purg.atory – a personal blog by elyograg

Homewood Suites has an excellent breakfast. Scrambled eggs, sausage, bagels, toast, cereal, milk, three kinds of juice, yogurt, and lots of toppings for everything. Knowing that food is expensive in Disneyland, Kathy and I loaded up on a protien-oriented breakfast so that it would really last. The kids all ate mostly carbohydrates, despite our dire…

The continental breakfast at the hotel in Vegas was decent, but not very filling. The cinnamon rolls, which are a Holiday Inn Express specialty were the best part of the breakfast. Milk, yogurt, and hard-boiled eggs were the only choices in the protein department. We got on the road about 9:00 AM, and headed south…

I left work at about 3:30 PM with the idea that we would be on the road by 5:00. A series of sitcom-like problems conspired to delay that until after 6:30 PM. We had the kids watching movies on our two laptop computers, powered by an inverter and hooked to headphones. We secured the laptops…

This is a backdated post — we’ve already returned from the entire trip. Several other backdated posts will follow. At this point I plan on doing one post for each day of the trip, but that may not be the way it ends up. This trip was my wife Kathy’s idea. On February 21st (President’s…

My friend Nat has posted about a family dinner at which he was thoroughly disgusted by the items that his in-laws brought to eat. The name of both his post and my post matches the name of a forum that used to exist on Lower Lights. When I first set up the forum system on…

I’ve done a little work on making my blog look more like Nat’s. In the end, I want it to look different from his, but he has a great look already that is better than the wordpress defaults. Not knowing CSS, this is a slow-going adventure! CSS looks extremely powerful, and the only way to…

It’s Valentine’s Day. Have you remembered to obtain SOMETHING for your significant other today? For those of the male species who may not be aware, we cannot EVER ignore any Hallmark Holiday (birthdays, mother’s day, anniversary, TODAY, etc.), even if she tells you that you don’t need to get her anything. The fact that you…

The quote in my last post got my brain thinking on a tangent. People waste an amazing amount of energy doing things that are either pointless or harmful, myself included. I have a tendency to get lost in my computer or a movie and ignore everything else around me, especially if it involves getting up…

I came across a quote today that someone on an open source mailing list was using as their signature. Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof. — J.K. Galbraith It is amazing that we have progressed as…

When you shave, do you move the razor downward or upward? The former is often referred to as “with the grain” while the latter is “against the grain.” In the movie Lethal Weapon 4, Roger Murtaugh tells his son that he should shave with the grain. For me, shaving in this way results in almost…

Kathy surprised me with a new present a few days ago. It’s a Nikon D70 digital camera. She’s known for a long time that I wanted one, and with my recent raise at work, she felt that I deserved something special. This camera is so far beyond anything I ever expected to own that I’m…

It’s nearly midnight on New Years Eve, Mountain Standard Time. Tomorrow, we all venture into a new year. Things are pretty good for me right now. I have a good job, and some additional opportunities on the horizon. Kathy’s brother (my brother-in-law) is exchanging vows in the afternoon tomorrow — with his wife. They were…

This christmas, we did something a little different for the kids. We told them prior to the big day that they would not have any presents under the tree, and there would be nothing in their stockings. They didn’t actually believe that we would do it, but we did. Sitting on top of their stockings…

I upgraded to WordPress 1.22 just a few minutes ago. I am now back to the default stylesheet, and will work on modifying it when I can. I had one problem after the upgrade. I could not edit my links. I fixed the problem myself. Here’s a patch. I finally did find an official WordPress…

Here’s the states that I have visited. There are actually a few more, but I am not counting the ones that I went through on my bus trip to Ohio.

I went to Walmart on December 24th. Yes, I was dumb enough to wander into the den of evil on Christmas Eve. Thankfully, I only had a few things to get, and I was able to get into a relatively fast “20 items or less” checkout line. I bought some of the 50 cent pies…