On June 4 @ 6:53 pm, my wife gave birth to our first child, Calvin Owen Miller. He weighed 7lb. 10oz. and 20in. long, and, in my unbiased opinion, is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, next to my wife.

I have posted a few pictures in a couple different sets on Flickr if you would like to check it out. Below is the birth announcement I made using Inkscape.

This post is a revival of a webpage I made over 4 years ago, and I was recently reminded of it, so, I decided to bring it out again.  The problems demonstrated with this page are not as prevalent on the web today as they were several years ago, but I think it’s still relevant. Follow the link provided below for your viewing pleasure.

Annoying Webpage

Oh, as far as the “How To” part goes, just follow these simple steps when building a webpage:

1. Use ugly, clashing colors
2. Integrate pop-ups as much as possible
3. Includes sounds that play automatically
4. Be sure to include some sort of animated text
5. Create a MySpace page in lieu of steps 1-4

1. The terms multiplicand and multiplier
   For those of you who don’t remember or were never taught these terms, multiplicand refers to the first number in a line of multiplication and the multiplier is the second. i.e. in 2×3=6, 2 is the multiplicand and 3 is the multiplier. These terms are useless since multiplication is commutative, and, therefore, it doesn’t matter which number is first. Also, once you are past the 3rd or 4th grade you will never hear these terms again anyway.
2. Plasma as a fourth state of matter
   I know plasma is a fourth state of matter (Bose-Einstein condensate and fermionic condensate are a fifth and sixth according to Wikipedia), but for some reason it was only mentioned in an elementary science class and never again, and I think it’s because no one really understands it. When I took chemistry and materials science in college we did phase change diagrams without even mentioning plasma as a fourth option, just solid, liquid, and gas. If I didn’t need to know it at that level then I definitely didn’t need to learn about it as a 5th grader.
3. I before E except after C
   This just simply gets you in a lot of trouble since there are so many exceptions.

Every time I fill up at the pump I record my mileage as well as how much gas it takes and the price. Using this data I can produce some fairly interesting although useless charts.

The PC is all I have ever known. I guess it sort of fits like the proverbial old shoe since I know it inside and out, upside down, and backwards. I am familiar with all the hardware, software, settings, file structure, tweaks, tips, hacks, etc… Well, I guess I shouldn’t say all, but I’ll leave it at a lot. Macs were just something with pretty colors, but were not very useful for doing real work. Actually, I had that notion without ever really using a Mac so I guess it was just successful subliminal advertising or something like that. Anyway, all that to say this: I now have a 20-inch, 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM iMac in my home.

First off it’s not technically my computer since it actually belongs to Walnut Creek of Thomasville. I am just using it to do work at home with a program called MacDraft which, believe it or not, is not available for the PC unless you get PCDraft, but I’m not getting into all that.

With my previous Mac experience being somewhere between zero and Continue Reading »

Aunt Frances’ Lemonade via Taste of Home.

I don’t have a long telephoto lens so I was a little limited on what I could do last night. It was cloudy so I had to do a little waiting at times for the moon to be visible. However, the clouds did produce some nice effects. These are two of over fifty shots I took…I love digital. The first shot is all from one exposure. It was way underexposed so I had to reduce the noise after I adjusted the exposure. The second image is a compilation of two exposures. One for the moon itself and the other for everything else. Check out Flickr where I have these same two shots with the moon artificially enlarged.

There will be a total lunar eclipse tomorrow night which I will make an attempt to photograph. The current forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies during the 10:01 to 10:51 pm eclipse. This could produce a nice effect if the moon is visible through the clouds, or it could ruin everything. We’ll see.

I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to someone who said they really had more storage space than they could use. Closets often bulge to the seams until the garage inevitably ends up sacrificing its vehicular storage capacity for our ever increasing collection of stuff. If the garage is the only storage option, it can be used much more efficiently than just stacking stuff in the corner. One solution I have found, especially for items not accessed on a regular basis, is to use overhead storage. This gets things up and out of the way allowing the precious floor space to be reclaimed.

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Valentine’s Day brought a little color for the camera.