This is just a little fun participation in CSS Naked Day! A full 48 hours of sans-CSS bliss — it just gives me shivers!

This past weekend our family met my sister’s family in downtown Portland for some fun wandering. The trip had started as a planned visit to Voodoo Donuts just off Burnside, but the presence of “adult” donuts on their web site resulted in a change to Finnegan’s toy store and Pioneer Place.

The kids had a blast at Finnegan’s, and we waited out a rather severe deluge of snow, sleet, and rain before heading a block away to a store we saw coming out of the parking garage: Authentic Models. I had never heard of this store before, but the old bi-plane models hanging from the ceiling and the huge sailboats in the windows made it necessary to stop in. It was a nerve-wracking few minutes, trying to manage six busy kids who just left a store in which nothing was off-limits for their exploring fingers. But they did great, and we were awed by the beautiful displays and by avid curiosity as to who would spend $4600 for a mini Bugatti with no motor (!!). Here are some pictures from this place:

One of the first things I saw when we walked in was a bright red miniature ride-in Bugatti that I initially thought was pedal-powered. They also had a powder-blue version in the showroom that was just as beautiful. I discovered later that these are individually hand-made, and come ready for an electric motor that the customer has to install. The brakes are actually inside each of the four wheel hubs and linked together with a thin cable tied to a brake lever on the side of the cockpit. The seat is leather. The wheels are inflated rubber tires on custom aluminum hubs. In short, I was awed by them.

Add the hot air balloons, airplanes, dirigibles, sailing ships, and vintage-looking globes, looking glasses, miniature wooden model kits for kids, and carved “glider” rocking horse, and I was enthralled.

From there we headed down to Pioneer Place to walk around and, presumably, grab some yogurt or ice cream to mollify the kids, who originally expected donuts with cocoa puffs on them. It ends up we just enjoyed the sky bridge between the mall and Saks, got some smoothies at the food court, raced elevator travel against escalator travel, browsed the Mac store while waiting for Lindsey and Tori at Claire’s, and rode Max back to the parking garage.

And, with Lindsey’s purchase of some magnetic earrings at Claire’s, our parking in the Smart Park ($2.50 for four hours with validation) was, this time, smarter than Paul’s $5/day smash-my-window-and-steal-my-loot parking lot.

Amy wrote about this trip, too, and has some great pictures.

Disappointed with CP Hosting, I switched to 1and1. I ran into a problem with 1and1, which remained unresolved after about a week. So I switched to BlueHost, and am up and running again. My apologies to the thousands of readers out there who have been stranded.

Man, the last few weeks of 2007 disappeared a bit faster than expected. We’ve had a full few weeks with vacation (alas, no travels, but separation from work for a week or two), Christmas, a birthday, New Year’s and all things in between.

We’re one month away from massive changes, Lord willing, and are thankful for the health and rest that Tami has enjoyed. The rest is now becoming more scarce as the uber-uncomfortable stage rolls in. We’re looking forward to both Tami’s mom and sister coming next month, and not quite sure how hectic things will be for how long.

We still have not completed our Christmas picture cards, and have already decided to call them New Year’s cards instead. Maybe they’ll be Easter cards. Grrr. I just have to schedule a slot with our family photographers. If you haven’t been keeping track of the lower-quality snapshots we get around here, be sure to check out our Flickr pics.

My sister has this thing she does with her family on a rather regular basis that involves a dinner of popcorn. Yeah, that’s it, just popcorn. We do a similar dinner occasionally with popcorn and smoothies. And we make some of the best smoothies on the planet, since my parents got us a VitaMix many years ago. Oster and crowd can’t touch the VitaMix (though this guy may be able to). Our basic smoothies consist of a banana, an apple, an orange, some frozen fruit, a few scoops of plain or vanilla yogurt, and some ice. That’s it!

During the summers this is a great dinner, since the popcorn is light and the smoothies are cold and refreshing. But we have a rather significant problem, which was evidenced tonight in all its glory. We snack while we make the smoothies. So dinner tonight was not really just smoothies and popcorn. There were some fresh snap peas with ranch dressing. And some tortilla chips with ranch dressing. And a little of this and a little of that.

So this relatively healthy dinner turns into something worse than Beer Barrel Burger and a side of pork rinds.

But it sure is fun!

This past Thursday we arranged for a babysitter and enjoyed an evening with Paul and Suzette. We joined them for dinner at the Fish Grotto in Portland, which is an intimate little restaurant that seats about 40 people. Our server was friendly and diligent, and the food was delicious. Tami and I have not been going out much lately, with her going to be early and not feeling well all the time, so this was not only a chance for us to invest some time together, but it was also a wonderful chance to invest some very enjoyable time with Paul and Suzette.

After dinner we decided to walk the cold, windy streets of Portland in search of a coffee shop. Finding an open one after 7:00p can be difficult in that part of town, so we wandered into the Wild Oats to see if they had some coffee. They were busy and in the middle of some dinner promotion, and it was too busy to find a place to sit and enjoy a cup, but on our way out to continue our search we ran into Matt and Sara and the boys! They had eaten just up the street from us, and were getting ready to find a coffee shop themselves. So our eight-strong party headed a few blocks away to a Starbuck’s we thought might be open. Indeed they were open, and we sat in the noisy warmth of the ubiquitous roasters, enjoying fellowship, pumpkin lattes, and sweets.

It was refreshing being able to talk to a couple of other guys for longer than the few minutes before and after church services, and humbling to hear that some of the struggles and dreams I have are not uncommon. Matt and Paul and good men, and two I greatly respect.

I am in the process of adding a full picture album to the site. This has been the most frustrating part about maintaining a web site, since I really like the platform I am using, but it has not supported a nice, simple, integrated photo album feature. So I was finally convinced to go with Flickr, since it has a very robust API and great upload and management tools. Getting it to work with Picasa is not as simple as it should be, but I have a workable solution for now using Flickr Uploadr.

I hope to get into serious photography in the near future, but have hoped to do so for years. We now have a cheap point-and-shoot, and it does what we need: it is small and can capture the moments that we want to capture without making a big deal of things. The pictures are not as nice as they would be with a Canon 20D, but they work for now in our current situation, and I have learned that even a bad picture is enough to provoke numerous memories years later.

So for now I am working toward a full integration of this blog with Flickr. And the first step in that is setting up Flickr with images, sets, and collections. I will work with this for a while, and get dynamic feeds into this blog as time permits.

Until then, enjoy the pictures that are posted so far.

I finally “modded” my XBox Classic so that it will run XBox Media Center. And I am thoroughly impressed with the quality of the software, and the great functionality available.

For those of you who may not have a clue what this means, here is a breakdown: The XBox is a console game system from Microsoft, released originally in 2001. It is essentially a 733Mhz computer with a super-fast bus and video card, internal hard drive, DVD/CD reader, up to 1080i video output, and networking capabilities. The games for it can be a lot of fun, but when I purchased it a year ago, the primary reason was to make this recent modification.

A standard XBox does little more than let you play games, though it will allow you to listen to CDs and watch DVDs. It ends up that a very creative and organized group maintains a set of code that can be installed on the XBox to make it much more useful than just a simple game machine. This “hacking” is slightly involved, requiring the box to be opened (for the cheapest route; for about $40 you can keep the box closed and do the same thing). It is probably not for someone unfamiliar with the inside of computers, but I did not find the process to be overly difficult. I followed the steps over here and here (and will be doing some of this here soon), did some additional reading and poking around, and ended up keeping my time to about three hours total. And the only reason it was that long was that I had to keep swapping my monitor and keyboard between two PCs and did not read everything as well as I should have the first time.

Anyway, the point is that I now have a game console that seconds as a top-notch media center in the living room, through the use of XBox Media Center (XBMC). This means, when connected to my home network (I have not run the permanent wires yet), I can, in the comfort of my living room, access and view pictures and videos from my main PC directly on the TV. I can listen to any of our music library, watch Apple.com movie trailers, check the local weather, and more. In other words, I have vastly simplified my life and made a couple of computers reasonably useful.

The video playback has already been great fun, since I recently recorded a bunch of Hi-8 videos to the PC for eventual DVD archival. With XBMC, I can browse to these using a graphical interface and a game controller, and then select and play the video, and navigate just like with a DVD player. This also works for any TV shows I may have recorded on the PC using the TV capture card.

The MP3 playback is amazing, too. Since the machine is built for graphics, it includes some really great-looking “visualizations” that can be displayed when music is playing. It allows for playlist setup, and lots of options around playback, crossfading, album art, album info, and so much more.

And because the new iMac is on the network, too (perhaps another post on that), I expect to be able to retrieve files from it through the XBox. I have not have the time to test this fully yet, though.

And I could not say enough about the XBMC software itself. It looks better than anything else out there, is easy to navigate, and feels crisp and fresh. And I only have a 27″ tube TV!

Yes, it is a toy, but it is one that reduces overall life complexity. Once I get more hard drive space, I will be ripping most of the kid’s favorite DVDs to the PC, allowing us to access them without swapping out DVDs, using a graphical menu system that includes cover art and full info for each of the videos. I just do not know how I made it this long without XBMC.