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Last night we went to a Grace Brethren High School presentation of the musical You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown. I honestly wasn't expecting all that much, but I was wrong!
It was a very good performance by a very dedicated cast of kids. It was made even better by the very enthusiastic group of kids and families who made the trip over from Simi Valley.
Jonathan thoroughly enjoyed himself, as did the rest of us.
I was catching up on my Crypto-Gram reading yesterday and followed a link to this security horror story. That introduced me to the Shark Tank for the first time. It makes for some pretty humorous reading. It's written in the style of all the other computer rag rumor mill columns, but focuses on things that go wrong in the IT industry:
Clueless consultants? Bungling bosses? Useless users? Tell me your tale. If it gets printed, you get a sharp Shark shirt.There are some great stories there.
If you enjoyed the Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) series that was floating around for years and eventually ended up at the Register, you'll probably like this.
The May Crypto-Gram also linked to Stupid Security, which is also a pretty interesting read (and has an RSS feed). It's not normally funny though.
This week was the last normal week of the winter bowling league that Sarah and I bowl on (we started doing this to get out of the house when the kids were little back in the fall of '94). The season is broken into two halves and we won the second half. Woo hoo! We get to play the team which won the first half next week while gambling in a crazy event known as sweepers.
We'd been close to the front for a while, and even with my missing a few weeks because of recent trips and us losing 2 of 4 last week, we were still only down by 1.5 points (team totals for three games and the total score for the 4 weekly points). We were seeded second for the position round and had to win 3 of 4 against the team seeded first (a tough team) to pass them.
We took the first game and they took the second. We were ahead by about 60 pins for the fourth point. Win the last game and we're in, lose and we're done. We didn't approach our high game of the season, but we all bowled really well (most of us were 20 more pins over average in the last game), the other team had one bowler with a really awful game and that was it.
We finished up tied for points for the year with the team we had to beat (they were ahead of us by 2 points for the year). We also ended up with the team high series and total pins for the season (unless next week counts, I'm not too sure about that).
And of course, next week is sweepers. The idea there is to gamble away all the 'award' money given to teams based on their finishes in a few categories. This being a handicap league, the money for everyone, including the winner isn't all that big. I won about $500 a few years ago when I played on a team that won a much more serious scratch league (my cut was from a team of four).
I can pair up my score with as many other people as I want (from this league) and it costs me $1 for each entry I make with someone else. I usually end up spending about $40 on this. Winners are picked from three categories; men, women and doubles (one of each). Have a really good night and pick a few people who also have good nights and you can walk away with $200 just from the pots. This being a handicap league, anyone can win and it's a lot of fun. And then of course, the season is over...
I normally take summers off but my wife has volunteered me and I get to start all over the following week.
I was offline for nearly forty-eight hours this week because I was up in San Francisco and busy, therefore mostly oblivious. My family was also offline (which I got a lot of feedback on when I arrived home). This is the first time since we moved to DSL that it's happened (it happened a couple times with the cable connection). So everything was kinda dark and it lasted a couple days (I had problems when I tried to hit the net before leaving for the Airport very early on Monday morning, but no time to deal with it). All it took was a reset on the part of Covad, but the required talking to a support rep which meant a phone call.
I am now going to need to figure out how to shuffle things around so that I am truly running a bridging system between the cable modem and the DSL connection. If I can put the rest of the family on a network that uses cable for most traffic, redirects other traffic (based on a port list of some sort) to DSL and can fail all traffic to DSL when cable dies, that would be close to ideal. I thought I was mostly there, but now I'm not so sure. I need to do some poking around.
Strange things we worry about these days when we go away on a trip...
