Sarah was my friend in high school - she was a year ahead of my in school, and did things like field band and color guard with me. I was there for her 16th birthday party, just before things got really bad for her. I haven’t kept in touch, but I’m glad to see how well she’s doing. Read this article!

http://www.petercallesen.com/

Speaking of new tools, check out my post about ScribeFire over at bloggingamigos.net (a group blog I’m starting to post in).

This is an AWESOME little tool. I spend quite a bit of time adjusting window sizes for screenshots at work - and this is going to be a BIG time saver.

I work with proprietary software that doesn’t resize using external apps. This tool, however, gives you dimensions as you resize - so you can just drag the corner to the right size! So simple, but SO useful.

http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

This is… hilarious.

Remember the coworker who thought my “binary” clock was a braille clock on first glance?  He wrote an article about it.  =)

Here’s a little new-year vocabulary for you:

• To “bogart” is to hog or take more than your share.  (Read this.)
• The plural of “metropolis” is “metropolises” or “metropoleis.”

I just watched, for 2 hours tonight (!), America’s Got Talent. It was awful. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. After all the grief I’ve given cousin Jen for watching American Idol, I am feeling rather guilty. =)

What hooked me was a commercial promo before the show even started. They showed a kid (with no audio - someone was doing a voiceover) doing a dance I immediately recognized, even without sound. This kid did some moves from a Bollywood film called Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai - a movie I watched in college. I know the moves because I had a roomie who frequently practiced them.

So I waited anxiously to see this.

(The movie version is here.)

So nice… he lets me take pictures of him while I play with my new camera:

Dave, uploaded by tara.aukerman.

My body doesn’t know what’s going on.  After 4 hours of sleep, I stayed awake for 20.  Then I went to bed at 6:30pm (HI time).  I woke up every 15 or 20 minutes after 2:00am (which is my normal wake-up time of 7:00am, IN time) until I finally got up at 6:00am (HI time).  I’ve made it ’til 9:00pm tonight, but I’m fading fast. 

I’ve been trying to get in a last hour of work today, but work right now is some graphic manipulation, trying to squeeze an image and find an extra 24 pixel rows - then trying to use that image as the base of a 20-image series.  It’s just too detailed for me to really focus on right now.  So I’m posting a funny video.

We ate at the Hickam AFB officers’ club tonight - at a mongolian barbeque.  It’s a building with only 2 walls, opening out over Pearl Harbor.  While we ate, submarines and motor boats floated by.  I got some fun pictures of my family, but can’t put them online or they’d cry…  my favorite is one of my dad’s face right after a baby puked all over the table in front of him and in his coffee.  =)  Use your imagination.

Leah and I asked Kelly (mom’s friend) to take a picture of us goofing off.  I handed the camera to her in video mode instead of picture mode.  =)  Here’s us posing for her, then waiting, then posing for a second shot just in case the second didn’t come out (pushing the capture button started then stopped the movie):

[coolplayer] http://tara.elmadera.com/images/hickamposes.AVI [/coolplayer]

Other pictures from tonight are posted on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/taukerman/.