If you don't visit Woot.com very often, you really should start. If not to buy something, then just to hear their podcasts.

Every weekday they do a little two minute song about the product they're selling and some of them are just hilarious. Take this one for instance. The item being sold is a USB Bluetooth adapter. But their jingle guy wrote the whole song about some make-believe pirate named Blue Tooth - which makes sense, because Bluetooth really does sound more like a pirate's name than a networking standard.

Some days the podcast is merely amusing, and some days it's laugh-out-loud funny. The creativity that goes into putting out these little songs five days a week is staggering to me. I don't know how he comes up with some of this stuff day after day! "He had teeth just as blue as a red thing is red!" *LOL* Brilliant!

Check it out if you get a chance!

The one day I don't have to be up before dawn in I don't know how many days, and I wake up by myself at 7 am. Three and a half hours before I have to be to work. *sigh*

And the gym isn't even open yet.

I successfully received my test email notification - the email form works! Drop that ole' email address in there and you'll receive an email with a short synopsis of any new blog entries once every 24 hours. The emails go out a little after 1 am EST.

Hmmmm, lets see now . . . is there anything else I want to steal from Lani's site?
That calendar thing looks interesting . . .

With a little help from Lani I think I have the email updates working. This is my first foray into RSS and Atom feeds, so it's got a bit of a learning curve for me. Unfortunately, the email update service (Feed Blitz) only sends out email notifications once every 24 hours, so I can't test it immediately to see if it's working.

I just keep copying Lani's website.

I added an email subscription service (as you can see to your left) which will send you an email whenever I make a new post to the site. I haven't fully tested it yet though, so it may or may not be working correctly.

Edit: ok, never mind. It's officially not working right. Stand by until I can figure out what the problem is.

Thanksgiving has come and gone for the Rhodes family. We had a very nice time, even though not all of us were able to be here (see below for more on that!) I think maybe the neatest thing about this Thanksgiving was having my grandparents there with us.

For those who aren't fortunate enough to receive one of my father's sometimes painfully detailed email updates, my grandfather's health (his name is Jack) has taken a turn for the worse over the last several weeks, necessitating a move from assisted living (where he was living with his wife, Marilyn) into a full time care skilled nursing facility in early November. Because Grandma is still pretty healthy though, it's meant she's had to stay in the assisted living facility because she doesn't qualify for the level of care that Grandpa currently needs. It's been kind of a sad time over the last month with Jack's health deteriorating and his being separated from his wife of over 50 years for what is the first time in their lives, as far as I know.

As we were moving towards Thanksgiving this year, it was looking like Grandpa wasn't going to be strong enough to leave the nursing home and spend Thanksgiving with us. However, Kelly and Dale were able to arrange to have Grandpa over to her house for Thanksgiving, which was a complete surprise to both him and his wife. It was just heart warming to watch Grandpa and Grandma sit next to each other holding hands, just enjoying each other's company. It was really sweet to see how much they really enjoyed being able to be with each other again, even if it was just for a few short hours. Being able to give a couple who's been married for that long some time to spend with each other is really something to be thankful for!

However, as I said before, not everyone was able to make it up here. My Aunt Cheryl and her family weren't able to make it up, nor were my brother Don and his family (they'll be up for Christmas though). Not to fear! Go-Go-Gadget Mark (that's me) had his trusty video camera with him and we recorded Thanksgiving video greetings for both the Weston and the Rhodes contingents that couldn't make it:

• A quick message for the Weston side of the family


• Around the table with greetings for Don, Lani, & James

So all in all, a very nice Thanksgiving. I think this is my first Thanksgiving at home in a while (is it four years?), Grandma and Grandpa got to share Thanksgiving together, and we all were able to be there to celebrate what is really the remarkable story of their marriage commitment. Being able to witness a little bit of their love story (yes, it sounds corny - but it's true) is what I'm very thankful for this year.

I have stinky farts tonight.

. . . and water was upon the face of the carpeting.

So let me tell you the adventure I was fortunate enough to miss over the weekend at work. Myself and two other partners closed the store on Saturday night and all seemed to go uneventfully. Well, evidently we forgot to turn off the water to the Frappuccino cleaner. (As a quick description, the Frappuccino cleaner is essentially a pressurized fountain that only runs when a pressure nozzle is depressed on the top of the device. When it is pressed down, it sprays water straight up. One takes a Frappuccino blender pitcher, presses it upside down on the nozzle thereby depressing the nozzle, and the cleaner sprays water all over the inside of the pitcher and rinses the pitcher clean. This saves much water over the more traditional practice of leaving the sink running into the pitchers to rinse the pitchers out.)

As I said, we forgot to turn the water off to the pitcher rinser that night. At some point over night the hose running to the pitcher popped off the rinser and ran free all night long. When the opening shift came in on Sunday morning, the store was sitting in a couple inches of water. Needless to say, we had to call in Facilities and have them clean it up. This was beyond what a mop and a little hard work could fix. We needed the pros. Evidently we were closed until about noon and ran floor fans to try to dry out the carpeting all day long. When I opened Monday morning the fans were still running and the carpeting was still damp to the touch.

So the lesson? Make sure we turn off the water to the Frappuccino cleaner. Either that, or make sure you have the day off after you close the store so you don't have to deal with any disasters you help create.

I finally got my hard drive back. Well, ok, I got it back about a week and a half ago, so this is a little anti-climactic. But still . . .

They managed to recover all my pictures and videos, but that was about it. I'm not sure what took so long (2 weeks in the shop) but they only got about 30 GB of data. They kept telling me they were having problems because the amount of recoverable data on my hard drive was more than the size of the hard drive they used to recover data to. I think they told me they had recovered 190 GB of data. But when I got it back there was no where anything close to 100 GB of stuff, never mind 190.

But no biggie. The pics and videos were the only truly unrecoverable material, so I'm thankful for that. I can recover my music from my iPod or re-rip my cd's, which I'm currently working on. And although I lost a lot of useful documents, I don't think I lost anything earth shattering.

So all in all, a successful operation. Now it's down to the task of reconstituting a useful computer. On the other hand, after I got my computer back the muffler on my car decided to go. So once I get that fized, we'll see what has to be replaced next. Thank goodness for emergency savings, eh?