This last weekend was beautiful in Chicago. The temperature was around 80 degrees during the day and dropped to the 60s at night. Ahu and I spent most of our time by the pool reading and getting some sunshine. We went to the Chicago Botanic Garden on Sunday. We went to the shady area by the Rose Garden and had ice cream and read our books. Saturday we watched the movie Amelie, which is the first movie we received as part of our Netflix membership.

I upgraded the Romance Life radio station on Live365.com today. In the first day of being live, without the promotional features of a premium station, 9 different users stumbled onto the station. Two of those set Romance Life Radio as a Favorite and one of them gave the station a 5 star rating!!! I’m really enjoying managing the music and the playlists and having upgraded to the Premium level, I can now create multiple playlists and schedule those playlists for different times of the day and week.

I just had to drop a quick note to express my utter satisfaction with Amazon.com! Several months ago I preordered the latest Harry Potter book. When I ordered it, I was still living in the Loop. After I moved, I forgot to update my address. Well, I forgot until a few days before the book was supposed to be released. I went online and changed my order. I had requested the normal shipping to minimize cost.

After much planning and hoping, I finally launched the Romance Life channel on Live365.com!!! Live365.com is the world’s largest Internet radio network, with an audience of more than 3 million listeners each month. Live365.com makes it easy for the average Joe to set up an Internet “radio” station. It costs only $7.95 per month to get started and they handle all the servers, bandwidth, and any royalties paid to ASCAP and the music industry.

In my never-ending quest to improve my golf game, one of the strategies I pursue is the elimination of variables. A golf variable is something like choice of golf club for a given distance, positioning of feet for a swing, grip on the club, and…choice of golf ball. Now I know some players who think of golf balls as some sort of precious commodity. I’ve seen them looking for a lost ball for 10 minutes on the course, buying floating golf balls so they are not lost in a shot over a water hazard, and, worst of all, picking up random junk balls of low quality left behind by another golfer.

The IMAX version of the Matrix Reloaded opens on Friday! For those of you thinking you should probably see the movie again to figure out all the confusion, this is the perfect opportunity! What did actually happen there at the end with Neo and the Sentinels??? Just who is this “Bane” fellow and why is he not a nice guy??? The special effects have got to be incredible in the IMAX format.

Am I the only one who was paying attention to the news when a research expedition off of the coast of Cuba last year reported discovering a series of underwater monoliths at approximately 2,000 feet in depth? At the time, National Geographic reported on the story. A few less-scientific minds took interest also. Another article here and the most interesting article here. It’s interesting to me that the individuals who discovered the site are engineer Paulina Zelitsky and her husband, Dr.

This is a handy little map of my travel plans and travel history. I will update this as often as I can but in general it will show where I’ve been in the last six months and where I will be in the next six months. Clicking on the destination will navigate your browser to something related to that destination, either the hotel we stayed at our an image gallery or something like that.

Today I realized that the floppy disk is truly a thing of the past. I frequently move files between my computer at home and my computer at work using FTP over the Internet. Today, when leaving to go home, I wanted to send myself a Word document to work on over the weekend. When I went to FTP it, I found the network was down for maintenance. Naturally, I thought of the floppy disk drive since the file in question was only 350K in size.

Good God, man, are you crazy??? AtariAge has a running set of articles on how to program the good ol’ Atari 2600. With a focus on game programming, it is very interesting to compare the programming techniques of today against the hoops they had to jump through back then. It’s hard core stuff and not for the faint-hearted. Try writing code to send each scan line to the television or try working with 128 bytes of RAM…