Ah, OK

Should have known that as soon as I complained some would show up. It's in the wall, so I'm leaving it be for now, but there should be more iron around here somewhere.

The Latest Project Hole

What's amazing about this hole isn't the huge number of blocks coming out of it -- it's been the total lack of iron this hole has yielded so far. And by total, I mean total -- zip, zero, nada.

Wonder Woman

Campy '60s source material aside, this shows that A) DC can make a good movie, and B) a good movie can have a strong female lead.

On Our Way To Play

Inspecting a sign on the way to play with Icon in the afternoon. Alex likes to go to one of the soccer fields and throw a deflated ball for Icon to chase (because he's a service dog he isn't permitted to chase real balls, so this deflated ball is a unique toy that signals to him that it is OK to chase and play with), and Icon really likes it too. It was pretty hot, though, and Icon seemed to be laboring a bit, so I called a halt to the game early.

Sign Inspector Again

Alex is volunteering to go walk the dog with me in the mornings on the weekends. I think he likes being out with the dog. I've been letting him have exclusive control of the dog with only a traffic leash, and while he's still hauling the dog around a bit, the dog doesn't seem to mind too much and it is going pretty well.

Riding The Rails

Riding the Via train to Montreal for the Friday Grand Prix practice sessions. It was an early day that turned into a long day (we almost missed our train because the access bridge between the two islands was closed for an hour because of a "situation") but we made it home on time in the end. Nathan seemed to have fun and was enthusiastic about the idea of going again next year.

This Time It IS A Hole

This one is a hole, rather than a cavern -- it is only 13x7 blocks, but it goes down from the upper hillside down to bedrock.

...and at the bottom, I've encased the lava formation in glass.

Again, it didn't take nearly as long to dig as I'd thought it would. Maybe I should dig a more ambitious hole next time. Or a more ambitious cavern?

ubx32.dll: Success

So a long time ago, like 1998 long ago, we were running on these Windows NT 4.0 workstations that were joined to the local windows domain. Terrifically crude stuff by today's standards, sure, but it is what we had and we liked it.

One of the things you could do back then (as today) was to set a pre-password dialog box on the computer. Presumably this was for the critically useful "thou shalt not log in to this computer if thou be unauthorizedeth" messages. But this dialog is customizable. So on my co-worker's computer, I set the pre-login prompt to have a title of "ubx32.dll" and a message of "Success!" It looked just like a pseudo-error box that every other application would pop up, and "ubx32.dll" seemed like a plausibly anonymous name of a NT application dll.

So every time he pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in, his computer would show him this dialog, complete with an OK button, which he'd have to clear before he could log in.

And then I forgot about it.

A year later, I happened to be at his desk, and he has a little yellow sticky on his monitor, with "ubx32.dll??" written on it. And I laughed, because I suddenly remembered about the prank. And of course I had to let him off the hook at that point.

He said that over the year it had been appearing he'd probably wasted about half a day on googling around trying to figure out what the hell was happening to his computer.

Sign Inspector

Alex likes to stop and inspect the street signs that we pass -- the school crossing signs are singled out for special attention. He has Icon sit and then he peers up at them.

Today I did something different -- I let Alex hold Icon on the short leash without having my longer leash on the dog as a back-up. I took over during the poop-and-inspect phase of the walk, as well as when we passed other dogs, but other than that Alex did very well holding Icon.

Icon Walking His Boy

Jenn is away this weekend, so Alex has to come with me in the morning on the dog walks. Both Icon and Alex seem to really like being out together.

Domestic Life

Everyone playing in the back yard after supper.