In comes tumblelogs. The idea of tumblelogs is nothing new. Actually, its been around for quite some time.

From the “everyones favorite” encyclopedia, Wikipedia:

“A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.”

So here is my shameless plug, check out my tumblelog: http://tnez.net

Right now, I am using it kinda sorta like an online scratch pad. Yes, there are better ways to go about doing it but I like it so far. For me, its short and to the point, the way a tumblelog was designed to be.

Well, not all is lost. If you live and/or commute in the Baltimore, MD area, here is a website that lists the lowest regular gas prices. It’s called BaltimoreGasPrices.com. As of today, here are the latest prices for my area:

You might drive a minute or two out of your way but believe me, its worth it when you can save $.72 cents!

Don’t live in the Baltimore area? There is a national gas price locater at GasBuddy.com. Enjoy.

I’ve been saving all my hard earned pennies in a jar for times just like this. Suddenly I am asking myself if I should put all those shinny pennies to good use and give this offer a try. I think at last count, I have just enough to get me a higher-end Mac Mini. Who knows, this might even push me over to “The Dark Side” for good.

UPDATE: It seems that Apple has pulled this promotion and is no longer offering it. Kinda strange to me. Not even 24 hours had gone by… let the speculation begin.

To them I say:

I don’t understand why more people, especially techies, wont google it instead of asking those same dumb questions. Is it that most of them are lazy individuals that would prefer to take the easy route and ask first? Well, to some extent we are to blame only because we enable that sort of activity to happen again and again.

This brings me to one of my favorite sigs from none other than Bart Simpson:

“I will use google.com BEFORE asking stupid questions.”
-Bart Simpson

Gotta love Bart Simpson for setting us all straight.

The best part of the concert was when one of The Wiggle sidekicks, Captain Feather Sword, put on a skit where he sang his trademark “Quack-Quack-Quack” song to the tune of the likes of Mic Jager, AC/DC, and Metallica among others. He impersonated them all extremely well.

Joshua loves watching “The Wiggles” at any time of the day. It doesn’t matter if its a DVD, a VHS, a music CD or someone humming one of their catchy tunes. I have to admit, most of the songs they sing are just that, extremely catchy. I hear the songs so much that I often find myself replaying the tunes in my head while at work, in the pooper, or while eating dinner. If you are a parent and are familiar with The Wiggles, you will agree that some of the songs are flat out hypnotic and mesmerizing. The funny thing is that the songs are often about simple topics that kids can relate to: sleeping, eating, and animals. Simple but effective.

The only thing that sucked was the ride into downtown D.C via the metro and the fact that we forgot our digital camera! And no, they didn’t sell any disposables in the arena.

I didn’t update my site much last week because there were a few things going on that took much of my free time. For starters, I was working “The Day Shift” all last week. It was nice working that shift since its been almost a year now since I last worked the day shift hours (7am-4pm). For a brief moment, it gave me the feeling of normalcy. You see, I am used to working the graveyard shift (9pm-7am) Mon-Thurs. I saw a lot of people that I hadn’t seen in a while. It was nice seeing some co-workers but at the same time, I didn’t miss others. I also didn’t miss the freaking parking fees in downtown Baltimore. Its flat out rape!

So why did I work the day shift?

Well, I will tell you. Our company is a hard core Linux company but lately they have been seeing higher demand for Microsoft Windows based servers. After much deliberation by the big wigs, it was decided that we should not limit our company to just one market but to open ourselves up to other ventures and offer Windows based servers. I have mixed feelings about it but so far I personally like the idea. Not so much that we, a hard core Linux company, is going to sell Windows based servers but the fact that I am getting cross trained into the Windows platform. So far so good. Believe me, its not like the Windows XP world that some of you might be thinking about right about now. I will provide for info as soon as I get time to digest it.

Many of you have expressed further updates on how my “moving to York, PA” is coming along. Well, thats another reason why I couldn’t update this blog. My wife and I have been yelling at our builder non-stop. Initially, we were given a moving date of August 17th 2005. Well, thats come and gone and we aren’t living in our new home. We are still living with my brother-in-law and his wife and son. Anyway, the builder has now given us another date, September 17th or the 19th since the 17th is a weekend. A whole month late! Don’t get me wrong, we expected some delay of a few days and maybe a week but we didn’t think it was going to be a whole month! They told us that their plumbing sub-contractor quit on them because they (the plumber and crew) were given too much work by our builder. So, our builder quickly hired another plumbing crew but this threw off the entire schedule. Everything got pushed back a couple weeks. Needless to say, we aren’t too happy.

On an unrelated issue, my son finally got his staples out of his head. He didn’t even cry which impressed the heck out of me. Back to the normal running and jumping that kids his age do (23 months old).

Well, thats last week and this weekend all wrapped up.

We were in a model home in York when suddenly it happened. My son was running around with speed similar to when a fat kid sees cake, yes, thats light speed people! He was running so fast (for a 22 month old) that he was not able to turn the corner fast enough and slammed head first into a corner wall. My wife was behind him so she quickly picked him up. Needless to say, he was crying hysterically. Initially both my wife and I had the “oh, its ok” attitude since it wasnt the first time he has crashed into a wall. He is currently in the “terrible two’s” phase and for those of you who are parents will surely understand. Anyway. that quickly changed when we saw a bead of blood pouring down the side of his head.

My wife and I quickly gained our composures from a brief panic attack and started to clean his wound. The cut was big and deep enough that the blood never really stopped dripping down the side of his head. We rushed him to the nearest emergency room (York Memorial Hospital) which was approximately 6 miles away. When we arrived, we were quickly attended my the ER staff. We answered a barrage of questions and once they realized he never lost consciousness, they decided to staple his head shut since he was too young for stitches and the liquid kind would not hold that deep gash. If he would have lost consciousness, he would have had to stay for observation at the hospital.

The ER doctors came in assured us that it was common practice for these types of wounds because of the age of the patient. Once our nerves were calmed, I held Joshua in my lap with on hand while holding his head still. The ER doctor first gave him two shots of some type of numbing agent directly to the wound. After a few minutes of letting Joshua calm down, I held him tight once again so that the ER doctor could put the staples in and seal the wound. “Click!” “One down…”, the doc said. Joshua wasnt happy. “Click!!!” “Ok, I think he only needs two staples!”, as the confident doc puts the staple thingie away.

Man, am I glad thats over. Honestly, I think it was harder on my wife and I than on Joshua. Its been 2 days since he had the staples put in and you should see him now, the “energizer bunny” meets the “tazmanian devil”. I’m sure that this will not be the last time that Joshua will have to be rushed to the ER room for some type of injury. I just hope its not anymore severe that two staples. Being a parent is rough.

The entire 8 day vacation was planned day-by-day well in advanced by my lovely wife. We decided that we should go to most the local theme parks. However, we only ended up going to 2 of them, Legoland and Sea World San Diego. Out of the two theme parks, Legoland was by far the best one we went too. It seemed like it was tailor made for my son Joshua. The rest of the trip was spent catching up with family which is why we didn’t go out as much as previous trips. We didn’t mind at all though since we enjoyed the company and not to mention the awesome food. There were family members that I had not seen in over 10 years! Most of them were from out of state or out of the country. My wife and I sorta felt special since a lot of the family members came to visit from great distances just to see meet both my wife and my son Joshua.

If I get the time, I will post some pics.

Big mistake number 1. I didn’t know that “Lil Bow Wow” was going to be performing at the Hershey Stadium. Man, Hershey Park was packed! It kinda sucked cause I was pushing a stroller around all day and let me tell you, there are s0me rude people in this world and I think all those rude people had a national convention at Hershey Park. Come on people, have a little common courtesy!

Big mistake number 2. All corny jokes aside, my wife and I finally were able to find the “kiddie” section of the park for our son after tons of shoving and cutting people off with the stroller. We decided to let our son go on his very first roller coater ride. It goes by the menacing and ferocious killer name of, you guess it, “The Ladybug“!!! My son cant ride it on his own so my wife took the liberty of volunteering me to be my sons “chaperon”. Mind you, this ride goes around in circles with the occasional ups and downs as it makes its way around in a complete circle. My son started his usual “wwweeeeeee!” cheer but towards the end he was nothing but cries! I don’t blame him, I too felt like I wanted to puke! Yes ladies and gents, I wanted to puke on “The Ladybug” at Hershey Park. It totally reminded of how I felt on my fishing trip a week ago. Not a good feeling at all. Thankfully the nauseating feeling only lasted for approximately 5 minutes.

I did enjoy the short 40′ walk through Zoo America’s night portion. I don’t know how else to describe it other than its a huge tube like shaped structure that once inside is pitch black. To the left and right are creatures of the night. It was pretty cool.

It was my fist time at Hershey Park and I have to say it was just O.K. I would probably have better things to say about the park if not for the intense heat and humidity, the extremely rude crowd, and the smell of B.O. everywhere.

Once we arrived, we were greeted by the boats’ Captain of the “Semper Fidelis III” (yes, he was a “JarHead” in his time…) and his mate. We sailed off promptly at 6:30am after a mandatory safety briefing. Ten miles later, we were out on the bay’s reef. We weren’t alone, oh no. There were approximately 30 other boats “trolling” the reef. Man, at this point everyone was like, “We should have gotten up at 3am!” Oh well, we were here and ready to fish. Unfortunately, 6 hours later, we had only caught 10 fish with each fish no shorter than 20 inches long (18 inches was the minimum legal length). Everyone’s mood at that point was a little low in my opinion. Honestly, I think it was the heat that got everyone all down. It was HOT! However, the Captain and his mate quickly accesses the situation (like a good lil’ Jarhead) and decided to change pace.

The captain then suggested that we do some chumming. This is where the fun part started in more ways than one. First, we had our own fishing poles with clams as bait. The Captain was doing “chumming” while we fished. No less than 20 minutes later we caught our legal limit of 20 rock fish and one blue fish, for “the boat”. The biggest fish was a 29 inch rock fish. That fish was nice! Everyones mood quickly changed for the better.

The other fun part was me puking! Yes, I got motion sickness for the first time in my life. I felt like a little wuss! I puked a grand total of 3 times! So in a sense, I helped the captain (I think the rock fish liked my German bologna sandwich I had). I was good all morning when it suddenly hit me. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was a combination of diesel fuel exhaust and the heat. Whatever, I am not trying to make any excuses. Thankfully I didn’t damper anyone’s mood as everyone seemed to understand the situation. Or maybe it was my, “Give me a beer and lets party” attitude after each time I puked. As much as I hate having that “puke” feeling, I still had fun. Sign me up for next years trip!

This is how I looked and felt!