Cruising

Amy and I were on a cruise to the Bahamas last week. I had to go for a business trip, and she got to tag along. We’d never been on a cruise before and it was pretty fun. ‘Course I had to sit in hours and hours of meetings, but there was still plenty of time for hanging out in the sun. Interesting stuff:

  • watched the space shuttle take off
  • at three lobster tails the first night on board
  • inadvertently swam with a (nurse?) shark
  • watched a drug bust unfold on a boat in Nassau
  • saw a massive lightning storm at sea
  • rescued a fishing boat with a bum motor

Why Obama

I have been, and remain, a fan of Dennis Kucinich. A Kucinich presidency would be truly revolutionary, which is why he’ll never get the job. So these days I’ve become a fan of Barack Obama. Today I encountered a great video by Larry Lessig on why he supports Obama. Take the 18 minutes and 32 seconds to absorb it.

Internet safety

Tru’s been digging on Star Wars videos on YouTube lately. That’s fine, but he’s also figuring out the address bar in a browser and just kinda being the 6-year old information sponge he’s supposed to be. All good. But a little worrisome since you never know what he’ll come across (no, I don’t sit right next to him the entire time he’s on the computer).

Amy and I’ve been kinda wondering out loud when/if we should get some kind of ‘kid safe’ software or whatever. Instead, I ran across the coolest alternative ever. And it’s not just for kid safety, either.

OpenDNS is a free service that basically routes your Internet connection through their servers. The benefits to this are multi-fold:

  • Super easy adult site blocking
  • Phishing protection using PhishTank (which they also operate)
  • Domain correction (if you enter craigslist.og, it’ll correct it to craigslist.org)
  • Domain whitelisting (in case you want to include a site that’s otherwise blocked)
  • Domain blocking…you can even add a custom message about why it’s blocked
  • Network shortcuts…this is really cool. If you’re on our wifi and you type ‘bh’ (without quotes) into a browser address bar, you’ll be taken to http://bikehacks.com. You can set up as many of these shortcuts as you like. They’ll work on all the computers on your network.

And there are lots of options behind all that stuff, which makes it super flexible in terms of usage.

I’m really stoked about this. I know my kids are protected, and since we leave our wifi open for our neighbors, I know their kids are protected too. Setup is totally easy–they’ve got great tutorials for a ton of different routers. Our basic fios router was in their list and I pretty much followed the instructions word for word. Had to change settings on both the wifi and the Ethernet parts, but the whole setup took about 5 minutes, tops. Easy.

Snowboarding with Tru

Tru and I went to Skibowl this afternoon and rode for about 2.5 hours. He went on the lift for the first time, and that was a pretty cool deal. I had to get him out of school early so we could play hooky together. I think he might’ve liked that most of all…

No pictures, though. Left the camera in the car. Tru did great the whole time and is well on his way to being a regular snowboarder (meaning, I won’t have to ride down the hill backwards, in order to keep an eye on him).

Relatedly, Tru dropped in at the skatepark last Monday. His first time. He was freaked out, but he did it (holding my finger). If it’s dry tomorrow morning, we’ll go ride a bit and see if he’ll do it again. Definitely getting a little video this time…

YANB (yet another new blog)

Yeah, I just can’t help myself. Yesterday Matt and I started a new blog that I’m super exited about: BikeHacks.com. This’ll be a relatively high-activity blog since we’re aiming at a minimum of two posts per week. That’s not high by blog network standards (usually 5-9 per week), but it feels like a bit of a stretch to us. But we’re stoked and we’ve got a lot of ideas for content. Should be super fun, and I’m going all-out in terms of tweaking and optimizing it for search engines. We’re definitely going to be aiming for high traffic for the blog, and then we’ll apply some monetization stuff to it. Time to make some coffee money again!

A family photowalk

Amy had to teach this morning, so I had to figure out how to avoid the “housebound boy” syndrome (multiplied by three). Fortunately we all woke up late, then took our time savoring my lovingly handcrafted waffles made from scratch (without referring to a recipe, I might add). Then we leashed up Frodo, put Asher in the stroller and took a photowalk.

Our little adventure is chronicled in this Flickr set, but the pics below give you an idea of one of the highlights. We tied a string around my little camera and lowered it into a storm drain, just to see what was down there. Now we know!

Here's what we're gonna do...

Here's what we're gonna do...

What's in a stormdrain

What's in a stormdrain

Blog brain drain

I turned off the auto-update from EcoQuaker to this blog. It was annoying me, so it was probably annoying you, too. You’re welcome.

I’d kinda like to do a “lifestream” sort of blog where I aggregate all the places where I put stuff. On one hand I was kinda thinking bren : blog might be the place, but I don’t think that’s right. I like this blog to just kinda be a personal/family blog. Maybe I’ll make a special page over on brendonconnelly.com. It would have del.icio.us links, Twitter updates, updates from here, from EcoQuaker, joglog (when/if it gets resurrected), etc… Probably only interesting to me, but there you go…

New blog

You’ll notice some weird posts earlier today. Those are pulled in from my latest diversion: EcoQuaker. I don’t know what my fascination with blogs is all about. Amy doesn’t even blink anymore.

Anyway, this one (should it stay alive more than a few months) is about being green, about being an environmentally conscious Christian and pretty much anything else that comes to mind along the way. Think environmental “Slacker Manager.” If you follow this blog, you don’t need to follow that one. Posts will be pulled in automatically. We’ll see how it goes.