Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

Beth and Todd the day after Christmas 2004, in Glenwood Springs 

Did I mention we had a great Christmas? Beth and I drove to my parents’ house near Redstone, CO. My brother Kent and my cousin Deb and her husband Rick drove up on Christmas day for dinner. We were joined by a couple neighbors, too. Christmas dinner was fantastic, of course. The day after, we went to Glenwood Springs to soak in the pool. Then we rode up the tram to the Glenwood Caverns. We didn’t take the cave tour, but just ate a late lunch at the top of the mountain. On the 27th, Beth and my mother went shopping in Aspen while I just hung out and relaxed at the house. We drove back home on the 28th.

one man lord of the rings – I wonder if this one man is ever coming to Denver.

Looks Like I’m Going Nowhere! – Here’s the start of yet another website. I’ve been setting my home Linux PC up to have external access to ssh, ftp, http, and mail. So I decided to give it its own domain name. So far, I’m most proud of the drawing that serves as the front page. If you click that, it just takes you to a TWiki website without much content yet.

I’m sad to report that I’ve discovered that the domain name ToshiStation.com has already been taken by someone. And I was going to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!

the end of the internet – Check out explodingdog.com for unusual art like this:

BBC NEWS | Europe | Dutch consider infant euthanasia – According to this article, 72% of pediatricians in the Netherlands (and 74% in France) are in favor of “ending the lives of newborns in certain circumstances.” I wonder what the numbers would be in the US. I remember writing a research paper in high school English class about euthanasia. I was then – and still am – of the belief that it’s appropriate and acceptable in some circumstances.

For instance, if a baby is born without a brain (the example the article gives) I think it’s unnatural and wrong to use technology to keep the infant alive. Similarly, I told Beth that if the time comes when I have senile dementia to the point of not knowing who I am or who other people are and have a poor quality of life, I want her to do everything legal in her power to put me out of my misery. In the good ole USA, that may not be much, especially if this country turns into the gestapo state we seem to be headed toward. In that case, I hope she can take me somewhere that has a more sensible legal view of such things.

Well, I went on a nice shopping spree this afternoon and bought myself several related Christmas gifts. I got a Martin guitar (model 000CXEBLACK), a case, a Behringer Ultracoustic ACX1000 amplifier, a KORG GT-3 guitar tuner, a strap, a couple sets of strings, and a book of Christmas music for guitar.

Here’s what the guitar looks like:

And here’s the amp:

Beth is fond of this photo she took. It’s me relaxing on the freshly mowed lawn with my laptop PC. Ah, the beauty of wireless networking! I think this was taken in early October 2004, but she just developed the film recently. 

I finally scanned the photos I took on our Thanksgiving snorkeling trip to Yal Ku Lagoon, and added those to my Akumal photos page. There are some of my first underwater photos there. Most of them came out really crappy, but here are the best of them.

Last night, Beth and I went to L’Atelier, a fancy restaurant in Boulder. I wouldn’t really call it a “French restaurant” despite the name. Boy did we spend a fortune on dinner! All told it was just shy of $150 for the two of us, but every single thing we had there was good, from salad to appetizer to entree to dessert. OK, not everything was good; the tap water was really gnarly and I had to get bottled water. I think the Boulder water department must be trying to get rid of all their old stockpiles of chlorine before the end of the year.

After dinner, we went to see the Boulder Chorale give a performance of Christmas music. Also, there was a marimba band and a brass band. It was all pretty good, but I thought it was strange they were only giving 2 performances – one Saturday night and one Sunday afternoon.

In other news, this morning I finished playing HL2 (that’s Half-Life 2 for you who aren’t into video games). I should say “…for the first time” since I think I’ll play the game again. It was way, way better than DOOM3 in just about every respect, but especially level design. I played on “Normal” so maybe next time I’ll do “Hard” and see just how hard it is.

I worked yesterday in exchange for being able to take December 23 off. I had a ton to do and next week I’m in JBoss training most of the week, so I wanted to get caught up on the other stuff. So, my weekend is just Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night and Sunday day (today). So, I’m now catching up on all the crap that’s piled up on my desk over the past week.

Later today, I’m hoping to go get some unhealthy lunch (like hot dogs at Wienerschnitzel) and then buy a guitar at Guitar Center. And somewhere in there, I need to ride the exercise bike some. Beth wanted to go for a hike, but I think the weather’s just not nice enough for that today.