Category Archives: News

News

The Circus

Last night we went to the Circus in Union Grove. We had ticket for a free child admission and another one for a free adult admission with a paid adult, so with Kevin, Sandy and I we only had to pay for one adult ($20). Before the circus, however, they had pony and elephant rides ($4 and $6 respectively), so Kevin took a ride on a pony named “Blackey.” He was an all-black pony, and I told Kevin he looked just like Socks. Then he noticed a tan-colored one and said it looked just like Peanut. I had to walk with my arm around him around the circle as he rode, and I think we did about 10 laps–quite the workout for me. After that we were in line for the main event.

Is it me, or does the circus seem more and more like just a money scam each year? This year the tent seemed smaller than last year, much less seating, and less equipment-intensive acts. This year even the human cannonball act was moved outside the tent and performed after the show as sort of a grand finale as everyone stood around the parking lot and watched before leaving. There also seemed like many more “money schemes”– a “official” circus coloring book sale for $1, in which several coloring books contained “hidden surprises” with coupons for either a free balloon, popcorn, or cotton candy (Kevin won the cotton candy) which was offered during the first 15 minutes of the show and not even during intermission, a photo op with either a giant snake or baby tigers, and even a peanut sale in which a tiny bag of peanuts sold for $1, again with many of them contain coupons for prizes (Sandy won nothing). The latter, of course, was no-doubt also a tool used to sell more drinks!

In addition to the tent being much smaller this year, the acts were much smaller as well. The trapeze artist/hoola hooper/stunt girl was a small child, maybe 9 or 10 years old! She exhibited some neat skills for a girl her age, no doubt. The balance of the show included two elephant acts (not sure even these were the same elephants in both acts though), a couple dog acts, a monkey act, some “clowning around” in-between acts, a lady doing rope-climbing tricks, and the human cannonball finale.

We enjoyed the dog and elephant acts the most I think. The dogs appeared to all be either Jack Russell Terriers or something similar. The appeared to be slightly larger than Chihuahuas. They looked like they were all from the same family too, having very similar appearance. I think there were 6 or 7 of them in the largest act. They’d jump through hoops, walk on their hind legs, slide down a slide, etc., and return right to their stand afterward. One of them even walked on his front legs! The other dog act was much simpler, and consisted of several dogs of completely different breeds with various stunt skills.

The elephants were fun to watch too, especially in the much smaller tent–they appeared to be that much more enormous! They did some dancing, handstands, and various other tricks that seemed next to impossible to do within the small ring they were in, but they performed flawlessly.

It all seemed smaller and shorter than the year before though, but I don’t think Kevin noticed one bit. He got a toy–a cool spinning ball ($10) with various LEDs of different colors inside that flashed at different times while spinning, which creates a very neat effect! I’ll have to try to snap a night-shot of it to post on the site, and he got his cotton candy, popcorn, and sno-cone, so he was very happy. As we were leaving the parking lot he was asking when the next one was, so he’s ready to come again, as usual.

One ticket to the circus…. $20
A toy…. $10
A ride on “Blackey”…. $4
Box of popcorn…. $3
Sno-Cone… $3
Bottle of water…. $2
Circus coloring book…. $1
Bag of Peanuts…. $1

The look of joy on Kevin’s face as he watched the performance…. PRICELESS

News

The Spectacular New Atari Video-Game Computer!

I did a little more digging through the old boxes tonight and found this! It thrilled me beyond words. View the full-size image by clicking the thumbnail, then click on the medium-sized image. Read the entire ad. This is a real keeper. Can you imagine? I can’t even remember what we initially paid for our first Atari 2600 system, but I know we did get one early in it’s release, so it had to be close to this price. Wow. I even played Yar’s Revenge for a while yesterday. I relearned the gameplay pretty quickly and I was again hooked. That was one of my all-time favorites.

I almost fear that all of this reliving of my past is somehow going to cause my mind to lose what it currently knows about TODAY’S computers. Kind of like a retroactive brainwashing… Uhoh. I feel the gigbytes slipping away and being replaced by “k’s”…

News

Old Car Lovers Show

Kevin and I walked over to the car show at Baker Park yesterday morning. Take a look at the photo highlights. Kevin seemed pretty much disinterested, however. He seemed to be just tagging along, not thrilled at all by all the old cars, except a slight perk-up when he spotted a bright yellow one (his favorite color) and a flashy purple one with flames (mom’s favorite color). I was thinking maybe the car show would touch a nerve with him and spark some interest. He has expressed an interest in cars in the past, hence his collection of hundreds of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, but that seems to be fading these days.

I’m always searching for that one thing that’s going to thrill him to no end, to pique his interest enough to spark some sort of direction for him. For me it was computers and electronics. Once I found that, which happened at around 9 or 10 years old I believe, I was hooked for life. I’m hoping to help Kevin find that one thing too. I’ll wait as long as it takes. And until then we’ll try to expose him to as many different things as we can, giving him the opportunity to find his niche for himself. One thing is true though–he loves going “places.” No matter where, he just always wants to go to more places. Take him to school, then shopping, then swimming, which fills out the whole day, and he still says “I wanna go to more places!” even though he’s half asleep from exhaustion. He seems to just want to experience more and more of what the world has to offer. Perhaps he’ll be a traveler of some sort when he grows up, who knows.

But the car show was nice. As you can see by the photos, there were some awesome vehicles there, including the Prowler and several “Deathmobiles”, complete with coffins and–in some cases–skeletons. Kevin was afraid to approach the hearses with the skeletons and body parts all around them. I told him, “Come on, it’s not real, it’s make-believe” but he wouldn’t get close, so we moved on.

We had lunch there (hot dogs, soda, and ice cream), Kevin played on the slides and swings a little, and then we walked home. Later in the afternoon, Kevin, Sandy and I went to my dad’s to visit for Father’s Day. Sandy cooked burgers, brats, and hot dogs on the grill and we had a good meal. Overall it was a pretty nice Father’s Day all the way around.

Oh, and make sure you don’t miss Socks’ audition photo for the part of “Odie” in the new Garfield movie….

News

Something Old, Something New

There are new releases from both Firefox and Thunderbird available! I’ve made them available on my site for instant download. Just click on those links to download them immediately. They’re also in my new “Downloads” section in the right sidebar on the main page of my site. The new versions look really great, especially the enhanced themes for Firefox, and there’s been a lot of improvements all throughout both programs. One big example in Firefox: On any web page start typing a few letters of any link–for example if you’re looking for the link to CWShredder on my site just start typing CWS and Firefox jumps immediately to that link on the page! It’s not even a command, it’s just always there waiting. You’ll never have a hard time finding any links on a page again!

That was new. This is old: I took a huge leap back in time yesterday. A good friend of ours who passed away last December left behind a house full of “classic” computers and gaming gear. His wife offered this stuff to me yesterday after being turned down by several charity organizations. No one wanted to give his antique equipment a new home. I, however, was thrilled at the thought of reliving a huge part of my past, and jumped at the chance. I have 6 or 7 Atari game systems, a Colecovision, two Atari 800XL computers and hundreds of programs, games, controllers, and peripherals for them.

It’s really quite a sight, but I guess you wouldn’t appreciate it unless you were part of that era. I’m going to post some photos of the stuff soon, just for the other geeks from my generation to appreciate. Matt is currently experimenting with all of the hardware and software, so I’m waiting for his official word on today’s generation’s take on MY generation’s technology. It should be very enlightening. I’ll keep you posted. And don’t forget the rest of my essential downloads that are available. I highly recommend all of these:

AdAware 6.0 build 181
CwShredder
ComputerGuy.mp3
Dvd Shrink
DiskPie
Easter Eggs
Flash Movie Extractor
Kazaa Lite Resurrection
Kingdom Hospital Jigsaw
Matt Puzzle
Pop Peeper
Peanut & Socks Jigsaw
Spybot 1.3
WinTidy

News

Jay and Silent Ty Stop By

Jayson was here from Arizona this evening. He took us out for pizza to this place. By far the best pizza we’ve ever had! There’s just something about that super-thin, super-crunchy crust and perfect toppings that make this pizza awesome. And the garlic bread was great too! We’ll definitely be visiting this place in the future.

Jay also brought his new toy along (his Sony DSC-P73), so we compared features, talked geekspeak, and took a few pictures. I’ll let him do the posting in his gallery section this time–I’m sure he’s anxious to try it out for the first time with the new camera. I just had to post the one picture of Wells Brothers so everyone knows about it. It’s at 2148 Mead Street, Racine, WI, Phone: (262) 632-4408.

He picked up Tyler for the summer and they stopped back at our house shortly before heading off to their hotel for the evening. Tyler was pretty quiet at first, but once he started playing Eye Toy with Kevin he opened up pretty quickly and started having a blast jumping, punching, and kicking inside the video games.

They’re flying back to Arizona tomorrow. Definitely too short of a visit, that’s for sure! We’re hoping to be able to go out there to visit him in the near future for a “slightly” longer visit than this one was.

News

New camera!

Well, Today Shell and I got a new digital camera. Thanks to the expertise knowledge of Jim, we opted to buy the Sony DSC-P73. Wow, what a camera…many features which gives me a bunch of reading to do just to figure them all out! We messed around with it for a bit tonight and here are a few we took. Well, We will have many more comming! Take care all….

News

Site Changes

Don’t worry, nothing major. I added a “Downloads” section to the right sidebar of our main page, http://www.jimtrottier.com. This includes every file available for download directly from our site. I had a few complaints from users and customers having difficulty finding specific utilities I recommended that they download from my site, so this puts them all on the front page, so you can search the page for the text or just look through the Downloads list for what you need.

The main utilities, CWShredder, Spybot, and AdAware I’ll try to keep updated, since I use them regularly myself. In fact, CWShredder is a new version (version 1.59) already, since I first posted it on my site a few weeks ago, and Spybot has a very nice new version (version 1.3) as well. I don’t mean the updates either, I mean the program itself. So if you have version 1.2 or earlier, you should uninstall it and install this new version. It seems to run much faster to me, and is much easier to use than before. It even groups the Spyware it finds into a summary list, making much easier to follow.

The gas price updates may disappear soon. We’re back below $2/gallon for the most part, so the situation is a little better, and I’m not sure anyone really uses it besides me anyway. I do submit my readings to Kenosha News on Tuesdays and Fridays though, and it’s used in their “Gas Price Watch” column in Wednesday and Saturday editions of the Kenosha News, so it doesn’t go TOTALLY unused. But if you actually look at it and/or use it to decide where to get gas, PLEASE reply with a comment and let me know. It’ll help me to decide whether or not to keep going with it on the site.

News

Time for a Little R&R (Ronald Reagan)

Hey, did anyone notice Ronald Reagan passed away? How could you miss it, it’s everywhere. Every website I’ve been to the last few days has mentioned it, even the non-political and non-news sites. And now it’s on MY site! I make it a point to not get political on my site, so please excuse me for a moment. I think this whole thing’s a bit much. Everywhere you turn there’s tributes, stories, memorials, and remembrances day after day. I understand an ex-president doesn’t die every day, but the TRUE American Heroes you hear very little or nothing about when they pass. Why is that? Did we fly the flag at half-staff when Nicholas Berg was beheaded? Reagan gets 30 days, June 6th-July 6th, right on through Independence Day, when EVERYONE is staring at the American flag. How about what’s-his-name (see? I already forgot), the pro football player who gave up a multi-million dollar contract, dropped everything, and went to Iraq to fight for us as an Army Ranger and got killed? I read two articles and he was gone. Ray Charles died yesterday. He wasn’t a former president, but I’m sure he made more money in his lifetime and touched more lives.

Reagan liked Jelly Bellys though, that’s what’s most important. And for that reason and a few others every government office was closed today. Now we’ll remember Reagan for having stopped the federal government and Wall Street dead in its tracks for a 24-hour period of time on an otherwise busy and productive Friday. And watch out, here comes a new national holiday! And I’m sure my employer won’t pay me for it, either. But that’s ok. I say, instead of working every June 11th, let’s make it “FREE JELLY BELLYS FOR EVERYONE, EVERY JUNE 11TH!! — NO WORK! IT’S TIME FOR SOME R&R!”

News

Another DVR Down

Well, we blew our second DVR drive last week. I think we’re getting pretty good at it. This one was the second of the two original DVRs we got when we started using them back in August of 2003. They gave us a new box and we were back up and running again the next day. Except without the 20 or so scheduled recordings we had set. Now we have to wait until the fall TV season gets rolling again to find our shows in the schedule and set new timers. But luckily we didn’t lose any critical saved shows on the hard drive.

And since we got the new box we’ve been enjoying the free “on-demand” channels we now get! I think this is something new (the free ones I mean) because I hadn’t heard of them before. Sandy likes The Food Network On Demand. She gets a list of saved shows and recipes and she just chooses one and there it is, whenever you want to watch it. It’s like having a hard drive already filled with a bunch of shows from each channel and you just choose what you want to watch whenever you want. Kevin likes the Cartoon Network On Demand and PBS Kids On Demand and I like TechTV On Demand, although I’m not sure how long this channel will last, seeing how everything is so up-in-the-air now regarding TechTV these days. Speaking of which, I can’t record The ScreenSavers properly yet since they moved it to the stupid G4TechTV channel. There’s no show schedule on my DVR for that channel! It just shows “No Data” across the entire day for that channel. That kinda takes the Tech out of TechTV, doesn’t it? I haven’t gotten around to trying to create a manual schedule for it yet, but that’s what I’ll have to do I guess. But I can see it already–as soon as I create a custom schedule that works they’ll cancel the show and fire the staff. It certainly wouldn’t be much of a surprise at this point.

Time Warner also gave us 3 free months of HBO On Demand and Cinemax On Demand with the new DVR too. So guess what I’ve been catching up on lately? Season 5 of the Sopranos! This is awesome. I can’t wait until they do this with EVERY major TV show! Just scroll through each episode and watch the shows you missed, or watch the entire season beginning to end!

News

One more jab at Incredimail

A friend of mine recently ran into an interesting problem: After uninstalling Outlook Express (if that’s even really possible) she opened her Incredimail and tried to open an attachment in an e-mail. She got an error stating that Outlook Express could not be started, and it may not be installed properly. That’s funny, I always thought Incredimail was Incredimail.

So I stopped over and tried a few things. After I reinstalled Outlook Express guess what? Incredimail was then able to open attachments! Go figure. And the opened window had her current Incredimail skin, and even had a Help > About menu, which STILL touted itself as “Incredimail”!! I believe we’ve been scammed, people. At least those that made the mistake of purchasing the full version. We thought we bought an actual program, but now it appears to be just a skinned version of Outlook Express! Nothing on Incredimail’s site says anything at all about being an enhanced version of Outlook Express or anything remotely close to that. But knowing very well how Outlook Express is the frequent target of hackers and virus infections, I would be a little more concerned at this point if I were still using it as my e-mail client.

Think Thunderbird. Think Thunderbird. Think Thunderbird.

News

Annie

We went out for dinner and a play with Pam and Louie tonight at Fireside in Fort Atkinson. We had a great meal and saw a great play. Annie is by far the best play I’ve seen so far. Everyone knows the story, so I won’t go into that part of it much.

The actors were amazing though. The entire play was very well acted and choreographed. Most amazing to me, however, was the incredible talent of the younger actresses who played all of the orphans in the play. Ranging in age from 7 to 12 years old, these girls could sing and act great, just like the pros they were working alongside of. My personal favorite was “Molly”, played by 7-year-old Addy Eckert from Grafton, Wisconsin. Her antics and perfect timing were amazing, not to mention just how adorable she seems to be. Of course that could just be her character though…

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the meal–every part of that was great too, from the salad and fresh bread to the roast beef and great asparagas spears on the main course, everything was very very good. If you haven’t been to Fireside Dinner Theatre before, Sandy and I highly recommend it. Click here to read about the play and the supper menu.

And on a side note… As we were leaving the theatre in our car we watched a lady walking two identical Golder Retrievers on leashes from the theatre! I assume this was Misty (the retriever who played “Sandy” in the play), but who was the other dog?? Wow, these days even DOGS have understudies!

News

Milwaukee Public Museum

Kevin’s class went on a field trip today to the Milwaukee Public Museum. Sandy chaperoned and took a ton of pictures! Take a look.

Hey Pam, I see YOU went to the museum recently too. Did you forget your camera?? I can’t find any of YOUR pictures on your website… And when did your spelling get so accurate!?! Wow, I only found one typo in all those big words! It’s almost as if you didn’t write it yourself… Let me guess… You had Joey write it for you, didn’t you? Ah hah! =)

News

Kenosha Police Scanner

There’s an awesome feature on KenoshaOnline.net that I recently discovered. It’s a Live Kenosha Police Scanner! It scans all of Kenosha’s Police and Fire frequencies live, and whenever anything happens you hear it all, right in your browser–anywhere in the world!

I’ve been a scanner enthusiast since I was a kid, but have been having trouble with my old 200-channel Bearcat portable lately–memory problems, and battery won’t hold a charge any more. So it was quite a treat to find this little gem. It’s cool–nice and clear, with all the important channels covered. I even created a new tab for that url and re-saved my home tabs in firefox so every time i start my browser now I get the police calls. It’s been really exciting the last couple days especially, with the storms there’s been a ton of activity on it!

It doesn’t take up much bandwidth at all, since it doesn’t talk all the time, only when there is activity on the scanner. So even dialup users can enjoy it a great deal. Even if I’m doing something else on the computer I’ll actually minimize my browser now–so I can continue to monitor the police calls.

Kenosha-area users should definitely check it out! You can get hooked real easy, and you’ll soon find yourself asking “What’s a 10-50?? What’s a 10-56??” This should help.

News

The Flood of 2004

Well, Geekette gave it a good name today. This entry’s title says it all. The headline on the front page of the Kenosha News today reads “Floodgates Have Opened – Kenosha County executive declares a state of emergency.”

Yeah, there’s some water out there. I had a computer job in Illinois today, and I was a little concerned this morning about the best route to take to get there. I chose to take Highway 50 to 45, and 45 South into Illinois. I got lucky and didn’t hit any flooded roads except this one, which I drove through without a hitch.

The trip back was another story though. I chose a slightly different route for my return trip, and ended up having to backtrack about 5 miles when I got here. I’m listening to the scanner calls right now, and they removed the barricades from that very intersection not more than 15 minutes ago, and now there’s a pickup truck stuck in it. The utility workers at the intersection reported that he was continuously bumping a barricade further and further down the roadway, probably goofing around, when his truck fell into a ditch. Brilliant. They’re going to check him for a possible DWI now.

Geekette posted some great pics too, from right outside her door. I love the basketball court pic!

News

Shirley’s Journey Begins

Shirley Burbey (Beecher) passed away last night at 1:30am. She was a lifelong friend of my father’s, and his closest companion for the last several years. We will miss her a great deal. She is safe now, with no more pain, in God’s hands.

News

Museum Visit

Kevin and I took a trip to the Kenosha Museum yesterday. He wanted to go somewhere and it was nice out, but as usual money is tight. So we did the museum and had a good time. He always enjoys seeing the dinosaurs and bones, and adventuring through the flashbacks in time. The indian village was finally complete, and he liked looking at the gorey guts of a buffalo that the indians were ripping apart in one exhibit. I liked the art the most, and I took a picture of a nice painting too, it’s right here in the photo of the day section.

After the museum we rode the trolley for two laps. Kevin loves it every time, and I think he could ride it all day and never get bored if we’d let him. After that we had lunch at one of Kev’s favorite spots…McDonalds! He always knows which toys are given away at each of his restaurants, thanks to his own web page he uses on his computer, so he knew he’d get a Lego toy this time, and he did.

After that we went home and he practiced riding his scooter a little. We weren’t able to do it for long though, the wind was really fierce yesterday afternoon as the cold front moved in, and it kept blowing him off of his scooter!

News

Jigsaws Galore

I’ve been playing with Jigsaws Galore this week. It’s a great jigsaw puzzle game that lets you make a puzzle out of any photo or image you have. It’ll let you save collections of puzzles, and even generate “Gift Puzzles”, which are standalone executables that anyone can load and play without even requiring the purchase of the program!

I bought the full program though ($25.00). I plan to use it to generate bonus jigsaw puzzles to include on the CD-based photo collections I plan to start selling in the near future.

In the meantime I’ll be making and posting several puzzles on my site to get some feedback on them and give everyone some free samples of how they’ll look and work. Here’s my first one. Enjoy!

It’s 108 pieces. See how long it takes you…WITHOUT cheating =) Let me know.

News

Walgreens Overcharges

Walgreens recently paid the state over $22,000 to settle accusations that checkout scanner errors overcharged customers, state officials said. Half of the 28 Walgreens stores tested by state agents failed the state standards, which require an error rate of 2% or less. The Walgreens stores tested had an overall error rate of 5.5%. They said the average overcharge was $2.40 and the average undercharge was $1.28. State law requires stores to issue refunds for overcharges.

So my question is, “Does the state law require stores to issue refunds for overcharges when the CUSTOMER catches them, or ALL the time?” There’s no way it can be all the time though, since cash-paying customers don’t leave a paper trail. So overcharges found after the customer leaves the store go unclaimed, obviously. And I highly doubt anyone follows up on the other paper-trail-generating credit card and check users when an overcharge is made either.

But I do find it very enlightening that even an error rate of 2% is ACCEPTABLE! Why should ANY overcharge be acceptable?!?! So if I spend $100 in a Walgreens–or any other Wisconsin store for that matter–and they charge me $102, that’s just fine with the state. It’s ok to rip me off “a little” I guess. Well, fine. Then I guess I can fudge my tax return by 2% too then, right? Good! Because I owe the state quite a bit this year, that’ll help me out a lot!

News

Will’s 1st Birthday!

Well, today we celebrated Will’s 1st Birthday! We cant get over how much he has grown in one year! Shell made him a nice Blues Clues Bday cake and my mom brought over pizza. It was just a small get together, but we all had a good time. We posted his picture’s so take a look if you like 🙂