Holy crap. Wil Wheaton is playing in the World Series of Poker next week. Good luck man.

I've created a new photo album with pictures of the garden, the cat and Emma. You can see that my greens have gone to seed, but my tomato and cucumber plants are blooming. Also, check out Emma's new tattoo.

Erika and I saw Garrison Keillor's Rhubarb Tour on Saturday. It was a lot of fun. We were sure that we would be the youngest people there, but we saw at least a dozen other couples that were under 50.

Mr. Keillor was very friendly with the crowd. At the beginning of the show, he walked all the way from the stage, down the center aisle, and to the very back of the lawn, all while telling stories and singing. Before and after the show, and during the intermission, he was kind of enough to stop, greet people, and sign autographs. Luckily, we brought along a copy of one of his books for just such an opportunity:

Monday again. The weekend felt both busy and boring at the same time. Friday night we all went out to celebrate the 01321-birthday a week late. We ate at El Torito, where the service was horrible, but the food was good. I watched Wendy for an idea of how much to tip. Since we all ordered after having to flag down employees who didn't seem to think we wanted to eat, and we were eating spicy food with no drink refills, we decided 10% was good enough. I had a fun time anyway, since we got to hang out with the Neals sitting across from us (and Connor stealing my menu, pushing my water, and grabbing for my rice). It was kind of fun to hang out with Wendy outside of her natural habitat. ;)

After El Torito, a few of us went to Bananas, a little dive of a place in Fullerton. I guess the Karaoke machine wasn't on, so it was pretty low-key, which was okay by me since I was tired after a long week.

Saturday I did laundry, watched The Dirty Dozen, went out to eat with Ric, bought a Wheel of Time companion book (which officially makes me a nerd), and we spent some time reading in the coffee shop at Borders.

Sunday we went to church and then I literally did nothing but read for the rest of the day. I was bored out of my mind. (Miata should be ready for pickup from the shop very soon!) At least with all of this reading, I'll have the next Wheel of Time book done in time for the release of the new Harry Potter book. At the rate I'm going, I may even have time to re-read book 5 to remind myself where the series left off.

Last Wednesday night I got to the Troubadour at doors opening time for the first time in ages. I've become such a lazy concert-goer. I remember when I first started going to shows, thinking that the people who showed up late all just thought they were too cool to stand around until the headlining band came out. As it turns out, we all get older, and it can hurt our poor little backs and feet and knees and shoulders to stand around for so long.

At any rate, I got there early and actually found the opening bands more of a pleasant listen than I've experienced in quite some time as far as opening bands go. First was Augustana, a young group just about to release an album. I liked the way their songs began simply and grew complex by the end. Three of my suggestions would be: don't have your music play automatically on your website and back off the mic when playing at the keyboard (seeing a string of spit going from a singer's mouth to the mic is not pretty), and open your eyes more often to connect with the audience. Otherwise, good job. The second band was Long-view, from Manchester, whom I had heard of but had never heard. I liked them as well. Can't find a website for them.

I don't know if I mentioned it, but we were front row, center, no barrier (I love small venues). My sister sat on the stage in between bands. As it turned out, being that close was almost a disadvantage when the lead singer of Embrace found that he could stand in between two speakers, right in front of us. RIGHT in front of us, as in we needed to back our faces away from having them look right at his "special area." The mic cord kept hitting my sister in the face whenever he stood there, which made me laugh until I was dodging it as well. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun to be up front and make eye contact with the band.

Embrace are an energetic bunch, and thanks to the Troubadour's newly expanded balcony, that energy led to some athletic climbing and hanging from the balcony while singing.

I have to admit I've listened to the new album a lot at work, so I knew the music really well while not knowing the lyrics all that well, so I felt kind of dumb when everyone else up front was singing along and I was pretty much reduced to a hum, but it was a lot of fun anyway. The band asks the audience to get involved and get jumping, and so we all got really into it, except for my sister, of course, who looks so funny when she's the only one standing there doing nothing in a sea of pogo-ing fans.

We stayed a little bit after the show. Apparently my sister's boyfriend knows every Embrace fan in town. He and my sister had already been to the in-store performance at the Virgin MegaStore that afternoon, as well as a few other shows, and he also went to the Jimmy Kimmel show performance as well. So we waited around while he chatted, and good thing we did, because we caught him a drumstick. Cool.

Fun times. And I've finally found where the free parking is around the Troubadour, so I'm all set for the future. Yeah!

FOXNews.com - Views - Iraq: Bush Myths vs. Reality

I could barely believe my eyes when I saw this article. Could Fox News really be fair and balanced after all? On the same page I saw a link to another: President's Stubbornness Delays Social Security Solution. But wait, both articles come from the same author: Martin Frost. Frost is a Texas Democrat who served in the US House of Representatives for 26 years until 2003 when he lost after some redistricting forced him to run in a Republican-friendly district. Frost then lost his bid for DNC chairman. I guess we can add Frost's name to the short list of liberals that work at Fox News. Now Alan Colmes* has someone to talk to at the water cooler.

*Actually Alan Colmes is more of a moderate than a liberal.

Fox News apparently doesn't mind hiring a liberal or two as long as they meet three out of four of the following criteria:

• Lost recently
• Funny-looking
• Not actually very liberal
• Jewish

I did a bit more reading and I was surprised to learn that Wesley Clark now works for Fox News. He comes close to meeting my requirements. He lost in 2004, he is fairly conservative and he has a bit of a Jewish heritage. But there's no denying that he's a handsome man.

I've been spending a lot of time working on the B2evolution project lately. I upgraded brendoman.com to the newest version of it, then I had to reapply the hack I had made before. I'm working on rewriting it as a plugin that will be easier to install and will be able to survive upgrades like this. The project needed some help sifting through antispam reports and maintaining the central blacklist, so I volunteered to do that. And I submitted a skin to the skins repository. I have another one under development now. And I've been reading through my new book: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL by Kevin Yank.

That's the boring, geeky stuff I've been up to. Yesterday morning Sara and I flew with Dad to an airport in Kansas. We ate breakfast at the restaurant at the airport with some of his pilot friends that meet there once a month (including Private Pilot Magazine writer Leroy Cook). The day before that I went with my sister to the Apple Store to help her pick out an iPod Mini. We got an FM transmitter for playing music in the car, but the quality was really terrible and we could hardly find a place on the dial that wasn't getting interference from other stations. I think we can come up with something better.