This morning, I found my 2 year old son, Ashton, holding my cell phone singing, “where is the cow?” over and over. It took me a second, but then I remembered my alarm is set to the song from this cartoon:
So my wife finally started her own blog over at blogspot, The McClean Family.
Now I can keep all of my posts really boring and nerdy while she chronicles our family life events.
Speaking of other blogs, I recently rediscovered this disturbing one that I had set up for a school assignment 3 years ago. I hardly remember writing any of it: Dug’s Blog.
Someone (my wife) nicely pointed out that I didn’t post about any of the sights or attractions we saw while we were in London. And I did promise in that I would make another post if I remembered anything else. Here were a few of our favorite places, in no particular order:
1. Windsor Castle
This is the Queen’s little (about 484,000 square feet) home that she likes to stay in on the weekends. The castle is awesome, and the surrounding city of Windsor is absolutely beautiful.
2. Royal Observatory, Greenwich
One of my favorite places, probably because it is located on the prime meridian, and it is from where most places base their time zone (GMT -0700, anyone?). I also got this awesome picture from the camera obscura there:
Well, even though you can’t see anything in the picture, when you stand in the dark room long enough to let your eyes adjust, you can see a live image of a London street being projected onto a table.
3. Different Palaces of London
Hampton Court Palace was by far my favorite palace that we saw, with the dining areas and kitchens being my favorite, because it was really, really old — I believe it was used around the 12th or 13th century. The palace reminded me of the old medieval era portrayed in movies. I didn’t take any pictures of the inside; I don’t remember if they allowed pictures or not. Oh, and the maze there was super fun, too.
Other palaces we saw were the late Princess Diana’s home, Kensington Palace; and the queen’s current home, Buckingham Palace. Though we never toured the inside of Buckingham Palace, we did see the changing of the guards there.
4. Museums
The British Museum, I got to see the Rosetta Stone in person.
The London Aquarium, always fun to see underwater life (I’d love to visit Sea World again sometime soon).
The Natural History Museum, “But look at my little arms. I can’t press the fire button, and jump at the same time.”
There is definitely a lot more to see, and my wife and I would love to go back again, but I’m done trying to think of more to write.
So, I meant to write this entry about a year ago when we went to England last March. I wanted to write about cool things I saw and tips about traveling out of the country.
1. My debit card was the cheapest way to pay for things.
I’m not sure if this is the case for everyone, but I made purchases on 3 different cards (American Express, Chase Visa, and my Visa Debit Card). American Express and Chase both charged about 3% on top of the exchange rate (which was around 1.95 USD to 1 GBP at the time). When I used my debit card, I was simply charged the exchange rate my bank currently offered.
2. A lot of electronics actually work with a simple outlet converter (i.e. – not transformer).
I noticed my laptop power supply listed a voltage range of like 110-240V, so I used an outlet converter and plugged in my laptop to the 220V outlet, and it worked like a charm. I left it plugged in for nearly a full week, and was even able to log on to the Internet from an access point at the flat. My external hard drive also had no problems (and anything else with that wide of a voltage range).
3. Some buskers are awesome, you should tip them occasionally
Especially if they’re as hot as Natalia Tena (who plays Nymphadora Tonks in the Harry Potter movies, and who claims to have performed in the London Underground).
One day during the trip, I had a Shins song (Young Pilgrims) stuck in my head the entire day. That same day while we were traveling on the Underground, we heard a man playing and singing that same song; and he was pretty dang good, too. I only had enough to tip him like 50p, though (about $1).
4. Never rent a car to drive in London
First, traffic inside London is horrible, and is not fun to drive in (even if you have experience driving on the left side of the road on the right side of the car). On top of that, if you even so much as happen to cross into Central London (about a square mile in size right in the middle of Greater London), you have to pay congestion tax of £8. And, you don’t pay it to actually drive in Central London, they have cameras that track your license plate, and you get fined £100 if you get caught not paying it (from the people I’ve talked to, it’s near impossible not to get caught, so I just payed it so England would still let me visit them in the future).
5. Besides, public transportation in London is super awesome
It seemed like we could get anywhere we wanted to be within a half hour (except that I was cheap and only paid for the tube in zones 1-3, and buses in zones 1-6, so it was really only fast for us within the first 3 zones. There are 6 zones total in the whole London area, laid out in rings). Oh, and the Oyster cards they have are pretty cool, too; you just touch your pass to their automated machines, and it determines if your fare is paid (you can preload cash on the card, or pay for unlimited use per day/week/month). I’m pretty sure Becky thought it was neat when she saw Harry Potter and Arthur Weasley use Oyster cards, and actually knew what they were. Or maybe I’m retarded; it is pretty late right now.
6. Eat at Nando’s
If you like spicy food or chicken (note the key word, “or”), you should eat at Nando’s. Not only is the food good beyond all belief, but it’s actually affordable, even for the price being in pounds. I really like the PeriPeri sauce, especially the extra extra hot one. Anyway, Becky was in her first trimester of pregnancy with Kaelyn, so she was feeling great on this trip, especially in the mornings. She had specifically told me one day that she did not want to eat chicken, but I couldn’t stop craving Nando’s and talking about how I like their food more than a lot, so I took her there anyway (I had somehow missed that she said she didn’t want chicken).
She took one look at the menu and gave me a mean scowl, but decided to order a chicken pita, and asked for it not to be toasted. Luckily, she had just ordered a chickn pita from Chili’s the day before that was toasted (and hated it), otherwise she’d have never thought to ask. Anyway, she made me get her that same pita again another evening when she was having some pregnancy cravings.
7. If I think of anything else, I’ll write a new post; oh, by the way, I have pictures of our trip in the photos section of this site.
It had been a while since my last entry, so I decided to take a look at my site, where I noticed lots of hidden sex tags had somehow been added on to my last post. They weren’t comments, but were actually part of my entry. And since Becky doesn’t often update my posts with dirty thoughts, I’m sure either my password has become compromised or wordpress (or one of its plugins) had a security vulnerability.
In any case, I decided to update gallery2, wordpress, and the wpg2 plugin to the latest version. The upgrade also added the freaking awesome functionality of highlighting the “photos” tab when that page is active! I didn’t have to tweak a single thing to get it to work; though I still had to do custom css fix to the font-size so you can read the gallery text).
Now off to change my passwords…
Kaelyn Jade McClean was finally born Saturday morning (6 October 2007) at 2:02 am. I really have no idea what the deal is with Becky and her wanting to have babies when we’re supposed to be sleeping (Aidan was born about 10:30pm and Ashton about 4:00 am).
Here’s her very first picture:
I have decided that I am one of the least observant people I know:
I was attending a Flash training class in central Phoenix today (the building is about 100 yards from Indian School Rd and Central Ave), and as I was leaving for lunch, I heard a news report over the radio that two helicopters had collided midair above Indian School Rd and Central Ave, around 5 to 15 minutes after I’d left. Though it’s an extremely tragic event, it still would have been a pretty awesome thing to see; and I like to think I could have seen it if I were just a little more observant of my surroundings.
On a much happier note, my wife thinks that having two helicopters crash land on you would be a sweet way to die. Much better than dying of stinking old age.
UPDATE: Removed a dead link to an azcentral.com news article about the story
I decided to title this article based on how my oldest son, Aidan, likes to refer to sequels (and for that matter, originals: “Daddy, we’re going to go see Transformers number 1.”)
A few months ago, my wife placed a pre-order for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and assuming we would have completely moved to Phoenix by then, decided to use her grandparent’s address for the shipping address. Long story short, this is the only book of the series that I was able to read before her.
Though it was Becky that got me started on reading the books, I have really enjoyed them, and was looking forward to the book arriving (though I’ve always seemed to like entertainment intended for children). While I am no critic (though, it could be argued that the common reader is the best critic), I did think the book was very well-written; however, I can’t say if I actually enjoyed the book or not.
Becky knows me well enough to know that if I liked a story, it means that no one (of importance) dies; and if I didn’t like it, it means someone I didn’t want to die does (in the case of this book, that would be Harry, Ginny, Ron, or Hermione; sorry, still can’t spoil if any of them live or die, because I don’t want to die myself).
And yes, I’m very shallow when it comes to stories; which is probably why I had a hard time reading some of the assigned Shakespeare tragedies in high school.
Copy and paste the following code into the address bar of your browser, and press enter:
javascript:if (.2 + .4 == .6) alert("frick!"); else alert("double frick!");
The code basically says, “If .2 + .4 is equal to .6, then pop up a window with the message, ‘frick!,’ otherwise, pop up a window with the message, ‘double frick!’” I didn’t learn this until yesterday, but the problem is that floating-point data types don’t always store exact values, but approximations of them, so the “wrong” pop up appears.
There’s this guy at work that, the entire time he’s using the restroom, sits there and whispers to himself, just enough under his breath that it’s difficult to make out what he’s saying. According to another coworker, he is whispering to himself things like, “Just breathe.” I feel bad for the guy, but it still creeps me out.
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