Delayed

My new branch in Manteno was scheduled to open on June 20, 2005. It is now June 22 and no branch. It has been delayed without a rescheduled grand opening date. The problem? That's a long story...

Seems the Village of Manteno uses well water. Once upon a time there were three wells serving Manteno. Somehow, one of the wells became contaminated with who-knows-what. My sources say that the EPA will never approve this contaminated well for use ever again. So...now we have two wells. Manteno is a growing community and apparently two wells just isn't enough. This (finally) explains my low water pressure and my toilet's weak flush. The grocery store that my bank will be in, Berkot's Super Foods, has recently built an addition that more than doubles the size of the store. My bank is situated in the new portion of the store. To satisfy Manteno safety regulations, Berkot's installed a new fire suppression system for the addition. The system requires a certain water pressure to operate effectively. Because Manteno is down to two wells, the village cannot provide enough pressure to adequately operate the system. So...because Manteno can't make enough water, Berkot's can't open their addition because it does not meet village regulations. In order to provide enough pressure to operate the fire suppression system, the village must do one of two things: drill a new well (very expensive) or begin to purchase water from another municipality (in this case, Kankakee). Apparently the well issue as been festering for quite a while and the village has not acted. My sources at Berkot's tell me that they are expecting to open their addition in "the fall." So...this means that my bank will probably not open until September or October. Darn.

So, that's where I'm at. Delayed.

Blog news: I have a new "photo album" archive. It is located at http://bhinc.homeip.net/. The intent of this archive was to create an easy place to find my photos without having to load up the whole blog. I'm toying of the idea of making the archive an actual "homepage" that will be more than just a listing of my photo albums. The blog, of course, will still exist but most of the non-journal content will be relocated to the homepage. I am interested in doing this because Blogger makes it very easy to post and edit posts but it is slightly more tedious to change other elements of the blog page. Using Macromedia Dreamweaver, I can easily edit my photo archive page. So...if/when I decide to do this, I will be sure make a post about it.

New Photos

The blog is updated once again. I hope y'all remember to hit refresh every time you visit or you might be missing out on the latest and the greatest. Alternatively, you could subscribe to my RSS or ATOM feed and be updated automatically whenever I post. Now that's a cool idea.

So...two new albums have been added (see the "photo albums" section on the right hand side of the page under my lovely picture). One, called "New Kitchen," is appropriately enough filled with pictures of my new kitchen. The second is a collection of 96 photos taken during Tulip Time 2005 in Pella, IA. Also, please note that this is my first album that is completely captioned. Talk about learning new things every day - I finally realized today that Picasa2 exports the captions you enter to the webpages. Seems standard but I didn't know it did that. So, now every time you click on a picture, you can read my lovely caption up at the top. Enjoy!

The Computer World

My how things change. Apple has announced that it is abandoning the PowerPC processor in favor of Intel's x86 architecture. This would was seemingly years in the making. I remember back when I was in school - I don't remember which year it was - there was a big commotion when a page was discovered on Apple's server that detailed a port of Mac OSX to the x86 platform. At the time I was unsure what this would mean. My hope was that Apple would release a version of OSX for Intel-based machines that would compete with MS Windows. However, now that the transition of Apple's line of hardware is actually happening, I understand now why a version of OSX that could be installed on any x86-based computer would not be in Apple's best interest. Steve Jobs has said - and I agree - that the strength of Apple is directly related to the fact that they control both the hardware and the software, thus guaranteeing the user's experience. So, will Macs with Intel processors be better than their PowerPC predecessors? Probably so, if only for the fact that Apple will be able to offer consumers more choices. Will they be cheaper? Probably not. By controlling both the hardware and the software, Apple has the ability to charge a premium because an Apple Mac is "exclusive."

I'm getting tired of hearing about Firefox. A browser review on CNET.com rated Firefox the best browser and listed its "cool factor" as one of the reasons for the ranking. Cool factor!?!? Is this how we are evaluating software these days? And how did Firefox acquire this cool factor? I've always been dismissive of Firefox. Back in the days when I didn't know about Opera yet, I was a staunch Opera user. Why? Because Netscape was a joke. They spun off the Mozilla Foundation and donated their source code so that the open source community could improve the browser. And you know what? Mozilla was a joke. It was never released on time, was notoriously buggy, and generally sucked. Trust me, I know. Being an early adopter of just about everything, I tried Mozilla in the early days. It was definitely not cool then. So what do they do? They "strip" it down, slap a new name on it, add tabs (which Opera has had for a long time), and suddenly its cool? I just don't get it. As far as I'm concerned its still Mozilla crap. Download Opera. Use it. If you want the ad to go away, there are a lot of ways to get it for free. Check out Opera's website. Or just click here. Google's great.

Greatest Hits

I know I just posted, but I started thinking. It's not an everyday thing but sometimes it happens. I was looking at my newly created post on the front page of my blog and I happened to glance at the "archives" listing. I haven't missed a month since March 2004. Now, there haven't been daily posts during that time or anything crazy like that, but no multi-month gaps that were so prevelant early on in my blogging career. All this thinking made me want to go back and read my blog. Yes, the whole thing. Upon realizing how long my blog actually is (somewhere around 25,000 words according to Blogger's stats), I mostly skimmed but read the "important" posts. After reading for a while I though it would be fun (and maybe a bit enlightening) to compile a list of highlights. You know, posts that are funny or thoughtful. So...here's my list.

Stupid Daniel Alert - January 2001
I'm Still Alive, Pt. 1 - March 2001
I'm Still Alive, Pt. 2 - April 2001
Cliff Almost Passes Out at Church (How Ironic) - April 2001
Orange Peel - September 2001
9-11: First Thoughts - September 2001
White Boy in a Black Class - December 2001
Use of the Term "Crazy-Drunk" - January 2002
Essay on God - January 2002
Quotable Quote - February 2002
Going Shooting, Prologue - January 2003
Going Shooting, Report - January 2003
Me in the School Newspaper - February 2003
The 4east Reunion Message Board - March 2003
Eddie's (Vedder) Speech - April 2003
Diet RC: Discovered - April 2004
Crazy Old Age? - April 2004
Rear-ending, Vonage, Promotion - July 2004
An Essay on Happiness - August 2004
New Computer, New Phone - December 2004
What I Come Home To - February 2005

Now, I know it's a long list, so if you're not inclined to go through every link, I'll just point you to a few of my uber-favorites: "9-11: First Thoughts," which, appropriately enough, is an account of my experience of September 11, 2001; "White Boy in a Black Class," about how literature and politics are two different things; "Essay on God," which affirms my belief in God; and "An Esasy on Happiness," which in a nutshell details my life's philosophy, at least as it applies to happiness versus satisfaction.

For those of you that read this who are old four easters, I encourage you to revisit the message board located at www.mywang.org. It was only in use for about 5 days but I thought it was a good idea. There are some fun pictures posted there and a few interesting posts. At least it's nostalgic. So...check it out. Please?

Long Weekend

Well it's already June 4 and I'm in the midst of a 3-day weekend. What have I got to show for it? Not much - I did absolutely nothing today. That's right. Got out of bed at 1pm and watched some of my backlog of TV shows all day. But at least by watching them I'm able to finally delete them. I've got a 250 gig hard drive and I'm really scared that I've filled most of it up already. I haven't checked so I'm not sure but I bet it's close. Err, it was. I've been deleting a lot of stuff. Watch it once, burn it if good, delete it if not. Why take up valuable space? But with all of that downloading and deleting I'm sure I'm ready for a defrag. Should probably set that up to run tonight.

So...I'm sure many are wondering what I thought of Star Wars. Well I've seen it twice - not nearly enough times - the first at a midnight showing in Chicago Heights, IL and the second at the AMC River East theaters in downtown Chicago. Did I mention that the second time I saw it was in DLP? Yeah, it was definitely worth it. Brighter colors, more vivid images, just awesome. What is not awesome is the apparent non-existence of a theater within a 100-mile radius that is showing Ep3 in both DLP and THX. I have to choose between one or the other. And having already seen the film in DLP, I'd like to move on to seeing it in THX. I'm sure that the DLP makes a bigger difference than THX, but what the heck. If it's an excuse for me to see it again, who cares?

I thought the movie itself was awesome - definitely the best of the prequel movies and probably besting the fourth Lucas-directed SW film, A New Hope. Whether Sith is better than ESB or ROTJ is probably up for debate and I would have to say that I probably won't make up my mind until I have all six movies on DVD and can compare them side-by-side rather easily. My initial thoughts are that Sith will come in just behind ESB for me, ranking it as my second-favorite SW film. For those who know me, you know that I have a very hard time ranking anything. Top ten bands? Top ten albums? Top ten movies? Gee, I can't even pick my top ten U2 songs. But when the set is narrowed down to six (in the case of the SW movies), I guess I can force myself to choose.

In non-SW related news, it looks like my bank might be delayed again. "What the heck are they doing," you might ask. I have no idea. Last time I was in the store, it looked as if the bank was mostly if not completely done, at least structurally. There's no computers or other equipment in there yet, obviously, but there are signs up already. Signs. That's gotta mean something. But signs do me no good. Since the bank is inside of an addition to an already-existing store, logic would suggest that the store addition must be ready for the bank to open. And from the looks of it, the store addition being ready might be some ways off. I mean, they haven't even finished the parking lot yet.

Tomorrow I'm going to get a haircut (long overdue) and then go to the Bennett's for a nice Sunday dinner. Then it's off to spend some time with Tim and Jess. So...for all the stuff I didn't do today, I guess I'll make up for it tomorrow. At least that's the plan.