I met my wife, Marissa, two years ago today while we were both helping serve hamburgers to the residents of Mercury Court, a low-income housing project in Nashville. I was putting pickles on the burgers while standing next to her and I noticed she wrinkled her nose every time a pickle came near her. So of course I started moving the pickles closer to her face every time I picked one up. Heh. We celebrate our one year wedding anniversary in a little over a month. Life with my two freckled girls has been great. Love you baby!

Ok, I threw away my old Atari 2600 a long time ago, but here's a replacement that is just a cool, if slightly goofy, idea.

I'm not sure why I find the whole Richard Scrushy saga so interesting. I guess it's because I grew up near Birmingham and I actually knew his sister at one point. It turns out his greed and excess was just as big as any of the other CEO's that have been brought down recently. Here's an article about it from Fortune magazine and another older article along the same vein. Hopefully there will be a new Richard Scrushy prison cell in Alabama soon.

SpaceX looks like a company that might actually be able to bring space launch costs down to under $5000 a pound. Hopefully it's not just another dot-com billionaire trying to find creative ways to waste his money.

My wife Marissa and daughter Victoria bought me tickets for the Music Man musical at TPAC this past Sunday. This is my 1st official Father's Day as a step-father but I have to say it's the best one yet! Heh. I played tuba in the orchestra for our high school production of the Music Man about 20 years ago and I've always wanted to see a full blown stage production of it. The show we saw at TPAC was well done, and the actress playing Marion had an amazing voice. Some of the actors voices were a bit hard to understand, but her's nearly blew everyone else away.

Over the weekend I purchased the Animatrix DVD. It's basically a collection of 9 Anime shorts based on the Matrix Trilogy. There was some really good backstory that helped explain some things in the recent Matrix:Reloaded movie. The relationship between Neo and the kid that bugs him in Zion is explained, plus the story of the ship the Osiris, which warned Zion of the impending machine invasion is covered. All in all it's a good DVD, especially if you're a fan of the movies. Picture and sound quality were very good. I haven't seen all the extras on it yet, but they look interesting as well.

There's a really good web site called It's Your Turn that allows you to play chess and other similar games for free against other people via a completely web based interface. I enjoy playing regular chess and Chinese chess (Xiangi) and occasionally I play their version of Stratego which they call Sabotage. If anyone wants to try a few games my user id there is Hatch68. Log in, create an ID, and invite me. I try to do at least 1 turn per day.

I went to see the Matrix : Reloaded last night on the IMAX screen at Opry Mills. Very impressive. The visual clarity of the film was so good that it was sometimes scary. The scenes taking place on the freeway were just incredible in the IMAX format. You could see every blackhead on Keanu Reeves nose during his closeups and that much resolution may not have been too kind to Carrie Anne Moss since she seems to have aged a good bit since the first film.

My friend Paul Novarese posted a link a while back to an article discussing the metaphyscial aspects of the movie. It's a good read and has lot's of links for follow-up reading.

Ok, I like the band KISS, and I wouldn't mind seeing them on tour this summer with Aerosmith. Tickets for the Nashville show went on sale today, and when I logged into Ticketmaster to check the prices I experienced a bit of sticker shock. The price just for sitting on the grass back behind the seats is $42.00 each! The cheapest price for any actual seat is $92.00 and they go up to $132.00 if you want to be anywhere near the front. Adding to that insult is that Gene and Paul couldn't even bother to get Ace cleaned up and out of the gutter for this tour and the fact that the show is on a Tuesday night and I just have to say that Gene Simmons and Steven Tyler can KISS my A$$.

The Sammy Sosa corked bat incident seems to not concern a lot of people in baseball. I think this article by a Sports Illustrated writer seems to best reflect my opinion on the whole thing. Sosa should never have had a corked bat anywhere near him, whether practicing with it or not. Basically Sosa is an idiot.

Read this article about the Real US Government Deficit and try to sleep well at night.

I'm about to finish my first week at my new job. I'm working at Edgenet, Inc. in Brentwood, TN. They write configuration software for the Fenestration industry. So far I really like it. More details soon.