Halloween 2008

We went trick-or-treating with Anna's friend Eva and her two cousins. Pretty cute for a group of Halloween ghouls.  Then they all had a sleep over at Eva's for the night.  Stayed up watching scary movies and stuffing themselves with candy.

An unmanaged forest

In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn't burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn't much different from that. ... read more

Rejuvenating Vacation

We just got back from 3 days at our favorite cottage in Point Reyes, CA!  The weather was perfect, sunny and clear, slightly cool in the mornings for a run, and great temperatures for hiking and beach combing during the day.

Check out some of the photos I've posted on my flickr account taken in and around Point Reyes National Seashore.

 

The only drawback this time was our favorite restaurant ,Reyes Cafe, changed their menu about 6mo. ago.  It went from having a great selection of items that were all great, to one or two that I thought were good enough to eat.  So, I guess we'll have to try some different places to eat when we visit the area.

Running on the Beach at Drakes Bay

Save Net Radio

Check out Pandora my favorite & Last FM which I've heard good things about but haven't tried yet.

Summer Fun Playing in the Sprinkler.

View at YouTube

We found another way to stay cool while I was treating the pool.

Anna has been in the pool both at home and school this summer. So, she has gotten very comfortable in the pool and swims well even though we haven't had her in swim lessons yet. She loves diving to the bottom to retrieve toys and likes to show off her swim strokes too.

We've been working all summer but I'm taking a week off before school starts to spend with Anna. We'll take in some sights around town and visit the Train, Aerospace, and Discovery museums as well as take in some miniature golf, Water parks, and plays. Along with anything else I can think of that might be fun that week. We might even take in the State Fair one day.

Kindergarten Career Day Fashion Show

Anna has graduated from Kindergarten and is looking forward to a Summer of fun.  We are hoping to get her into swimming lessons and a few other things to keep her busy and her mind active.

Smokin' Weekend visit to Nana's

We were looking forward to a few days off and planned to visit Nana in Watsonville, one of our favorite places to visit along the coast. We heard there was a fire in Corralitos which is about 7-8 miles north of Watsonville. As we got close enough to see the smoke, we started to think we would just pick up Nana and take her back home with us. The smoke plume left a huge dark cloud stretching right over Watsonville and across the valley. Surprisingly, by morning the air wasn't all smokey like we thought it would be. So, we stayed the weekend. We kept an eye on the news of the fire through out the weekend. Here is a channel 3 news report on Sunday News report on Corralitos Fire. By Saturday, the winds had shifted and all the smoke was blowing away from us and the coast. This turned out to hamper the fire fighters as the fire jumped the line they created, killing their hopes of containing the fire by the end of the weekend.

The rest of the stay was nice. We did some minor yard work to help Nana clean up her yard. The weather was nice and cool. We played and read stories for Anna. Anna and I put together a 300 piece puzzle of a princess sitting on a unicorn with the castle in the background. While I ended up doing most of the work, Anna enjoyed helping find pieces. She found all the pieces for the princess and part of the unicorn. It was a unicorn weekend for her, as she also watched the Last Unicorn twice during the visit. There was a Fly-In and Air Show that we could see and hear from Nana's house. The airport is just a mile or so from her house, so we could see the planes flying over head through out the weekend. Anna had a run-in with some Cold Stone cotton candy ice cream on Friday that had her barfing until long after bedtime. That put a damper on Friday but by Saturday, she felt better and ate and drank enough to make up for Friday. She was still a bit lethargic Saturday but by late afternoon she seemed fully recovered. Mom spent her time snapping photos of Nana's flowers, especially the Orchids and Fuchsias.

Update: I spoke too soon.  Both Julie and I came down with the same symptoms as Anna Sunday.  Not a very restful night and we had the 3 hour drive home the next day.  Luckily traffic was light and we made it home with out having to use the barf bags in the car.

SANS Institute - @RISK: The Consensus Security Vulnerability Alert

CRITICAL: Intel Centrino Wireless Driver Buffer Overflow

• Affected:
  • Intel Centrino 2200BG Wireless Device Driver

• Description: The Intel Centrino 2200BG is a popular wireless network (802.11) card, commonly used in laptop computers. Its driver for Microsoft Windows contains a buffer overflow in its handling of wireless network traffic, a vulnerability that Intel has fixed since January 2007. A new exploit targeting this vulnerability has been released. A specially crafted wireless network frame could trigger this vulnerability, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with kernel level privileges, completely compromising the vulnerable system. The wireless network interface on the vulnerable system need only be in range of the attacker; it need not be connected to any particular wireless network to be vulnerable. Full technical details and a proof-of-concept are publicly available for this vulnerability.

• Status: Intel confirmed, updates available. The patch can be accessed through Intel site reverenced below.

  SANS Institute - @RISK: The Consensus Security Vulnerability Alert

Anna's New Ride!

Watch it at YouTube.com

Now that Anna is actively participating in the ride she is enjoying our bike rides much more.  She used to try to talk to us from the enclosed trailer but it was too hard to hear her to have much of a conversation.  We would always bring along books and toys but she would usually get board on the way back and fall asleep.  In the summer with only the bug screen down in front and the back flap open she would get more air-flow but she would still get pretty warm in the trailer.  This new Trailer bike gets her involved in the ride more and she can see the scenery much better. She is talking the whole ride and having fun!