Roblog

Wow. We went to see the third installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - The Return of the King - and it was every bit as good as all the hype I had heard. At a running time of 3:10 (the movie was not longer than that if you don't count the previews or credits), it did not feel long. It was beautifully done.

The four-disc extended version is already on my birthday list for 2004.

I have posted 30 new pictures to my web site. Go check em out!

One of the statistics I can access about my website are pages or files that were requested from a visitor to my web site but did not exist. I'm sure you've seen the "404 File Not Found" error messages before. Looking at a list of these failed requests can help me identify if there are any problems with my web pages that are referring to nonexistent files.

Unfortunately, the list of these requests is cluttered with things like:
/scripts/..%c0%2f../winnt/system32/cmd.exe
/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc
These file references appear nowhere in links on my website, so I know they are artificial external requests that I do not want being made, since most of them are probing my website's defenses.

It seems like I've been having to exercise my mostly-atrophied handy-man muscles recently. Mainly, that involves my finger muscles when I dial various service companies to come fix our stuff.

Who converts a 4th-and-26 play with less than 2 minutes to go in a playoff game? The Eagles did yesterday, which enabled them to continue a drive that tied the game with 5 seconds left. They won the game in overtime by intercepting a horrendously awful pass from Brett Farve and returning it deep into Green Bay territory; this led to a short field goal and an Eagles victory. They will be in the NFC championship game for the third year in a row.

Yesterday's game was hard to bear as an Eagles fan. They won, so I am happy about that, but for most of the game it looked as if they should not deserve to win. That is how much of the season has gone, though. I wonder if they will have the worst-ranked offense (18th out of 32 teams) and defense (20th) for any team ever having gone to the Superbowl.

Yes, I think they are going to the Superbowl this year. They still have to beat the Carolina Panthers next week, but I think that Green Bay was the tougher team between the two. The Eagles will find a way to make that game gut-wrenchingly close, I'm sure, but I expect them to win.

I do not see how they can beat either of the two remaining AFC teams: the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots. I will be happy with them just getting to the Superbowl and having a decent showing.

Then maybe they can win it all next year!

Donna, the ever-organized woman that she is, made a list of items we need to pack to travel with the twins. We do this every time, so she figured that we should create one we can reuse the next time we travel. Makes sense to me! So here it is.

For the third consecutive year, the Eagles lost the NFC championship game. They became the first team in history to lose consecutive championship games at home (AFC or NFC).

It was fun being in Pennsylvania for a few days this past week (I tagged along on one of Donna's business trips, which she will be blogging about extensively), since the whole city was Eagles-crazy. Being an Eagles fan in Houston, that was an energizing experience.

Now, however, I am again reminded how hard it is to be a fan of the Eagles. They have been pretty good for so long, which means they make the playoffs, but always end their season with a loss. It's fun to root for the expansion Houston Texans, since they aren't really expected to win, so every win is exciting, and every loss is not too tragic. I imagine it would be fun to root for a team that gets to the Super Bowl, since that is such an event just to get there is a success for most teams. But to be on the edge year after year, never really improving, but still teasing the fans with flashes of greatness is exasperating.

But I'll continue to be a long-suffering Eagles fan. After all, the longer the wait, the sweeter the victory. At least I imagine that would be the case.

I have discovered at least one purpose for my blog - to tell how often my daughters get sick. It appears that Amanda is catching a cold, and Elena is showing signs as well. So, here it is recorded in my online journal so that I can look back and say, "Wow, do toddlers get sick a lot!"

The girls' second birthday was yesterday. Their party, which will be dog-themed and include several other toddlers, will be this coming weekend. For their actual birthday, we made them pancakes (their favorite breakfast) and gave them their presents from us: socks, a broom, highchair for a doll, and a Play-Doh pack. They like opening presents now and usually want to play with the contents right then. It was fun watching them enjoy their gifts.

We got a new dishwasher today, which mostly completes all of the recent household problems we've had. I still need to finish the front door and get the car's tail light fixed.

My work has been quite busy recently, and it looks to continue that way for several months. That's fine with me. It's a new project and I'm excited to be a part of it. Someday, I'll have some experiences to share. But for now, it just means that this blog and further PHP website stuff will slow down as I will have less free time to work on them.

Donna took quite a few pictures at the conference in Philadelphia last week, which she will be uploading into her blog soon. Several of the pictures she took was of posters, which must be viewed at a fairly large size if the writing on them is to be legible. This means that the full-size pictures can be larger than the average-person's computer screen.

The standard Movable Type code that it (politely) generates when uploading a picture doesn't handle this very well. The window that the picture appears in (once you click on the thumbnail) is set to have no scroll bars and is not resizable. This means that you are out of luck about seeing the entire picture unless you can move the entire window around. So I decided to try to change it.

I've decided my favorite kind of weather is wind. A big, strong wind. Winds when it's cold are not much fun, but I can feel so much power in a strong wind. I love leaning into the wind, feeling it whip my pants legs behind me as I walk against it.

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." -John Ruskin

My new project at work has still not been advertised at the client, so I still have to be careful about who I tell about my new project's client.