Just submitted my first photo to JPG Magazine.  They do themes for each issue, and the highest-voted submissions on the website get published in the print magazine.

Would be very cool to get in, huh?

"Indy Jones finds himself in an unfortunate but familiar situation. Let's hope that radiator is better built than the last one."

As posted on Flickr

My neice Taylor wearing Jackie's new sunglasses from Italy.

Molto alla moda.  ('Very fashionable.'  Turns out, you can't say "cool" about something in Italy.  It means something else.)

 Please adjust your bookmarks... I'm going to be publishing my blog using different software, which means a different web address to read it:

web.mac.com/pwheeler/myWeb/Blog/Blog.html

 Please let me know what you think.

Wow.  2007 was kind of impressive.  Did lots of cool things, aside from the great, grand adventure of raising a 1-to-2 year-old boy.

• Connor got his first haircut, and I cut my hair ‘short’ for the first time in years.

• It was our first full year of producing in HDTV at work.

• Got a lot of r/c flying time in the Spring/Summer and got pretty good.

• Jackie & I went to The Police reunion concert show in June.

• Went to San Diego for a really nice (bachelor) guys getaway weekend, and got hooked on Guitar Hero in the process.

• Was Best-Man at my buddy Matt’s wedding in July

• Re-connected with a bunch of old friends, some at the reception.

• Had our first road-trip with Connor, driving to California, and had a fantastic time with all of our CA friends.

• Got a new MacBook.

• Had a great time teaching and fencing.  Practically put in charge of the program.  Put together an Open Tourney, and happily finished 4th, despite how little I myself have been fencing.

 If you're actually still reading my blog, you've probably noticed some little formatting problems, for at least part of the year.  I had to do some recovery at some point, and it's never quite been the same.

 Well, with a new year upon us, I'm thinking that I may just chuck the whole thing, and start over, perhaps using a new blogging application, and a fresh new look.  I'm thinking that if I can get it working cleanly again, and can streamline the process of writing to it again, that I may be more consistent at blogging in the new year.  What do you think?

 Anyway... here goes 2007.  I'd say that it was a pretty darn good year, though it seems to have flown by. But then, looking back on 'em from the tail end, they always seem to have flown by quickly.  Just perception, I guess.

 2008, here we come!

 I had already recently decided to boycott chocolate that is not 'free-trade' because it turns out that a great portion of the chocolate grown in Africa utilizes child slave labor.  I'm a rather moderate chocolate consumer/lover myself, my wife as well.  So I plan to make some trips to Trader Joe's and Sprout's to see if they sell any free-trade products that are free of such abuses.

But now, this morning I read another angering issue.  According to MSNBC, Japanese whaling ships set off today for the Antarctic to hunt protected Humpback whales.  So, now I find that I must also, to the best of my ability, boycott any and all products from Japan.

Then, to make these protests effective, they must be combined with writing letters of protest, and efforts to spread the word.

(Ah crap... I just realized that we drive two Japanese cars.  Grr...)

Today, October 3rd, is Change a Light Day, when you are encouraged to switch out one old incandescent light bulb around your house with an energy-saving compact flourescent light bulb (CFL).

I just have to figure out which one to do next.

So here's cool little tool.

You sign up for a free account with jott.com.  Then, the next time you need to leave yourself a note, especially when you think of something while running around town, you call 1.866.jott.123.  In my case, my cell phone has voice recognition, so I can just say "Call Jott" and it does the rest.

Then you can record a voice message, to yourself.  And the cool part is that jott will transcribe what you say, and send it to you as text in an email message.

It's like a notepad without the pad.

Beyond that, you can set up other friends on jott, and send messages to them using the same method.

Quick, easy, clean, and free.

As a bonus, for all of my fellow Mac-users out there, I found this great page, listing dozens of really good, really useful pieces of Mac software, that are all freeware.  Something for everyone, and some really great software authoring.

It's a really funny sequence, if you can sequence through 'em like a flip book, like I do in iPhoto.

 Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Arrgh!

 Actually finished another book... (one of my biggest goals every year is to read more, but I'm not very consistent, no matter how much I think about it.)

Anyway, without writing a review about it, I completed Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen.  I don't think he's a very consistent writer, not always making his point very well, but for the most part, it was a pretty wise and enlightening book.

This section had a post it note next to it, so I guess it was about my favorite passage:

Imagine we're astronauts who have crashed on the Moon.  We're stranded.  We look up into the sky and see the beautiful blue Earth, but we can't get back to it because our ship is damaged.  All we can do is look at the brilliant blue orb in the cold back sky and long to be home again.

But suppose we managed to fix our craft after all, and landed once again, on Earth.  How would we feel as we first set foot upon the Earth?  What would we observe and savor?  How intensely would we experience the smells and flavors, the gentle rain, or the warm sand underfoot? 

This is how we should walk on the Earth with each step.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

(from the Buddhism: Plain and Simple)

My apologies to anyone who actually reads my blog.  I haven't posted anyhing in a couple months.  

Not that I haven't had things to write about.  The blog's just been kind of hung up.  First, I was holding off on a post until I received a photo from a friend to use in the post.  Then I was just procrastinating, I think.  

Finally, I ran into computer issues.  First, I took my iBook in for service before the warranty expired, and they ended up replacing the hard drive.  This meant that I had to restore all of my software and data onto the new drive.  And then Jackie's hard drive went out, and we were one computer down.  At last, I decided to add a new computer to the family, and bought a new MacBook.  And I've also upgraded to the latest version of iBlog.

In the end, iBlog by iPat is back on.

So you'll notice that in addition to this and subsequent posts, you may find posts from the past summer months showing up for the first time as well.  Please leave feedback.

You also may notice some little technical glitches, here and there, like missing graphics, or errant code.  This too shall pass.

Hope you had a great summer.  I did.  TTFN.

There seems to be no way of keeping him from anything tech or mechanical, so today when he just had to be in the office and play with my computer, I decied not to fight it, and instead sat him on my lap, plugged in a mouse, fired up a simple art program, and had some fun.

The result... Connor's first work of computer art.  I, of course, wrote his name, but most of the rest of it, was his work.

Larger versions, suitable for framing or refridgerators, are available upon request.

 This evening I went out to Pei Wei for dinner, for the first time.  I'm told that it's kind of the casual diner version of P.F. Chang's, which is a really nice restaurant chain around the valley.

Anyway, I got my fortune cookie after dinner, and this is what it had the gaul to say:

"You will hear pleasant news."

Myself, I don't think that counts as a fortune.  It's supposed to give you some kind of information, not just let you know that you'll be getting information in the future.

Once again, I think the guy who writes the fortune cookies is messing with me.

Connor had developed a sort of car-game, where he will start out with an “Mmm....” sound, and then add random words, like “mmm..... truck.”  Most of the time, they're indistinguishable sounds, but he's clearly practicing and/or making up words.

I had begun to make it a take-turns game, where I would do one, and then he would do one, and since then, Jackie learned the game too.

Well today, we went to Rula Bula for lunch, meeting David Ivazian and Oliva.  Afterwards, we had talked about going to the water park there on Mill Ave., but decided it was just too darn hot.  So, we told Connor that instead we could go to Grandma Ludlow's and go swim in her pool.

So driving away, we just needed to stop by the house on the way for our swim wear, before going on to Grandma's.  We began to play the “mmm...”-game as we drove happily along.  I would go “mmm... tree.”  Jackie would go “mmm... bird.”  Connor would go “mmm... pool.”  And every time, though with differing inflection, Connor would go “mmm... pool.”  All the way to Grandma's house.

Gotta respect a guy who knows what he wants.

 It's official. Cable television has completely lost it's mind.

I've written, er, ranted before about how annoyed I was at the demise of Bravo, after they were bought out by NBC/Universal. Where they were once a place to see, shall I say, more sophisticated culture programming, whether that be music, great movies or even Inside the Actors Studio, it later became the place to see "Waterworld," run back to back, and Jay Leno and Billy Joel on Inside the Actors Studio. How are they actors?

Well, my later favorite was the time that Sci-Fi ran "Braveheart." While it may take a few liberties with historical fact in the interest of motion picture drama, I fail to see how it falls into either Sci-Fi or Fantasy. I'll let 'em go, by comparison, when they began to rerun their "Passions" soap opera from NBC, since it was dangerously close to old Doctor Who episodes.

The clincher was tonight, when I found the original "Planet of the Apes" film airing on History Channel. That's even weirder than when the Cartoon Network was running "Saved by the Bell" as part of it's Adult Swim late-night block.