Hamilton Pool

We recently went to Hamilton Pool, which I expected to be more of a pool like Deep Eddy, but I was happily surprised.





It is actually Hamilton Pool Preserve, which is basically a collapsed grotto with a waterfall about an hour or so south of our house. Here you can read more facts, such as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department noting it as Travis County's most significant natural area.






After a .25 mile (!) hike down some pretty rugged terrain you see a small beach and the pool stretches out from that. I'm not sure how deep it gets, but it is over my head at less than halfway across. Directly across from the beach is a waterfall that apparently never stops flowing, even in times of drought. What enchantment is this?

If you want to take a break from swimming, you can walk around the pool in the rock caverns, and there is a walkway that circles the pool. Pictures can't really do it justice - it's pretty amazing.




Be warned though - I wouldn't advise carrying a bunch of umbrellas, coolers or other stuff. It's quiet a hike down. A tired three-year-old was a pretty good workout!

Gaming table

A while ago I posted about getting some wargaming miniatures for a game my friends and I play. Well, to say that I "play" it is stretching the truth, as my miniatures are still languishing in an unpainted, unassembled state. But I have watched some games!

Anyway, these games are usually played on a 4'x4', 4'x6' or 4'x8' table with various pieces of terrain/scenery for strategery. I've started making such a table, as I'm more interested in the terrain aspect of the game than the actual playing.

My table is 4'x6' with a plywood top and 1"x4" bracing for stability.





One can stop at this point, drop a cloth over the board or paint it whatever color you want and badda-bing, you have a gaming table. You want a forest? Green felt or paint. Desert? Light brown.

I'd like to go a little farther than this, though. I want to play multiple games on multiple types of boards but limit my storage concerns. My plan is to leave the plywood as is except for some holes cut in it. Around the edge I will have some sort of molding (I already have .25"x2" strips) that will extend up from the plywood about .25" or so. This will form an outer shell.

Next, I will get 4'x6' sheets of that pegboard material (thin MDF or hardboard) but without the holes, and paint each side different colors, appropriate to the terrain on which I would like to game. That board goes into the shell and appropriately based terrain gets placed on that board. Alternatively, I could actually model terrain onto the board (hills, sand dunes, lava cracks, whatever) and the shell would hold that as well. The holes in the plywood will allow me to push up a corner of the MDF board to exchange it.



We'll see how far I get with this project, but it's faster than de-sprueing miniatures! I think my only concern at this point is weight - the plywood made it a little heavier than I expected - and possibly scratching the surface of wherever I rest the table. In a move sure to cause my gaming friends (with armies ready to go) to roll their eyes, I am thinking about getting felt and stapling it to the bottom of the 1"x4" boards so it won't damage our kitchen table.

Guitar Hero 2

I got Guitar Hero 2 for my birthday, and I love it.

We have Dance Dance Revolution, which we all think is great, and I still really like Parappa the Rapper. Guitar Hero's basis is still the tried and true rhythm game, but the controller sets it off. It is a lot of fun.

I was going back and forth on wireless versus wired controllers. There was a guitar controller that I liked, but it was wired. I eventually decided on the wireless guitar, and it was the right choice. With kids, cords are a no-no, and with the wireless you can move around more and even sit back on the couch and play.



We had some friends over and at the end of the night we fired up Guitar Hero, and it was even more fun. I borrowed another wireless guitar from work (for, uh, testing), and we had some guitar/bass faceoffs. What's funny is if the TV volume is down far enough, all you hear is the clicking and clacking of the keys and the picks.

I have the actual Red Octane Guitar Hero branded semi-Stratocaster-style guitar, but you can pick up a generic guitar (in semi-Explorer-style) for about half the price, and I'll be picking up a second guitar pretty quickly.

I've heard a lot of jibber-jabber of how playing Guitar Hero can help your ability playing real guitar. As someone that's taking lessons playing real guitar, I don't see it. The closest I think one could get to Guitar Hero/real guitar synergy is maybe practicing with a metronome. Or light pattern recognition, but translating buttons to notes and chords? I don't think so.

Harry Potter and the License to Print Money

I picked up the latest Harry Potter book Sunday. I was worried that everyplace would be sold out, but our local grocery store had stacks for the cover price of $35.99. Even for a hardback, that's a lotta lettuce. Sunday's newspaper had a Target ad that had the same hardback for $17.99. How could I afford not to get it? I've been careful to avoid spoilers, but I had my own theories on certain plot points.

I read about 120 (out of ~780) pages Sunday night and went to a doctor's appointment Monday morning. The receptionist and one of the nurses were all atwitter about my book (which I took with me, naturally), checking my progress and wishing they could have stayed home to read all day. I agreed, and regaled them with my tale of saving half the cover price. The nurse told me that The Beast had a similar deal for a similar price.

Later that day I was picking up some lunch at another grocery store...again with the book in tow as I was using every spare moment to read it. A lady behind me asked if I had skipped ahead to the end to read it. I had to resist rolling my eyes - who would do something that ridiculous? I told her no, and that I was trying to avoid hearing any details before I finished the book. Internally I was preparing my "na na na na IDON'THEARYOU" defense in case she dropped a spoiler-bomb, but she just looked off in the distance wistfully and said that she kept hoping someone on the news would reveal the end. I was like, "Okay...." and checked out.

I finished it Wednesday, and I liked it. I'll avoid any kind of review and won't reveal anything.

My high def woes

So I really want to jump on the high definition movie race, but I have a small problem.

Our main TV is downstairs in the living room. We have another TV in the master bedroom. We watch movies on both of these, and have been known to start a movie downstairs and continue/finish it upstairs. We also have a portable DVD player for the car to keep some sanity (ours as well as our kids) on long trips.

Let's say I get a high def disc...I'll need to get at least two players! Limiting ourselves to only watching some movies downstairs won't score very highly on the WAF.

If it's a kid movie? Fuhgeddaboudit! I'll need some way of watching it in the car. You try disappointing your kids and see how that goes.

Even though, personally, I think Blu-Ray will eventually win the format war, I want to hedge my bets right now. I could always get a combo player, but right now I only see the LG BH100 as being able to play both HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs, as well as conventional DVDs. Bad news - Google Product Search shows those bad boys almost hitting $1000...and don't forget I would need two!

Still not too many details on the rumored Samsung Duo HD BD-UP5000.

Right now there is no compelling reason to drop that amount of cash when normal DVDs in progressive scan mode look just fine.

Death by...Home Depot

We just spent over nine hours across two or three days in Home Depot (with some excellent customer service from Bruce, Daniel and Kent) agonizing over carpet choices. Believe me - our kids thought the agony was much worse than we did. I can make only so many laps around the store with them in the cart waving DANGER flags before they get bored.

Our current carpet is getting a little threadbare in a few places, and kids running around with juice usually isn't good for carpet. We knew we wanted a speckly carpet, as the mixture of colors hides spots very nicely, but it doesn't change the overall color too much. At first we were gung ho for Berber, which can take a lot of wear and doesn't get frazzled, but everything we saw looked like either industrial or indoor/outdoor carpet. Not what you want in the bedroom, much less the living room.

Then we looked at Frieze (free-zay, naturally). This was a good combination of long and short loops that gave a good texture to barefeet, and it looked like we could get one that held up well. The problem was that the Frieze we wanted was coming out to over $1000 more than another one we wanted.

We settled on some light-colored speckly carpet from the Plush family. Now we have to wait some amount of days before the measuring people arrive, and then a few weeks before we move all our furniture out of the house, have them install the carpet and we move everything back.

This was a grueling exercise, and hopefully we won't have to make any more decisions like this until our next house. I know more about carpet now than I thought I ever would.

Taco Meat

Not on this last vacation, but a few weeks ago we went to my parents' house and visited our family farm.



We have a small herd of Longhorns, and they are delicious! Here is my Uncle Jay being the Bull Whisperer.



We were able to get pretty close, and we drove up in trucks and got out and walked around a little, with the kids on the back/roof of the truck. Not all the Longhorns are agressive, but they can inadvertently cause some damage just turning their heads around.




Here's the origin of the post title, if you haven't seen it yet.

Back from vacation

Wow, I'm finally back online. Taking a vacation for us can be tricky. Sometimes we have "working vacations," where I take time off of work and we work around the house on projects. Even with the best of intentions we seem to have less time for projects than we expect.

My time off has also let me experience purchasing my first box of wine.




All in all, not that bad - I think we may just have it too cold. Great for cooking, though, and the no-mess...spigot?...is great. I agree that a lot of the "wine experience" is the presentation, uncorking, and pouring from a glass bottle. Cardboard storage may be a buzzkill for purists, but for my special spaghetti sauce, box wine is fine by me! At least there are games built in to your purchase....

We also started Phase 2 of our playscape, watched a few movies and are preparing for our youngest's third birthday, which will be Toy Story-tastic!

If I'm so "rested" from being off, why haven't I been getting up so early? Unfortunately we found a Jackass marathon just about every night this week.

Model Fight: Maison de Roulement 004

Finally some more work on Maison de Roulement.

I added the walkway around the bottom of the building. There will also be some way to get down to the ground. Also some detail around the front doors and selected a wheel design. The axles are there, but no connecting bits or protection.




I like the way SketchUp lets you have components, and groups, but I've found myself getting into groups of groups of components, and multiple components rolling up into single components, and I haven't found an easy way to absorb parts of models into other components easily, like I'm used to in 3D Studio MAX. It's probably just my workflow.

More bees to love

The Halo 2 videogame had an elaborate Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called I love bees that tied in with the launch of the game. It involved real world people getting emails, text messages, phone calls, etc, from in-game entities, artificial intelligences, and other characters.

It looks like those crazy Bungie guys are at it again, but this time for Halo 3.



Click on the image or go to http://halo3.com/comic/ to check it out. I accidentally found the clue that lead me to more parts of the game.

Dell Inventors Awards Banquet

Monday night was the Dell Inventors Awards Banquet. It's for everyone who has had at least one invention/patent disclosure make it through the (Engineering) Patent Committee to get submitted to the US Patent Office.



This was my third Inventors Banquet. This year it was at the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum, and everyone gathered in the atrium (360degree Java image) for cocktails and mingling. We've started our diets again, so I was bummed at the idea of not taking them up on free wine, but eventually we had some (hey - we've been really good!).

Michael Dell gave an opening speech about innovation, simplification and the contribution to Dell from patent submitters. We unknowingly sat two tables away from him, who was spirited away when I wasn't looking.




After The Big Dog spoke there was a mad rush to the buffet. Salads included Caesar and some kind of Thai salad. Moving up, there was some sort of pasta area that we skipped. Next came the meat of the dinner...the meat. Moroccan chicken with some sort of great curry dusting, some kind of roast, and Halibut steaks...all very good. We said no to the rolls and desserts, but of course said yes to coffee.

During the dinner our Chief Technology Officer (my manager's manager's manager) talked more about our patents, future trends, actual crazy patents and gave awards, alongside our patent counsel.

The event was semi-formal, and we'll take any opportunity to dress up when we're out of the town sans bambinos. After some last minute changes (new purchases) to our wardrobe before leaving the house we were a pretty good match.

Lost in translation?

This is from a recent motherboard. My guess is that this system is gooder at saving your CMOS values.

I can see you!

Some interesting fallout from the Google Street View's Privacy-B-Gone mode. Slashdot picked up a Wired story about some privacy complaints from the picture-taking-van, as well as Wired finding a lot of interesting features from the photos.

Unfortunately, Denver, CO, is the closest place to me with Street View enabled.



I've seen a van drive around our subdivision with cameras, but so far no luck finding front views of our house online, which may not be a bad thing.

The Force is strong in this hoody

Check out this hoody - hot off the Industrial Light and Magic presses and just in time for the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars - perhaps you've heard of it?

It features the Star Wars logo on the front...



and a nice montage of characters comprising a 30 on the back.



Thanks and big ups to Spaghetti!

So my French isn't that good...

...but I think I know the gist of what they want.



We saw this classic piece of Americana on the back of an 18-wheeler north of Austin.

Interesting title regarding very tall plants

My wife was driving around the school where she teaches one day and saw a pretty amazing plant, and she couldn't wait to show me.



This thing is crazy! It looks fake, but it's the real deal. I knocked on the door to see if they minded us getting a picture of it, and the lady (who turned out to be very nice) gave us the full rundown of it. They picked it up out in West Texas...somewhere...and it has just taken off. It's either Agave or a Century Plant...which look like they are practically the same thing.

At the time of this picture, it was about 18 - 20 feet tall, and should be blooming in a few weeks.

These cookies are LAME

I love chocolate...and peanut butter...and cookies! You would think that a combination of all three would be great, right?

Not necessarily.

We tried some Reese's Peanut Butter Cookies (far left cookie) on a recent trip. The taste was okay to alright, but what sent me over the edge was the packaging.



14 cookies?

Are these cookies so amazing that they require cushioning above and beyond the standard cookie, which of course necessitates a lower number of cookies per box? No freaking way. Big waste of money. I'll stick with Oreos, or better yet, plain sandwich cookies that manage to cram 1000 in a bag.

Just what we need as summer approaches....

We built a deck in our yard so we can hang out, have parties, whatever. I've always wanted a chimenea for cold nights or S'mores (regular or Peeps), but I didn't want something that someone could accidentally brush up against and toast themselves.

We went over to some friends' house and we had a great time around their fire pit. "Not too shabby!" we thought, so we found one and picked it up.

It's best used in the dark.



Here's a shot with the flash, and you can see our protective measures in the background. Fire + wooden deck == Safety First!



We live next to a green belt with plenty of firewood, or so I thought. On our first foray out for wood we stuck around the back fence, where we found wood but it basically sent smoke signals directly to the neighbors' porch.

Forced to punt, I looked around for anything ready to burn and remembered that we had a lot of cedar planks left over from our playscape bridge wall, so I chopped some of those up. Next time we're at the farm we'll pick up some mesquite.

Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch

Waaaaay back in March we went on a safari...outside San Antonio. Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch is a huge game preserve where you drive along a road that meanders through various habitats looking at animals you don't normally see in Central Texas.

You can also buy bags of high-protein/carb alfalfa pellets to toss out for a lot of the animals to ignore. Seriously, what's up with all the animals eating before we got there? I guess that's what you get when you're at the back of a parade of cars all feeding the animals out the windows.

I think the most exotic animals we saw were some strange deer-like things with what looked like fuzzy, thick horns. Whoops! I forgot that picture. The most rewarding time was actually feeding a giraffe by hand, and letting our boys feed it too - definitely not an everyday occurrence.



Once you go through the vehicle tour you end up back at the beginning of the reserve where you can get out and eat, visit the aforementioned giraffe area and see a selection of birds, monkeys and a goat petting zoo area. We brought quite a bit of the food back with us to this area, but the goats were more interested in the paper bags than the food itself!

Model Fight: Maison de Roulement 003

I've been fiddling with the wheel and tire design. I admit that having a traditional inflatable-style wheel borders on the ridiculous for holding up something this heavy, but in the Bizarro World, tire roll on building.



I Photoshopped two layered renderings to show the wireframe - with SketchUp's default rendering it's hard to see the curvature.

Model Fight: Maison de Roulement 002

I'm working on a window treatment and some artsy effects around the edges.





I was going to put in a scale Letterman Digital Arts Center, but I can't find the model anywhere.

Model Fight: Maison de Roulement

I've been thinking about something for the past couple of days. I've had an image in my head about a huge apartment building that's wheeled and rolls around certain places.



I've also been thinking of some backstory to it as well as some ongoing stories about the adventures that some of the residents will have. Who knows, this might turn into a longer project? I just have to make sure I keep it different from the Crimson Permanent Assurance building in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Kickstarting Model Fight

I'm trying to get my creativity going again with the Model Fight. I got to a place where I felt like stopping on the factory, but I couldn't leave it alone in my head.

My first idea was to go as fast as I can, just to get some work on paper (pixels?). I even had a cool title - 24 Robots in 24 Hours. The gist was to work quickly going in with the expectation that I wouldn't have a finished project at the end, or even 24 finished projects! I would go for an hour, stop and move on to the next one. I got the idea for faster-paced work from places like National Novel Writing Month, the Three Day Novel Contest as well as other timed creative events.

At the end, I could revisit all 24 models and pick ones to develop further. This "rushed creativity" with ridiculous deadlines isn't new, and it's not the best way to work, but the goal is usually to spark something in your head or get you in a more creative spot.

I worked on my first model for about 20 minutes yesterday, and I didn't like where it was going. But it did give me an idea that I'd like to flesh out...or do I mean steel? Puns-a-flying! Maybe it's already a success?

Either I just accidentally dropped some acid, or we're watching a Disney movie!

We have a regular movie night on Fridays where we order pizza and eat in the living room. Thanks to Netflix we have queued up family/kid movies to always be here. I'm not Leander's biggest Disney fan, but you can't go wrong picking some classic Disney fare for the kids, right?

Uhhh, not so fast.

Dumbo was the latest offering. You can tell that it's from a long time ago (1941) by the tone of the dialogue - not that family friendly and antagonistic.

But that's not what raised my eyebrows.



Dumbo apparently has a dream sequence brought on by...something, perhaps the titular acid? Forgive me for not taking better notes - we were travelling and it was on in the van. Some of this stuff is pretty out there.



I'm pretty sure I watched Dumbo when I was younger, but I don't remember any of this.

Apparently there's an elephant that shops at Pottery Barn too!

My plan for World Dom...I mean High Definition

I've been wanting to jump on the High Definition bandwagon for a while, more for watching movies than anything else.

As to the competing formats, HD DVD and Blu-Ray, I'd be happy with either one if I knew every movie was going to come out on both. As it turns out, at least for now, there are some titles that I want exclusive to each one of the formats. I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I think eventually Blu-Ray is going to win, but it's going to be a long time. In the meantime I need to figure out how to get both....

I think I just got approval from the CFO to get an Xbox 360 + HD Drive. I should probably get it before she reads this.... Why the 360 and not the PS3? I know more people with the 360.

That's basically it.

I know I'm going to be happy with either High Definition video format. I'm getting ahead of myself with my blog posts, but I've seen examples of both, and Daddy likes!

I don't have all the time in the world to play games. Xbox Live is very nice, and I like having the opportunity to play with my friends when I get a chance.

But what do I do about Blu-Ray movies? The answer came to me a few days ago. I'll build a computer with a Blu-Ray drive and connect it via HDMI or DVI to the TV! The 360 covers the HD DVD angle.

Bada bing! Both formats. Thank you, Cleveland. Good night.

I put a preliminary system together today, and it worked like a charm. I have to figure out the best place to put it, as the Wife Acceptance Factor is both critical and slippery to grasp. A regular desktop stuck next to the TV has a low WAF, so I need to figure out how to shoehorn the components into a small form factor chassis, or at least one that is similar to my home theater components.

Definitely more to come.

Full sized images posted...FINALLY!!!

I've complained about images I post to my blog not being clickable, that is, clicking on them did not link to the original/higher resolution images.

I've been searching Blogger help files, help forums and sending email to Blogger with no response. I checked other blogs on Blogger and their images don't seem to suffer this same fate.

I checked the HTML of my posts and I couldn't see any alternate upload paths for the high resolution image...it's like my blog lost the functionality to upload fullsize images.

Blogger lets you work in a WYSIWYG environment or an environment that displays all the HTML code. In the WYSIWYG environment, you can drag uploaded images around to the correct spot and the layout code was smart enough to make everything how you want it.

Well, almost how you want it.

It turns out that moving an image in the WYSIWYG space gets rid of the original resolution code (image name, path, pixel count, etc) that is in the HTML. It just disappears. All that is left is the code for the thumbnail image.

I stumbled on to this while flipping back and forth between the an older post that still had clickable links to full size images and a recent post.

Why does this happen? I can find no other reason besides it being a bug.

If you go to the HTML environment you are able to cut and paste ALL the image-related HTML code to another place in your post, and everything goes with it. I've reuploaded the image to the post below and it works like a champ.

I'm relieved that I've found the solution, to say the least. Am I going to go back and fix everything? Probably not.

Not that there's anything wrong with my blog....

I just previewed my blog after posting the Snipping Tool entry, and I happen to check out the Ads by Google area.



Thanks, Google.

What's up with Vista Enterprise?

I've been on Vista Enterprise on my corporate laptop for a while, and a friend just got Vista Ultimate, so he's going through and finding some cool Vista tidbits.


One of them is the Snipping Tool, which looked to be in Vista Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate, but not Home Basic nor Enterprise, or so I thought. My initial reaction was confusion, as I thought Vista Enterprise was to Business as Ultimate was to Home Premium.

I mean, (performance wise) the bits are the same - the features are what define the edition.

I use the tried-and-true Alt-Prnt Scrn for screenshots/dialog captures, so I was slightly disappointed that my system didn't have what sounded like a cool program.

After some poking around, it turns out that Enterprise DOES support the Snipping Tool. As pointed out by Spaghetti, the Snipping Tool falls under Tablet PC Support, which defaults to disabled in Vista Enterprise.

After checking the box and a few moments of configuring...make that a few minutes of configuring...I'm golden! I'll definitely be using this.

But why wasn't it enabled by default? I would think that "Enterprise users" would want more productivity-increasers and would be savvy enough to not be overwhelmed by feature inundation, but who knows.

Gifted and Talented

We moved our kindergartner out of a private school and into public school with some trepidation. I'm a product of both private and public schools, and our assumption was that we (and our son) would get more out of a private school.

We quickly learned the opposite.

After enrolling in our subdivision's elementary school (Leander ISD) we found that the kindergarten teacher our son has is amazing. Any doubt as to the quality of the education from her quickly dissipated. But could kindergarten keep up with our son?

LISD and our school has a Gifted and Talented program, and something called QUEST. At this level, QUEST focuses on creativity, critical thinking, observation, etc. We went through the application process, filled out questionnaires, the school interviewed our son, and finally we heard that he had been accepted into QUEST! Shazam!

His first project is researching a particular insect (he chose honeybees) and working on making his insect out of craft materials for a QUEST fair later this year.

Housekeeping

It looks like more than a month has gone by - time for blogging!

Fixed wishlist.
Fixed movielist.
Removed musiclist.

Model Fight update 10...the end?

So our Model Fight kind of ran in to the weeds. I finished most of the exterior of the building I was going for, and here it is.

I'm going to give this project a rest and start another. It will have something to do with robots, of course.