Author Archives: joel

Sean’s First School Picture

Posted on November 25, 2008 by joel

Sean had his first school picture taken a month or so ago. Now, you've all seen the pictures we've taken of him. It is impossible to get that boy to sit still for more than three seconds at a time. Frankly, Lori and I weren't expecting much from these school pics. So you can imagine our surprise when we opened them up and saw the photo you see here. We are still trying to figure out what the photographer must have done to get Sean to cooperate. My money is on drugs, but Lori is convinced it must have been a bribe.

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42 Words of Wisdom: #11

Posted on November 24, 2008 by joel

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."

- Douglas Adams

In the evenings over the last couple of weeks, I have been doing some research online into how to go about starting a garden. Next year, I would like to start a garden somewhere in our yard with the kids. The goal here is threefold. First, I'll learn something new and have fun doing it. Second, the kids will (hopefully) have fun helping, and (again, hopefully) learn how hard work can pay off in the end. And third (and potentially most importantly), we can save some money on our grocery bills. I'd also love to grow enough to can some of our harvest, so we can enjoy it through the winter. And making some homemade salsa from ingredients that all came from our own garden would be pretty cool, too.

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Nerdbots

Posted on November 23, 2008 by joel

I love these things. The couple that builds these uses items found at antique stores and bits and pieces from the hardware store. I'd love to make one of these myself. They're cute and charming. I showed Sean the website, and he loved looking at the pictures of all the robots.

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Special Rocks

Posted on November 22, 2008 by joel
I don't think I've mentioned this before, but last summer we started collecting rocks from the places we visited with the kids. I was hoping that it would give them a trigger to help them remember things we had done as a family. It seems to be working. The rocks are on the windowsill above our kitchen sink. Sometimes Sean catches sight of them while helping me cook or wash dishes, and tells me about them and where they come from. We've got a "special rock from the beach", a "special rock from Maudslay park", a couple of "special rocks from the Saco River", and a "special rock from the mountain". I'm hoping to keep this up next year. Who knows, maybe it will eventually lead to an interest in rock-hunting or geology. At the very least, though, it gives him a way to remember special moments we had, which is enough for me.

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Batman’s Roadtrip

Posted on November 21, 2008 by joel
This is the last of the things I found on those old backup CDs. When I took a roadtrip a few years ago, I took a Batman action figure along with me, figuring I could pose him in funny places, and put a "Batman's Roadtrip" section on my old website. I forgot to snag a picture of him in half the places I visited, but I did manage to get a few - as you can see below. In the first shot, Batman is expressing his ire at the rain that thwarted his planned hike. The second shot was taken at a lake in Arkansas whose name escapes me. The third shot is Batman just chilling at the hotel, and the final two shots were taken atop Mount Carrigain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

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Happy Head Horde

Posted on November 20, 2008 by joel
Yet another discovery made while digging through old backup CDs. This was a little project I had started, but it never really got off of the ground. The plan was to start a webcomic using these action figures. I was going to take photos of them, and then add in speech bubbles and Batman-style action messages and put it all on the web. The good guys you see below were going to be called "The Happy Head Horde". The guy with the red fists was called "Atomic Willy", the guy in the brown trenchcoat was "Handsome Dan", and the bird guy didn't have a name yet. The aliens you see in the last photo were going to be one of their adversaries. They didn't have a name yet, but they were going to be a boy-band from outer space, as you can tell from their juvenile posturing.

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Rocket Cam

Posted on November 19, 2008 by joel

Another thing I found while digging through those backup CDs was this image. Back when I was working at CATSAT, a group of guys I worked with used to get together on weekends to launch model rockets. At one point, I took apart an old digital camera I had, and got a friend to help we work out a circuit for triggering the shutter automatically. I tried putting this camera in a rocket several times - I think I must have built a half-dozen rockets in the course of this experiment, and all of them crashed into the earth shortly after launch. But on one launch, I managed to get a single picture before the rocket's inevitable plunge to its dirt destiny. The resolution is low, but the pic is still pretty darn cool, isn't it?

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Chopstick Assassin Productions

Posted on November 18, 2008 by joel
I was digging through some old backup CDs, looking for old episodes of a podcast I used to listen to. In the process of looking through all of those CDs, I found the image you see below. Some of you may remember this image from the old website I used to run, back when I was in college at RIT. That page existed from then until just a couple of years ago, when the hosting contract finally expired. At one point, I had a stack of these made up as stickers. I put one on my old Escort, and then promptly lost the other 499 stickers. I've gone looking for them several times, but have never managed to find them again.

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Sean’s Drawings – Little Guy

Posted on November 17, 2008 by joel
Check out Sean's latest drawing. It's an evolution of the guy he used to draw a few months ago. But now he's got a lot more detail in his face, and he's gone from 4 simple limbs to legs complete with shoes and arms with hands. Amazing!

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Costumes

Posted on November 14, 2008 by joel
Lori and I had been talking about buying some extra costumes after Halloween this year, to give the kids some extra dress-up clothes. Since last Halloween, Sean and Carter have both been wearing Sean's pirate costume all the time. So this year, we grabbed a few costumes off of the clearance rack, and they've been loving them ever since. Carter still has another couple of costumes that aren't in these pictures - maybe we can get pics of those soon.

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