Author: Brian

Happy 5th Birthday, Beautiful Girl!

We had so much fun at the zoo on the Saturday before your birthday.  You were careful to point out that you weren’t five yet, but that we were just celebrating your birthday on that day so everyone could come.  We met everyone outside and then you got to parade in as the line-leader.  You got to pet a tortoise and a ferret and because the zoo was already geared up for Boo at the Zoo, the carousel went around backwards!

On Wednesday, your real birthday, you helped Mommy make your birthday cake.  It was a chocolate Hello Kitty cake with a blue eyes and a blue bow.  We had several little gifts for you but by far the hit was the airplane with real bullets.  🙂

You’ve grown to be such an inquisitive and intelligent little girl.  Mommy and I are so very proud of you.

We are a Utility Sink Household

Yeah, yeah, it’s been 366 days.  I can’t come up with a good excuse.  I’m a horrible person, yadda yadda yadda.

While the finished product would’ve probably looked a lot better had a professional did it, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

One Friday when Janie and the girls were out of town I decided to completely remove the bottom bit of sheetrock instead of just patching the holes we already had.  I’m glad we did because some of the insulation needed to be replaced as it had suffered water damage too.

 

Nice new insulation!

 

As you can see, not only did we fix the leak, remove mildewy sheetrock and insulation, replace the wall and paint everything again, we gained a new utility sink!  Hopefully I’ll never see another bathroom sink with something disgusting soaking in it.

Your Mac Can Speak Roman Numerals

The Mac speech synthesizer has to be aware of context as it speaks.  Otherwise, if you had “$1000” in your sentence it would say something like “dollar sign one thousand”.  I get that.

Did you know that it can speak roman numerals?  We stumbled on one phrase that triggers it:  “Mac OS X”.  Specifically “OS” triggers it.  The numerals must be uppercase as well.  I imagine that when Apple demos the Mac speech synthesizer, they want it to be able to say its name correctly.  However, you can also substitute any other valid Roman Numeral for the “X”.  How sophisticated is the Roman Numeral processing?  1987 seems to be complicated enough for me, but my Mac handles it with ease.

Try the say command in Terminal:  say “OS MCMLXXXVII”.  Cool.