Monday Miscellanea comes on Tuesday this week:
Wendy found a wildlife rehabilitator on Friendswood and took the baby birds to her. It turns out that they’re not bluejays at all, but grackles. She says they’re in good shape and will probably survive. It’s nice to know we took good care of them in the short time [...]

Two of Summer’s friends came by today carrying a surprised wrapped up in their shirttails: two baby bluejays. They had found the birds on a lawn, probably blown out of their nest by last night’s storm. Wendy told them that the best thing they could do was to go find the nest, and put the [...]

Looks like more bad weather is on the way. We’ve been seeing lightning all evening, but now radar shows the storm front is upon us. We’re hearing thunder, and Rudy is barking. Should make for a rollicking evening.

Judging from what we’re hearing so far, this storm is more about rain and wind than lightning and [...]

Something I discovered last night in playing around with Ruby and Rails is that the CGI has a very long startup time, on the order of several seconds. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s extremely annoying, especially when you’re trying to test changes to your code. I knew that the Fast CGI mod for [...]

Charles Kuffner, Houston blogger, caught the baton and says he likes Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat”, and prefers the version by Eddie of Ohio. I’ve never heard their version, but somewhere I’ve got a live Jimmy Buffet cover that I prefer. As for Lyle Lovett, my favorite songs are “Don’t Touch My Hat”, [...]

Memorial Day weekend is here, and I’m spending some time with Ruby. Ruby is a programming language that looks a bit like Python, a bit like Smalltalk, a bit like Lisp, and a bit like Perl. It’s a truly object-oriented scripting language with some powerful but elegant features. I first heard about Ruby three or [...]

…because school’s out for summer, and the girls are feeling happy.
As for me, I’ve got a nagging stomach bug and I haven’t slept a wink the past two nights.

It was on this day, a Memorial Day thirteen years ago, that our lives changed forever. Notice of the change came the night before, when Wendy rolled over, shook my shoulder, and said “Wake up, coach, it’s time to go to the hospital.”
Hippo Birdies to Summer, who turned 13 today. She got a new portable [...]

Thurl Ravenscroft, most famous as the voice of Tony the Tiger, died Sunday at age 91. I had never heard of the man, although I have been hearing him every Christmas for years. As I learned at Off the Kuff, Ravenscroft sang “You’re a Mean One Mister Grinch” in the 1966 animated cartoon How the [...]

I’ve been using Bloglines to manage my subscriptions to other people’s weblogs. It’s amazing the rate at which subscriptions accumulate. Bloglines is a great service, but it needs to add tools that allow people to track activity on their subscriptions, such as the rate at which different weblogs publish, and which weblogs have been idle [...]

The last couple of nights we’ve noticed bats flying around the house in the late twilight and early evening. At first it appeared to be just one bat, flying circles around the house, but later I saw two of them at once. These two spent about half an hour circling the house, not cruising but [...]

I am not a political person. To be sure, I have strong political opinions, but I’ve long since passed that time in life when I enjoy engaging in political debate. You’re not about to change my mind, and I’m not about to change your mind, so let’s just talk about the weather instead.
Despite that, I [...]