Randy Pausch died this weekend. I posted about him back in September 07. I said it then and I’ll say it again: if you are having a bad day, watch the video above. It will inspire.

I went to see “The Dark Knight” this evening. All the hype around Heath Ledger’s last performance is very well justified. He is beyond good as The Joker. I’d argue that if he’s nominated for an Oscar, he should get a Best Actor nod (vs Best Supporting Actor). I found the movie very well directed and designed, yet its about 20 minutes too long. Typical to Batman movies, its very dark.

I’d also like to know what’s up with Christian Bale changing his voice when he’s in the Batman jumpsuit. Reminds me of this classic Snicker’s commercial

Google announced that it has indexed one trillion pages. Dr. Evil would be proud. Oh, wait…they don’t do Evil.

An anonymous commenter slapped me into shape. I just went back to my phone booth in the field, only I updated it a bit. This is good for now. It appears to work in IE too. Let me know if you find any bugs.

So the painters finished up painting the house. And here is the big “reveal”. Its a nice grey with black shutters and a deep red door. Combine this with the grass that is growing and the house is now almost presentable :) To see a before photo, scroll down to the previous post.

I’m having website design issues. I’ve been trying out several new looks for the site recently and I’m just not happy with any of them. So I decided to go with a really straight forward look for right now…nothing fancy at all…just your basic deep grey header..until I get some inspiration that will prompt me to try it again. The font and link colors are from the previous design and I just don’t have the energy to go into the code and switch the colors right now.

Here is the first view of our house getting painted. This is just the primer coat, but none the less, it loos pretty good. They worked filling in and cleaning up the trim today, and will probably paint the trim tomorrow, with the main coats going on later in the weekend. This is going to transform how the house looks!!! Just for kicks, above is a before picture of the house.

This is grass. This is grass on my property. I never thought I would see the day.

Here’s an interesting rumor. AOL execs are pursuing merger talks with Microsoft. What an amazing turn of events this would be for Microsoft…to go from courting Yahoo to being courted by AOL.

Now AOL is not anything close to what it used to be. Its transformation into an advertising supported business appears to be flat-lining. Its one “800 lb gorilla” – AOL Instant Messenger appears to have lost about 400 of those pounds with new social networking services like Twitter, Plurk, et al.

Could be an interesting combo. More to come.

During the week of July 4th, 2008, we finally bit the bullet and had our “grass” resodded. I put the word grass in quotes because to say that the stuff we had on our plot of land was grass is a big, big stretch. It was more like some form of green moss growth…it was terrible and made our property look like the Pigpen of the neighborhood.

So during the July 4th week, I stayed home and we had some landscapers come to our house, rip up the top layer of dirt across the whole property. They then dropped down a new layer of topsoil, they put down 45 lbs of grass seed, and then dropped hay all over the place.

We are now seeing real, actual grass growing on our property. Photos to be shared shortly.