
Züca unboxing
Picked up my new Zuca at the office. With this, I intend to not check any bags to San Francisco. The only thing I think that would make it 100% perfect would've if there was a specific place for a laptop. But, it's designed as a suitcase alternative.

Drobo hat
I had thought about buying one of these from Drobo's booth at the Macworld Expo. Glad I didn't. I forgot I'd be getting one for filling out a Drobo survey.

New digs
Crisper's remodeled their dining room. Also new dorky uniforms.

Twittelator's silly new splash screen
Uh, ewww.

Comfort food
Yes, exactly why I eat here every now and then.

Tonight's view
The venue where I'll be the next two hours.

Which room?
This sign was on a big door at the Pt. Charlotte United Methodist Church. Best visualization of planned obsolecence I've ever seen. No, I couldn't look inside.

Basketball choir practice
On the floor of the Orlando Magic's Amway Arena.

Game seat
Not a splendid seat, but I was given the ticket, so I'm pleased to be here. Now, if the Magic will just pull ahead.

Business hours
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Oh, poop
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A little disturbing
This was a church service prop last week, but I think it frightens me.

Marketing FAIL
Note the expiration of the offer. Today. This came in the mail yesterday.

New blossoms
Don't think I've ever noticed my hedge blooming before.

Scooter crash
Cute visual display. Obviously not a real crash.

WireTap Demo Fail
C'mon, Ambrosia. This sort of thing is foolish. I don't care about installing the demos, and you go part way to letting me choose to skip them, but why am I not able to uncheck more than 3 MB of useless support file stuff?

Mood=unhappy
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Free Universal Pass
Universal mailed 1-day, 2-park tickets to a random group of central Florida residents, and I was on the list. There's also a coupon for up to six more people for $50 (normally $65 for Florida residents and either $85 or $90 for nonFloridians depending on if they're purchased online or at the gate. Now just to figure out when to go and who wants to come.

Twoosh Easter Egg
Twitterrific 2 for iPhone has an Easter Egg that not only echoes the audible Twoosh notification from the desktop application, but also throws up this splendid visual Twoosh!

Customized PT Cruiser
Pretty retro. Seen near University of S. Florida.

Twitterrific App Preview
Someone pointed out to me that a Twitter post I made right after the public preview of Twitterrific 2.0 had been used in one of the application preview images after it was made public a couple days later. Probably explains the slight increase in new follower frequency I've been experiencing.

Gallery Eclectic Bistro
Very tasty restaurant in Tampa. Highly recommended.

Fry art
Cousin's son got artistic with his french fries.

Drainage fail at Hollywood Studios
I think Disney has a problem.

Whoopsie
Must invoke powers of zen. The fact that I mistakenly ordered replacement foil and cutter block in black instead of silver is *not* a crisis. Shaver will still operate exactly the same way. Color matches the bottom portion. Not a crisis. Zen. Inner peace.

Waiting
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Close-up tiger
In the tiger pop-up window at Busch Gardens. He was yawning a big mouth, but I missed it before the camera shutter tripped.

New cellular radio for alarm system
After three late or no-show service calls, I'm quite confident my troubles with alarm monitoring are behind me. Old radio is gone. New radio is confirmed communicating with the company. Best of all, the tech who came was an installer with more clout than a regular technician. A tech would have been required to bill me $149 for this radio and I'd have to suss out whether I deserve to pay that with the company later. But this installer didn't bill me anything at all. Yay him.

Playing Wii with friends at Melvin's house
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New weird vehicle
The model name said "Cube." Nissan, I think. And I thought the Scion box truck thingie was crazy!

Temporary server home
Finally got around to moving the old Mac G4 which holds my web photo albums into the closet, out of the way, making room at my desk to get the Mac Pro currently set up on my dinette table moved into the den. Eventually, the Mac Pro will power the new and improved photo server, and this G4 will go bye-bye.

Old Opel
Saw this vintage car while driving back to work after lunch.

How to peg a CPU—part 1
The Quad G5 Macintosh is encoding Quicktime DV files to MP4 media to place online. For some reason, Quicktime itself never seems to take full advantage of all the CPUs, but MPEG Streamclip does!

How to peg a CPU—part 2
Meanwhile, over on the dual-core, 64-bit Windows box, Windows Media Encoder is slamming out WMV files of the same videos.

Future video director
One of my best friend's younger daughter. I think she's a natural.

Some people on the other side of the pool are about to get wet
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Workspace, at last!
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Upgrade eligibility
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Render progress
That's 26 files, 31 minutes each, rendering full DV files at 6.6gb per show out to disk. It's been going since a bit before 7pm and it's now 8:30. Maybe—just maybe—it'll finish by the time I go to bed tonight. And then there's 26 more from the first season (this is the second) that I'll hopefully do tomorrow night.

HOT
Officially the hottest my car's outside temp display has ever shown. Actually, it was 109 but dropped a degree by the time I took the picture.

Just got my new edition AP Stylebook
My previous copy was from the late 80s that I had used in college! I was long overdue for an update!

Burn, baby, burn
When you've got the horsepower, you find ways to use it. Averaging 550-600% usage on my quad Mac Pro (virtualized 8-core thanks to Nehalem technology) while encoding DV video files to MPEG-2 required by a broadcast affiliate. Yes, about seven hours total to encode 52 half-hour shows, and it will be churning well into the night—but at a bit more than four minutes per half-show, it's going almost three times faster than my Macbook Pro laptop encoded them last year. Had to re-encode for updated end credits.

Garmin nüvi 775T
Just arrived today. Have wanted something like this for several years.

Nullmart
Though I don't know why two friends with whom I shared this saw "New Customer? Start here" text, Walmart apparently thinks less of me than even a New Customer.

Planter antics
Kids in my community repeatedly foul up the entrance planter.

Very big flag
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In position for downtown Orlando fireworks
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Sunblock FAIL: I missed a spot!
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This will nicely accommodate all I need for my day excursions in England
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Oh thank you, GPS, I thought I was off-roading
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Location of TJA reunion
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Crash and reboot
LOL—the in-flight seat-back entertainment screen for the adjacent passenger crashed just after we landed. Let it never be said Linux never crashes.

It was supposed to have been held
As the confirmation sheet on the left indicates, my mail was supposed to be held from July 9 through today, July 21. This is the pile I found in my mailbox when I arrived home Monday evening, July 20, and some of it had clearly been in the box longer ago than Monday. I have lived at this address for exactly four years and have submitted hold mail requests 5-6 times. Not a single time has the request been processed properly. Even if all this was placed in my box only a couple days ago (probably not), I know for a fact the last time that my mail wasn't held in any way. All prior times I had indicated that I would come to the post office and pick it up, yet each time I arrived, they did not have my mail and said that it was on the truck and out for delivery.

Tampa Junior Academy reunion
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Crud—something fell from a tree and dented the hood of my car 🙁
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Permanently closed
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Something tells me I might be overdue for a new chair mat
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First three cell phones I ever owned
I'm turning these (plus an old AT&T freebie that I never once used) in for recycling. Totally forgot how HUGE the first two were.
Left: Nokia 2160i on Bellsouth Mobility that I only used to make rare outgoing calls. Cell service was expensive back then. I also carried a pager at the time and that was the number I gave out.
Middle: Mitsubishi T250 plus the thick extended life battery on AT&T. I bought this one because, at the time, it was about the only one that offered a reasonable screen on which to browse mobile web.
Right: Sony Ericsson T68i, the first of three SE phones I owned and I would probably still use SE phones if it weren't for the iPhone.
After the T68i I used a T616 that I later gave to my dad but it's now dead and gone. Then I had a S710a that I sold to someone on eBay after I bought the first iPhone. That first iPhone went to my cousin's husband for a time when I got the 3G (not 3GS). I then sold the 3G to Gazelle and now have an iPhone 4.
(Yep, I updated this caption one last time for my phone history. Likely won't update it again whenever I upgrade from the iPhone 4. Putting this one to rest. 🙂

Lori's girls are having a good time learning about water current
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Alligator feeding time at Orlando Science Center
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Petting alligators
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Petting alligators
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Shakers!
"Shakers" refers both to what these are and where I am eating.

Hygene priorities
So let me get this straight: we go around touching door handles, elevator buttons, copier buttons, telephones, ad nauseum, but we install new biometric punch-in clocks for hourly employees and suddenly we need hand sanitizer bottles?

New Sun Chips flavor—yummy
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Yay—got my desk cleaned up finally!
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I got mine
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Lucky odometer reading
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Ready for Winter Springs groundbreaking
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Installing Mac OS X 10.6
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So close, but so far away
It takes a LOOOONG time to copy more than 700GB through USB 2.0. (I'm cloning my Time Machine drive to a new drive because the old one is ailing.) And don't let that elapsed time fool you. It's not 17 hours in. The number reset after one day, so add 24 hours to that. Elapsed time is now actually 41 hours! Hmm, is a bit less than 5MB/sec the expected throughput of a USB 2.0 copy?

Trans-Georgia Express
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Geekbrief meetup
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Geekbrief meetup group photo
via Neal and Cali's camera

Anybody want me to look for something for you?
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Inside McKay's
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Cindy Coolidge and John Jones wedding
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Cindy and John getting away in a Studebaker
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Trackless kids train ride at Hamilton Place Mall
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Doin' that video editing thang again
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See that? That's the day @CaliLewis retweeted a photo I posted. Yeesh! 🙂
It was the photo of a sign in the bathroom at the Alachua, FL Moe's restaurant.

I guess I enjoy torturing myself
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Looks like we ended up with an unofficial uniform today
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Here's what I'll be staring at tonight and tomorrow
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Kind of delayed, but my notification finally arrived
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My view for much of today
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The aftermath
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I can haz car title!
By the way, for those of you kids who've never paid off a vehicle before, this is what's known as a pink. That's right, just like airplane black boxes aren't black, pinks aren't pink.

Very pleased with how this layout came together
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Mmmm Sweet Tomatoes
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I eat tapes for lunch
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Today's accomplishment
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Found my favorite childhood book
Have a look at all the scanned pages at flic.kr/s/aHsjDNJoSo

Country Bear Jamboree finale
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Two-color Cinderella's Castle
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Cinderella's Castle off angle
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Aaaiiiieee! George Scaife is back!! Nooooo!
Who is George Scaife? Only the most overused and most totally bogus name in spam you ever did see!

¡Por favor manténgase alejado de las puertas!
I absolutely love that Disney is actually capable of poking fun at itself!
I snapped this last weekend but forgot to upload it. I may have to get one!

Puppysitting
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She's finally calmed down and chill
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Is this dog making an obscene gesture?
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Some college-era prints I'll be scanning later
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My office's long-lost Canon XL1 finally found!
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Laying down on the job
It's a cartoon character costume, but the person wearing it doesn't seem too motivated.

Stunt show finale at Hollywood Studios
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Indiana Jones finale at Hollywood Studios
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Well, there's a *little* bit of ocean view from my room
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Pool and ocean view from Myrtle Beach Marriott
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Listening to Harvest Music Festival in DeLand
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Thankful for gas pump credit card slots that read both directions
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The family Thanksgiving dinner table decoration
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Gourd turkeys
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Big scan job
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Dinner with the gang at Del Taco
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Embodiment of patheticism
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Time for another press check/approval
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First sig approved, second will be up in the afternoon
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Sleeping man in waiting area sounds like evil LOTR creature
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