Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Razor's Edge
November 27, 2007

I had a most amazing experience today. At lunch I finally stopped at a place that I’ve been eyeing for months. It’s a “traditional” barber shop called “Shaving Grace”.

I’ve been needing a good haircut for weeks now, my last cut falling woefully short of adequate. My bangs have been falling forward onto my forehead in an annoyingly straight line. The most remarkable thing about the woman who cut my hair was not her skill, but the hacking smoker’s cough she’d erupt into occaasionally. Ick.

Riley's Birthday
November 19, 2007

Last Tuesday was Riley’s third birthday. Berta stayed home to prepare things for the day. She took Riley out and bought a lot of balloons and a cookies-n-creme cake that he picked out himself.

Since we ordered a few things for him from the mail-order toy catalogs as gifts, they were a bit delayed in coming, so we didn’t have any gifts to give him on his birthday. Instead, we all went to the toy store and picked out a few things that Riley liked.

Distance to Suburbia
November 12, 2007

Berta and I went to IndyHall’s movie night on Saturday to hang out in the city and to watch the first of the two films in the double-feature, “Office Space”. We got to talk to a few of the folks down there, both some people we knew and some people we met for the first time.

The event was sponsored by Philly Car Share, which is an interesting organization that offers shared vehicles to city-dwellers. You basically make a reservation, and you get a car for a few hours. It’s kind of like renting, I suppose, but it’s a more comfortable plan. The cars are where you might need them to be, parked in nearby lots, rather than centrally at a rental place. And they have all different kinds of cars, so if you needed a trunk or a van, they’ve got that, or for a night out on the town, a convertible or BMW is obtainable. Neat idea for folks that live downtown, especially.

Screensavers, the Ill-Begotten Stepchild Application
November 04, 2007

After my debacle with the monitor this week, I decided that I needed a new screensaver. Primarily I was thinking of disabling the login display when returning to the OS from the screensaver, but I have been thinking I wanted something more for a while now. And since my new monitor does not recover from power-save mode, I need something good to prevent the burn-in that I saw on the monitor at Best Buy.

I’ve been using the basic My Pictures slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP for a while. I have a lot of pictures, and the kids like to see my computer showing them photos of us on all of our vacations. Abby actually asked me why I had changed my screensaver once, which prompted me to restore the photo one.