…stupid super bowl…

• 15 - Different animals in this year’s Top O’ The Food Chain Chili.
• beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, buffalo, elk, venison, ostrich, yak, llama, kangaroo, wild boar, pheasant, pork, alligator
• 10 - Previous record number of animals set last year.
• antelope, but no llama
• 8 - Types of beans in the chili.
• kidney, black, pinto, garbanzo, cannellini, fava, borlotti, adzuki
• 5 - Types of “onions” in the chili.
• red, white, yellow, shallot, garlic
• 14 - Seconds it took Devon Hester to give the Bears the lead.
• 0 - Times the Colts turned the ball over in the second half.
• 16:08 - Amount of time that the Colts had the ball more than the Bears.
• $2,600,000 - cost of a 30 second advertisement during the Super Bowl.
• 93,000,000 - Number of Americans who watched the Super Bowl.
• 208 - Days until “next year” begins.

daBearsdaBearsdaBears

With apologies to Laura. Apparently it is going to be a long two weeks for her.

…now if i can just get anna to say “Ditka” by next sunday…

UPDATE:  Apparently, the Man doesn’t want us to see the Super Bowl Shuffle.

So some browsers (cough Internet Explorer cough) were having trouble with with the photo gallery. I think I’ve got the problem fixed, but if you have any problems getting the pictures (or with anything else), please let me know.

If you are interested in the gory details, look below or view the Photon forum.
(more…)

Hmm… what’s been going on in Denver lately…?

I think that basketball team we have might have been in the news lately for something or other. Oh yeah, and it snowed a little bit the other day. In fact, the blizzard and the Iverson trade even got tangled together with Iverson not being able to make it into town until a few hours before tip.

But importantly (and photogenically) that Anna kid turned one somewhere amidst all that snow. We got a few obligatory cupcake photos.

Also, plenty of pictures of kids playing in the snow.

Details of my 6 hour drive home from work on Wednesday not included…

• 46,000,000 - Number of Americans without health insurance.
• 8,300,000 - Number of children in the U.S. without health insurance.
• 73.8% - Amount that U.S. health insurance premiums have increased since the year 2000.
• 5 - Consecutive years that the percentage of Americans with job-based health insurance has declined.
• 0.46% - Percent of U.S. health care costs related to malpractice claims.
• 31% - Percent of U.S. health care expenditures that go towards administative costs.
• 15% - Percent of European health care expenditures that go towards administrative costs.
• $6,100 - Amount the U.S. spends per person on health care.
• $2,550 - Average per person spent on health care by the 30 OECD countries.
• 22nd - Rank of U.S. life expectancy among the 30 OECD countries.

No, really.

Pictures.

That are current.

Posted. On this site.

Yes, at long last we’ve actually got some current pictures of the girls up.

A couple of sets of shots from various birthday parties.

Plus some current fashion modeling (she’s dressed as a witch in case that isn’t immediately obvious). Please note, the hat, wand, broomstick, boots (so the dragon doesn’t burn her feet), wings (to help her fly), and purse (for holding magic things). By far the most accessorized kid at the playground…

Also, some browsers (cough, internet explorer, cough) apparently have some problems with the code that wraps the photos.  So until I get that figured out, if you get file-not-found errors, you can skip directly to the pictures (or upgrade your browser).

With apologies to Harper’s

• 6 - Number of people in 1,000-person U.S. embassy in Baghdad who can speak Arabic fluently.
• 46 - Percent of Americans surveyed who believe that Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attacks.
• 61 - Percent of Iraqis surveyed who approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces.
• 93 - Acts of violence for a single day in July in Iraq as reported by the U.S. military.
• 1,100 - Acts of violence that the Iraq Study Group found had actually occurred on that day.
• 100,000 - Number of Iraqis fleeing their country every month.
• 152,000 - Number of U.S. troops in Iraq.
• 100,000 - Number of U.S. government contractors in Iraq.
• $348,000,000,000 - Current cost to the U.S. of the war in Iraq.
• 2,935 - U.S. Service members killed in Iraq.

OK

So it’s taking a while, but slowly the site is beginning to get somewhere. Photos are getting organized and posted, I’ve got my music uploaded so that I can listen to it from work, and the all important fantasy scoreboards seem to be mostly working. I’ll get my 100Gb’s worth yet…

I still have to upload a few more pics and update some of the directory paths, but I think I finally found a workable database driven photo system. Upload a picture once, but post it into multiple albums. Store full resolution images, but show thumbnails, or sized copies. Plus the whole thing can be wrapped so that it keeps most of the look and feel of the main site. Still have to figure out how to get sub albums to show up better, but… For the nerdily inclined, I’m using PHPWebGallery and Photon. You can see the unwrapped view here.

The music is made accessable using mp3act. It is AJAX-tastic, but doesn’t have an easy wrapper into the rest of the WordPress site. I’ll see if I can’t rig something sometime. In a bid to not get sued by The Man, I’ve password protected that section. Let me know if you want a user account.

As for everything else, I’m using a modified version of the Equix theme on WordPress.  Random quotes are made possible by McQuote.  Tweaking is done using WordPress-phpMyAdmin and EZStatic.  Email notification written by Watershed Studios.  Theoretically you can read this on your blackberry because of something Alex King wrote.  And GoDaddy is letting me keep the whole thing on their servers for the next two years for about a dollar a Gb, which seems pretty reasonable now that everything is up and running.

Now, back to the lab…

If they had the internet on computers, we could read about…

• Bathing in oil. No, not a metaphor, actually sitting in a tub of lukewarm crude oil (insert Dick Cheney joke here).
• Crayon art. None of Ella’s crayons look like this.
• Two atheists offer to send messages for the faithful after the rapture.
• “Some of our personal sins include: drunkenness, heresy, sacrilige/blasphemy, gluttony, laciviousness, and sloth. There is no way we are going to disappear into Heaven any time soon.”
• Grow your own furniture or grow your own house. Either way - not for the impatient.
• If you are going to a party near the North Carolina beach, someone is already bringing chips.

Big news day for the large meat eating animals of the world. First there is the “incident” in Florida. Think what would happen to newspaper readership if all stories got to end with the sentence:

Investigators still have to figure out why Apgar, who police said was naked and smoking crack at the time of the attack, was attacked by the alligator. - link

Then there is the story from San Diego that a killer whale attacked her trainer during a show at Sea World. Apparently this is not the first time that this large seal-eating carnivore, locked in a small pool of water, has attacked one of the slow swimming bite-sized mammals that get into her tank.

Only one of these animals will be made into a pair of boots.