I’ve started up Picture of the Day again in an attempt to hone my photography skills.  Here are the last three entries - ending with the one for today.

I’ve had the Roku Box for a few months now.  It costs $99 and I bought it for one simple reason:  my wife and I object to having to use Windows and Internet Explorer to watch Netflix’s Instant Programs.  As a secondary reason, we’re not in college anymore and we object to having to watch on our computers.  We want to be able to watch these on the TV just as if we had rented little silver discs.  The Roku box is tiny.  Here’s a shot of the front:

During inaugural week I was in Hawaii.  Given how cold it was in the Balitmore/DC area that week, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be there.  I stayed at the Embassy Suites Beach Walk in Waikiki and I cannot say enough good things about the hotel.  When we first checked in we were offered some tropical drinks both alcoholic and non-alcoholic.  The rooms were suite style and very well kept.  Every morning they had a whole bunch of complimentary breakfast food - including omlets made to order.  They also had a happy hour every night with free drinks and cheap snacks. Of course, I took my Canon 400D and Fujifilm A 345.  Overall I did pretty well.  Out of 800+ pictures only 63 were out of focus.  Also, for sake of mentioning it, 61 were of my wife.  That’s a new thing for me as we usually don’t take the usual tourist-y pictures.   Our first day were were still on Eastern Time so we got up at 0400 and went to watch the sun rise.

I had done a second review of Gentoo 2008.0.  People suggested I do a completely commandline install and I did.  But my blog post got corrupted and I’m not typing that up again.  My Gentoo install was unsuccessful anyway.  So I fared no better with the commandline than with the GUI install.  I’ll give it another shot sometime in the future.

I last changed themes in April 2008.  It hasn’t quite been a year yet, but as was the trigger last time, the latest version of wordpress doesn’t work with this theme.  Last time it was tags and the time before that it was widgets.  Now I want a theme that fully supports Wordpress 2.7 - especially the threading of comments and other such features.  I believe I have found one that works.  Also, with my current theme it has that annoying large header at the top.  My dad didn’t even realize I had linked him to my blog.  He thought that header image was what he was suppopsed to look at.  I also think it’s interesting that this new theme is a brownish colour as was my original Tripod-hosted blog.  Here are some images of the current theme for historical reasons

The other day I was messing around with flickr’s slideshow feature and I came across this:

And here it is zoomed in:

This comes from an episode where the characters are discussing the founder of Springfield who uses the word Embiggen and some teachers debate whether it’s a real word.  I love the way programmer put little homages into the code they work on.

Last week I finished the Discworld Series.  I started with a few books early in 2008.  From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series.  Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books.  So I read the first four or five books here and there.  Then in November Borders had a “buy two get the third one free” and my wife bought me the remaining 20-something books for my birthday and Christmas.  She also let me start reading in November.  I started reading them during my lunch breaks at work, on business trips and - when things were getting really interesting - at home.

Some of these are the same as the previous two days, unsurprisingly.  But some are new to this list..