My daughter finally convinced herself to be potty trained. Yay!

Unlike most kids, she did not go through a transition phase. Once she decided that it was worthwhile, she immediately stopped wearing diapers. Even at night. Not a single accident at night either, which I find absolutely amazing. As her reward, we bought her a bicycle as promised. She is incredibly good at riding it already. She is a fantastic athlete. Coaches be warned. Recruiting efforts should start now!



Trevor was feeling a bit put out about how good Megan was doing on her bike. Seems that was just the motivation he needed. We dusted off his unused bicycle, and within a day, he learned how to start, stop, and ride all over the back yard unassisted. Amazing. A great week indeed.

I had to go to San Francisco for the majority of the week, but would talk to Trevor each night and ask if he learned how to ride standing up on the pedals yet. He hadn't. But my wife told me the next day that Trevor started getting up early in the morning and was practicing riding before school. How cool is that!



As of Saturday, he is up on the pedals and able to hill climb. He has achieved mobility, and we have thrown away the diaper pail. Life is good :-)

Something my father has known for years now, but I'm starting to become a believer. Yes, I've golfed now. Exactly three times, in three tournaments. I've gotten quite good...at picking partners :-) I really like the "Best Ball" format!

Look what Trevor built:

My home machine is set up with 3 hard drives. Two of them are high speed 10,000 rpm SATA drives configured in a RAID 0 format. This means that the computer writes 50% of the data to both disks simultaneously. If I have a 100MB file, 50MB would be written to disk 0, with the other 50% written to disk 1. This makes the process of reading and writing the hard drives VERY fast.

But alas, when one of these disks becomes unstable, life gets seriously disrupted. I'm currently in the process of a hard drive failure. It's really annoying. Periodically, my computer will go from running full steam ahead to a black all loss of power screen, in the blink of an eye. When I view the system logs, it tells me that it encountered a bad block of memory.

Then this weekend the system refused to boot up at all. The BIOS would start, but the RAID array controller would start to panic, and report that disk 0 was offline. Thus ending that boot sequence. I kept trying though, perhaps about 50 times. This went on for a while, until I finally called for Tech Support. The nice Hindu Indian sounding woman suggested I tried rebooting. With teeth clenched to prevent a sarcastic comment about rebooting for the nTH time, I pushed the button.

I'll be darned if the thing didn't start right back up again as if nothing had ever happened. The Indian woman spoke English well enough to laugh at me. And then she suggested I do a full backup immediately, and darn it, she's right.

It's always a bit humbling to do a full backup. After about 6 DVD's of data, you begin to wonder, "Do I really need all this crap?"

I hope I never find out.

Not too long ago I tried my hand at Graphic Design for a Pastor friend of ours. This does not come easy to me, but I stuck with it. This is what I came up with:



After that, I went on to make a little sample site for him:



Alas, he seems to have gone a different direction. His new site offers a bit of eye candy, but there is very little content, and the code...oh the code. It's ugly, so very ugly. It actually caused my FireFox browser to crash when I clicked on "About Us". Sigh.... I shall pray for him :-)