News

February Begins

Tomorrow Kevin turns 3 years old! We’re having his party at Bozzo’s house this afternoon.  His party has a dinosaur theme, and he’s getting dinosaur-related gifts.  Sandy and Jim got him the movie Dinosaur on DVD (Special Edition, 2 DVDs), some dinosaur wood puzzles, and a big plastic container filled with all sorts of dinosaurs.

Jim’s using 5 messengers now — MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Odigo, AIM, and ICQ.  Sheesh! It’s not so bad though with 2 PCs on the internet at once–all the messengers stay on one PC and we surf the net and do other things with the other one.  It’s just experimental though, to see how all the programs work and what their differences are.  There’s an alliance forming among several of the major messenger services right now, so hopefully they’ll come up with a good unified solution… In the meantime though, Jim just likes to play with them and juggle between them until they break.

The blue car is in the shop this weekend–another head gasket blown.  That’s the 2nd hard gasket change for that car now, so it’ll be on it’s 3rd gasket. The black car is on it’s 2nd one as well, so I guess it’s just a thing you have to live with on Neons.  We’ve heard it’s a pretty common problem on Neons.

Our CD recorder died last week too. It just stopped refusing to record CDs one day, and then stopped reading CDs altogether. I opened it up, but could see nothing physically wrong with it.  So I’ll have to get another one of those along with a new DVD drive, which has been giving me trouble for some time too. That one occasionally refuses to read DVDs, and never wants to read CDs any more either…Maybe it’s me, but neither one of them wants to work any more no matter what I do.  I’ve even tried them in different computers with the same results. Oh well. Time to upgrade.

News

Christmas is over

Christmas is over, but the snow, slush and ice lingers on.  Enough already! We’ve had so much snow in the last month everyone is sick of it.  It’s supposed to start warming up next week (1/8/01-1/15/01) so at least enough snow should melt so we’ll have ROOM for the next batch whenever that comes.

Web Site Changes – We’ve changed our home page so it would be easy for us to use as our “Start Page”.  This was the original intention of the idea of a “home page” on the internet; So each web user could have their own personal Start Page.  But since the commercial “Portals” like Yahoo, Excite, MSN, etc. did such a good job of combining so many features and allowing customizable features, this is now a rare occurrence on the internet.  But what they’ve ALSO added on those pages is unnecessary advertising and tricks to get you to click on THEIR recommended sites, which is how they can offer all of the neat “free” features they have.  So our home page is faster-loading because it’s free of all of that customization code, free of ads, and free of MOST of the extra snazzy graphics and effects (hey, we have to have SOME fun!).  So if you find it useful, feel free to either add it to your favorites or even make it your own home page if you don’t have one yourself. And if you DO have one yourself, let us know and we’ll add it to our “Friends and Family” site list!

Photo Albums – We’ve added our Christmas album for 2000, so take a look if you’re interested.

Odigo – Jim’s been experimenting with a few new programs: Odigo, which combines AIM, Yahoo, and ICQ as well as it’s own services, and it looks like a nice alternative to using two or more messenger programs. Too bad it doesn’t support MSN Messenger, or it would cover all the bases we need.