new tradition for us, and one that I really like doing. Any activity that involves me walking around with a saw and cutting stuff down, and not going to jail, is a good time.

Even though it’s bitterly cold out, we still got a smile out of her.

And a few hours later, we’re completely ready for christmas.

My first choice of costume for the baby was Master Blaster from Beyond Thunderdome.

My choice was of course discarded in favor of “happy caterpillar”.

She really hated this costume, and except for maybe 5 minutes, screamed when the little caterpillar hat was on her head.

More pics here..

Check out the pictures here

I’m not sure they still make you do this, but back when I was in high school if you wanted to more easily get into college, they tried to make you take a foreign language. So I picked German. I don’t know why I did that. Spanish or Latin seems more useful. But I just HAD to pick German. Not only did I struggle in it, but it completely wrecked my ability to write in English. Why? It’s a little known fact that German is the only language in the world that requires you to capitalize all nouns.

To this day, by default, I always capitalize all my nouns, no matter what language I’m writing in (mostly English, but I do it in computer languages too). I don’t know why I allowed the noun capitalization meme to infect my brain, but it’s there, like a song that’s been stuck in my head for the last 15 years. I can’t stop. Today I wrote up a fairly wordy piece of documentation, only to realize at the very end that I forgot about my noun problem, and every noun was capitalized. Search and replace can only fix things to a point. I sometimes wonder how many hundreds of hours I could have reclaimed if I never took that stupid foreign language.

I should also mention that the only opportunity I’ve ever had to use my German was at Lake Como in Italy, which borders Switzerland. There was one waiter who tried talking to me in a language that sort of sounded like a dialect of German, but his speech was impenetrable. That was my one big chance, and I choked.

3 years of foreign language classes down the toilet.