Yesterday I was talking with Mary at lunch about something I had read where Bill Bradley had indicated he wanted to eliminate the F-22 Raptor program as a cost saving measure if he was elected. Considering the F-15′s it will replace are about 26 years old and the technological advances we’ve made since they came out (stealth technologies, more powerful computers, thrust vectored engines, classified stuff, etc.), not to mention the money we’ve already invested in developing the F-22 that didn’t strike me as a good course of action. Our conversation moved on to other things that I did actually like about Bradley and I didn’t think anything more of it. Then last night I happened to flip to a program on the Discovery Channel about Air Force test pilots and it spent several minutes discussing and showing footage of the F-22. Nothing like a good coincidence I always say.

I read the first Harry Potter book during the drive down to Utah last week and I really enjoyed it. I think part of the reason I liked it so much was J.K. Rowlings imagination reminds me a lot of my own.

Uh oh! Mary bought some Tae Bo fitness videos today at lunchtime. I don’t know if it’s going to be safe to go over to her apartment any more now .

My current fitness regimen consists mainly of riding my bike (on trackstand) while playing NCAA Football 99.

Well, obviously it started working again. I’ll quit complaining.

Great, Blogger is acting weird this morning and telling me it can’t find axodys.com. I of course have no problems going directly to axodys.com.

There’s quite a bit of snow dropping out of the sky this morning. And it hasn’t shown any signs of letting up yet either.

Happy Valentines Day Mary! I love you!

Hmm… so much for inline CSS. I wonder what I’m doing wrong? Ah ha! Fractured tags can kill you.

The SVG stuff (simple vector graphics) that Dave Winer has been talking about recently on Scripting News is fairly interesting, but also kind of depressing. Oh boy, yet more cool technology that will take at least another year or two for widespread browser adoption and integration.

I went to Angela’s Ashes this afternoon with my girlfriend and her parents. It was fairly good, but the word from Mary and her mom is the book (as is often the case I think) is far superior.
Hmm, the weekend is nearly over.

Looks like iCab does indeed work with Blogger. I checked my iCab preferences and discovered that InScript is not activated by default. Turning it on allows you to publish. Cool!

The new version of iCab is out and it supports JavaScript (or InScript in this case with trademarks and such being what they are). Unlike IE 4.5 for the Mac, it actually seems to work with Blogger as I’m using it right this moment (got to love that German engineering). Oops I spoke too soon, I can post stuff, but the publish button dosen’t do anything. That and there’s still no support for CSS. Still, it’s great to see some third party competition for the big two and it is still in Beta.

In the tradition of EvHead, Megnut and countless other weblogs, I’m hoping to do my own redesign sometime this week. This will of course have to be fit in between work, basketball practice, basketball games, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, eating, spending time with my girlfriend, Ferazel’s Wand, updating my weblog, riding my bike, and everything else. No Mary, those items were not listed by order of importance!

Bye-bye free time, my copy of SMAC for the Mac has arrived.

I enjoyed the latest Penny Arcade quite a bit, especially since my girlfriend has red hair too.

I played with Fireworks some this morning and managed to come up with my first animated GIF for the weblog ads at Scripting News. I really like Fireworks a lot. The drawing/painting combination is extremely powerful.

I also added the little script that pulls up random weblog ads and hopefully they’re appearing up in the right hand corner.

I think I’m finally just about recovered from all the shopping that I did earlier today. Thankfully, I’m much closer to being done as well.

My girlfriend and I had planned to go to today’s GU basketball game against Montana, but apparently too many people were free to attend the game this afternoon and we were turned away at the door. I didn’t mind too much since the Bulldogs had already beaten Montana once this season by 16 or so, and missing the game allowed us to do some additional shopping.

I just discovered an interesting cross platform XHTML related product over at mozquito.org. It looks like they have some fairly interesting stuff in the works there.

I succeeded in doing a little bit of shopping yesterday, and it looks like I’m about to do some more here. I still have quite a bit to get done in this coming week unfortunately.

I picked up The Iron Giant on DVD while I was shopping yesterday. In case you hadn’t heard, it’s a great animated film with something for kids and adults. It’s also one of the first films to fully integrate a CG character with traditional animation, and does it quite well.

Whew! I am incredibly tired right now. It’s been a long tiring day. I did manage to vote after work for the first time in a couple years. Mary voted for the first time ever!

After voting tonight it occurred to me that senior citizens always seem to be the people running the places I’ve gone to vote at. I wonder if that’s merely because they’re the main group of citizens in our country that have a lot of free time on a given Tuesday or perhaps they come from an era that takes voting a little more seriously then many younger people do. Considering the levels of voter apathy these days does that mean that someday when we’re all senior citizens they’ll be problems staffing the voting booths? Oh wait, it’ll all be done on the Internet by then anyway right?

Not only is today Halloween, but it’s also the first day after daylight savings time. It always seems to take me a little while to get in sync with the change when we start monkeying with the time of day. Now I’m probably going to be getting hungry before I leave work the next week or two.

I saw The Story of Us this evening. Today’s high: spending time with my girlfriend. Low: having to go into work to restart the email server.

Prior to the movie I saw a much more in depth Toy Story II trailer than I had up to this point. I’m definitely looking forward to it based on what I saw. I think November and December are going to have a lot of strong movie offerings this year.

It was amazingly cold and rainy today!

Luckily it cleared up in time for Hoopfest setup to move along with out any problems.

Mary and I went to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me tonight. It was better than the first one. Yeah Baby Yeah!

I helped Ann Hutton get her new grape iMac up and running. I definitely liked the purple case.

Mary came over and hung out for a while tonight. I introduced her to StarCraft, but unfortunately I couldn’t get Conan working properly on the Apple II emulator I’ve been playing with. That was annoying.

I took Mary to her first couple Ferris summer league basketball games tonight. We started out the evening with a Team I victory over Shadle Park I in an overtime game where they played as poorly as I’ve seen them play this summer.

In the second game Team III ended up losing by about 10 to Lakeland.

My dad finally got to meet Mary as well which was good.

Ferris II beat G-Prep II by about 20 tonight and I assume that Team I beat Medical Lake (they were playing at the same time).

My mom finally got to meet Mary this evening when we went out to pick up the tape my parents made of Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Pirates was pretty good I thought, although it definitely over dramatized some characters and was factually incorrect in some ways. Still I think it did a good job of capturing the essence of the times and people.

I ate at Thai Tom’s on the Ave for the first time and it was really good. I definitely got plenty of good Thai food this week.

Afterward we headed back to Steve’s apartment for some cutthroat UNO. Holly ripped (accurately) on my card dealing skills and Mary was kicking all of our butts until she had to leave to pick up her brother at the airport.

We took a brief ice cream break at that point and went to MixUp. Jesse and I indulged ourselves in some Decadence (a raspberry, chocolate ice cream, and brownies mix).

I finished up the night with my friends by watching Better Off Dead”. I enjoyed the movie, but I was pretty tired and it didn’t seem quite as good as it used to.

I took Mary to her first Theatre Sports at the Market Theatre. It was my second time and completely awesome. The ice skating rink sketch was completely amazing!

Ironically, with Mary gone this week I ended up only having one day of basketball games and that day was today.

I spent the first game videotaping Team I playing G-Prep. They didn’t play all that great and lost, although Erik Benzel was awesome! He scored 25 points single handedly on shots he mostly created for himself.

In the second game of the night Team II handled Davenport pretty easily and won by about 20.

My apartment has been really hot lately!

I’ve been enjoying a strawberry rhubarb pie that Mary gave me immensely!

Today like most Sunday’s ended up being a pretty uneventful day for me. I did get in a nice phone conversation with Mary, who is over in Seattle house sitting for her brother.

My apartment has been pretty hot lately. I may have to pick up a little air conditioner soon.

Exciting times!

I finally met Mary’s parents when I went over to her house to pick her up after work. They seemed pretty nice as I expected they would be. For dinner Mary and I stopped at Rock City for an excellent Italian/American dinner. The focacia bread was awesome and my pasta with scallops, snap peas, and juicy pineapple chunks was scrumptious!

We watched two quality videos once we got back to my place. Austin Powers and The Whole Wide World (which Jesse had reccomended to me quite a while ago).

Tonight was a big night for basketball as Ferris Teams I, II, and III all had games. Team III lost again, Team II played well and won, and I left prior to Team I’s game.

Mary and I spent the evening working on special bead necklaces for all 18 of the children she works with in the mornings. It was fun, but tiring work concentrating on all those little beads.

Today was an awesome day! Mary came over around noon and we walked over to 4th and Jefferson to catch the shuttle to Artfest over in Brownes Addition. It’s been going on for over ten years, but neither one of us had heard about it prior to seeing info on it in the Inlander this week.

Artfest turned out to be a pretty neat little festival. Definitely an order of magnitude smaller than Bumbershoot, but there was plenty of good artwork, good food, and interesting stuff going on. There was even some live music, specifically blues and country western while we were there, but certainly not limited to that over the course of the weekend.

Artfest wasn’t even the highlight of the day’s fun though. That night we made the short walk from my apartment down to Interplayers to catch their season finale, Moon Over Buffalo. I hadn’t seen a live play in ages and this one was completely hilarious! Mary and I are definitely planning to catch a lot more plays.

Mary and I went to The Matrix tonight. I of course really like it since it was my third time around.

I think we’re going to try to catch The Phantom Menace again fairly soon as well.

I got to bed before midnight last night and ended up getting up before eight this morning feeling pretty well rested. It’s kind of nice that I got an early start in that I have plenty of laundry and picking up I can do before Mary comes over.

The weather today is kind of dreary and overcast. The doppler radar doesn’t show any precipitation on this side of the state although they are predicting some showers later.

I got in a fair amount of computer gaming this weekend which was pretty fun. I actually finally advanced to the Protoss levels and beat the first couple of those.
We had four of our Macs networked together out at the lake, but we never actually got around to networked StarCraft. We did get in some serious Marathon action though.

Mary made it home safely last night, now we just have to figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow.

Today is the day of Mary’s big presentation in Chicago.

Mary reports that her presentation went really well!

It’s kind of a weird hazy day in Spokane today. It’s definitely not as nice as it has been the last few days. It was still pretty sunny and warm on my bike ride home though.

Looks like I’m going to be headed out for a little lake action this weekend with Steve. Jet skis, computers, and friends- what more could you ask for in a weekend? Mary being back from Chicago of course! LOL

I finally started looking at all my retirement investment information for work.
I’d been putting it off for a while, but since I need to have it done by the end of the day tomorrow I figured I’d better decide.

The main two options I was evaluating last night were Fidelity and TIAA-CREF. Both are pretty good options, but I think Fidelity isn’t as flexible about letting you move your money around between funds.

Mary graced me with another phone call last night which was of course very cool. It sounds like the highlight of her day was almost getting her head taken off by a cross carried by a man dressed like Jesus who kept walking up and down the street near her hotel.

I didn’t think to check my messages until I came back into my apartment after putting a load of laundry into the dryer. Sure enough there was a message from my lovely girlfriend Mary. She had actually called at 10 AM this morning while I was at work just to say hi and tell me she was safely in Chicago.

It was really nice to hear her voice and know that things were okay at her end. Oddly enough just after I finished that last sentence I ended up taking a three or so hour break from updating my site to talk to a certain someone in the windy city.

Today was Jason saves the day for his family and friend’s computers.

First I went out to my family’s house and got their iMac working again. That was fairly painless since I’d already started the previous day before leaving for more pressing engagements.

After I got done with the iMac I headed back into town to take a look at Brian’s computer. He’s never been able to connect at speeds greater that 21.6kbps with his internal modem. After fiddling with settings and running 3Com’s phone line test we determined that he has two problems. His phone line and the internal modem itself. So I’m not sure what he’ll end up doing.

I ate at Taco Bell twice yesterday, mainly because they’re having that Phantom Menace contest and I want to win. Yes, I know I have no chance.

The strangest thing happened while I was waiting in the drive through while getting my dinner at Taco Bell. I looked in my rear view mirror and the girl driving the car behind me totally reminded me of Mary. She had similarly cut red hair, and although her eyes and nose were in shadow her chin, jaw, and mouth seened amazingly similar.

Strange coincidence… or something else entirely?

While fiddling around with Kristen we discovered that I had managed to get a little sunburned yesterday during my 15 minute walk from Speedy Auto Glass back to my office. I was wearing a white t-shirt and the rays must have gone straight through to my shoulders and neck.

I went out to my family’s house to find my copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany so Mary could read it on her trip to Chicago and found out that their iMac had some issues.

The bad part was my initial attempt to solve the problem only made things worse! I ended up starting the system software reinstall process and promising to return the next day.

I managed to get my windshield replaced this afternoon to the tune of $172. Good thing I had been planning on doing it for a while.

The weather has been great all weekend, but I’ve actually been staying indoors and doing other things for most of it. Hopefully the weather will continue through the rest of the month.

I ended up staying up really late working on a CD for Mary before she leaves for Chicago. I think it turned out really well though so it was worth it.