In The World…

I guarantee I can beat it.  Here’s the story.

So, I’m working from home today.  I spent the last night coughing and nearly choking to death on phlegm to the point that I “slept” in the other bedroom so that I wouldn’t keep Jess up all night.  Upon arising  and hacking up a loogie the size of New Jersey, I decided that instead of subject my fellow coworkers to my respiratory issues, I would just log in and work from home.

Anyway, lunch time rolled around.  Jess reminded me that if I’m sick, I really should eat something.  I headed to the kitchen to see what I could find.  Ahh-ha… I know, I’ll have a nice big peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Haven’t had one of those in a while, that should hit the spot.  What else can I have?  Yes… good… we have a box of individual size bags of Sunchips that we got from Costco specifically for lunches.  Perfect.  Throw in a Pepsi and you have a pretty solid lunch.

I set about chowing down my sandwich (on 8 grain bread, I might add).  Trustworthy PB&J will never let you down.  If it wasn’t for those things I probably would have starved to death in childhood.  Also, I’m a bit of a strange eater when it comes to lunch.  More often than not, I don’t mix foods together.  I eat one thing, finish it, move onto the next.  Don’t ask me why, I just do.  If it’s a burger and fries, the fries go first, then the burger.  But, if its a sandwich and chips, the sandwich goes first.  I know, I’m weird.

Sandwich done, I open the bag of Sunchips to finish off my lunch.  I’m happily munching away while I work, as I’ve done hundreds of times before.

Let me preface this next part for those that might be squeemish… proceed with caution.

As setting, let me state that my office is fairly dim.  I don’t have the overhead lights on, and the shaded window has drapes on it. Really, the only light is from my monitor and a bit from the hallway, which is plenty.

As I was about 3/4 of my way through the bag of Harvest Cheddar chips, I began to ponder what those dark spots were on the chips.  I had noticed them upon starting, but in the dim light they appeared to just be another “grain” in the chips or perhaps larger clumps of seasoning.  Ummm… no… I’m not that lucky.

After piecing together my more recent history with Sunchips, I was fairly certain that Harvest Cheddar chips really didn’t look like that normally. Something was amiss.   That is when I looked a little closer, and came to a horrible HORRIBLE realization.

That’s not seasoning.

Again, squeemish people move on now.

They were ants.  Dead ants, specifically.  All curled up on themselves like dead ants do.  The bottom of the bag was FULL of them.

For the record, I chugged the rest of my Pepsi in about 2.4 seconds.  I can’t say I totally felt the urge to puke, but it did cross my mind.

Now I specifically remember eating one chip that had 20 or so specks on it.  Thinking nothing of it, I popped in and chewed away happily.  Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I think it did taste a bit… off…

I think the worst part now is that I still have bits of the chips stuck in my teeth.  Which, of course, means I’ve got bits of masticated dead ant in my teeth as well.

Ok… that thought is making me want to puke.  I’m off to brush and rinse with Listerine about 24 times.

Of course, I couldn’t NOT post a picture…

All told, I think I’m off Sunchips for awhile.  Oh, and Frito Lay?  Prepare to get a piece of my mind.

Murphy… me watering the plants… oh boy…

Click on image to go to Flickr and see it bigger.

Needless to say, he loves the water.

Mom, this post is for you.

See, I’ve been… slightly lax… in updating my blog here lately.  Blame it on our crazy schedules, blame it on Facebook and Twitter, blame it on my sheer laziness.  I saw my mom this past weekend, and she said that since I haven’t been updating my blog, she’s got no idea what has been going on with us.

So, without further ado, here is what has been happening recently.

We are presently in the middle of “wedding season”.  This past weekend was cram packed with the wedding festivites of Jess’ sister.  With family in from out of town and all the requisite wedding activities, we were pretty busy.  The service was nice, weather turned out perfectly.  Unfortunately, this is not the end of our wedding escapades.  Next weekend is another wedding for some friends.  Fortunately, neither of us are in this wedding, but Jess is on board to bake cupcakes for it.  I guess the bride asked a bunch of friends to do this… don’t ask me why.  Then the following weekend, Jess is heading up to Lewiston for the wedding of a sorority sister of hers.  The weekend after that, is a getaway reception/party in McCall for the friends who were married (with the cupcakes).  Whew.  I think that’s it.

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I’ve finally taken the 10 minutes it cost me to tweak the blog a little bit.

If you’re a semi regular visitor you might notice now that the content area is wider than it was.  Previously, I was frustrated by the fact that my content area was so narrow, specifically when posting images.  I could only go so big before the damn thing would blow up.

Now it is definitely wider (by 200px).  Of course, I don’t think I’m done futzing with it.  I’m really kinda bored with the look and feel of this thing and want to go in another direction.  The only thing that is stopping me is the fact that I really like my rotating headers I have and I don’t want to have to recreate them or something to fit a new layout.  As you can see, they don’t fit the new width and perhaps I’ll do something with that soon.

Since I basically play with HTML and CSS all day at work, it really isn’t high on my list of things to tackle once I get home.  But maybe I’ll have another slightly larger burst of energy to completely change this blog layout around.

Stay tuned.

I have spent at least part of every day for the last week and a half at work wrestling with the sites I’m building in order for Internet Explorer 6.0 to play nice.  I’ve had it.  Fed up.  If IE6 was a horse, we could have shot it a long time ago.  But, it keeps hanging on.  Tormenting me.  Creating hours of extra work and dozens of extra headaches.  I cannot describe how mind-blowingly frustrating it is to design a site which looks perfect in every modern browser only to have IE6 trundle along and blow the whole thing up.

It… just… won’t… die.

Looking at the browser statistics, it appears that still 17% of users out there are still clinging to this horribly outdated browser.  In fact, looking at my blog’s own stats, I’ve had 66 visits in the past month from users sporting that devil-spawn of a browser.

I’m not going to get into all of the reasons IE 6 is bad.  Unless you’re a web developer the reasons wouldn’t make much sense to you.   Suffice it to say, I’m not the only one that feels this way.  A quick google search points to almost 1,000,000 hits on the search terms of “IE 6 die”.

IE 6 is an ancient technology.  Seriously.  It was released all the way back in August of 2001.  Read that again… TWO THOUSAND AND ONE.  In case you weren’t aware, it is now 2009, you know… just fyi.

For reference what 2001 means in web-years, take a peek at what the web looked like all the way back in 2001.

• Yahoo.com
• CNN.com
• HP.com
• Microsoft.com
• Youtube.com, Facebook.com, Flickr.com, Gmail.com were not even in existence.

Do YOU want to be using a browser designed to display sites like those?

I ask each and every one of you to do this.  If you are using IE, please click up on the “help” button at the top of the browser, go to “About Internet Explorer” and that will pop open a window.  A version number will be listed there.  If it starts with “Version:6.0…” for the love of all that is holy, please please please please please please please please please update your browser.  Even one fewer IE6 user will make the world a better place.  Browsers are free.  Yeah, they don’t cost you one red cent.  Newer browsers have all kinds of user friendly features that IE6 can only dream about.  Trust me.  You’ll never regret it.

Get IE7 (you don’t even have to go to IE8 yet, ignore that IE8 ad at the top).  Get Firefox (which will keep itself updated, by the way).  Get Google Chrome.  I implore you.

Consider it your good deed for the week.  Plus, you’ll be on your way to assisting me to retain what sanity I have left.

Much appreciated.

Well, we did it.  After just 8 short weeks, “the puppy” has come home.  Here is where I describe the ins and outs of bringing home a new puppy to two people who seemingly weren’t fully prepared for what was in store.

See, we had settled on the fact that we would reserve a puppy from Gem Doodle’s (next litter later summer/early fall ‘09 if you’re interested) most recent litter.  One of the offspring of Tula the poodle and Bruno the golden retriever would be ours.  All we had to do was wait.

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Blogging has been sparse lately.  I’m through apologizing for it.  Instead, you should just subscribe to the RSS feed so you can be updated when I finally do post something new.  Like this!

Behold… my favorite images from our trip to Oregon last weekend.

Please go to Flickr to enjoy the whole set, or you can click on any of these images below to view it bigger.  Most of them look MUCH better when viewed larger, so I highly recommend doing that.

Without further ado…

Some background info… for spring break, Jess and I joined my sisters and their families in a house on the coast for 3 days.  We found a great place in Yachats (30 min south of Newport) with a good view, beach access and a hot tub.  It was fun.

We explored the area, ate sea food, enjoyed the rain, and relaxed in the hot tub.  And, I got some good photographs out of it.

We have another big week this week… mainly tomorrow, Wednesday the 1st.  But that is another post!

This previous weekend, Jess and I got out of town for a couple days in our annual “post holiday decompress” trip.  We usually try to get away for a weekend sometime after the first of the year just to come down a bit and recharge.  This year was a little later than normal, but we still made it.

We stayed at the ‘everything old is new again’ Shore Lodge.  Fresh off their failed “Whitetail” experiment, they are back to their roots.  I’d never set foot in the building, but I gotta say that place is really nice.  We had the authentic “McCall experience” in that we stayed at Shore Lodge, ate at Lardo’s, The Pancake House and The Mill.  We also bought a 6-pack of beer at Paul’s.

Probably the most fun thing we did the whole weekend was snowshoeing.  We borrowed some friend’s gear and tooled around the shore of Little Payette Lake.  I’d never been snowshoeing before.  Many years ago I did a little cross country skiing and snowshoeing is kinda like that.  We had so much fun, we may be in the market for our own snowshoes.

We also had perfect weather.  The sun was shining and the temps were in the upper 30’s.  It was so nice we were able to shed our coats and de-layer a bit.  Absolutely gorgeous.

Of course, I loved being out there with the new camera and playing around taking pics.  Here are my favorites. Click on them to go to Flickr.  Or you can view the slideshow.

Question.  When you get the keys to your new residence, what is generally the first thing you do?

If you’re like 99.9% of the population, you probably take the 6 seconds and proudly slide that new key on your key ring.  It’s almost a symbol of your new life.  A very momentous occasion for most.

Unless you’re my wife.

Somehow, she never bothered to place a house key on her key ring, despite the beautiful little setup the builder had for us upon our move in.  Each key on a shiny little ring in a jewelery box.  Nope.  Never did it.  In fact, I even TOLD her to do it, multiple times in the past 9 months since we’ve moved in.  Still never did it.  She even has the typical “woman keyring” with a dozen or more keys on it… keys to her office and her parents house and even to a padlock to my old storage unit.  “I have a key to the rental house, though”, she said.

Why do I mention this?  Oh, I don’t know… maybe it could have something to do with the fact that we just spent the last 45 minutes locked out of our own house.

We just now regained entry with the help of a locksmith and $55.

See, after work we decided that we would go to the gym and work out.  No biggie, we do this multiple times a week.  However this time the garage door somehow locked when it closed upon our exit.  My guess is the lock mechanism wasn’t turned all the way open or something.  Anyway, when the door shut, it locked.  We got back from the gym only to find it immovable.  Oh shit.

Even worse, the hide-a-key we had in the front of the house for just such an occasion, wasn’t there.  See, this exact occasion happened to my lovely bride a few weeks ago and she retrieved that key to let herself into the house.  As I lifted the rock to get the key I was greeted by the sight of bare dirt.  No key.  Well gee… I don’t suppose you remembered to replace that key you used to get in the house did ya?  Apparently not.

Here I am, in shorts and a sweatshirt perusing my work bench for something that might be able to open the door.  Like I’m friggin MacGyver or something and am going to miraculously figure out how to pick the lock with a nail, a wasp trap and can of spray paint.  Unfortunately, I did not have these skills.  What I did have was an iPhone.  The iPhone again saves the day, as I was able to look up locksmiths.  Finally, the forth number we tried (yes, I had her call) we found someone who could come out in just 25 minutes.

As I only had shorts on and was freezing, I got back into the car and started it up simply for the heater.  Jess had the one good idea… we had beer in the fridge.  So, I partook.

Jess then told me that she was “taking 80% of the blame for this”.  Like somehow this was my fault, despite the fact that I did take those 6 seconds and have a key on my ring.  We were driving her car.  Thus, no key.  She then relented and accepted 90% of the blame, to which I assigned the other 10% to the lock itself.  My favorite quote from her was, “I didn’t have a key to my old house either!” like that somehow made this all ok.

Finally the locksmith arrived and it a few short minutes he was inside and it was all over but the fifty bucks we owed him.

Ahh… never a dull moment around the Haberman household.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a dozen keys made and hiding them all around the garage and yard.

If you haven’t heard of the indie phenomenon called Slumdog Millionaire, I don’t know where you’ve been.  It’s everywhere seemingly, including the Oscar noms.  The other night Jess and I finally made it out to see it.  What follows is my review, which as always, will most assuredly contain spoilers.  Continue at your own risk.

I can honestly say that this movie is really unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  It is a remarkable movie.  I can tell you, it completely earns it’s 94% fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com.  I am the first to admit that I am woefully ignorant about life in India beyond what I have seen in Gandhi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  The first of those was probably a little more accurate, but I digress.  The basic premise of this movie is the story of a young man who goes onto the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  The movie begins with him being “gently” interrogated.  We the audience are unaware as to what is going on.  Turns out, they are trying to figure out how he answered all the questions correctly.  The rest of the movie is spent as he tells the detective his story and how he learned the answer to each of the questions.  I know it sounds a little strange, but it is a very effective way of telling a story.  Again, not like anything I’ve seen.

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