Happy New Year and Moving Madness

Here, Naomi shows off one of her Christmas presents, and her destiny (Nichelle is too busy getting ready for our move to read this), with a “Geek in Training” t-shirt from ThinkGeek.com. She also received the TCP/IP creeper, but won’t fit into it for several months.

Back at the Wilcox family, we are moving in one week, and packing in earnest. Thanks to Nichelle’s extremely hard work and planning, it looks like everything is going to go smoothly.

Our new address as of January 9 will be:

329 Nowell Street
Nashua, NH 03060-4453

Phone: 603-886-5225

I should also mention that my friend Mark Sohmer has finally taken my advice and started a BLOG of his own at http://blog.sohmer.net/. Of course, since he is using Bryan Harrington’s code, later modified by me, guess who gets pestered with questions?

I’d like to BLOG some reflections on the past year, but am too busy at the moment.

In more recent events, Christmas was excellent, and despite being sad, Dad’s funeral was really wonderful. I will defiitely write more about that later.

Our Trip to Boston’s Museum of Science

On Friday, October 3, I Took Isaac and David, and Isaac's best friend Nda (En-dah) (John opted out) to the Museum of Science on Friday (I took a half day off, and picked Isaac up from school, and we went by subway). We had a great time. The digital camera I bought lets me get low-light and other kinds of photos I could never capture before.

It’s funny, because you never know what will really interest the kids. David now wants to go back (he asks approximately every day now). For some reason a 2300-year-old mummy in the life sciences section fascinated him. Later, he was a little mad that they put a sign up asking people not to sit in or stand in the tyrannosaur footprint.

One very cool new exhibit was sponsored by Microsoft – it's a mock-up of the “cockpit” of the Wright Flyer, linked to a huge projection screen and M$ Flight Simulator 2004. The Wright Flyer was very difficult to fly – not so bad climbing and leveling off (although it would stall very easily), but banking (by weight-shifting) was usually disastrous for us. Friday afternoons and evenings the museum is mostly empty, so we all had plenty of chances to try it.

Jeffries Tubes

Film/TV art director Matt Jeffries died from a heart attack July 21 at age 81. He was best known for designing the original Starship Enterprise for the “Star Trek” TV series—and remembered for the “Jeffries Tubes” in the ship, where the guts of the mechanics are.

Lego [in the] News

  

I’ve seen a number of interesting Lego-related items in the past two days. Here are three good ones:

Wow! I still haven’t gotten around to completing my Lego Thunderbird 2 model (my first ever attempt at a Lego reproduction.

Thank you, Mr. Greene!

Mark Greene (a master of all things related to databases) was kind enough to diagnose our ailing SQL string that was preventing certain numbers from being found. Thanks, Mark!

The Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek

[doug]Okay, I’m really a fairly big Star Trek fan, despite being very disappointed by the latest film, but this list on the Happy Fun Pundit site is too delicious to pass up. Somewhere down the page you’ll find my own comments.

Here’s item one from the list, to give you a sample:

Noisy doors.

You can't walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They're dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!” every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40.