After we went fishing, we met Dave and Andrew, Dave and I went to Sammon's in Temple to play some golf.  I've shared some golf stories before, and it is well-known that I suck.  I've done some crazy things like accidentally throwing a club into the water, and now I have another one to add...

I hit Dave with a golf ball.  It was a total accident. I was lining up a 9-iron shot while Dave was searching in the stream for his ball.  A 9-iron is supposed to give you a really high arch, but mine went like a drive...straight at Dave.  I hollered, Andrew hollered, but to no avail.  Lots of thoughts went through my head like:

• He'll be killed, and I'll get life in prison
• It'll hit him in the eye and he'll be blinded
• Maybe he'll pull a Matrix maneuver and avoid it completely.  The ball will continue and go right in the hole.

Nope.  It hit him right in the front side of his elbow.  He's doing fine now, and it looks much better.  I felt really bad.  He had to play trombone at church the next day.  I thought his career might be over, but it's fine.  I even found out he was bragging that he had been hit.

Anyway, I had some nice shots, like a 45-foot putt, and a drive on a par 4 that put me inches from the green (which then took me another 5 strokes to get it in the hole).  It was a blast.

I've been really busy, but I want to get most of my activities up here, cause we had alot of fun.  I'll get them up one-by-one.

Saturday morning, I got up early to take my car in to the shop to get the windshield replaced.  It had a huge crack in it, right at eye level.  While it was in, we decided to go fishing, so my dad, brother (Andrew), and I hooked up the boat and went to the lake.

Now this boat is pretty small, and really old, and it's had its share of problems.  It used to belong to my grandfather “Papa” who loved to hunt and fish and everything outdoors.  I got alot of my love of the outdoors from him.  He headed out to a nice cove near the northeast corner of the lake.  I'm working on being able to generate maps from my GPS data, but I'm not there yet.

We fished for a while until we spotted a pretty cool cave.  Andrew didn't want to go in because of the spiders, and, to his credit, there were some pretty large scary-looking spiders in there.  I got in there and killed them with an oar.  It was pretty cool.  It's hard to see what it was like from the pictures, but it went way back. If I had had a flashlight, I might have gone in further, but no way without one.

We trolled around some more, and witnessed a kid getting hooked in the ear across the cove from us.  It was really quite, and all of a sudden, everyone in their boat was screaming and yelling. The kid was pulling away, which was setting the hook deeper, the mom was yelling, “Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-“ and the dad was yelling “Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-“. It was crazy.

When we tried to start the motor to go elsewhere, we realized it wouldn't go into gear. Perhaps it was the stump we hit on the way into the cove.  We tried to open it up and fix it, but the linkages were fine, it must have been something in the vertical-to-horizontal transfer case, which we couldn't fix.

We made an effort to get back using the tolling motor, but the winds were pretty high, and the GPS was indicating it would take almost 2 hours to get back at that rate.

We flagged down another boat, which happened to be the boat that we witness the hook-in-the-ear earlier.  The boat “The Emperor of China” towed us back to Temple Lake Park and we got the boat out of the water without too much trouble.  We were happy to have gotten back.

It's the first day of my Memorial Weekend 2004 vacation, and I did so much.  Here's the short version of what I did today:

1. Took car in to get windshield replaced (had a crack)
2. Went to the lake to fish with my dad and my brother.
   1. Fished
   2. Climbed in a cave with big spiders
   3. Broke the boat
   4. Got towed back to shore by the Emperor of China (or at least a boat of that same name)
3. Picked up my car
4. Went golfing with Andrew (my brother) and Dave
   1. Sunk a 45 foot put
   2. Almost chipped one in
   3. Hit an awesome drive when some people were watching
   4. Otherwise stunk up the joint. (we almost ran out of balls)
5. Ate at El Chico's

I hope to break these stories down a bit and include some pictures, but I'm exhausted.  So I'll give that a try tomorrow sometime.

I guess they've got the air conditioner on summer duty here at work.  It is freaking cold.  I just mentioned to some co-workers that I was suffering from Frozen Mouse Hand Syndrome and it got a laugh, so I thought I'd write about it real quick.

For those who don't understand what I'm talking about, the hand you use your computer mouse with stays exposed on the keyboard or mouse much more than the other one (at least from my personal experience).  Mine gets really cold before I realize it, and I have to sit on it for a few minutes to warm it back up.

I just got a call from Becky who was doing some shopping at the I-35/Parmer Target.  They are opening a new Freebirds in that shopping center!  Location is no longer an issue in the great Freebirds vs. Chipotle debate.  This one is about the same drive time from our house as the nearest Chipotle.

The website says it's opening on June 7th! whoo hoo!  Of course, it will be mobbed for the first month.

I got my installation kit for voice over IP for my home phone last night.  It's pretty awesome.  My home phone number doesn't get switched over until Friday, so I can only make out-going calls.  All incoming calls still go through the old system.

The hardware they sent is just a D-Link 1120M that's specialized for the service.  It's basically a single-port NAT firewall that you put between your cable/DSL-modem and the rest of your LAN infrastructure.  If you're serving external service like a web site (like this one) then you have to delve into the configuration (which sucks compared to my Linksys router) to allow incoming traffic to successfully traverse the “double-NAT”.  If the D-link had a DMZ option, it would be perfect, but it doesn't, so you have to forward ports on both routers. I plugged in an old phone and made a couple of calls last night, and there was absolutely no perceivable difference in operation between it and a regular phone line.  Not thinking, I rebooted the router while I was talking to my dad, which of course ended our conversation.  That was pretty funny.  It just completely slipped my mind that I was not on a regular phone line.

The service lets you do awesome stuff like:

• Unlimited long-distance
• Have your voice mail sent to you in an email, or check it via the web, or send alert emails to let you know you have voice mail
• Forward your calls to multiple locations and have them ring all at once, or in sequence
• Schedule “do not disturb time“ when your phone will not ring (with an exception process for emergencies)
• plus lots more I can't think of

And it costs much less than we've been paying for our home phone service.  This is starting to sound like a commercial, but I'm just excited about it.  If you're paying more than $40 for your home phone service, let me know and I'll send you a referral so we can both reap the rewards.

I just got an email from Adobe touting the new features of Premiere Pro 1.5.  One of the features I'm really excited about is native support for my Panasonic DVX100's 24p and 24pa modes.  If done correctly, it would really reduce the number of steps in my 24p editing pipeline.  It's got a pretty compelling upgrade price of $99.  I haven't decided to get it.  I'd like to line up a specific project to use it on before I spring for it.

I haven't had the opportunity to try out Vegas Video, but one of the selling points there was the 24p support.  This may turn the tide a bit.

That sounds like a good band name.

After several people asked about the size of the turtle in a previous post, I realized that the small lens of my camera phone tends to exaggerate the perspective of things.  The turtle picture almost makes it look like a Galapagos tortoise in scale.  If you're interested in getting the actual size of the turtle, Jen's got a picture of Becky holding it in one of her posts, so you can see the size.  Her picture was taken with a “real” camera and has some nice detail.  She also does some interesting post-processing on her pictures that give them a very cool look.

Dave made his Barnes Family patented homemade pizza for us this evening.  It was delicious.  I have captured the process to share with you, but I've left out some key steps so you can't reproduce it.  Kind of like MacGuyver.

Delicious!  If you notice from the pictures, Dave has a pizza stone, which makes the crust come out extra perfect.

We went with Jen and Dave to see Shrek II this afternoon, and now we're hanging out waitin for dave to make some of his excellent pizza.  Shrek II was very enjoyable.  Antonio Banderas is absolutely hilarious. 

On the way to the theater, we saw a turtle on the sidewalk, so we moved it to a less dangerous location.

Stay tuned for pizza pictures!!!

The other day, I griped about phone numbers and suggested a DNS-mapping for phone numbers. Looks like this is underway on several fronts.  Here's a slashdot story that points to several of these projects.