Pretty interesting little site. Type in your birthday, and it'll tell you what song was #1 on the charts (for either U.S. and the U.K.).  On January 22, 1965, the Beatles were sitting at #1 with "I Feel Fine".

On my 18th birthday, Men at Work were at #1 with "Down Under".

What song was number 1 when you were born?...when you turned 18?

http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/cont/choose.html

 
Geek Toys

I have a few minutes here during lunch. So while my chili and cornbread noisily start the digestive process, I figured I'd mention some of the cool geek toys that I've seen lately.

First, Bob has upgraded his decently cool little weather monitoring station to a full fledge weather center! Very cool little station, I must say. I'm sure that Donnie would approve (not that his opinion matters...but we'll humor him).

Speaking of el Diablo, Donnie has been a busy guy with his amateur radio equipment. He's managed to install an antenna array in his back yard that would make most covenant-controlled homeowners cringe! I wonder how long it'll take his neighbor to report this one...since they can probably see it from their second floor window. Donnie's already done a "smoke test" with his new array...speaking with someone all the way over in Ohio using a repeater satellite.

Here at home, I've been enjoying the wonderful features and add-ons for Meedio for several months now, but this weekend brought the introduction of a pre-release beta of MeedioTV. MTV is a full-feature DVR (digital video recorder) application that works in conjunction with the rest of Meedio and actually puts my PVR-250 to work doing something other than just providing me with a remote control. It includes a free web-based electronic program guide (EPG) along with many of the niceties that make Tivo owners so proud (timeshifting, scheduled recordings, etc). Meedio is quickly becoming a very stable and powerful HTPC package. With a few more months of refinement, I expect it to give Microsoft Media Center Edition 2005 a run for its money.

Jason's coming up to visit this weekend. Hopefully, he'll bring his new toy...a shiny new Paul Reed Smith. I was so happy to hear that he had picked up a new guitar. For a while there, I thought that his RC airplane hobby would forever displace his interest in music.

J.D. has a bowling tourney this weekend in Tulsa (which is how Jason will be getting up here). I wish him the best of luck...may all your games be in the 200s!

Amy's at home right now nursing an early season head cold...while simultaneously trying to entertain/supervise without exposing Griffin to the bug. My handwashing habit has been kicked into overtime, and it may be a few days before she gets any kisses! The only thing worse than 2 hours of commutes each day...is 2 hours of commutes sandwiching 8 hours of work with your head stuffed with cotton. No thanks.

I hope that all of you are feeling good and enjoying this wonderful Fall weather we've been having.

 
Psst...Wanna see some pics?

Today, I spent a little bit of time checking out the new(ish) free photo management program, Picasa. This is a very slick little app for working with digital pics. It was developed by a small company, who recently sold it to Google. It seems comparable to Photoshop Elements, with a a little heavier lean towards photo archiving (including a pretty cool timeline mode). Anyway...one of the features of Picasa is the ability to publish a collection of photos as a web page. Since I've never really been that crazy about the way Photoshop creates picture galleries, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Finally, after a extended hiatus, here's a new photo gallery.

 
Trick or Treat!

Wow…I can't believe that it's already November!! I hope that everyone had a happy Halloween this year. Thanks to Griffin, I had the best one since I was around 13 years old. This was his first year for him to Trick or Treat (he had strep throat last year), and we had a blast. It was so nice to live in a subdivision that has so many young children. There were lots more people participating than I was expecting. Griffin wore the Winnie the Pooh costume that he wasn't able to use last year (not the coolest…but certainly cute). Thank goodness the rain stopped briefly and the night was relatively cool. He was able to hang in there for about an hour before he started running out of steam (and dragging his bag of goodies). Even after he was done, he really enjoyed watching all the little ghouls visit our house, and helped Amy and me give out candy until the many pounds we had were all gone.

This weekend was also special because it was my niece's birthday on Saturday. Karson is already 1 year old and extremely precious. Melissa and Rusty were brave souls to host a party at their house. All the kids played well together, even with the distractions of Karson's new toys. Griffin was thrilled to be able to play with Joshua, and got to meet Parker for the first time (he's exactly 1 month younger than Griffin). Everyone really enjoyed themselves, young and old.

I have to run…my project manager has been overseas to Dubai, Singapore, Jakarta, Perth and Bejing over the past three weeks. Her first day back is today, so I'm sure we'll be in lots of meetings this week. The new project is going very well, and I'm settling in quickly.

As usual, I'll talk about all the pictures that I've got…but I can't post them right now. I'll see what I can get done this week.

Happy Fall, Y'all!