Journal Archive 2000 to 2002

October 2, 2002: I’m thinking about resurrecting the suvbacklash website.  You see, I was interviewed by a reporter for USA Today last week.  She was writing this article about the SUV backlash (though she didn’t use that term exactly) and wanted some extra background material.  None of my interview was used in the article, but the article did turn me on to the fact that there’s more activity on the anti-SUV front than I was aware of.  I thought for a few moments about building it as a Manila site, but now I’m thinking that if I do resurrect it, I’ll just keep it in FrontPage.  In other news, I’ve developed an interest in learning more about ethical relativism.  I’ve been reading on the web about it some, but have failed to find a really good book that surveys arguments for and against.

September 24, 2002:  I just finished putting some more wedding related photos up on the site.  They’re the ones of the Friday and Saturday before the wedding.  See them and others on the wedding photo page.

September 22, 2002:  In reviewing my photos from the honeymoon, I’ve made an astounding discovery.

September 19, 2002:  Geez, where do I start?  Let’s see.  The wedding on September 1 went nearly perfectly.  Then we spent two weeks in Hawaii for our honeymoon.  You can see photos and my travelogue here.  Today I went back to work for the first time since August 29.  Wow, what a shock!

August 21, 2002: The big catch up.  Since I haven’t been keeping this updated, I figure there’s a lot to write about.  Here goes.

Wedding Plans.  It’s now less than two weeks until Beth and I get married.  I thought we had everything squared away until I realized we still have about 20 things on the To Do list between now and then!  I won’t go into any more detail since you can learn all about the wedding on its own page.

404 Not Found.  The band has been busy lately.  We did a photo shoot a while back at Lakeside Amusement Park.  We’ve played a few gigs here and there, but not steadily, unfortunately.  I bought a BOSS SP-505 desktop sampler, which I’ve used at a couple of performances so far.  It’s OK for the price, but has a few shortcomings.  You can see my thorough review of it here.

Bats.  Back in July, I went on a very fun field trip with the Colorado Bat Society.  We visited the Orient Mine in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado.  There, we saw the largest colony of bats in the state.  I wrote up a pretty thorough photo journal of my trip.

More Photos.  I bought a digital camera this summer.  The main reason I wanted one was to take to Hawaii with us on our honeymoon.  But I’ve made pretty good use of it in other ways.  For instance, I took a lot of pictures of my bat trip (see above) and some of the pre-wedding barbecue party we had in early August.  After the honeymoon, I should have lots of pictures to share with you.

Mini Cooper S.  Ever since March (see my March 24 journal entry below) I’ve been thinking about test driving a MINI Cooper S.  But they apparently don’t have any available at the Colorado dealership yet.  I sent them an email and they never wrote back.  Lousy marketing!

Digital Video.  My band 404 Not Found recorded a couple of 30 minute TV segments for Denver Community Television (DCTV).  It’s a show called Innervision TV and the sound quality was so bad on the first one, we went back to tape another show.  Anyhow, I have videotapes of both performances, which I bought from the host of the show.  I really wanted to be able to show the videos to other people on the website, but I didn’t have the equipment to digitize a VHS tape into any computer format.  After some research, I found that Mike’s Camera in Boulder will transfer VHS to DVD for $80 an hour.  Since this was going to be just under an hour (two half-hour shows) I thought about that for a while.  But then I found that you can buy a USB device to grab video for anywhere between $40 and $150.  So I thought, “Why pay someone $80 to do it when I can buy something for the same price?”  So after researching a lot of these solutions, I bought a Pinnacle LINX.  It plugs into an RCA video and left and right audio in one and and a USB port on the other side.  And it comes with software to grab video.  Admittedly, it’s not full TV resolution (640 by 480).  In fact, it’s half that, but I figured that’s good enough, for two reasons.  First, if I want to show this online, it has to be low res.  Second, the video is fairly crappy to begin with so having it at lower resolution won’t hurt anything.  Anyhow, since trying out this new device, I’ve found that it consistently locks up my PC every time I record video using it.  Not instantly, but after an insidious delay of anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes.  After crashing my PC (which runs Windows XP and isn’t ever supposed to crash) a few times, the Microsoft crash agent thingy suggested I update my video driver.  So I got the latest NVIDIA GeForce driver and installed it.  When I did that, then suddenly my PC would then lock up consistently within about 2 minutes of starting Windows!  Boy that’s frustrating.  So I went back to the old video driver.  Windows doesn’t crash anymore.  Except when I try to capture video.  I wonder if I should buy a Macintosh.  I definitely want one of the new iMacs with the big screen.

Recommendations.  I recommend reading Interface by Stephen Bury.  That was my summertime sci fi book, I guess.  I hope to take more fiction on my honeymoon with me, but most of my backlog of books is nonfiction.  I’d also recommend Paris to the Moon.  We’ve seen lots of movies this summer, but the ones I most recommend are The Bourne Identity (maybe just for the very strange two or three lines of non sequitur dialogue) and Cable Guy (which I watched on DVD and was surprisingly impressed with).  I had a dream about Milla Jovovich last night, so I may have to rent Resident Evil.  (I’ve secretly loved Milla since Chaplin, though it was her role in The Fifth Element that really cemented her forever in my heart along with Gena Gershon and Madchen Amick.)

Finally, I just can’t get over the impression that Donald Rumsfeld (“Mr. Secretary”) looks a lot like Richard Couch (“Mr. Bankruptcy”).

Don

Dick

Did I ever tell you the story about Richard Couch’s Gay Son?

August 21, 2002:  Ok, I’ve been getting more feedback that people actually read this thing.  For instance, just yesterday, I got an email from a guy in Poland who wrote:

BTW: I visited your website and read your online journal It’s interesting to know how life in the USA looks like.

So, I guess I need to spend some time bringing readers up to speed.  I’ll try to catch up soon.  Maybe tonight.  If not, it’ll have to wait until the weekend.

July 19, 2002:  One person emailed me to say he read the online journal.  Thanks Perry!

May 27, 2002:  Wow, I’m getting good at only updating this once a month.  Email me if you actually read this.  Otherwise, I won’t update it more often.

April 27, 2002:  I’ve spent most of my spare time in the past two weeks building a new PC.  It’s been way more of an ordeal than I expected.  I’m not new to building homemade computers, but this one has been one of the most challenging ever.  I wanted to replace Sponge and Mollusk, my old Windows XP and Linux machines, with a single top of the line machine and a hardware firewall/router.  The whole setup finally works, but I learned some hard lessons.  Here are the top three:

• Windows 98 will not boot if you have a CPU of 2.2 GHz speed or faster
• Windows 98 will not boot if you have more than 1 GB of RAM
• GeForce 4 video cards are incompatible with SOYO P4S motherboards

March 24, 2002:  My birthday was the 20th and we had a party.  Lots of people came and I got many nice gifts.  But nobody bought me one of these, unfortunately.  I had heard they were going to make Minis for sale in the US again, but I forgot about it until I saw a billboard along I-25 last night that said “THE SUV BACKLASH STARTS NOW”.  That’s one of their many marketing slogans.  It was particularly interesting to me, since I once owned the domain name suvbacklash.org and suvbacklash.com.  When I got home, I went to check out the Mini USA website and then checked the domain registration for suvbacklash.com.  Turns out that nobody else has picked it up since I let my registration lapse after I shut down the site.  So, I registered it.  Again.  Maybe there is going to be an SUV backlash after all.  Of course, you wouldn’t know it from the actions of our Congress, who just voted to cancel the improvements to the CAFE standards.

This past month, 404 Not Found has been rehearsing lots and we started our Spring 2002 performance series.

Also, the wedding planning has been coming along.  We now have:

• a date and time - 6 PM September 1, 2002
• a location - Boulder Theater
• an officiant - Gail Boex
• a caterer - A Spice of Life and Erika from Sushi Zanmai
• a DJ - A Music Plus
• rings - seen here
• a guest list - lots of folks
• invitations - printed up and sitting in a box

And I even started a wedding web page.

February 18, 2002:  It’s been a month since I wrote anything here.  And I doubt anyone even noticed!  The past month has consisted of lots of work work, lots of music work, and lots of wedding planning.  Today’s a holiday for me - the first time I’ve had Presidents Day off since 12th grade, I think.

January 19, 2002:  Whew, it’s been busy lately!  On top of work (which has been hectic the past week), I went to the health club Monday night, had the online CD release party for Nightmare Lullaby on Tuesday night, a test team management workshop Wednesday night, and our weekly Deadlands game Thursday night.  So last night (Friday) we just stayed at home and watched The Hurricane with Denzel Washington.  It was a decent show, but nothing amazingly outstanding.  I also spent all night until nearly 1 AM working in the recording studio.  I’m trying to get it ready for Scott and Rich to come over this afternoon.  We’re going to plug a bunch of audio devices in together and see what kind of noise we can generate.  Basically, this is some experimentation and rehearsing for our first live performance, which will be next week.  Later this morning, I need to go shopping and get some various gear to make things go a little smoother in the studio.

January 11, 2002:  Did I mention I finished reading Culture Jam?  It’s a good book and I recommend it.

January 5, 2002: Wow, it’s a new year.  There have been only 3 things in my life the past week - planning our wedding, working, and finishing the new 404 Not Found CD.  It’s done, by the way.  It’s called Nightmare Lullaby, after the spoken word piece of the same name by Scott Siders.  I’ve been planning an online CD release party, and if you happen to be reading this and have not gotten an invitation yet, please consider joining us.

December 29, 2001: In case you haven’t heard, Google’s extensive USENET archive is finally online.  It represents 20 years of Internet history, dating way back before there was a World Wide Web.  It’s great to see all these articles being preserved for posterity.

Just for grins, I did a search for myself to see how far back I could trace my online history.  Turns out that my very first USENET article was posted on November 6, 1990.  I thought it would have been earlier than that, but I guess not.  That was my 9th and final semester as an undergrad at the University of Colorado.  In December, I would graduate with a BS in Aerospace Engineering Sciences and then in January I’d start graduate school.  Here are some other funny subjects I was involved in all those years ago:

August 9, 1991

My mail order bride want ad I was looking for someone who could cook and clean plus take over my job at PVI writing Fortran code.  Note my self-assumed title of Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy.

February 24, 1992

First mention of the woman who would become my life partner, Beth Partin I had been dating Beth for less than a month when I posted this.  I guess I’ve gotten used to kissing someone with glasses!  Also note that by this time I was signing my name as “Todd.” which is something I still do to this day (any of you who have ever gotten an email from me know this to be true).   Also, notice the fake middle name “Slan” in my signature:

Todd “Slan” Bradley-Postmodern Reaganomics Renaissance Man, The Exception to Every Rule, An Example To All Men, The Biggest Jerk In The World, Supreme Ruler Of The Galaxy, AND Captain of The Unnamed Computer Science Ultimate Frisbee Team.***

November 11, 1992

On the Dynamics of Rotating Sport Discs This is the paper I wrote to get a Masters degree at CU.  To this day, many people don’t believe me when I say I got a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering by studying the flight of frisbees.  Here’s proof.

***  If you’ll forgive a tangent for a moment, each of the items in my signature has a history, and I’ll explain them now:

Slan: I once got a letter from CU addressed to Todd Slan Bradley.  My middle name’s Alan, and S is just one letter away from A on the keyboard, so someone clearly made a typo when entering that.  I thought Slan sounded like a cool, Slavic name and so I used it as a pseudonym for a while.

Postmodern Reaganomics Renaissance Man: A coworker of mine at Precision Visuals named Matt Powell gave me this title one day.  He was impressed at the amount of computer and non-computer trivia I knew.

The Exception to Every Rule:  I wish I could remember the context, but I’m pretty sure that Jaye Lampe gave me this name.

An Example To All Men:  Hmm, I can’t remember where this came from.

The Biggest Jerk In The World: In high school, I had a friend named Daren Deffenbaugh.  His sister Julie called me this one day when I was bugging her about something or other.  The title stuck in my mind because it’s such an absolute.  If I can be better at something - anything - than the other 6 billion people on the planet, that makes me feel pretty good.

Supreme Ruler Of The Galaxy:  When I lived in Libby Hall at CU, one of the other guys on our floor was a very soft spoken fellow named Bill.  When anyone would ask him what he wanted to do when he graduated, he’d always say he wanted to become a king.  He was totally serious about it, too.  And so I figured if Bill can aspire to be a king, I can aspire to even greater power.

Captain of the Unnamed Computer Science Ultimate Frisbee Team:  Even though I wasn’t a Computer Science student, I hung around with lots of them.  I somehow got elected to captain their Ultimate team, and I think the team was later named “The Flying Bitheads”.

December 27, 2001:  Christmas has come and gone!  I got some nice gifts and for the most part had a quiet day at home.  My parents visited from Thursday through Sunday, and Beth and I spent Christmas day just the two of us.  I worked the day before and the day after, while most of my coworkers took those days off.  For Christmas, I got several CDs, a couple DVDs, two GURPS Traveller books, some toys, and some money to buy more toys.  Don’t know what I’ll spend the money on, yet.

We went to see the long awaited Fellowship of the Ring movie on opening day last Wednesday.  And we liked it so much, we went to see it again on Christmas.  It’s a great film and is now voted as the #1 movie of all time by readers of IMDB.com.

I’ve been making good progress mixing the next 404 Not Found CD.  I made the first test CD and made lots of notes about how it sounds on various equipment.  Now it’s back to the studio to remix some tracks and remaster others.

Here’s an idea I had a long time ago, that I’ve been meaning to write down here.  This came to me while I was driving home from my parents house at Thanksgiving in my NGV.  One of the most important features of this car is that it has incredibly low emissions, a point that’s accentuated when driving over the mountain passes on the highway along with all the diesel trucks and SUVs that pour out smelly black and blue clouds for miles and miles.  I was thinking the gasoline companies should research fuel additives that give off various designer scents when burned.  I imagined a special gasoline that smells like milk chocolate when it burns.  That would sure make highway driving in traffic a lot more pleasant!

Perhaps part of what made me think of that was an article I read about a guy who has a car that runs on leftover fry oil from restaurants.  He says that the car puts out fumes that smell like wherever the oil came from.  So if he gets used oil from a chicken joint, his exhaust smells like KFC.  Or other times, it smells like fresh french fries.  Even if it’s not chocolate, that sounds nicer than the usual burning diesel smell.

December 15, 2001:  Well, Christmas is nearly here.  I’m almost done with my shopping and may finish the rest up this weekend.  We watched The Avengers last night on DVD.  It pretty much sucked.  Maybe I’d like it more if I were a fan of the original TV series.

My pet peeve of the day is for-profit companies that don’t read and reply to their email.  This has happened to me twice in the past week.  First is the Harry Fox Agency, a company that licenses songs written by one person for use in a recording by another.  They have a website and a customer service email address for questions, but a week after sending them a question by email, they still haven’t responded.  The other time this happened to me this week is with a company called Colorado Weddings, which - as you may have guessed - organizes weddings in Colorado.  They also have an email address, to which I sent a note requesting more information on north Denver venues they work with.  Still no response.

Speaking of email, last week my hatred of spam email finally came to a head.  I realized that well over 50% of the mail I was getting was spam, so I shut down one of my email accounts that was the source of a lot of it. I can no longer be reached at ToddBradley@bigfoot.com.  Originally, the Bigfoot concept seemed great.  Their tagline was “Email for Life” and the idea is that you’d get one email address that you could use forever, and it would just forward messages to you at another address.  So, you could have it point at your home ISP email and then if you switched ISPs someday you just point it to the new one.  Well, eventually realizing they didn’t have a viable business plan, Bigfoot started making a requirement that if you were going to use their “free” email for life service, you have to accept advertisements delivered to your mailbox.  In the end, I wasn’t willing to do that, so I canceled my service.  Also, I looked at a number of anti-spam programs and settled on one called Spam Eater Pro, which I purchased.  It filters out spam messages using two different methods - checking senders’ addresses with a number of anti-spam services (like ORBS and RBL, two of the most famous) and also filtering based on regular expressions in the header and body.  Between those two methods, it’s doing a good job of deleting my spam before it ever gets to me, and it only cost $25.

December 2, 2001: I just finished a massive two day project to revamp the photos section of this site.  My photos from my October 2001 vacation are finally up, along with notes of where I went.  Plus, I put several scans of old pictures on the site.  You can find it all from the main photos page now.

Last night, Beth and I went to see Amelie, a French film that’s incredibly funny and good.  It’s playing at the Mayan in Denver.  We’re still looking for a place to have the wedding, and haven’t seen the perfect location yet.

November 28, 2001: I finally got my photos back from Snapfish.  The prints are of standard quality, but what I’m really impressed with is the digital versions.  The computer files, delivered on CDROM, look really, really good.  They make me look like I’m a real photographer, rather than some schmoe with a 15 year old point-and-shoot camera.  I’ve already taken one of the photos and put it up as my desktop on my PC at home.  I’ll go through them all and do some cropping and touchups, then incorporate them into my October 2001 travel log, which is a work in progress.  More on that later.

November 25, 2001:  Last week was a pretty short one for work, but still very busy.  I had Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving and drove to my parents’ house for the holiday.  There, I met up with Beth, who had been on the Hopi and Navajo reservations as part of the Traditional Support Caravan.  My aunt invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at her cafe in Redstone, which was very nice.  I took my cousin Billy along with me and saw lots of other relatives.  It snowed a couple times while we were there.

We drove back Saturday so that I could make it to Scott Siders’ book release part at Stella’s coffee shop in Denver.  He read some pieces from his new book and did a little duet performance thing with Josh, who also played with a musical group.

Now I’m home trying to get caught up on things - bills, email, etc.  Also, I’m going to start Christmas shopping.  But before I do that, I’ll update my online wish list.

November 12, 2001:  I spent all day yesterday (Sunday) playing Ultimate.  It was the fall league tournament.  My team played four games, from about 9:00 AM straight through to about 2:00 PM.  We won the first one, lost the second, won the third, and lost the fourth.  That first loss put us in the “beer bracket” which we didn’t win, unfortunately.  But it was good fun.  I haven’t played 4 games in a single day in over a year, so I was fairly tired and sore, but not as bad as I expected.

November 10, 2001:  I just got home from the movie theater.  I went with my friend Mike to see The One, the new Jet Li movie.  It’s gotten terrible reviews, but I was actually impressed with it.  I was expecting a real stinker, but this was a good movie, given that you understand the genre it comes from.  It’s got great effects and sound, good action and fight scenes, and even a decent (though not very original - but who would expect such a thing) plot.

Earlier today, my Ultimate Frisbee team had our final practice of the season.  Tomorrow is the big tournament, and I guess we’re about as ready as we’re going to be!

I sent five rolls of film to Snapfish this week and requested prints and a CDROM.  So once those come back, I’ll put some of them on my website.  The photos are mostly from my vacation to Utah three weeks ago.

November 3, 2001:

I’ve now been running Windows XP for over a week and it hasn’t crashed or locked up on me once!  That’s about 5 to 10 times better than Windows ME was.  And I found that Team Fortress Classic (TFC) runs better than ever before.

The plot with the car accident last week thickens.  The kid who ran in to me filed a claim against my insurance.  The insurance inspector (claim adjustor) took recorded statements by telephone with both of us and denied the kid’s claim because she felt I was not at fault.  So, that leaves me with two choices.  I could either file a claim on the other driver’s insurance and hope they find him to be at fault (in which case I don’t have a deductible to pay), or I can just forget it and file a claim on my collision insurance (in which case I have to pay a $500 deductible).  Well, I did the first one and then found out from the other driver’s insurance that he is an “exempted driver” for the car that he was driving.  So, they will be denying my claim based on that.  But to me that sounds like he was driving without insurance, which is a fairly serious crime in Colorado!  So now I’m not sure what’s going to happen next.  Will my insurance company take him to court?  Will they ask the police to arrest or ticket him for driving without insurance?  We’ll see.

Let’s see.  What else happened this week?

Well, Monday night Beth and I went to Sushi Zanmai’s annual invitation-only party.  It was at the former JC Penney location in the nearly dead Crossroads Mall in Boulder.  We got in with no problem, and then stood in line for nearly two hours to get some of the free sushi that was the main appeal of the party.  Yes, free sushi!  Then when we were about 10 people from the front of the line, finally, they ran out of sushi!  So, after spending the whole night standing in line starving, we decided we’d had enough of this “party” and went to Sumida’s for supper.

Halloween was Wednesday night and we had a pretty low turnout of kids, which means we’ve got lots of candy left over.  Thursday night I watched The Tao of Steve on DVD; I really liked that movie and would recommend it.

October 29, 2001:  As always, I have a ton of news since I last wrote.

First off, I lived through my first week on the job.  My title is QA Engineering Manager and I guess they liked me so much on my first day that they gave me a second group to manage on Day #2.  So now I’m overseeing two software QA teams, and I’ve got a lot to learn about the company’s products and related technology and people and everything else!  Everyone’s great and I’m very excited and happy to be at Voyant.

Last week, I upgraded my home PC called Sponge to Windows XP.  So far, I’m very happy with it.  It hasn’t crashed once, which is much better than Windows ME.  Unfortunately, XP wasn’t compatible with my sound card, my tape backup drive, or my printer.  So, I bought a new sound card, took out the tape drive and am just doing archives to a secondary hard drive, and traded printers with Beth.  Now it’s running smoothly and everything’s happy.  Oh, I had to upgrade my Norton SystemWorks to the latest version, too.  Version 2001 wasn’t XP compatible for 2002 is.

I still haven’t made any progress on writing a travel log about my vacation, but I will.  Beth and I watched a few episodes of Sex and the City on DVD over the weekend.  It’s a famous show that we never saw because we didn’t have HBO until recently.  It’s fairly funny.  I can’t say it’s my favorite TV program, but it’s nice to have a 30 minute TV show without commercials.

Yesterday (Sunday the 28th) my Ultimate Frisbee team played our next to last game of the regular season.  We won easily against the juniors team, made of a bunch of teenagers who are all in the same church group.  One more game, which should be a bit tougher, and then the tournament!

Finally, on Friday (the 26th) as I was driving home from work, I got in the first auto accident of my whole life.  Some 16 year old kid borrowing his brother’s sports car rear-ended me at a stop light at Sheridan and 120th.  I didn’t call the police, thinking it would be nice to cut the poor kid some slack, but now I’m regretting it, because he denies responsibility for causing the accident.  Having a police report would probably be a good thing, although I can’t imagine how the insurance company or a court would find that I caused the accident, since I think they almost always consider the rear-ender to be at blame over the rear-endee.  Luckily nobody was hurt.  My own suspicion is that the boy was driving too fast for conditions, paying only marginal attention, and trying to impress his girlfriend in the passenger seat with how fast his brother’s car could go in rush hour traffic.  We’ll see how it goes with the insurance investigators.

October 22, 2001:  Wow, there’s a lot to add since my last journal entry.

First off, I just got back from being out of town for a week.  I left on October 11 for Salt Lake City, where I attended the annual conference of the Glen Canyon Institute.  It was on Friday and Saturday and I just barely made it there on time, because I drove and the roads Friday morning in southern Wyoming were a mess due to some snow, low temperatures, and extreme wind.  Then, I took the “scenic route” back, stopping in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks for some camping and hiking.  I stopped for a day at my parents’ house in Redstone, Colorado and went fishing on the Colorado River on Friday with my dad.  Then, I finally got home late on Friday the 19th.  I took lots of photos and am planning to write up a whole travelogue once I get the pictures developed and scanned.

The other big news is that I start a new job today.  Unfortunately, the consulting business I put so much heart and soul and startup money into just hasn’t taken off the way I’d hoped.  And I need to start paying the bills.  I had heard about a company called Voyant Technologies from a guy I worked with at Jabber and he said it was a great place.  So, I talked to them some.  They had a software QA manager position open and it sounded like a very good opportunity.  From what I can tell, the company is very sound, they have a good product for which there’s lots of demand, and - best of all - the people are great and really seem to know what they’re doing.  So, they convinced me to come join the team.

While I was on my trip to Utah, I ended up buying some more camping gear, too.  The best thing is a really cool day pack from REI, with a Platypus “hydration system” in it.  Maybe I’ll tell you more about that in a later entry.  Gotta go to work now.

October 6, 2001:  Last month, I refinanced the mortgage on our house.  I paid off the existing mortgage plus the car loans for my and Honda Civic GX with a new loan from the University of Colorado Federal Credit Union at a much lower (and fixed) rate.  Other than having monthly payments of about $800 less, one other benefit is that I got a big fat refund check from the feds for a bunch of mortgage insurance I’d paid (since the previous loan was from FHA and required mortgage insurance).

So, with the check from the Department of the Treasury filling my pocket, I decided to go on a shopping spree and buy some outdoors clothes and equipment that I’ve wanted for a long while.  I got:

• Columbia hat - I’m running out of baseball caps and wanted something that isn’t made of cotton.
• Marmot Catskill sleeping bag - Why do I need another sleeping bag when I already have 3?  Well, one of them is a double wide for summertime camping with Beth.  One is 20 years old and doesn’t insulate very well anymore.  And one is a very warm mummy bag that has zippers that always catch and doesn’t work well for someone who sleeps on his side and rolls around a lot (that’s me).  This Marmot semi-rectangular bag doesn’t have the insulation value of the Cabela’s mummy bag, but it’s got an awesome zipper design, with special panels sewn into the bag to prevent the zippers from catching on the fabric.
• Pacific Trail Pac Tech Terrain jacket - I’ve wanted a true waterproof breathable shell for a long time.  I had a decent water resistant shell but I gave it away and it wasn’t fully waterproof.  This one is great.
• Galyan’s brand polar fleece sleeping bag - supposedly you’d use this for summertime camping, but I bought it as a liner for my new sleeping bag for times it’s cold.
• HydRID LightWeight long sleeve t-shirt - If you’ve never owned any clothes made of CoolMax, you should.  CoolMax is the most awesome fabric I’ve seen.  It wicks sweat away from your skin really nicely - 5 times faster than cotton, they say - but is as comfortable as cotton.  I bought a pair of CoolMax underwear several months ago for wearing while hiking and playing Ultimate Frisbee and when I saw a long sleeve t-shirt made of the stuff, I just had to buy it.

October 5, 2001:  Yesterday, Beth and I drove up to Loveland to look at a possible location for our wedding and reception called .  It was a nice enough place, but didn’t seem quite right for what we wanted.  We’ve got a long list of possibilities and I think it’ll take weeks to evaluate them all.  At some point, we’ll make a wedding web page, but we don’t have any of the details sorted out yet, so it would just be blank at this point!

Next week, I’m leaving town to drive to Salt Lake City for the annual meeting of the Glen Canyon Institute.  It’s going to be a tight schedule since I have to be in Boulder on Thursday night for the quarterly board of directors meeting for the Colorado Bat Society, of which I’m the Executive Director.  But the first of the events I want to attend in SLC starts at 6:00 PM on Friday.  So, I’m starting my road trip right after the bat meeting.  I’ll make it to Wyoming somewhere and stay the night and then drive the rest of the way on Friday.  To save money, I’m planning to camp.  The GCI events are over Saturday night, and I’ll probably spend Sunday doing some sightseeing in Salt Lake City since I’ve never been there except to pass through.  Then I’m taking the scenic route back and will hopefully do some camping and hiking at some of the places we didn’t have time to visit on our Utah trip in the spring.  I may hit the San Rafael Swell area, Arches National Park, the La Sal-to-Gateway road that I’ve always wanted to see, and then visit my parents in Redstone on the way back over the mountains.

I watched episode #2 of Enterprise last night.  It was o.k.  In some ways, I like the show because it’s so much different than the previous Star Trek television programs.  But in some ways I don’t like it because it’s too similar.

What else have I been doing lately?  Always trying to find new clients for my consulting business.  Evaluating a diskette of new sounds for my Korg Karma in preparation for writing a review.  Reading a bunch.  Shopping for a new sleeping bag.  Playing and practicing Ultimate Frisbee with my team Big Hair Todd and the Swillers (also called Big Huck Todd and the Swillers).  Playing and practicing Team Fortress Classic with my team 30+ Team 1.

September 26, 2001:  I went to see Chris Locke talk last night at the RMIUG meeting.  He’s not as freaky as I expected.  In fact, his talk was really quite good.  I may even buy his new book, though I thought Cluetrain Manifesto was a bit tedious.

Also, for the past two days I’ve been immersed in my project to cook blue corn lamb tamales.  Well, I’m finally done and they came out pretty decent for my first attempt.  I spent a couple hours this afternoon writing up the recipe for them, as well as writing a recipe for borracho beans and finishing my recipe for smothering chili.  They’re all on my recipe page.

Tonight I’m going to watch the series premier of Enterprise.

Sure wish someone would leave a note in my guestbook.  Maybe nobody reads my online journal.

September 19, 2001: I made a Visual TFC Map Guide with screenshots of the most popular TFC maps.

September 3, 2001:  I’ve been spending a lot of time in my recording studio the past few days, making good progress on a lot of new songs for the next 404 Not Found CD.  Also, I just scanned in an old photo of me at age 16.  Go see the Todd Through The Years page [Ed. - It’s now here] to see it.

August 29, 2001:  I finished another book this morning.  That makes 4 I’ve finished in the past week - Cowboy Slang, Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, and Hopi Dwellings.  I decided it was time to go write some book reviews for Amazon.com, too, which I did.  I’d like to say it’s now time for some fiction.  But out of the 14 books left on my “books to read” shelf, 13 are nonfiction.

August 28, 2001: Beth and I spent a long weekend in the mountains.  On Friday we drove from our house in Broomfield to the Denver Creek Campground.  Saturday, we visited another local reservoir to watch birds and got ice cream in the town of Hot Sulphur Springs.  Then we drove to Winter Park and rode the Alpine Slide and saw the oompah band that was playing there for Octoberfest.  Then, it was back to our camp for dinner.  Sunday, we leisurely broke camp and headed home by way of Rocky Mountain National Park.  On the drive home, we saw coyotes, antelope, moose, elk, and deer.  All in one day!  We stopped at the Alpine Vistors Center and later stopped for a short hike up to Alberta Falls, where I asked Beth to marry me.  She agreed, and we hiked back down the mountain and drove to Estes Park where we had a very mediocre meal at a Mexican restaurant.  We got home fairly late Sunday night.

August 23, 2001: I added this guest book thing.  Leave me a note.

August 20, 2001:  Beth and I went to see King Lear performed at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival on Saturday night.  The weather turned out to be great, unlike the show I attended last year, where I got rained on.  There’s a new burger joint on The Hill in Boulder, in the space previously occupied by a Korean restaurant, and before that a Japanese restaurant.  It’s called Thunderbird Burgers.  The burger was o.k. I guess, but about 3 times as much bun as meat.  They have these huge homemade style buns.

Last night (Sunday) we went to an open mike night at Stella’s in south Denver, near DU.  It was pretty good, though a little bit long for my tastes.  I think 15 different people read, which was about 3 times as much as I’d prefer.

Tonight and tomorrow night, we’re going bat watching, as part of the Boulder County Bat Survey.  Assuming the weather’s nice, that is.  If it’s rainy or windy, we’ll have to postpone for another day.

Oh, I put a few photos up of me on vacation this spring.

And last night I finished reading William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties.  It’s probably not his best work, but entertaining nonetheless.

August 17, 2001:  Today, I received an interesting brochure from a former employer of mine.  There seems to be a minor typo in the spelling of my last name.

August 8, 2001: After years of nagging from people who want my salsa recipe, I finally put up a recipes page on my website.  Check it out and let me know if you enjoy any of the recipes.

August 2, 2001: My doctor says my blood cholesterol level is too high, so I have to start taking medicine and eating a special diet to bring things under control.  I’ve always had high cholesterol and have a family history of cholesterol problems, too.  So, I guess it’s good to take care of it.

I added a whole bunch of photos to the website today.  There are now several sets of photos all indexed here.  And I’m going to scan some photos from the Canyonlands vacation we took in the spring.

Also, I’ve been working on revamping the website for the Glen Canyon Institute over the past week.  It’s huge!  But it needs help.  And the Glen Canyon Institute is a very good cause.

In other news, I’ve been reading and watching a fair number of movies lately, which is a good thing to do when unemployed.  Unfortunately, due to lack of money, I’ve had to put soaring on the back burner.  So, I canceled my membership with the Mile High Gliding Club.  It was a sad thing to do, but I just don’t have the money for glider rentals so it doesn’t make sense to pay the monthly dues to the club.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into it someday.

July 24, 2001: Did another big update on this website, converting everything over to use CSS.  That’s not an overly simple task in the realm of FrontPage, but it’s done!

As I wrote in my journal entry a couple weeks ago, I’m starting my own company.  I just sent the paperwork off today to the Colorado Secretary of State and the IRS.  The company is Zang Spur Consulting LLC.  I’m setting up a website for it, but it’s still very much under construction.  I’ve been spending the past several days writing a business plan for myself to serve as a guide over the next few months.

You might be asking yourself, “Where does the name Zang Spur come from?”  Well, here’s the story:

Why Zang Spur Consulting?  Well, I needed a name and I wanted something with some geographical significance.  It turns out that in the 19th century, the town now known as Broomfield, Colorado was called Zang’s Spur.   The name comes from the farmer who lived here, Adolph Zang.  He convinced the local railroad to build a rail spur out to his farm, to make it easier for him to get his goods to Denver.  So, that rail spur was known as Zang’s Spur and the township that formed up around it got the same name.  Sometime in the 1890’s the name changed to Broomfield, after the fields of broom corn grown here. I didn’t like the ’s in Zang’s Spur, since it made the name tougher to spell and didn’t yield a nice internet domain name.  So I dropped the ’s and stuck with Zang Spur. The City of Broomfield did the same on the sign for Zang’s Spur Centennial Park, which now simply reads “Zang Spur Park”.

July 13, 2001: I moved all the best SUV Backlash website content over here [since moved].  I just don’t have the energy or time to keep up www.suvbacklash.com anymore, and the backlash that I predicted doesn’t really seem to be coming after all.

July 13, 2001: It’s Friday the 13th.  I’m happy to say that no more bad things have happened to me since my last entry.  My ankle’s mostly healed.

I am officially unemployed now, and should be collecting unemployment insurance before long.  Jabber.com, the software startup where I’d been working for the past year, gave me an insultingly low severance pay of 2 weeks salary, which ran out last week.  I can’t really blame them for including me in their layoff; it’s hard to justify having a high paid customer support manager when you don’t have any customers.  Clearly, the original expectations of having a viable product in late 2000 and customers lining up at the door were grossly out of line.  But I do hope things turn around for them.  They’ve got the start of a great product and some good people.

Moving on to bigger and better things, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to do something I’ve been talking and thinking about for four years now - start my own consulting practice.  My new company is called Zang Spur Consulting.  It’s an independent consulting practice specializing in customer support and quality assurance consulting to software organizations.  Most of my time the past three weeks has gone to trying to learn how to set up a business like this - legal and financial concerns, finding clients, etc.

In personal news, I attended the wedding of my cousin Megan and her new husband J.J.  It was in Redstone, CO on July 1, and was a very nice ceremony.  I got to see both of my brothers (Matt and Kent) at the same time, which is rare.

Also, I’ve gone soaring a couple of times.  Earlier this week, I made my first solo takeoff without a “line boy”, meaning that I hooked up my own tow rope and launched without a wing runner.  That same flight was my first solo flight where I did any significant soaring, gaining a few hundred feet of altitude in a squirrelly thermal over east Boulder.

June 20, 2001: Man oh man what a week it’s been.  On Saturday I nearly broke my ankle by stepping into an ugly hole while running around around in the desert.  On Tuesday, I got a notice that the check I wrote to the United States Treasury for my estimated tax payment bounced.  So, I’ll get to pay the bounced check fees and the late tax payment fees.  And today (Wednesday) I got laid off from my job.  What else does Lady Luck hold in store for me?

June 12, 2001: Oh, where do I begin with the news?

First, the regular season for Spring League Ultimate Frisbee is over.  My team, Adverse Reaction, won our final game of the season.  In fact, we only won the first game and the last game, and lost all the rest.  But I caught the winning point of the last game!  So that made me happy.  Then we went to Wahoo’s for food and margs.

Beth and I have volunteered to help with the Boulder County Bat Survey again this year.  The first bat watching trip was last night.  We’re monitoring Stearns Lake again this year.  We only saw one bat, but I heard at least two on the bat box.  It was a little breezy, but that didn’t seem to deter the bugs.

I bought a new musical instrument last week.  It’s called a Korg Karma.  It’s a synthesizer keyboard with a number of special functions to help with improvised music.  It’s the most expensive keyboard I’ve ever bought (even on sale) and I didn’t really budget to buy a new keyboard this year.  So, now I’m selling off a bunch of older music stuff on eBay in order to raise the money to make up for this new toy.  Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy the past week that I’ve only been able to play it for 3 or 4 hours.

Also, I upgraded our internet connection.  Since about a year after we moved into this house, I’ve been using ISDN.  Unfortunately, it’s expensive - $75 a month for service from Qwest plus $50 a month for my ISP.  But, since our neighborhood doesn’t have DSL or cable internet, ISDN was my only option for a high speed connection.  Well, now there are other alternatives.  The one I chose is MHO DirectWave, which is a wireless broadband connection.  It operates via a microwave dish on the roof and costs just $60 a month for service (for 1 megabit up and down) including ISP.  So, I’ll be saving about $65 a month and getting around 8 times the connection speed.  What an improvement!

The weather has gotten nice enough (finally) that I’ve resumed my glider lessons.  I took one last weekend and one the weekend before, with one solo flight each time.  Now I need to spend some time taking the practice exam in anticipation of getting my private pilot’s license.

My group of gaming friends is now onto a new game.  We started playing GURPS Traveller a few weeks ago.  I hadn’t played (or refereed) Traveller for about 12 years, so it’s been a relearning experience for me.  The campaign I’ve put together is called The Dark Wing Missions and is a merchant campaign with some space opera style drama and intrigue (eventually) thrown in.  I’m definitely helping keep Steve Jackson in business as I’ve already bought 8 or 9 GURPS Traveller products!

Man, that’s a lot of news!  Better make the font smaller and move the old stuff off to the archive…

April 7, 2001: You’re probably wondering why I don’t update my web page more often.  Well, I set up a weblog site for myself, http://tbradley.manilasites.com.  But it’s so slow as to be painful to use.  So maybe I should just write my thoughts here more often.

The weather’s been getting warmer and nicer.  It’s really windy today, but I’ve been taking my Xootr to work more often lately.

Also, it’s not new news anymore, but I upgrade my recording studio a while back and added a recording booth called a Whisperroom.  It’s nice.  So, I’ve been spending a bit more time making music lately.

April 1, 2001: April Fool’s day.  We lost our frisbee game today, but drank a lot of margaritas.

March 25, 2001: Ultimate Frisbee season started today.  I’m playing in the B league of Grass Roots Ultimate.  My team is B-2 and we’re called Adverse Reaction.  We won our first game.

March 20, 2001: In case you didn’t know, my birthday marks the first day of spring.  Beth took me to Gasho of Japan for supper, and then we went home to watch a movie on DVD.  I’ve been watching lots of classics on DVD and I highly recommend Netflix.

December 7, 2000:  I finally made my first solo flight in a glider!  I took the day off work to get in some glider lessons.  After four flights with my instructor, John Campbell, I took one by myself.  I expected to be very nervous, but wasn’t.  In fact, it was nice to fly around without someone chattering nonstop in the back seat (just as he told me it would be).  Here’s the traditional Polaroid photo of me right after landing.  Click for a bigger picture.

October 2000:  I’m now scooter enabled.  I bought a Xootr Cruz and am now trying to learn to ride it.  If you’d like to buy one, ask me how I can easily save you 5% on the purchase.

September 2000:  I’ve upgraded my two PCs and I’m trying to build a third to run Linux.  Unfortunately, I’ve had quite a few problems simply ordering parts!  Read this to see why I recommend you stay away from Advanced Design of Kentucky.

Summer 2000:  Well, I’m learning to soar.  You know, flying a glider.  Yes, a plane with no engine.  I started taking soaring lessons in the spring of 2000.  Progress is slow.  I’m a terrible student, but I’m keeping with it.  I’ve been learning at Mile High Gliding in Boulder.  Here’s what the glider port looks like right now [Ed. - link doesn’t work anymore].