it may not seem like the most important factor but i may start choosing my friends based on their birthdays. i just can’t take one more september birthday.

approaching mere hours to submit your photo to the everyman photo contest…

hell, the fancy javascript counter’s got me rabidly anticipating the deadline. but don’t tell troy its only because i expect his counter will do unnatural things when it gets to zero.

a neighbor gave away a piano today and i was the lucky one to get it. and even though no one in the house knows how to play i’m oddly much happier just knowing its here.

it’s getting more difficult every day to generate content that isn’t centered around my experiences raising kids. but lucky for you if it does, my kids are pretty fascinating.

i love the sense of humor in this…

ceiling mural in a smoker’s lounge

i’d been working with t.y. for a week and a half when this happened…

me: what’s wrong t?
t.y.: i’ve had a migraine headache for four days now and the medicine my doctor prescribed is making me loopy.
me: well, let me know when your leaving so i can make sure to get out of here ahead of you.
t.y.: don’t worry i live that way?
(pointing up as much as any other direction)
me: which way is “that way”?
t.y.: chapel hill.
(seems to me that everyone who lives in chapel hill likes to think they’re the only one lucky enough to do so)
me: that’s the way i’m going…
t.y.: where do you live?
me: near the intersection of [street] and [street].
t.y.: in [neighborhood]?
me: yes…
t.y.: where?
me: on [street].
t.y.: do you know ethan?
me: um, yeah, he’s my son…
t.y.: oh, your not going to believe this. i’m [son]‘s father.
me: no way!

t.y. came to our house for ethan’s third birthday party just two days before i started the new job and a number of times prior to that and yet neither one of us had recognized the other at work…

“the devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today.”
-venezuelan president hugo chavez referring to george w. bush while addressing the u.n. general assembly on 20 september 2006

as if my own spam weren’t enough, i’ve got some douche bag in the third world wrapping his spam in an envelope with my domain name and i’m getting all his delivery failures.

keeping up with the web 2.0 hipsters the idea archive is now all dhtml and ajax-ed up.

and since i’m not really all that hip, let me know if you notice its broken…

syriana spoiler coming next. If you haven’t seen it the movie or don’t want to hear this, stop reading now.

natalie’s isn’t usually the first to sniff out the plot in a movie and as evidence of that point we had to stop and rewind syriana twice within the first ten minutes to figure out if bob had intended to blow up his happy missile customers.

but since having kids, she has gotten crazy good spidey sense for knowing when kids are in jeopardy and matt damon hadn’t been on screen for more than two minutes before she declared “something bad is going to happen to these kids”.

sure enough, half way through the movie there was a kid floating in the pool.

again we stopped the movie and this time i got a ten minute (or better) sermon on how there should be a black triangle or something on movie boxes warning all sensitive mothers that kid evil exists in a film. and, this wouldn’t be the only time i’d hear that sermon over the weekend either…

when i was twenty years old i bought myself a brand new 4×4 pickup truck as incentive to give up smoking.

a week ago, i bought myself a 23 inch apple cinema display to inspire kicking ca phe sua da (vietnamese style iced coffee).

for the first time in nearly two years i’m using microsoft windows for my work desktop and in all that time it didn’t get a lick better.