Activities

I went swimming in a nearby river with my middle daughter, and I brought along my trusty Treo in case of emergencies. Of course, it's not waterproof, so I double-bagged it in Ziplocs.

Turns out they're not waterproof. I took it apart, dried it out, and used it for two days, when it stopped working altogether.

My wife upgraded me to a Samsung Galaxy S. On our AT&T network, it's called a Captivate. Very nice phone! But no keyboard. So I exchanged it for a Motorola Backflip, saving $155 in the bargain.

Biggest mistake ever.

Since Omi's moved into a retirement community, we're cleaning out her apartment, getting it ready for sale. Today Nathan came to help us move stuff. We rented a big U-Haul; it didn't fit, and the homeowner's association would allow us to keep it on the property anyway.

We tried to move two 7-foot solid oak bookshelves, but they wouldn't fit in the elevator. No way were lugging them down 7 flights of stairs, either. Nathan got to take anything he wanted from Opi's tool closet. But the big acquisition of the day had to be the HDTV.

Wading through my webcomics backlog, I came upon this delightful electric car strip from Kevin & Kell.

Of course, I can personally verify that electric cars don't go "vroom". They go "whoosh", "whizz", and "whirr", but not "vroom".

Every Mother's Day, the women all go out for a spa treatment. When Eri asked what the men wanted to do for Father's Day, I didn't have a ready response. The only testosterone-laden activity that came to mind was shooting.

They found us a shooting range: Hot Shots in Daytona. We actually had a lot of fun!

Quantum is a really neat RTS game that I found while perusing The Linux Game Tome. Don't be put off by the name of the repository: the game runs equally well on Linux, Mac, and Windows, because it's programmed in Java. Don't be put off by the programming language, either: it starts and runs quite quickly.

I recommend using the Quantum webstart link, since you'll not only get the up-to-date version, but libraries that are appropriate for your system, too. (This is practically necessary if you run on a 64-bit Linux machine.)

There's no documentation, so I'm writing my own. Read on for my Quantum strategy guide.