Wordle is Neatle

I just discovered Wordle. It takes a sample of text from the RSS feed of your blog (auto-generated by most blogging software) and creates a cloud of text. The bigger the words, the larger they appear in the resulting image.

This variation of the tag cloud concept is not really useful per se but as a designer and a programmer I think it's super cool how they analyze the density of keywords (something I have actually written a keyword density analysis tool to do) and then create such an artful arrangement of text. The typography is really neat and you can customize a lot of settings to tune the resulting cloud to your desire. One thing that I did notice using this is that one of us (I blame wifey) frequently forgets to put a space after a period.

HALLOWEEN? Yeah, I know, it's Thanksgiving...

Why is everybody looking at me? Oh, it's Thanksgiving you say?
I think I could get by wearing this every day!!
Mom agrees. ;)

So, to all those people waiting and waiting and waiting....Do you remember what you're waiting for? That's right, it's finally arrived: The Halloween Post!!

These are the pumpkins we carved at Gramma and Grampa's a day or two before Halloween.

I do apologize, but if you know me at all really, you would not have been surprised that this is coming a month late (see September 15th's post). I also apologize for the previously mentioned "spooky post... coming soon," because, well, let's get real, this post is not scary at all. So, there you have it. I lied twice in one post.

So, I had planned this Halloween party for all the in town friends and kids, but the only ones who could make it were The Painter and his family. Which turned out to be wonderful anyway. I just made less food and we had way way way too much dessert (not including the candy). It was most likely my fault for not getting the invitations out. It's hard to know to come to a party when you haven't gotten an invitation. I tried to call people, but long story short (it's really not that long I'm just a procrastinator and that sounded good) some had made previous plans and that sort of thing.

I designed and carved this pumpkin to greet guests and trick or treaters.

Here our little stinker is helping us de-gut the pumpkins. This was at Grandpa and Grandma's house a day or two before Halloween.

I didn't think our little monster would want to wear her costume all day (it was like 70 degrees) so before the evening she wore this very fitting t-shirt I picked up at the Target dollar section. It was literally fitting. I think it was for a 6 mo. old or younger. :)

Here is the dinner menu. The painter's wife also brought pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin colored frosting and brain frosting. They were delicious! Can you guess what we really ate?

And here's the dinner table all set for a nice scary meal. This was the benefit to only having one other couple over...we could set the table a bit nicer as dishes were no longer an issue.

Can you guess which is the kitty litter cake? Also on this table are some scary mouths and the week old bath water.

Can you guess what we are?? .....Hubby's is pretty obvious (pirate), but some didn't get mine. I was supposed to be an egyptian queen, but Hubby thought I was looking more gypsie-ish. How about Egysie? I made our costumes which was a ton of fun.

Here are the painter and his family. A good looking group...really...it's just, we took a bad picture of them. Sorry guys. It's the only one we have of you somehow. Anyway, the Painter was a used car salesman, but funny thing is they went to one of the lady's places he's been painting and she thought he looked "really nice!" She had never seen him in other than his painting clothes, so I guess I could understand that. The mommy here was a sourcerer and I think she's just concentrating really hard on a spell. The little ladybug was the cutest ladybug I have ever seen.

Hope you have enjoyed this post. I wanted to post more pictures, but it's probably enough. I'm due up for some videos though, so if I can get Hubby's help they will get up here soon.

NEXT MONTH: THANKSGIVING!!
just kidding, really...I'll do better.
No promises though.

Coming soon...An actual new post...Really.

Sorry there has been nothing on the blog as of late.  I am going to post a really cool halloween post, so hold on to your britches...It's gonna be spooky.  Or, at least it will have lots of cute pictures on it.  I will do a preview...

A wonderful picture of me carving away...very flattering, I must say.

Stay tuned to see the outcome and the Halloween post.

Photo Says It All

Polling Time

We're coming up on election time so, in true election spirit, we're doing a poll! The poll is located to the right of this post at the top of the sidebar.

What do you think we're having? It could be a boy, it could be a girl....place your vote and we'll let you all know next week sometime.

*If you vote more than once I will send my robot ninja monkey army to stomp your click-happy finger into pulp.

August Update...I know, it's September.

We had a family reunion the last part of July to the beginning of August. Here is the view we had for a couple of days.








This is a dinosaur footprint in the rocks, but it is caked with mud, so you can't see it very good.










Nora and I out to see the pictographs after dark.










Here is a shot of the pictographs, very cool.













For entertainment the guys shot off rockets. Nora didn't like it too much.










She didn't like bath-time either. You should have seen her when her hair was being washed. We think she was slightly traumatized by her birthday dive into her swimming pool. She is much better about bath time now, thank goodness.










Another pretty view.












This is looking through a separation in some rocks that overlooked the camp. Hubby and I went on a walk up there and carved our initials in the rock, which is a tradition.






















JK+N 08









Find the lizard.








One of the family members got into a wreck the last night we were there. She spent the night in the car, but was surprisingly not hurt.













Beautiful birthday flowers from hubby.










Here they are again. They wouldn't fit in one vase.














Nora in her birthday outfit from her auntie, uncle and cousins and her birthday headbands that I got her.














She's got her teenage look down already, I can't wait.














Now the purple headband.


























Brooklyn stayed over one day. She and Nora had lots of fun together.










They watched Hubby play a video game.

Sleep 1, Nora 0

You can only achieve this after a long, hard battle with sleep. How she could snooze in this position I'll never know. Watch for Nora as an Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast in 2020!

Firefox 3 Lament

I have oft been a promoter of Firefox, the free web browser by Mozilla. Firefox (FF for short) has long incorporated such convenient features as tabbed browsing, fast loading times and of course the ability to add third-party plugins that greatly improve the usefulness of the browser. I have installed FF 1.x-2.x on the browsers of family and friends, encouraging them to use FF for convenience and better security.

Then came Firefox 3. I was a beta tester but got frustrated enough with the beta that I uninstalled it and went back to the official 2.[something] version. Even after FF3 came out I avoided it. The only thing wrong with FF2 was a memory leak that would tie up more and more RAM if you left it open long enough. I was aware of this but it never really caused me problems. Then I got a new/fast/cool/strong work computer and was too lazy to try to find FF 2.x, since 3 had been released, and just installed FF3.

Now, if I make it through a day with fewer than 5 crashes I count myself lucky indeed. Firefox 3 is slow. Sites sometimes pause while scrolling and the whole browser locks up for 10-30 seconds. When I launch it nothing happens for half a minute before the window finally decides to show itself on my desktop. Same with opening a new tab...long delays. Any site that features lots of javascript calls such as gmail, facebook, google maps or other feature-rich pages is virtually guaranteed to crash.

Most crashes are recoverable, I can force-quit Firefox 3 and relaunch it. However, occasionally it crashes so bad that it actually kills my whole computer. Earlier today I was trying to log into a webex meeting (a software that allows you to share desktops for virtual product demonstrations). Firefox actually blacked the screen out with a bunch of verticle white bars. It required a hard-restart which is darn inconvenient when you have 10 people waiting on you in an online meeting.

Because I love Firefox, I installed v3 on my home machine to make sure it wasn't just my work laptop. My home laptop has had Firefox 2.x running on it fine for a long time. Same problems plague it with FF3.

So, betrayed, bitter, disappointed, I have to warn our readers...for the sake of your sanity, do NOT upgrade to Firefox 3. If something changes I will post about it but for now I simply can't recommend it for any environment. Find Firefox 2.x or use Opera (I still don't recommend any IE product).

Nora and Dad

My aunt "Nurse" took this pic at our family reunion, which we went to at the beginning of August. I intend to post more pics but I really like this pic of Nora and I, right after she got a bath...so I thought I'd post it.

Old News, But Fun News

We went to "cornland" to visit my family. It was lots of fun. This is a picture of Uncle Justin, Nora, and my niece(Senna) and nephew(Ocean) at "The Ledges," a park that has a creek that runs through it. It was so pretty. It recently flooded really bad and we could see the damage it had done to the whole area. This area was unaffected.



Here is an affected area.



Nora got to play with her cousins. I think Glade is spanking the baby...that cracks me up for some reason. Is that bad of me?



Getting some shooting in out in the field.



My uncle built this amazing stream that runs through his backyard. The man can pretty much do whatever he puts his mind to. It is quite a hit with the children...and me too. I want to play in it all day long.





Nora testing out the stream for herself. It was a bit cold for her to sit in.



Annie, the porch pooch. She is a sweetie, and a really pretty porch pooch too.



Hubby about to take the plunge from the tree house.



Now catching his breath after the adrenalin rush. It's scarier than it looks because you feel like you're gonna fall right when your letting go to swing. The let-go is a total leap of faith.



Just thinking back about a year ago. This is one of my favorite pictures of Nora when she was first born. I'm not quite sure why...Maybe it's her first (really alert) look into the world.



This must be the last pregnant picture of me. Not sure about the expression on my face.