Here's a couple of pictures for the Grandmas.  Maddy, Eric, and Marj look an aweful lot alike.  There are also a couple of Maddy at the park across from the house.  She has taken to saying "shoes?" which means "put my shoes on and take me outside to play!"  She has truly started to hit the bossy terrible two's with a vengence...

Eric had a game today against the Rockies.  He got two hits and made it home once.  I coached first base this week (I did the field ump duties last week).  I also do the field prep for our home games, but unfortunately there was no chalk today.  So we had to rake around the already disappearing lines someone had done earlier in the day before the game.

Tonight we're watching Lemony Snicket the movie with Jim Carrey.  I have to say I don't really like it that much.  His characters is completely over the top.  The kids are fine, but the story is lame.  I'm typing this in instead.

I'm also reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  Marj bought me the "five volume trilogy" in one bound book.  I've never read the books before, but recognize a lot of the pop culture references I hear frequently from it.  I can see where Red Dwarf took its creative spirit from.

Next week I'm off to Atlanta for customer visits.  I've only been to Florida in that part of the country, so I'm looking forward to checking out Georgia.

For the last two years I have been working on a Chippendale lowboy as a gift for my wife.  In typical Microsoft fashion, I jumped in way over my head or abilities but have been faulting in my knowledge as I go.  The first step was carving the ball and claw feet, which took me about 1.5 days per leg.  There is a great book (I'll post the ISDN number some time) that walks you through the process as well as giving good ratios for astetic purposes of the parts of the leg.

The carcass was not too bad to get right, mostly involving mortise and tenon joinery with a couple of dove tails for the built-in rails per classic design.  Over the last two years since I started, I realize I was missing some base skills, so I did a few other projects too.  So this lowboy has hand dove tailed drawers which I'm actually pretty good at these days.

Just last week I finished carving the shell on the front drawer (another trip to Woodcraft, yeah!).  It turned out pretty good, with only a little finish work required.

At this point I just need to make the top, plane some rough spots (I learned how to make my own hand planes in the last two years also), and do the finish.  I'm looking forward to having this one done.  I'm hoping it'll be good enough to get into Fine Woodworking.

I added some pictures taken with my smart phone (unfortunately our S400 has the dreaded E18 error so I didn't have a better camera).  I'll post an update as it gets closer to done.

One of the benefits of living in the Seattle area is having Starbucks headquarters close by.  Starbucks tries out new ideas on us first, and if they take off, they get expanded to the rest of their stores.  This one caught me off guard:  an in-store CD burner kiosk.  You browse the Starbucks music collection to pick the tunes you want, load a caddy into the device, and get in the queue to have it burned onto your own CD.  Presumably you can take it over to the counter and pay with your Starbuck's card (mine is a Duetto Visa card; I earn lattees the way others earn miles).

It's hard to see this one taking off.  Being able to buy your music a song at a time is great.  Starbucks also has a good collection of supported artists (and growing; the Ray Charles CD did very well).  However, CD burners are a commodity for any typical PC.  iTunes, Napster, etc all have big selections of music available.  MP3 players come in all kinds and form factors.  I simply don't like CD's that much any more.  I can't imagine wanting to spend a lot of time in the Starbucks, sipping coffee, picking songs, and burning them.  I have to imagine the cost of running one of these things is pretty high as well (how often does the photo kiosk mess up when you are ordering prints?  I'm always grabbing an attendant to fix the things).  It would have been quite interesting to sit through the business plan review.

Friday afternoon on 4/22 I was listening to 96.5 one of the two local Alternative stations in the area.  Eddie Vedder had just gotten through 60 seconds of an accoustic version of 'Black' when a bunch of odd sound effects, including snippets from the Twilight Zone, rudely interrupted him (I mean, who interrupts Perl Jam?!).  By the time these were done, Inifinity had switched their format to something they call 'Jack', which up until now to me simply referred to the cheese.  Which is what this format is.  A bunch of Tom Petty plus Sherryl Crow (ouch).

To top it off, they gave no warning at all to the DJ's like Andy Savage.  This is the second time that Andy has been screwed over in the Seattle market.  Bill Reed and others from 107.7 The End were on the this new station for the last year, and it was pretty good.  The End must have seen their play coming because a year ago they switch their format too from rap metal (Lincoln Park and Limp Bisket) to more new alternative sources like local boys Modest Mouse and the Kaiser Chiefs.  Then they branded it "Back to the Music". 

It was actually a pretty smart business strategy:  they had turned into a bunch of drones not playing their core music type.  DJ's that helped build The End get frustrated and cast aside, create their own format at a new station.  If The End hadn't switched right away to recapture their core base, they would have lost them and 96.5 would have taken off like a rocket.  Instead, a big company like Infinity probably didn't see the numbers adding up and didn't bother to tell the DJ's. On Friday morning, Andy was doing an interview with Jack Nicholas and you can tell he knew nothing of what was coming.

I'll be taking 96.5 off my speed dial now.  Jack is for cheese.

We recently bought a fully automatic espresso machine which is really cool.  Basically you put the whole beans in a hopper at the top, it automatically grinds them, packs them internally, then pulls the shots out the front.  Once it is done, it dumps the spent grounds into a bin so it can do it again.  It's basically a miniature version of the machines you'll see at Starbucks.  This one is so much easier to use than the last one, where you literally had to do the grinding on a separate machine, pack it down, carry the left overs dripping to the can, etc.  Spendy, but highly recommended.  I used to hit Starbucks 2 to 3 times a day, but now only about once (ok, maybe lunch too).