This past Saturday, Lynn and I invited my sister and brother-in-law, Cherie and Dale over for dinner.  I have been wanting and waiting to grill for them since they got us the best Weber grill in the world for a wedding present.

We tried a month or so ago but the rain was not being very nice that day.  Clear sky’s were in the forecast and Cherie told me that had a new thing to show us.  We of course were curious.

Wouldn’t you know it, come Saturday morning it started to rain.  I thought to myself, damn rain.  The sky started to clear and we were a go.  I have been perfecting steaks on the grill and was ready to entertain!

I was chopping some veggies for a foil bag to put on the grill and then I hear a dainty little horn.  Much to my surprise, I see Cherie and Dale riding up on a cool Vespa scooter!

We had a wonderful time at dinner.  It was nice and cool, no rain and we enjoyed a delicious watermelon a nice summer evening.

As Cherie and Dale were getting all “geared” up for their trek across the river, I could not help but capture the moment.

Being from California, we earthquakes, mud slides and wildfires.  I have never been in a mud slide, but I have watched the dark smoke in the distance of wildfires and experienced my first earthquake (6.6 magnitude) when I was one day old and the most recent, not on the west coast but right here in the St. Louis area — a respectable 5.2 magnitude.  But I never have seen flooding.

I hear about the Great Flood of 1993 and seen the plaque near the St. Louis arch that shows were the water came to.  I must admit, at first glance, it seemed a little unbelievable.  Today, this is not the case as I have seen first had what the river can do.  Nothing on the scale of 1993 or what is happening north of St. Louis in Iowa, but I have seen first had how high the river really is from the floods.

This last picture I found gives you an idea how much of the entrance is underwater.  Thanks to 3DJournal.com for the image.

So I have been a little behind on posting as of late, been busy. Lynn has been busy blogging all about the cool things that she makes. Sometime it is baked goods or cooked dinners.

On my way home from work, I stopped off at a market off of Olive Blvd. in University City. It is a neat Asian market that has fresh seafood and lots of other neat goodies. I got about a pound of tiger shrimp and a bag of sticky rice.

I fired up the grill and then proceeded to clean and remove the shell and vein from the shrimp. Making sticky rice is easy with a rice cooker, just wash the rice, add it to the rice cooker with the water and turn it on. Perfect rice each time.

I put the about five to six shrimp on each skewer. I had enough for three skewers. Next they received a quick Misto spray of olive oil. Then the shrimp skewers were seasoned with a Thai seasoning blend.

A few minutes on the grill and the shrimp are cooked. To finish off the dinner, lightly steamed asparagus with butter. Some fresh chives on the sticky rice for garnish and dinner is served.

It is sad but true, I have not had the time that I would like to “geek” out on the good ole computer.  Work has been keeping me super busy.

On the upside Lynn has taken up my post as an active blogger.  You can see all the cool things she blogs about on her own blog at See Lynn Blog

The President decided to come to St. Louis to talk about the economy at a World Wide Technology warehouse in Maryland Heights. Well that happens to be right down the street from my building. I mean less than 2 blocks. To the the roads were closed off and the motorcade went right by the my building. Check it out. Thanks to Tina B from work who shot this video as I forget to bring my camera to work that day.

Also, this is my first Flash Video that I have put on my blog that is all my own with the player and everything. It will take about 12 to 15 seconds of downloading before it starts playing. Of course you can start playing the movie at any time depending how fast your speeding connection is. Enjoy!

I got made at the cable people some time ago and get all my HD thru the air for free.   It was interesting to read in this Wired article that cable companies are compressing the HD signals and thus not giving the viewer the best experience they can get.

Yet when he tuned in Sci Fi HD for a recent episode filmed in high definition, the image was soft and the darkest parts broke up into large blocks with no definition. Explosions, he said, were just dull.

“It kind of looked like they took the standard definition and just blew it up,” said Swanson, a 33-year-old graphic designer and videographer who subscribes to Comcast Corp.’s TV service. “I couldn’t really tell if what I was seeing was really better than what I saw on regular television.”

As cable TV companies pack ever more HD channels into limited bandwidth, some owners of pricey plasma, projector and LCD TVs are complaining that they’re not getting the high-def quality they paid for. They blame the increased signal compression being used to squeeze three digital HD signals into the bandwidth of one analog station.

HD enthusiasts crying foul over cable TV’s crunched signals

I know, I know … I have been a little or rather not as much as I would want to, been blogging.  Work has been busy and I just do not seem to have as much time as I would like.

However, I have managed to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 and it is pretty cool.  Granted this is my first post with it.

ab initio

1. from the beginning

The Space Shuttle Endeavour lights up the early morning sky at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, lifting off at 2:28 a.m.

Endeavour’s mission, STS-123, will carry two new components to the International Space Station: the first section of the Japanese Kibo lab and Canada’s two-armed robotic system, known as Dextre.

zaibatsu

1. a powerful financial and industrial conglomerate of Japam

I like Adobe Photoshop just as much as the next guy and it is really great when you need to really work with an image, modify the contrast, levels and so on. It works great when you need layers and filters … I could go on but you get the idea.

But if all I need to do is take an image, crop it, take out the red eye (which is not as simple as it sounds in Photoshop) make the image B&W and easily save it to your local system or send it off to things like Flickr, Photobucket or Picasa then I have found the coolest thing that for just that. What is it, it is … picnik

What is Picnik?

Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

What can I do with Picnik?

Pretty much everything! We’ve got amazing Edit tools that can fix just about anything that could possibly go wrong with a photograph. Lacking photo-editing prowess? A bunch of our editing tools are one-click fixes, including auto- fix, exposure, colors, and red-eye. And the others, like rotate, crop, resize, and sharpening, can be controlled with easy-to-use sliders.

Move over to the Create tab and you’ll see our custom-made Effects (most of which have the ability to be painted into just the areas of your image where you want them), an awesome text tool with dozens of fonts, dozens of shapes, including seasonal shapes for holidays and events, and some super customizable frames. Not to mention the touch up tools and new Advanced Editing tools.

The best part is that is FREE — Yes FREE!!! They have a premium service for $24.95 a year. Not a month but for a whole year.