My Father-in-Law's bike trip has spanned from our house out here in California, to it's almost completion in Virginia.  I used the Google Maps api (sorry Yahoo) as well as flickr to track his progress and post pictures of his trip.  At every point/date in the map, I have a link into Flickr to see the images that were taken that day by his digital camera (he's sent us a few CD's of pictures along the way).  The only thing I wish I could do is create a Flickr badge for each day automagically and post it in the little bubble. ah well.

Building sound systems is fun.  I'm doing that right now for my church, Baylight.  I get to spend all sorts of money on fun equipment, put it all together and make sure it works right.  It's a fun job and is an organizational challenge.  How to make it easy to setup and tear down?  How to make it portable?  How to get a quality system on budget? (I cheated here a little)  How to lower the learning curve for someone to get trained how to use it?

Right now all sorts of fun boxes of things are rushing towards my house, I'll post some pictures when I get everything together and racked.

Saw it last night @12:40AM.  I'm still going over it in my mind, but I must say I liked it.  Lots of parallels to the original trilogy, scenes that look the same, but the principal character makes different choices (contrasting Anakin to Luke).  I didn't think there was a lot of fluff here, it took me from the end of 'Clones' to the beginning of 'A New Hope' smoothly and in a way that seems to seal the vast differences between Eps 1-2 and 4-6. 

Other impressions: lots of lightsaber related injuries and violence.  I think this deserves the PG-13 rating, there were some particularly disturbing scenes that I won't elaborate on here.

I'm kind of tired of the attitude that Lucas screwed up Star wars when he started the new trilogy.  They aren't the same movies, no question.  The new trilogy isn't as intriguing, I can't deny that.  I was contemplating some differences:

• No buddies -- The original trilogy had the standard gang: Luke, Leia, Han, Chewy, C3PO, R2-D2, all kind of looking out for each other, good chemistry between them all, etc.  The new trilogy doesn't have that, and honestly it shouldn't.  Anakin and Obi-Wan are buddies, but their relationship is much more strained.  Everyone loves watching buddies in action, why else was 'Friends' and 'Seinfeld' so popular? 
  
• No cool ships -- I still have my 'Millenium Falcon' toy from the early 80's, admittedly a bit worse for the wear.  The ship itself was practically a character, especially in 'Empire Strikes Back', where's the love?
• Low level of comic relief --  I honestly think Lucas had more plans for Jar-Jar, but I can respect that he really backed off of the character, part of me has to believe it was because of the almost universal hatred of the character.  R2 is great, he breaks into some R2-fu in the first 10 minutes of the new movie.  I'm not saying this is a fault, the nature of the story kind of requires it.  'Sith' is dark enough that too much comedy would have hurt it, though it had some decent funny moments.
• You're not 10 any more.  Get over it.
  

Born: 5/6/2005 @ 12:12 AM (Pacific Time)
Weight: 8lbs 14oz
Height: 21"
See more pictures @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/janssens/