Dudes...

Good stuff.

Lost Awesomeness..

"Mr. Friendly throws like a girl..."

Nice work here..

See here for Ryan Williams' secret to domestic tranquility.. nice work, Ryan.

Battlestar Office-ica

Sleepydad West Si'ee comes thru with another Youtube Winner...

Ferrell and a Ninja

I don't think I've ever seen Will Ferrell actually back on his heels.. this guy takes the comic initiative right away from him and I don't think he ever quite gets it back...

Must See Youtube

Hat Tip to Daddy Galindo (a fellow SleepyDad on the West Coast) for pointing me toward this great piece of TV nostalgia..

Soggy SleepyDad Workfromhome Wednesday

Rainy today. Good soaking rain.
But a pretty pleasant, working-from-home, day all the same.
Watched Bryce this morning while Mama gave her class and met with some students.
A couple of the neighbor kids came over (Blaine and Madison-- both right about Bryce's age) for a few hours and they all played great together.. it was incredible. Admittedly, Blaine's nanny (yes, nanny-- though so far as I've seen she doesn't fly on an umbrella-- har har) came with them and kept a good eye on them.. but they all really were on good terms today, despite the ugly weather. Lunched on grapes, PB&J's, and American cheese.. then everyone went home and had a nap.. including Bryce and Daddy!

Outstanding!

The boys are both still pretty tired-- catching up (or I wish they would) on all the sleep they lost the last 5 days or so while we worked our way through the latest cough/sniffle/sneeze bug that made it's way through our house... the turn of season allergies are making sure that those sniffles stick around a while longer-- Bryce has developed quite a little cough; good thing he loves his cough medicine... but suffice it to say, it's been a series of pretty groggy mornings around here while the boys have been waking 2 or 3 times a night each for one reason or another...

And yeah, while you're wondering, I did actually get some work done during all this activity today-- had the laptop setup in the kitchen while the kids were playing upstairs and was actually able to get quite a bit done. Not such a bad gig.

Just finished watching Monday's 24 on TIVO.. this season is faultering, I'm afraid. Not even the addition of Rick(y) Schroder seems to be saving the day here... did anyone really think it would? Powers Booth's Vice President is becoming entirely too over the top. Monomaniacal to the point, I expect they'll reveal next week that he's got a peg leg and likes to walk the deck...

Similarly puzzled by the Battlestar Galactica season finale-- watched that on Sunday night. It was trippy.. unlike 24, I think the last couple of BSG's may have saved an otherwise terribly plodding and ponderous season.. and yet I'm still just not sure what to make of this "All Along the Watchtower" business... I want to like it. But I'm a little annoyed with this manipulation they're playing with Starbuck.... and the 'we're all cylons' contrivance seemed pretty forced...

Moment of Coolness: The Unit

I'm slowly making my way through Season Two of the Unit.
And, as much as I've been enjoying it-- I think I mentioned that it gives me enough of a cloak-and-dagger dose to keep me reasonably happy-- I've been worried about it. The writing can be pretty uneven in places... and some of the plot-lines (as well as some of the script-lines) surrounding the Unit wives can be pretty forgettable.

But tonight, watching episode 12-- the opening scene has our fearless leader, Jonas Blane (Dennis Haysbert is a bad bad man!), being ushered into an apparently secret meeting-- in a basement closet-- with a White House 'undersecretary'.

Then William H. Macy shows up and things really get interesting...
Macy arrives, Haysbert is surprised (as are we).. and a few moments later we learn Macy is taking a turn as the President in this episode...

This scene may have just saved this show for me...

Zeroes

Watched the latest episode of 'Heroes' with my wife on Tivo last night.
It was an especially dark episode as they come down toward the end of Season 1.. introduced Malcom McDowell as 'Mr. Linderman'-- doing his usual menacing.. and Sylar getting the best of Suresh.. and Peter?? Oooh Cliffhanger.. and a grim one at that.

When it was over, my wife, who'd never seen the show, looked at me and said "I hate you. I'm never watching another show with you again."

This morning, the kids on Digg.com reveal that this Youtube video was actually created by NBC... good marketing, if you ask me.. is NBC on the Cluetrain?

The end of analog..

Interesting post on Engadget today about 'The beginning of the end of Analog TV'.

Got a chance to watch most of an episode of Firefly on our neighbor's gi-normous HDTV last night.. and I have to say, it got the wheels turning.

I've been in awe of HD before, obviously.. but it's never been so attainable.. and it's getting more so, by the week it seems. Samsung 42" Plasmas are going for $1200 or so..

Ahh, maybe next year..

Updates, Updates, Updates!

A few Sleepydad updates, since I haven't done any in a while, and some random notes:

First-- Snow Day! We got about an inch and a half of snow here at the house on Friday and both boys' schools were called off for the day, so we all stayed home and made a snowman out in the front yard. Here's a link to a slideshow of some pictures we took during the day.

Second, mine is the house of Pestilence! My wife and the boys have all been fighting one kind of bug or another for a week now. Aidan spiked a 103 degree fever on Sunday night, stayed home from school Monday and Tuesday, then Bryce started coming down with symptoms. Took them both to the doctor on Monday and they've both got raging ear infections... so it's a round of Amoxicillin for everyone! Now today, Aidan was sent home early from school-- the fever has returned. So it'll be back on the phone with the Ped tomorrow to see what they think the next step should be-- "Boys, remember not to leave the house without your surgical masks!"

Next, the Cold! It's been FREAKIN' cold here the last week or so. And given that I grew up far north of here, that's going some for me to say that. The thermometer may read 25 degrees, but I'm not always sure it's even that warm!

Yesterday was National Signing Day for College Football programs. The Irish got 18 signed commitments-- a great class, by any measure. But as always, it's always about the ones that got away: Aurelious Benn, Chris Little (the guy who's Mama told him to commit to ND after he verballed to FSU a few weeks ago-- the had a "conversion by the fax machine light" yesterday morning and decided to send his letter to Georgia), Greg Little... 11th hour de-commits. So Charlie's points of emphasis for next year's recruiting effort (which began this morning at 6am)-- focus on the meaning of the word 'Commitment'. In his press conference yesterday, he said "If they're looking, we're looking."

For any parents of young kids out there who might be reading this (heellllloooo?)-- found a pretty cool little website a week or so ago called Parentography.com. It only launched a couple of weeks ago, so it's low on content at the moment-- but the idea driving the site is one of those excellent "why the hell didn't I think of that" kind of ideas-- an online community/social networking site for parents to write reviews of local places that are good for their kids-- caregivers, schools, playgrounds, restaurants, the works. Users can also wrap those places up into 'excursions'-- linking different places into little sequences, as suggestions to other users for things like day-trips, etc. And they've got (right now) Yahoo maps running through an API displaying the lay of the land for all of the places on a map. I just think it's a great idea. But it's just in the offing now-- definitely at the 'get out of it only what you put into it' stage... but as more users sign on and start contributing content (hello-- I'm talking to you again, you parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, friends, etc etc), I think it could become a really useful online tool for parents... plus it's just kind of fun to blog, in a way, through reviews about places to take the kiddos.

Next: TV. Ah yes, the guilty pleasure. It's the dead of winter, so it's a good time for TV.. and I'm definitely keeping my TIVO warmed up. Guilty pleasures of the moment include
24-- but of course! A few weeks ago, Islamic groups were protesting the content of the recently started season, arguing that the show was confirming all kinds of negative stereotypes about Muslims-- your basic Italian-American argument against the Sopranos. Haha, well, I wonder if we'll be hearing from those folks anymore now that the last two weeks' episodes have revealed (yet again!) that the real villains of the story are just rich white guys from Orange County-- members of Jack Bauer's family, in fact! As Fox rebutted in a statement a few weeks ago, we should not forget that

Over the past several seasons, the villains have included shadowy Anglo businessmen, Baltic Europeans, Germans, Russians, Islamic fundamentalists, and even the (Anglo-American) president of the United States...

to say nothing of "Day 2" when the blonde cutie from SoCal turned out to be the bad guy.

Other guilty TV pleasures include Battlestar Galactica (a decent 3rd season so far, but a bit plodding and ponderous), Boston Legal (also a bit of a meandering season, but still appointment television) and a new one-- The Unit. I've been lacking, it turns out, my quotient of spy-thriller recently and so far, of the two episodes I've seen so far, The Unit just might fit the bill for that. I'm going to slowly start working my way through Season One, hopefully this weekend.

And lastly-- Pooh! we have a reluctant guest in our midst-- a little kitty named Pooh. Brought here by my brother-in-law, Ross, Pooh's staying with us temporarily while Ross relocates to Austin. So far, Pooh and our 13-year old cranky tabby, Sylvie have NOT been getting along.. but in recent days, the war seems to have gone from hot to Cold... as in, cats issuing long, declaritive stares across great expanses of the house, with the occasional hissing and spitting... but no hairy furball fights of late. So we're taking it one day at a time.