In an effort to lure everyone over to http://www.clubnightowl.com I’ve created a section for photographs and posted a bunch of embarrassing old pix of myself there. Don’t be shy now you blog-followers! Get over there and laugh at me and post some pix of your own that I can have a chuckle or two over!

Are there any “Children of the 80’s” out there like me? I feel privileged to have been a teenager during the 80’s as music went through quite an evolution during that decade. Like your average adolescent, I was tuned in constantly. When Barb sent me this quiz for song lyrics of the 80’s I was thinking… “Piece of Cake” so I hurried over to test my “Skillz” and got fed a slice of humble pie!

I scored a 52 and in my defense, the quiz is a “stickler” on spelling & singular -vs- plural. Scoring of the quiz also involves giving you the correct answers. Some I were angry over because I had the answer yet didn’t get the points because of some nonsense. Others, I was kicking myself over because once I saw the answer I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of it. The rest I never heard of.

Try it out, let’s see if you can do better!

I’ve been hinting for a while now that Wendy & I have another home-improvement project in the works. It’s almost half done so I figured it’s blogworthy at this point.

This endeavor was a “tuff” decision as it cost mucho money and it’s a topic of controversy as to whether or not a swimming pool even adds equity to a home. After much debate, we decided the pros outweighed the cons and so off we went into my graphics program to form a “plan“. As you can see, we want to add a swimming pool, a sunroom, a retaining wall, and lots of patio around it all.

So after months of listening to sales pitches at our kitchen table, scrutinizing bids and estimates, and researching on the Internet, the project finally began in late fall. They started by excavating the hill in our backyard and of course digging a big hole.

The next step involved assembling the steel walls of the pool inside the hole.

Here’s a pix of the completed assembly. Afterwards, they poured concrete around 3 sides and backfilled. A hot topic of debate for all who visited our house was how they were going to get the track loader out of the pool.

The question was answered when they removed one side of the pool and dug out the bottom to our specified depth & shape.

Next, they used some kind of machine to compact the dirt on the floor of the pool.

In comes the cement mixer again and here is the floor half poured.

Here they are trenching out the filter connections. Check out that pool filter! It looks like some kind of space pod!

In this pix, you can see the beginnings of the retaining wall.

It’s getting bigger!

In this pix, the wall is finished and backfilled. We absolutely love the way the retaining wall turned out!

Another angle of the “mostly finished” wall.

Quite the mess!

At this point it rained so much we were considering building an Ark and the pool filled up with a foot of water. Then Mother Nature turned up the volume a bit and everything froze. So now our project is on hold until the weather breaks and things dry up a bit. This is the reason we decided to do this project in the “Off” season. Does it matter when it gets done as long as it’s ready by summer?

And finally, this is a pix atop the beginnings of our Sledding hill. An idea I give full credit to Stephanie for. During an email to & fro, she was telling me about a time when they actually had loads of dirt brought in, planted grass on it, and used it to sled off during the winter snow. While in negations for the pool installation, the salesman brought up the question of all the excess dirt. To haul it away would have cost $200 per load so a light bulb came on in my head and I told him the dirt would remain “On-Site”. When the project foreman started excavation I had the conversation with him and he assured me that they would build me “Da Bomb” of a sledding hill!

So there is where we are currently at folks. I’m sure I’ll have more to add to the status of this soon!

Can any of my fellow nerds identify what that is in the picture to the right? If you guessed a computer’s hard drive you’re absolutely right! What makes it so amazing is that it was one of the “Original” hard drives from the birth of computers. It’s storage capacity was 500kb and one had to wear something like a space suit to handle it.

To put things in their proper perspective, it would take four of these monster drives just to accomodate one of the digi-pix my camera produces. If you were to try to put a MP3 on it, you might get about the first 20 seconds of the song before you ran out of space. My Cellphone has 100x the storage capacity of this drive. To get the same storage my desktop computer currently has, multiply that drive 500,000 times and then condense it into a box not much bigger than a deck of cards! Here is a breakdown for ya…

1024 bits= 1 byte
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1024 kilobytes= 1 megabyte
1024 megabytes= 1 gigabyte
1024 gigabytes= 1 terabyte

None of you probably give a rat’s-ass about this but I find it simply astounding how far we’ve come in just 20 years!

How fast can you type your ABC’s? Here is a neat little online test I found to determine just that. I took a couple of half-hearted tries and came up with the high score at the right. Can anyone beat it? It’s like 5 letters per second!

This is something my Mom would enjoy as she recently took up learning to type with Mavis Beacon. I recall vividly learning to type. Wendy and I took a course together in college while we were still dating. Back then it was thinking each letter then getting your fingers to perform each stroke accordingly. Now I type so frequently that I simply think the words and my fingers make it happen without much concentration.