Spell Checker – Whoopie!
Posted by mjpete on Jun 28, 2007
I got the spell checker plug-in working for this blog. Hopefully it will minimize my spelling errors! For fun I ran it against a few of my earlier posts.
Ouch – I have bad spelling. Fortunately for me, I’m no longer graded on my spelling. It also helps that the vast majority of the applications today have a spell checker built in. (God bless the ‘F7′ key stroke)
MJ took his First Solo Flight!!
Posted by mjpete on Jun 26, 2007
MJ is growing up fast! Today I took him to the airport. He is going to southern California to stay with friends for a week. He had to fly out from Newark to LAX by himself, and what a bummer of a flight he had!!
We got to the airport with plenty of time to spare, so we sat down and had a nice dinner, just him and I. Afterwards we checked in at the gate to find out the plane was delayed by 2 hours. The plane was coming in from an International flight and was late getting off the ground. After the plane landed, the gate attendants then told us it would be another 45 minute wait while customs clears the plane.
MJ finally boarded the plane almost 3 hours later than scheduled. I was told that since he was flying as an unacompanyed minor that I had to stay in the terminal until the plane was in the air. With all the flying I do that makes sense. I can’t recall how many times we’ve returned to the gate due to problems. So I went to an area of the terminal where I could see the plane. I also used my Blackberry to check the status of the plane. I found out that Continental has thier website tied directly to flight operations. The plane’s status on my Blackberry would update before the plane took the action!
Well, the status was upgraded for the plane. It had another delay due to catering. Delay due to Catering – I never heard that one before! About 9:30pm his plane was released for taxiing. He finally got into the air around 10:15pm!! A full 4 1/2 hours late.
MJ then had to endure a 5 hour flight to California. Fortunately he had armed himself with 2 movies on his iPod, 2 books and about another 10 hours of music. When he got to California, he gave us a call to let us know he was ok. He slept about 2 hours of the flight. When he landed it was close to 4am on the east coast.
I can only hope that his return flight is better!!
Another L Street Beach Dive!
Posted by mjpete on Jun 24, 2007
I have to say, I am getting my bouyancy down to near perfect with the dry suit and no thermals! I dropped a set of 2 lb ankle weights to keep my fins from dragging into the bottom. I now using 31 lbs on my weight harness and only one set of 2 lb ankle weights for a total of 35 lbs of lead.
We saw a Skate on this dive! The body was about a foot long and the tail another foot. We also saw a couple of fluke. None of the fluke would have been keepers, they are way to small.
The only bummer on this dive was that I lost my dive light. I had it on a lanard around my wrist. Somewhere during the swim out to deeper water it must have slipped off my wrist. I tried to look for it, but the bottom has to much seaweed to find anything that has been dropped.
Setting up this Site
Posted by mjpete on Jun 23, 2007
I finally got this site running close to where I wanted to get it. I managed to get wordpress 2.2 with gallery2 v2.2.2. I’ve settled on the K2 theme that is optimized with the WPG2 plug-in. This theme nicely displays the photos from gallery2. I also have tagging working using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.
Before installing Gallery2, I tried several different themes to get tagging to work correctly. With varying degrees of success, I found that K2 really was one of the few themes to work with UTW and not require modifications. The fact that there is a Gallery2 optimized version of K2 was icing on the cake.
I think I have all the major components working for this site. Though I doubt I’m done with tweaking it. For now I’m going to try to be content with it and focus on organizing the photos database. I’m sure eveyone can relate to the fact that with having a digital camera, we typically have more photos that we can print. Hopefully I can setup this online photo album in some sort of organized way.
So my Daughter has a little bit of me….
Posted by mjpete on Jun 17, 2007
Tonight my 6 year old daughter discovered that the remote from the master bedroom will work with the TV in the family room. She decided to play a prank on my wife and I by using that remote to turn off the family room TV that we were watching. At first my wife looked at me and asked “what happened?”. I caught on rather quickly because of the scampering feet and snickering as she ran down the hall. My wife turned on the TV back on and I told her what had happened. “What a little devil” was my wife’s response. A few moments later both of us hear her approach the family room again. Again the TV suddenly turns off. This time my wife ran down the hall after her. One of Cathy’s favorite phrases is “ok, who’s turn is it going to be to get punished”. This time the response from my daughter was “I’ll take the punishment because it was so funny to trick you guys. I really played a good one on you”. Cathy had all it would take to walk out of the room, before she got hesterical laughing. Jillian is definitely our character with a great sense of humor.
Night Dive at L Street
Posted by mjpete on Jun 15, 2007
High tide was at 8:30pm this evening. Because we were diving L Street Beach, we were able to get into the back bay area about 45 minutes earlier. Typically with shore diving we have to carefully plan the dive times so we enter the water during the slack tide. This minimizes the current and gives us the best possible visibility in the water. Because the back bay off L Street is protected, we get away with entering the water on either the early or late side of the tide. The bad news is that there is really not that much in the way of sealife at L Street.
By entering the water around 7:45, we were able to get suited up in the daylight. When we came out of the water an hour later is was dark. We saw some fluke and alot of crabs. There were blue claw crabs, spider crabs and hermit crabs. After awhile the crabs get annoying as they spread out thier claws in defense to us. Read the rest of this entry »
Court of Honor
Posted by mjpete on Jun 10, 2007
Last night was the final Court of Honor for the Boy Scout troop. The troop had 3 scouts make Eagle. They were the 175th, 176th and 177th Eagles for the troop. MJ officially received his Tenderfoot badge. Cathy was introduced to Boy Scout skits! It was comical to see the expression on her face after the first skit.
