My mom and dad were married 40 years ago today in Agios Vasilios, Greece! They have raised a beautiful family and are the best parents in the whole world!!!

Thanks, JT$, for sending me this sweet video. It’s not often we get to see a video of a car chase, other than cops, through the streets and highways of Metro Detroit.

Chief Designer of the GT, Camilo Pardo, being chased by a Z06 down I-94. 160mph+

The Z06 runs out of gas and has to get off at Middlebelt.

I think there’s a Lambo in there somewhere, too…3 cars total.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICLw_Y-WuuI

Michelle, Benjamin, and myself had a wonderful weekend in South Haven with our good friends, Dave, Sarah, and Ellie!

The weather was great, the drive was great, the food was great, the lake was great. I can’t think of anything that was bad. Oh wait, someone left a July 2005 Playboy magazine in our nightstand and they didn’t do maid service on Sunday. Other than that…great times!

In this photo, Benjamin is showing me where the bar is. :D

Eric got his Macbook yesterday and I wanted to share with him some of the apps I have grown to love using Mac OS X.

A site that I really like is actually this Greek kid who is interning at Yahoo this summer.
http://www.pstam.com – he likes to talk up Mac stuff all the time, so it’s a pretty good site and his Feedburner readership has nearly doubled in the past month or so since he got the Yahoo gig.

http://www.macupdate.com – great site, and it even has stuff filterable by Intel-compatible (Universal).

Apps:
VirtueDesktops (http://www.virtuedesktops.info) – desktop manager. Pretty damn nice, actually.
Doodim (http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/products/doodim) – dims background apps. Pretty cool, since the UI is so “brilliant” at times, it gets a bit distracting.
Adium (http://www.adiumx.com) – best IM app I’ve ever used, even on the PC. Great community making tons of plugins for this thing, too.
Parallels Workstation (http://www.parallels.com) – virtualization software. Works great.
Transmit FTP (http://www.panic.com/transmit) – FTP software.
TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml) – editor. Free version of BBEdit. Good overall editor. Should like it.
PictureSync (http://holocore.com/?PictureSync) – tool that uploads photos FOR you to Flickr and other services. Free, nice.
PandoraMan (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21464) – plays Pandora in a little window. Slick. Written using Cocoa, the Mac’s version of .NET or MFC.
OnyX (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582) – Mac equivalent of TweakUI. Great.
StuffIT (http://www.stuffit.com/mac/index.html) – uncompresses everything. Great tool.
Growl (http://www.growl.info) – pretty slick notifier that works with almost all apps on the Mac.
WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom) – old school editor. Fullscreen is kind of like being in a dark room, just writing.
Mori (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/mori) – notebook app. I’ve tried others, like Circus Ponies’ competitor and BBEdit’s company’s Yojimbo. Mori is the coolest, and it keeps letting you use it for free. Seem like cool folks over there at Hog Bay Software.

So, the salmon fishing experience was a prosperous one for me. Sean was kind enough to let me bag the first of two salmon we had on our multiple trips out to sea. Greg caught the 2nd one shortly after I caught the first one. The remaining two trips out yielded no fish (I was absent from the 3rd trip out).

Other than the fishing, we had good times and good laughs…lots of them. It’s always nice to see Sean, Bill, and Carlo. It was also a pleasure to meet Greg, now a resident of St. Joe/Benton Harbor.

Maybe it’s summer, or maybe it’s just that I’m in one of my down web-cycles. I’m finding myself NOT visiting my normal sites as frequently as I normally do. These sites are digg, Ars Technica, Tom’s Hardware, Newsvine, Ben’s Bargains, Flickr, popurls.com, dinofilias.com/blog, scottrouvalis.com, johnturner.com, and the list goes on and on.

Well, this morning, I must have had a brain burp and decided to go to Newsvine to see what may be up with Israel and Lebanon and a horrid news story jumped out! Some dude in Colorado admitted to 48 murders over the past three decades. I mean, I felt bad killing birds with a bb gun when I was a little kid from time to time. 48 people!! Holy shit!

On a lighter note, we’ve been having a dream come true in the making with Benjamin. Just watching him explore things, learn things, learn new sounds and words, get ready for bedtime with a good book to be read by mommy or daddy, etc. has been amazing!

What’s been up lately?

Fireworks we did with Kim and Matt:

A Day at the Rochester Municipal Park while I was off the week of July 4th:

Some July fun:

Some more July fun:

Emma’s 2nd Birthday Party:

Oh, I am going Salmon fishing this evening, and hopefully tomorrow, for the first time in my life. I’m meeting up with Sean in Ludington (on Lake Michigan). I’m pretty excited!!

I was in St. Louis last week for a work conference. Place seemed kind of slow for having a whole “downtown” look and feel.

Anyway,

Ben, enjoying Audrey and Joshua’s birthday party weeks ago.

Okay, I’ve been pretty slow on the blog updates, which is what I say about once a month or so. Maybe it’s because it seems to take FOREVER for my blog admin frontend to come up.

Well, hopefully Flock will change that.

technorati tags:flock, blogging

This is awesome. Thanks to Torilla Man for this one.

A Small White Dot

A kindergarten class had a homework assignment to find out about something exciting and relate it to the class the next day. When the time came to present what they’d found, the first little boy walked up to the front of the class made a small white dot on the blackboard and sat back down. Puzzled, the teacher asked him just what it was.

“It’s a period,’’ said the little boy.

“Well, I can see that,’’ she said, ‘‘but what is so exciting about a period?’’

‘‘Damned if I know,’’ said the little boy, ‘‘but this morning my sister was missing one, Daddy had a heart attack, Mommy fainted, and the man next door shot himself.”

JT$ sent me this. I heard this dude on the radio last week but forgot to check him out. Often times, I hear stuff in the car I want to check out, but I forget by the time I get to a computer. Anyway, thanks JT$, one of my surrogate memories!

[Evolution of Dance at YouTube](http://www.blog.peterfilias.com/Evolution of Dance at YouTube)

This is a great article that explains the ins and outs of what goes on inside a PC. Extremetech usually does a good job of laying out articles in an easy to read and easy to follow format.

A Beginner’s Guide to Everything that goes on Inside that PC

Maybe I’ll save this and use it for when I need to go over how a PC works. Thanks for doing this, Extremetech!

We took Ben up to Mackinac Island this past weekend (Friday - Sunday morning). Had an absolutely wonderful time. We rented bikes and rode around the island, giving Ben his first bike ride, ever. Besides sleeping for about 5 of the 8 miles, he seemed to really enjoy the open road!

We had a nice time getting to visit with Frank and his family (all but little Freddy).

Click this image to see the rest of the photos

I’ve been neglecting my people by not sharing the photos I’ve been taking as of late.

This picture of Benjamin makes me laugh. Click it for more.