Archive for 2009

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Finding Joy Friday, October 2009 Edition

Oct

9

2009

Finding Joy Friday

In cooperation with LaanyKidsMom, here is my entry for this week.

Where did I find joy this week?
At home, with my oldest child

Alpha enjoys reading, laughing at, and then telling jokes. After flipping through a few books at the bookstore, I realized that the joke books he likes right now are the “Silly Riddle” type of books. The other joke books aimed at young children were fine, but he appreciates the word play of the riddles.

Here are a few of our favorite riddles:

Q: How do you put a sliced pizza back together?
A: With tomato paste!

Q: What’s a pig’s favorite sport?
A: Pig-pong!

It’s so fun listening to him tell those jokes because he wants to make sure that you get the joke.

Q: If chickens wake up when the rooster crows, when do ducks wake up?
A: At the quack of dawn.
Then he will emphasize it for you: “Quack of dawn.”

Q: Who steals the soap from the bathtub?
A: The robber ducky.
“Robber, instead of rubber.”

Q: What drink has a cold?
A: Coffee. Cough-ee.
And then he coughs and says “ee“, just so you are sure that “cough” replaces “coff”

To understand a proverb and a figure,The words of the wise and their riddles.

Proverbs 1:6

Posted in Family | No Comments »

Automatic Football Winner Guesser – Pro Edition

Oct

8

2009

New Webpage Announcement: You can now follow the weekly progress of football game-outcome formulae at Some Fun Site.

Background information: Tuesday Morning Quarterback is a column by Gregg Easterbrook, and he touts the generic formula that Home Team Wins (HTW) is a better predictor of who will win any given football game – better than most polls and experts.

His readers have contributed the Isaacson-Tarbell Postulate (ITP), which states that Better Record Wins, and that is even better than HTW. ITP uses HTW as plan B if the teams have the same record, so the winner of any given football game will be the team with the better record or, if their records are equal, the home team.

TMQ usually includes the HTW and ITP results (how accurate they were) near the end of the season. Readers who are interested in the current results, without waiting for TMQ, can find them over at Some Fun Site. This is currently setup for the NFL only. Adding the stats for college football results is a possibility. Whether it is near future or far future has not yet been determined.

Would that they were wise, that they understood this, That they would discern their future!

Deuteronomy 32:29

Posted in Sports | 1 Comment »

Another Brick in the Cake

Oct

5

2009

We had some birthday parties at our house this past weekend. It was for our extended family (wife’s side), so in-laws and cousins also had some birthdays. Anyone who has a birthday in the fall was a guest of honor. And since some people involved were young boys, the theme was pirates (“And I’ve never walked the gang plank and I’ve never owned a parrot and I’ve never had a birthday in the fall“).

My wife prepared for the parties by buying some Lego molds – one for cakes and one for water (AKA an ice-cube tray).

Picture of Lego minifig cake mold
Picture of Lego minifig ice-cube mold

The cake mold was used to make some cakes – one for each of the children whose birthdays we were celebrating. That would be two boys and one girl.

Picture of 3 Lego minifig cakes

No, there was not a female version of the standard Lego minifigure. My wife just added some extra pieces of cake to the sides. Frosting covers a multitude of sins.

Picture of a Lego pirate minifig cake
Picture of a Lego princess minifig cake
Picture of a Lego pirate minifig cake

The ice-cube mold (mould for you Brits) was not used for ice at all. We made chocolates – white chocolate with food coloring (that’s colouring for … oh, never mind) added. It resembles the smaller, plastic bricks quite well. Some people just glanced at them and thought they were plastic pieces added for decoration. They were, of course, pleasantly surprised when we told them they were chocolate. The pieces were about an inch and a half long, in case you need a sense of scale.

Picture of chocolate in the shapes of a Lego bricks
Picture of chocolate in the shapes of a Lego bricks

There was also ice cream and a trifle. No shortage of desserts here. Oh, and we had dinner before that.

A warning in case you get the same or a similar Lego mold (yes, it was official Lego-brand merchandise): the resulting cake is fragile. One guy’s hand fell off (frosting hid that) and the heads broke off all three cakes (frosting again).

I haven’t frosted very many cakes in my life, and these were difficult to frost. The frosting (that’s icing for… okay, okay, no more) was just the standard frosting, but the cakes were too intricate. The hands were the worst – most of the details got lost and there were so many curves and crevices. And the face… the cake had eyes and a mouth, but those stood no chance of showing through the frosting.

But food coloring and gel decorating tubes made up for any deficiencies in the frosting department. Oh, and my wife did the detail work.

Draw for yourself water for the siege! Strengthen your fortifications! Go into the clay and tread the mortar! Take hold of the brick mold!

Nahum 3:14

Posted in Food | 10 Comments »

Let’s Blogroll

Oct

1

2009

Hey all you WordPress users: are you jealous of people on Blogger who get fancy blogrolls that sort the links in chronological order by most recent post? Do you want the little favicon next to your blogroll links too?

Your wait is over – SBS Blogroll is here.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. I noticed that my WordPress blog had a boring Links section, so I searched for a widget that would make it better.

I found RSS Blogroll, by Mr. Pants On Head. It did basically what I wanted, but it didn’t look quite right to me. I added a favicon option and also set the blog title to be a link.

Anyway, he did all the hard work – I simply modified it slightly so that it would look more like the Blogger or Blogspot format. If you want to see it in action, just look on the right side of this blog until you see “SBS Blogroll”. That section is my widget his modified widget.

You can visit the SBS Blogroll page to read more about it, including how to setup the thingy. Or click on SBS Blogrollsource to download it directly.

Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good The one who does good is of God; the one who does evil has not seen God.

3 John 1:11

Posted in Technical | No Comments »

A Mule That Spells

Sep

29

2009

If you are not sure how to spell a word, then you had better hedge your bets and spel each werd differently eech time. That way, you are shur to get at least one of them right.

Maybe it’s “flys”?

Magazine cover that says 'A Mule that flys'

or maybe it’s “flies”?

Magazine article that says 'A Mule that flies'

Machine Design is a magazine that is sent to about 180,000 engineers. MD has been around for a while, and I’m pretty sure it has some editors on staff.  The magazine that came today had a nice little article about Urban Aeronautics‘ Mule, an aircraft that uses fans instead of wings or rotors.

I noticed the misspelling (or typo?) on the cover right away. I figured either someone turned off the spell checker or maybe that is how the British or French spell it (like “tyre”). Then I turned to the article and saw that “flies” was spelled correctly there. Looks to me like this one slipped past the editors.

Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words.

Genesis 11:1

Posted in Life | 1 Comment »

Not Mine Monday, September 2009 Edition

Sep

28

2009

In a shameless spoof of MckMama’s Not Me Monday, I am posting a Not Mine Monday. This week is a mix of Not Mines and Not Mes

  • My child did not stand up straight at attention with his chin up and say “Yes sir!” to my wife when she was sternly lecturing him about his misbehavior. And then he did not march out of the room when she was done.
  • And if he had done that, I would not have hidden behind the sheet of paper I was reading in order for him not to see me as I was stifling my laughter.
  • I did not notice that both drinking fountains had the same supply line and therefore the height of water in one fountain varied based on the other water fountain. And I did not use that knowledge to cause my oldest to have water sprayed in his nose by letting go of my drinking fountain’s button as he was leaning to take a drink from his fountain. That would have been immature and would have given him some bad ideas. But if that had happened, he would have thought it was funny too.
  • I did not pack part of my lunch in a Bob the Builder bowl and take that to work.

And whoever in the name of a disciple gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.

Matthew 10:42

Posted in Family | 7 Comments »

Hocus Focus

Sep

25

2009

by Pocus

I saw something today that didn’t look quite right.

I was just driving (actually, I was stopped at a stoplight) and I saw alongside me a Ford Focus with a trailer hitch. I had my camera with me, so I snapped a snappy snap.

photo of Ford Focus with a trailer hitch

I had to take a picture, because who in his right mind would use a Focus to haul anything? Here’s another shot, closer this time.

photo of trailer hitch on a Ford Focus

Once I got home, I checked my extensive resources (i.e. Google) and found out that the Focus can tow up to 2000 lbs. That’s a whole ton! Who’d a thunk it? But the tongue weight is limited to 200 lbs. So I couldn’t step on the hitch if anything is being towed.

I know I can tell when there’s extra weight in my Buick (no diet jokes please). Throw several 40-lb bags of salt in there, and the 200 horsepower seems rather sluggish, not to mention the braking. The Focus is somewhere around 140 hp, and is only 2500 lbs. Almost doubling the weight that a car’s engine and brakes handle has to have significant effects on the vehicle’s performance.

I’m sure there’s some good reason for putting a trailer hitch on a Focus, but it sure looked odd.

How can I alone bear the load and burden of you and your strife?

Deuteronomy 1:12

Posted in Ponder | 1 Comment »

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