Camping pics slideshow...

Hey y'all. As promised, here are some pics from our camping trip with my in-laws at Oak Mountain State Park in Birmingham, AL. Kelly was working on a funny email about all the things we learned on the trip, and I am trying to get her to actually blog it herself. But until then, suffice it to say that we had a good time though it was VERY HOT. I don't have time to write more but hopefully Kelly will later...

Fishing Today

Well, we and Kelly's sister and her family are out camping this weekend at Oak Mountain State Park in Birmingham, AL. My brother-in-law Richard and I are out fishing with the boys (Connor, Luke, my nephews Joe and Anthony) this morning and here's a couple of pics from my Treo... Unfortunately, moments after the pics of the snake were taken, my nephew Anthony threw a rock and killed it. I will post more pics via Flickr when we get home tomorrow....

"I hope Tulio chews your balls off!"

So, we have given up on trying to get the boys to actually DO anything productive this summer. We have tried coaxing, begging, rewarding, punishing, restricting, behavior charting, fear-of-God'ing, and anything-else-you-can-think-of to get them to read, pick up crap, not break things, or get off their butts to go outside instead of watch cartoons and play Pokemon Diamond and Pearl all day. Nothing has worked.

As of earlier this week, all TV channels remotely interesting to them have been blocked. All portable electronic gaming devices - Nintendo DS times three - with all games, accessories, instruction manuals have been removed from the home. All reference to Pokemon in general have been removed as well.

Well, now that their vices have been eliminated, they are literally stir crazy.

Yesterday's incident? Our wrought iron, glass top table on the deck is now just our wrought iron frame. Oh, and about 50-60 glass shards.

Today they were a bit less destructive, though no less annoying. Kelly bought a teacup chihuahua back in the fall, named Tulio (from Miguel and Tulio from El Dorado). He's close to full grown, and all of two pounds. Anyway, Connor and Luke were literally terrorizing him today, chasing him all over the house, barricading him up with every cushion manufactured this side of the Chattahoochee, carrying him around like a potato sack over the shoulders, teasing him with toys, yelling at him, etc. Our Middle Child, our Ferris Beuller (everyone loves him but he gets into everything), Luke is the worst. Tulio growls the minute Luke grabs him because Luke terrorizes him so much.

Kelly has had it with the boys by this point this summer (even stopping by the office the other day to inform me she has made the decision that they are all going to daycare next summer, including the 11 year old...LOL), and lost it with the boys today. In a fit of mental rage, she yelled out at Luke...

"I hope Tulio chews your balls off!"

And of course Connor, our literal-interpretation, pragmatic guy he is, simply and matter-of-factly stated, "Man, Luke, I guess you won't be able to have kids or get a girlfriend or have a wife or anything. Well, I guess that's not true. You'll still have your penis."

And walked off.



Welcome to our world.

Poster Child for Stooopidity...

So could this be any sadder a comment on the stupidity of people just to get a rush of adrenaline?

"Hey, I know what we can do! Let's pay a couple thousand bucks to fly over to Spain and rent a hotel. Then lets puts on cute little white outfits with red scarves and be chased down little cobblestone streets by raging bulls! I think that would be cool!"

Welcome to pain, my friend.

Idiot.

Xbox 360 @ $199?! Hey we can dream, right?

Amazingly, I found this report initially on a PS3 site. But apparently Shane Kim has stated in an interview that he feels $199 is the mass market price point and that Microsoft is definitely working toward that goal!

Can you imagine the effect of this on the console wars if the 360 (even with its hardware problems currently under revision) came out at $200?! It'd simply be a two man race between Microsoft and Nintendo. All I can say is... wow.

Full article of interview can be found here at 1Up.com...

Corporate Idiots vs. Consumer Sheep

I am just livid. Where do I start?

There are just so many sources of corporate idiocy and arrogance that it is hard to find a starting point.

But let's start with Palm and the Treo 700p.

1. Palm releases the Treo 700p as its new flagship smartphone early last summer.
2. Everybody hails it as the best overall smartphone out there.
3. As the 700p gets more and more owners, slowly and deep within the bowels of website forums rumblings begin of problems with the 700p.
• There are significant lags in switching between apps.
• There are numerous freezes (sometimes as long as 15 seconds), hang ups, and resets.
• Bluetooth pairing is inconsistent or nonexistent with headsets and handsfree sets.
• There is skipping in audio when playing mp3's.
• I am sure there are more but this is what I could think of off the top of my head.
4. As these rublings get louder and louder to the point of a roar, Palm then begins to respond:
• There are no known issues with the Treo 700p.
• There may be some minor, isolated issues with the 700p that are due primarily to user error.
• Some minor and isolated issues are noted with the 700p due to the shared architecture between the 700p and the 700w (windows mobile version of the Treo).
• We are becoming aware of some isolated issues with the functionality of the 700p.
• We ackowledge that there are some minor issues with the 700p and we will issue a patch soon to repair these issues.
• We have come to understand that the issues with the 700p are more significant than can be repaired via a simple patch. Our engineers are in the process of developing a full firmware update maintenance release to repair these issues. The update will be available at the end of Q1 2007.
• We have missed the Q1 2007 release date, as issues have proven more complicated to solve than expected. We expect the MR update to be availble at the end of April.
• We have missed the expected release date of end of April. We will inform you at a later date when the update should be available.
• We can now report that that MR update will be available to consumers the week of May 28.
• There has been a slight delay in the MR update. The Sprint version of the update will be made available the following week. We do not have a release date identified for the Verizon version of the update (no explanation. ever.).
• The Sprint version of the update is now available for download!
5. Now watch the fun....
• Loads of people download and begin to update their Sprint Treo 700p's. And promptly Treo after Treo is getting trashed or "bricked" only to have to be completely replaced by Sprint or Palm.
• After only two to three days, the Sprint MR update is pulled from Palm's website.
  
• A couple of weeks go by, and they make it again available.
• Sprint customer begin to successfully install the update, only to find MORE problems with the Treo AFTER update.
1. Treo's are now making unidentified tones for no reason, EVEN IF THE PHONE IS COMPLETELY MUTED.
2. Sprint customers begin to notice that ability to connect to the data network is highly inconsistent or completely unavailable post-MR update.
• Still no word from Palm about Verizon update.
• Weeks later, Verizon update begins to slowly show up with technicians in stores to update their phones in stock. Many Verizon Treo owners have their 700p's update in store by technician, ONLY TO HAVE THE SAME SET OF PROBLEMS noted by Sprint users (unidentified tones, little to no data network connectivity), including many for whom the update did not solve many of the pre-MR update problems.

I'm one of those lucky Verizon Treo 700p owners who now gets to sit and wait to receive their replacement Treo because the maintenance update created more problems than I had BEFORE the update.

This is a great way to treat your customers and test your product, huh? Well, now check this one out...

Now on to Microsoft...

Man, I love my Xbox 360, but let's face it. It has been plagued with hardware problems from the beginning. I got my original 360 on Launch Day, and I am already on #4 due to hardware failures - one disc drive failure and two red ring of death. I have friends that have gone through 7-8 of them already.

Microsoft has had an eerily similar position as Palm had above for the Treo 700p:

1. There are no problems with the Xbox 360. Hardware failures have been due to user error - moving the console while playing, poor ventilation of system resulting in user-created overheating.
2. We are tracking hardware failures on the Xbox 360. Hardware failure rates are well within the typical 3-5%.
3. We understand that due to some QA problems in some of our factories, some launch units have had some concerns with overheating. Customers with units purchased in the first three months of Launch can have their units repaired or replaced for free.
4. We now realize that the hardware failure rates for the Xbox 360 are higher than expected and something we are prepared to rectify. "We have heard our customers' complaints." (Note this is 18 months after launch, and closely following industry reports of 33% and higher hardware failure rates.) As such, we are extending the warranty on all Xbox 360 units to three full years.
5. And the final nail. Microsoft today admits that ALL Xbox 360's are defective.

So here we have two major companies with major hardware releases that are to be their flagships, and they utterly screw them up. Furthermore, they LIE about it for well over a year. At least Microsoft is making repairs and extending warranties to three full years. Palm, the crappy people that they are, not only denied it, but when they finally did admit it and released updates, released such poorly tested updates they created even bigger problems than the ones the updates were to fix!

And the saddest part? We'll keep buying them. There will always be a 360 in my home (until Microsoft releases another console). As much as I have wanted to dump my Treo, it simply remains the best overall smartphone on the market. I can't make myself dump it for another manufacturer. So I am no better. The Corporate Idiots know our country is full of Consumer Sheep. They know that if "they build it, we will buy."

Just ask Palm.
Just ask Microsoft.
Just ask Apple.

Admit it, we are all a bunch of spineless technological gadget sluts. We get angry about defective product, complain about it, and never do anything else. We take their abuse over and over, and we must like it. Because we keep coming back for more.

Of vans and tents and boys and rain....

Just some of the latest junk that typically occurs around my house....

So we're heading out to Lake Harding (for you Valley folks, The Backwaters) to hang out with my parents at their place. I usually like to go in the truck because, frankly, after last year's fiasco with the 1996 Dodge Grand Caravan (here and here), I just don't trust it for anything more than tooling around town. There is more room in the van, though, so we load everything up and head out. We don't even get out of the neighborhood when we do the typical "we forgot something and have to go back." I head on back and pull down into the driveway...

...to digress... Kelly, had noted to me a few months ago the van was doing something weird when sitting and idling. It would just bog down and at times would "pop" into gear as she left the intersection...

..back to the story... Kelly goes in an grabs whatever-it-was, and hops back in the van. I throw it in reverse and start backing up the driveway. All of a sudden, the engine starts to rev up like I am grinding it out, yet the van is slowly rolling back down the driveway. I think, "Man, did I accidentally pop it into Neutral?" I check. Nope. Still in Drive. Uh oh. As a typical I'm-a-guy-so-we-just-hit-stuff-to-fix-it, I just rev the accelerator up more, and eventually it "pops" into gear and we start backing up the driveway. And when I say pop, I mean pop. Almost got whiplash from the jerk of it. So anyway, we back on out, but then when I put it into Drive, it just sputters and jerks and pops the 100 yards to the end of our street. That's it. I "pop" in back in reverse (which actually works this time) and back it down into the driveway. Unload everything. Load the truck up. Head out. But God always provides. We get down to my parents and are telling the story. My grandmother has been living in an assisted living home for the last year or so, and has a 1992 Corsica - with only 20,000 miles on it! She has been saying she needs someone to keep it up and drive it "until she needs it again," (Um, yeah.) So Kelly now at least has reliable transportation until we can get rid of the van for something else.

Now on to yesterday...

So we have been having some conflicts with Luke's friend across the street lately - he tends to try and rule the roost with the boys and can say some mean things at times - the latest was a series of name calling that started between him and Connor that ended up with pine cones being thrown at Connor and a switch from a bush being whipped across Connor's leg. It kind of came to a head yesterday when his mom stopped by and Kelly could not hold it in anymore. Nothing was really resolved, but at least Kelly had the chance to let his mom know more what has been going on. Of course she defended her son, but began to question him about these things and see inconsistencies in his report. Hopefully things will start to get better. Anyway, all this to say how surprised I was when I get a call from Kelly saying we are having a neighborhood camp out in our backyard last night. Connor, Luke, and three other boys (one of whom is the one I just talked about). So I get home, get the tent out of the attic, set it all up, and Kelly starts grilling hot dogs. Things start to go downhill. Connor, who doesn't know how to do anything gently or carefully, is having trouble with the tent zipper. And RIPS the zipper completely in half. First I thought he just separated the zipper mechanism from the zipper. I get out there... LIVID, MIND YOU... with my screwdriver and pliers trying to re-attach it. And the cheap metal of the zipper mechanism just shatters. Gone. Five pieces. Then we look closer and see that not only did he separate to mechanism from the zipper, he literally ripped the zipper IN HALF... Yes, the TEETH. Ripped in half. NOT the material. THE ZIPPER. I lost it at this point, and must censor my behavior description. I didn't kill anyone or curse like a sailor, though my mind was fantasizing about all kinds of terrible torture and creating my own language. (After that, every little thing set me of for the night. But that is another story altogether...) So they continue to play, and eventually it starts to get dark and they start with the smores....Then then rumble. Then the flash of light in the distance. Camping in the rain is one thing. Camping in a thunderstorm is something completely different. SO we quickly grab everything from the tent and bring it inside. While Kelly is getting them set up in the house, I run back out to zip up all the windows in the tent. It is already getting wet inside because it is raining so hard. I get everything zipped up... except the busted zipper at the bottom of the tent door. And just my luck, that door is at the top of the incline of our yard..... and water is literally streaming inside like a creek. I am sure I have a pool in my tent this morning.... and we still have to figure out how to get it fixed.... before we go camping in two weeks.

Oh, and Connor? He's still alive. But not allowed to ever touch a zipper again. Ever.

3 months and counting...w00t!

Well, I just made reservations again at The Overlook Inn in Ellijay, GA. After Kelly and the boys had been out of town for 6 weeks last summer Kelly and I went and stayed the night there and fell in love with the place! Very romantic and beautiful scenery. We decided it would be an annual event, as she finally got it - she FINALLY realized that we, as a husband and wife, HAVE to get away every now and then to remind us of our roles OTHER than mom/dad. So we have been talking about it and decided to do a quick fall trip this year when it is cooler and the leaves are colorful.

We stayed in the the Grand Gahuti last year and planned on staying there this year too for nostalgia's sake. That is, until I saw their new addition. You see, the Overlook Inn, though very private, is still a small B&B with a communal sitting area with fireplace, etc. Let's just say that when we go on these trips we don't want to be looking over our shoulder to see who's around. Well, they have added a new, separate, "secluded" cabin - the "Ananda". When I asked just how secluded it was, the owner kind of giggled and said, "Don't worry, you can't see nothin' except the view of the overlook..."... BONUS! Hmmm... let's see....

• Brand New Spa Cabin
• Elegant 3 Course Gourmet Breakfast at the Inn each morning
• Complimentary Wine & Cheese Tray in your cabin the night of arrival
• Join us at the Inn each night for Complimentary Wine and Cheese Hour
• Steam Shower for 2
• Cedar Lined Sauna inside cabin
• Satellite TV - CD / DVD
• Stacked Rock Wood-Burning Fireplace
• Fantastic Mountain View - Very Secluded
• Gas Grill
• Use of the Inn Extensive Library
• Egyptian Cotton Robes
• Hairdryer - Shampoo, Soap & Spa Salts

Um, yeah, baby! Check out these pictures - the place looks beautiful! Can't wait! Though I don't know how much I will be able to report back afterwards.... hehehe. For all my buddies living in the area, you should really check this place out, quiet, romantic, the food is great, and the people are super nice!

I've gone widget happy!

Help!

I finally took the plunge and updated my blog to the new Blogger template format (formally known as Blogger Beta)... First let me say, that when they say you will lose all your former formatting, they ain't just whistlin' Dixie! It was quite the pain in the butt to recreate the color scheme and layout I had previously, especially since the html coding looks quite different in the new xml/widget format than the old straight html format. Spent most of my free time yesterday recreating it. There are some bugs still in the process of updating it with the new widgets (i.e., some give you errors when you try to update them or edit them, but you can't delete them or they duplicate on the page). I finally had to create a secondary blog and transfer stuff back and forth to get it right.

But once I finally got it done, I am getting widget happy! Blogger only has a few Blogger widgets that they offer, but the cool thing is you can make all your own or copy from other types of widgets! The only ones on this page so far that are actually Blogger widgets are the Blog Archive and the Newsfeed at the bottom of the page. All the others are just HTML/javascript code added as widgets, or widgets for other applications that you can add as custom HTML widgets - the LaGrange Weather and Calvin and Hobbes widgets actually are copied over from yourminis.com. All in all, widgets are just cool for folks like me who have very little coding knowledge. Ever since I discovered them, I have been surfing for new cool ones to add to the blog - stayed up til almost 2 am perusing the 'net last night...LOL... One thing I can see, though, is that I am gonna have to be careful that I don't make this place look all junky with too many widgets!

Got a favorite widget you can't live without? Lemme hear about it!

Atlanta Zoo slideshow

Cool!

Finally figured out how to put a Flickr slideshow directly in a post. I figure you people will be more likely to look at the pics if they're actually here than having to put forth the effort to click on the Flickr badge in the sidebar to go there and see them. Come to think of it, that's actually a sad comment on the state of our impatience in this society today. Geez.

Anyway, enjoy! And sorry in advance for the Baboon porn show... the guy was in the mood evidently that day... Just watch and you'll see what I am talking about...

Xbox 360 repairs... Microsoft finally owns up to the problem

It's about danged time that Microsoft grew some balls and did the right thing, owning up to the SIGNIFICANT hardware failures on the 360. Reports have recently come out that as much as 33% of 360's fail! Well at least they are gonna do the right thing and spend the cash to fix the problem and revitalize trust in them with the consumers. Now if I could just get Palm to listen about the crap hardware that is the Treo 700p. Grrr....

(Click on the image to view the article...)

Our day at Atlanta Zoo...

Just a quick posting mentioning the pics from our day at the Atlanta Zoo this week... for more pics check out the Flickr badge in the sidebar over there....

Where my web time is divided....

So I know a bunch of you have complained about me never updating my blog. And you were right. I was lazy. I was busy. I was a procrastinator. Pick your reason. But you can see that I have tried to update more regularly lately. But just so you know, my time is divided these days... I have started a website to be used as a men's ministry resource for the churches in my area, and since I have very little web design ability, it is always slow going... But also, I do blogging there too. So first, I couldn't keep up with blogging here, and now I am trying to keep up TWO blogs...

Yeah, that should be a trainwreck waiting to happen. Anyone wanna watch?

I hate days like this...

So here it is.

4:17 pm.

I have been at the office since 7:20 am. Guess how many patients I have seen.

None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

• I was supposed to have a 4-hour psychoeducational evaluation at 8:00am.
• I was supposed to have therapy appointments at 1:00, 2:00, and 3:00 pm.
• I was supposed to have a session to provide feedback to parents on a previously completed evaluation at 4:00 pm.
• And I was supposed to have a last therapy appointment at 5:00 pm today.

Wow. I think this is the first time in my 10 years of seeing patients I have not had one single patient show for their appointment. As we say around here...

Welcome to Summer at Family Psychology Associates.

I mean, no-show rates always go up in the summer, but today was ridiculous! I guess that is what I get for trying to see patients the week of July 4th. At least I took tomorrow and Wednesday off, so at least I know I won't make any money those days. But coming to work all day hoping to make some cash and "not gettin' diddly" (can anyone tell me what movie that phrase is based on?) sucks out the wazoo.

And the thing that drives me the most crazy about a day like today is "now I have time to catch up on paperwork." Yep. Been writing reports and filling out forms and returning phone calls literally all stinkin' day. There's a reason why I try to stay busy with patients... TO AVOID ALL THAT STUFF!

Man, maybe the next couple of days' vacation will ease the pain...

Oh, and by the way, Happy July 4th!