Just got the following scam e-mail (most likely an advance fee scam) slipping through Yahoo's spam filters.

From: "Microsoft Award Promo" <06826134d@polyu.edu.hk>
To: undisclosed-recipients

This is to inform you that you have won $2.5 Million USD in the
quarterly promo of the Microsoft Award Promo.Your email address was
attached to the winning number.Contact the Claims Agent right away his
email address is: marysmithclaimagent@gmail.com Regards, Steven Smith.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was very hot in Western Washington this past weekend. Well, it got up to about 89 degrees on Saturday, which is hot by our standards, especially when you consider that central air conditioning is a rarity around here. They have it at the mall, some stores and restaurants, but not in most homes.

We got a portable air conditioner a while back, and when it gets this hot, we trundle it out to cool down our bedroom. Because my wife wasn't feeling well, I experimented with putting it up on a table and blowing it out over the bed, so she could lay down and cool off. We have a fairly tall bed (top of the mattress is at the bottom of my ribcage and I'm 6' tall), so when it was on top of the table, the cold air vent was just a little higher than the top of the mattress. Read the rest of this entry »

I previously wrote about how lame I am (BTW - I didn't get the job... ), but today, I include my wife in the geekery.

If you've read my blog assiduously, all three of you, you know we enjoy BBC America and some of its sci-fi and comedy offerings. Anyhoo, we were watching "That Mitchell and Webb Look" (it's no "Little Britain", but it'll do) and they were doing a sketch where two Nazi SS officers were discussing whether or not they were "the baddies."

They're on the Russian front, and as an aside in the conversation, one of them says: "If there's anything we've learned in the last thousand miles of retreat, it's that Soviet agriculture is in dire need of mechanization." My wife and I busted up.

We are such geeks.

READ ALL THE INSTALLMENTS: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 [here]

So, originally the plan had been to do 8 separate art pieces for my wife for our anniversary (which was today), then combine them all into one big piece and print and frame it for her. Eight is still the eventual goal, but the number I could get done by the anniversary was three, and I printed and framed two pieces separately instead of combining them all.

The first piece I printed was the "We Are Ladies" homage to "Little Britain". It turned out very nicely.

The second piece was a new one which combined six public domain images from NASA with one of our wedding photos (the wedding photo is not public domain).

One of the ways my wife impressed me on our first date was that she knew many of the various forms Zeus had taken to seduce mortal women in Greek mythology. Meeting a woman as beautiful and smart as her who also was into Greek mythology... be still my heart... No, really. I've been a mythology buff since I was 9.

But that just turned out to be a symptom of her deep-rooted sci-fi geekery. She and I watch "Doctor Who" and "Heroes" together (and "Eureka" and "The 4400" and "Torchwood"), plus we bring home sci-fi books and trade them. Part of our anniversary celebration the last two years (last year and this year) is to just go geek out at a book store.

So sometimes I call her "my sci-fi bride," and that was the theme I decided to use for the art piece.

The landscape at the bottom is a detail from a Mars Rover image from within Victoria crater, chopped off at the skyline. The background is a detail from a larger photo of a stellar spire in the Eagle Nebula. The planet in the upper left is Venus, radar imaged and color coded for elevation. The woman is, of course, my wife. And the space craft range from a space tug to a satellite to the ISS.

I framed it with a gold colored wood frame, with the gold really picking up colors from Venus nicely, and it's now hanging in our upstairs hallway. She liked it very much.

Her art project for me... The Luggage from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It was TOO cool.

READ ALL THE INSTALLMENTS: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 [here]