archshrk

October 2008

• Friday 31 | Halloween Costume Ideas

  From SignOnSanDiego.com
  Ideas for grown-ups
  For pop-culture vultures: If you spend most of your time at the megaplex, in front of the TV or perusing the tabloids, these options are right up your alley.

  * Aldous Snow: He stole the show in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” and now you, too, can croon ridiculously cheesy lyrics [...]

• Wednesday 29 | NumbSkull Game

  Found a fun new game to keep you distracted this Halloween. Numbskull from Nitrome is a simple puzzle game that is fun and challenging. Simply rotate pieces to get the skull head back to it’s body. But watch out for pumpkin traps and electric fields. Play at Miniclip.com or Nitrome’s site. While [...]

• Saturday 25 | Gmail is too cute – no seriously

  At the risk of unleashing another firestorm of hate comments I have to say I’m not liking the emoticon feature of Gmail.
  Following the evolutionary path blazed by colored labels, we present, in all their technicolor glory, emoticons in your mail. – Official Gmail Blog: A picture is worth a thousand words
  Now let me begin this [...]

• Friday 24 | Core Switches and WordPress 2.6.3

  So I woke up this morning to find my site working but also in need of an upgrade.

  A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard. Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to [...]

• Thursday 23 | Heads up – Site down

  Just wanted to let you know of the impending doom, er – downtime.
  Dear archshrk (note that I don’t capitalize my name),
  We are pleased to inform you that we will be installing new hardware on the core switches that are used by the webserver that hosts your account. In order for these upgrades to be [...]

• Wednesday 22 | Baby Battles

  Corbin is 10 and a half months but is already training for the Ultimate Fighting Championship – Gage Match version. Couple things to keep in mind, his opponent (a climber) is 3 weeks older than him and a lot more ‘agile’ but Corbin makes up for it in reach and brute force. Oh, [...]

• Tuesday 21 | A Bit About Bokeh

  Bokeh (bo-kay) is an adaptation from a a Japanese word meaning blur. In photography this term is used to describe the quality of the areas in the picture which are not in focus. A good write up on bokeh can be found here.
  This post is just a quick study of how bokeh looks in different [...]

• Monday 20 | Prayers for Wendy

  Wendy’s been in the hospital this past week with high temperatures and just a generally bad reaction to the latest round of chemo. It’s been unseasonably hot and the A/C at the hospital is not working and her mum was putting in long hours sponging off Wendy to try and keep her cool. She said [...]

• Thursday 16 | Gmail promotes bad etiquette

  I must protest! Gmail’s latest tip reveals what I consider one of emails greatest, and most often abused etiquette faux pas (not to be confused with fopas or fopaws) – The Empty Email Body. While this may seem perfect for Halloween, I assure you, this is far more scary.
  I often send messages where [...]

• Tuesday 14 | Hide the hamsters…

  The Visitors are baaack!

  Hoping to do for V what the Sci Fi Channel did for Battlestar Galactica, ABC has given the go-ahead on a reboot of the hit 1980s franchise about alien lizards from another planet who take over Earth. – E! online
  According to Variety, Scott Peters who is the brain behind “the 4400″, is [...]

• Monday 13 | Moon Shot

  So I was inspired by a recent thread on the Inktank forums to see what kind of pictures I could take with our Canon Rebel XT. Here’s what I got.
  Needs some work but I wasn’t really prepared.
  I’ll try again later after some research.

• Monday 13 | In-N-Out’s 60th anniversary hoax

  Though Philippe the Original dipped its prices to mark its 100 years in the sandwich business, California’s beloved drive-through burger chain, In-N-Out, has no plans to follow suit. How did the rumor get started? The Pasadena Star-News takes a look:
  Call it an Internet hoax, animal style.
  The rumor that In-N-Out Burger will [...]

• Monday 13 | October in the High Desert

  It’s not quite Oktoberfest but we spent the weekend with (my side of) the family up in the High Desert. That’s Victorville, Apple Valley, Hesperia and surrounds for you big city types. While there we managed to do something other than play boardgames (my favorite pass-time) – we hit the Corn Maze.
  This is [...]

• Monday 13 | The First Kiss

  It’s your First Kiss and several questions might come to mind:
  Is it the right time?
  Is anyone watching?
  Does your partner even want to?
  Is your breath fresh?
  AND—Should you use some tongue?
  Then you say . . ..
  ‘What the hey!’ and Just Go for it!!
  :D

• Thursday 9 | 3 days Only!

  We had to switch Corbin to formula at a very early age (about 1 month old) because he wasn’t getting enough milk the old fashioned way. When making the hard decision to go from nature’s milk to formula, you can easily be overwhelmed by choice. Luckily for us, our health care provider [...]

• Thursday 9 | Everyone loves stats

  I was reading/approving/editing some comments just now and realized I have received over 70,000 comments (based on current comment id#. Which made me all excited until I realized, most of that was spam comments (as was the case for comment #70,000). None-the-less, I thought I’d share with you some relevant stats about my site [...]

• Thursday 9 | wanna see me drool….

  Canon today strengthens its EF-S series of lenses with the launch of a versatile new model: the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS. With an equivalent focal length of 29-320mm, the lens offers an 11x zoom range – making it a powerful, lightweight alternative to carrying multiple lenses.

  For EOS 50D, 40D, 30D, 20D, 20Da, Rebel XSi/XS, Digital [...]

• Tuesday 7 | archshrk.com now supports Gravatars

  With my recent spat of housekeeping (notice the changes to the sidebars?) I have also added support for gravatar.
  What is a gravatar?
  A gravatar, or Globally Recognized AVATAR, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your [...]

• Tuesday 7 | Spam Blog and other stuff

  Kristi, one of my many, many, loyal readers, had an interesting experience recently which she blogged about.
  I started a new, private blog the other day as a diet journal. I have only posted twice to the darn thing. Now, it has been locked and marked as a spam blog. – Spam Blog
  I suspect blogger has [...]

• Monday 6 | The end of an era, or is that error

  This site has always been a pet project for me. I never had any real goal in mind other than to express myself in ways that only the broad reach of the internet could. Unfortunately, that expression comes at a cost. Domain registration and web-hosting are part of that cost and to [...]

• Monday 6 | 10 months and still growing

  Corbin is now 10 months old but you would hardly guess it. He comes from “large” stock (aka me) so despite being so young, he looks much older (as I always did). The downside to being above average is that his little boy arms are trying to lift a big boy body (and [...]

• Sunday 5 | New Presidential Candidate… It’s someone we know!

  There’s an effort to elect an unknown random person as President… and it’s someone we know! Watch this online video about the surprising new nominee.
  Jot back a note to let me know what you think!
  HT: Al Sends

• Saturday 4 | Mars Attacks!

  Last weekend, while Julia and the other ladies from church were away for a women’s retreat, I spent Saturday with my good friend Scott (who has three kids under 3 years old). In the morning we met at the Zoo where we got to fish a bracelet out of the Koi pond, walk past [...]

• Saturday 4 | Daily Radar Letters _2000-06-26

  Google is celebrating their 10-year anniversary and decided to do some spring cleaning. Among the things in the attic they found was a vintage search index in mint condition.
  We had so much fun searching that we wanted to put this old index online for everyone to play with. We thought it’d be even cooler [...]

• Friday 3 | Hymns that burn!

  Chris over at My Two Cents apparently had too much time on his hands as he put together the 5 6 Worstest American Idle style “hymns” ever heard – eva!
  In the list was my “favorite” hymn-to-hate – I Give You Freedom (aka Free Will Song). But as performances go, there are some real gems [...]

• Wednesday 1 | New World

  I’m becoming more of a board gamer as I get older. Not sure why, but I think it has to do with the quality of games. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy a good first-person shooter and the occasional Battle Sphere game (sorry, no racing games for me). I even played [...]