…for starting your holiday wishlist. Last year I looked all around for a good online wishlist tool, and didn’t find any I really liked. My criteria included:

• ability to import my Amazon.com wishlist
• ease-of-use (when I found something I liked, I want to be able to add to my wishlist with a click, and then get back to the page I was viewing — no copy/paste form stuff…)
• shareable (make some items easy to share with family and friends)
• private (keep other items to myself or limit who could see them)
• respect (respect for my time, as well as the privacy of those who I shared my list with - I did NOT want everyone who I shared my stuff with to have to register with the service)
• flexibility (wishlists are good, and is the main driver in my list, but a service should also be able to manage other info for me)

I think I’ve found all of that at Kaboodle (thank you again Ask MeFi).  The ones I tried last year are MetaWishlist.com and TheThingsIWant.com.  I also looked at Wists.com, but will stick with Kaboodle for now (even though it has a silly name).

(p.s. in case you wanted to get me a present, you can see my wish list here.  They also have an RSS feed in case you’re into that stuff…

Categories: Geek
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Congratulations to the Seattle Riot for getting a bid to the 2006 UPA Club Ultimate Championships! Anne and I took the kids up to Burlington on Sunday to see Sharon and the team work hard through 2 Final games (the Front-Door and the Back-Door since there were 2 bids to Nationals available via the Northwest Regionals). We didn’t actually get to see Sharon play since she had hurt her shoulder the day before, but are looking forward to her doing some rehab and kicking some serious butt at Nationals! Go Shark!

Categories: Family, Play, Sports
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I don’t remember how I found out that Alex Kapranos (the lead singer of the band Franz Ferdinand) was writing semi-regular entries about food/etc while on his latest tour. But, once I started reading them, I enjoyed his style, the content, and his thoughts. Too bad that the tour (and the writing) have come to an end. I shall look forward to the book (and the next album…)

Here’s the last entry :: Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | End of the road

Here’s a link to all of the entries (start at the beginning…) :: Alex Kapranos on Guardian Unlimited

Categories: Food, Random, World
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Just a quick note for those who might wander here - I think we’re up and running with the new look.  It’s based on the vSlider theme for WordPress and Gallery2, integrated by WPG2.  So far so good.  Please let me know if it doesn’t work for you, and why.  Any suggestions welcome!

Categories: Uncategorized
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Well, here we go.  I found the WPG2 plug-in for WordPress, installed it, and am now playing with it. 

That was easy! - now let’s see if we can get the gallery to look like the WP theme…

Categories: Web Site
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Couple of changes around here:

1 - moved from iPowerWeb to DreamHost. I’ve been on iPowerWeb for a long time, and was on one of their older servers. This resulted in slow load times for pages and email, and my host also was on a number of blacklists, so email sent was not delivered and bounced back too often. When I perused AskMefi for the “best web hosting”, DreamHost was consistently recommended. So, here we are.

2 - with the hosting move, I switched from MovableType to WordPress. So far so good, but it’s going to take a while to get used to the new platform, and tweak it to my likes.

3 - I also moved the gallery to Gallery2 from Gallery v1. Nice, but again, it will take some time to settle. I chose not to bring over all of the pictures from the old site, so we’re left with a random smattering of pictures marked as Favorites in Photoshop Elements, and some pix from our most recent Beach Week trip.

Anyway, glad to see you again - it’s been too long.

Categories: Web Site
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For those of you who don’t know, Golden Gardens is one of the 2 parks in Seattle that actually has a sandy beach (the other being Carkeek - another of our regular haunts). I took Alex and Leah yesterday, and we had a great time. The water was a little too cold to swim (although some people tried), but the kids had a ton of fun trying to dam up the stream flowing into Puget Sound, and I enjoyed sitting on the beach watching them. I helped too…

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First_Frost_2005-1
Hosted on Zooomr

I’m a pretty solid Flickr user, but Thomas Hawk tells me that Zoomr is the NBT, so here’s my try-out.

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Sometimes we remember, sometimes we don’t, but we all love to dream.  Or is that a gross generalization?  I love to dream, since my dreams are some of the most exciting adventures I have.  Don’t get me wrong, my waking life is pretty awesome, but it doesn’t hold a candle to my dreams in terms of sheer adventure and excitement.  However, I know that it’s not the same for everyone - there are many people that I know who would almost prefer not to dream based on their typical dream content (stressful dreams full of anxiety).  So, why do we dream?

Scientific American: Why do we dream?

(correlary - how do we control our dreams?)

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I saw two items today about meteorites impacting Earth.  The first one (a Japanese video showing what would happen if a HUGE meteorite hit earth) I said, hmmm, that’s interesting.  The second one (Antigravitas - The sky is falling!) I said, this is scary.  VERY scary.

There would have been no warning. No time to evacuate. Instead an area slightly smaller than a football field would have been leveled in an instant. Everything within two kilometers of the blast zone would have been subjected to extreme heat and pressure. Close to the blast zone many buildings would have collapsed, while further away they might just have lost every window. Many would be on fire within the inner zone.

Let’s hope that we continue to get “lucky” w/r/t the cosmic dance of death that our planet is engaged with. If not, well, see you on the other side. And don’t forget to tell your mom that you love her.

Categories: Science
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