Date's of Note

Last Thursday was Scott's and my Grandmother's birthdays. It was also the 1 year aniversary of Mike discovering he had Type II diabetes.

Yesterday(the 26th) was my 1 year blogoversary.

<Jiminy Cricket Voice>When You Wish Upon A Star...

...Put Your Money In Your Car,
Drive it, Drive it, Very Far,
And Give it to Us....</Jiminy Cricket Voice>

Well, we got back safe and sound. And just in time, from the looks of things. We left Friday morning, and it looks like 10 percent of Florida followed on the next day.

First, we have the good stuff. The weather was great. We had, maybe, a couple of small showers, but mostly it was just cloudy. Which means it was cool, which was good. The rooms were very nice(and very expensive) and quite comfortable. The buses to and from the parks came fairly often, and since everyone was afraid of Hurricanes, the parks were almost deserted. All-in-all, it was one of my best trips down there.

Now, we have the bad stuff. Our locks decided to stop working with our keys around Tuesday, and we had to scramble to get one of the custodian guys to get us in. My son got spooked somewhere on the first day, and now he pretty much hates loud noises(except the ones he makes) and all animatronic robots. This made picking attractions with him a pain in the arse, as most of the kiddy stuff still has things like this. We managed to keep him entertained though.

Finally, we have some recommendations. If you're going to go to Disney World, I definitely recommend staying inside the park. There are buses to and from each of the them parks and other attractions. However, try to stay in cheaper rooms than we did. If you go to Universal Studios, make sure you check out the "Spiderman" ride at the Islands of Adventure theme park. It was the only ride we went on there, because we only went in to find spiderman so my son could take a picture with him. However, I thought this ride was great. If you go to Epcot, try the new "Mission Space" ride. It was intense. I don't recommend either of these rides for your kids.

The drive down was uneventful, but the drive back involved major traffic in Valdosta and in Atlanta. In Valdosta, they were working on the roads or something, and they shut it down to one lane. In Atlanta, they apparently had a heck of a wreck somewhere around 400. Fortunately, we caught the news about it in time, and we went up 85 instead. The traffic this way wasn't great, but it wasn't stopped.

Command Line Stuff 1

Here's a simple Batch file you can create. It will allow you to run excel from the command line if you want. Just type the filename after the command.

Filename:xl.bat
@echo off

rem execute excel
start "No Title" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE" %*

The folder OFFICE11 may need to be changed to whatever version you have(or it could be in just plain OFFICE). The important point is to find the path to EXCEL.EXE. The "No Title" is necessary because start has that parameter in the first position, so that if what you call is a command window it can set it's title. Since excel requires no command window, this title will have no effect.

Obviously, you could do word(WINWORD.EXE), access(MSACCESS.EXE), or others.

Comics stuff

The phrase in the first panel of this Dilbert strip is so true:

My daughter sneezed so the school is sending her home.

I've lost track of the number of colds that have required me to take my son home.

It appears that The Norm is pulling a Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, and Bloom County/Outland(Nevermind, now it's Opus, and he's working again) and quitting. Michael Jantz, the Author, cites these reasons:

After eight years of battling the syndicate-newspaper corporations, he felt it was time to move on.

Seriously, Mike, I like the strip, but it isn't that great. I'd stick with making money.

If you're interested, he's asking for donations. If he gets enough money, he'll continue drawing the strip on the web. He ain't gettin' mine.

Finally, I'd like to open up the comments to statements about Opus. It's been out for close to ten months now, and I was wondering what people think of it. Personally, I think it's pretty weak. Not nearly as good as Bloom County or even Outland(which I liked less).

Lucent gets big refund.

Lucent, my former company, is set to get an 800 million plus refund from the IRS. I'd imagine this will help some.

Carbon Sequestration

It looks like there has been some development on sequestering CO2 at the power plant. The full story here. I've got Mike's song in my head:

Sequester Lo-ove,
Sequester Lo-ha-ha-ha-ha-hove,
Sequester Love,
I think I'll write a book.