I took the family out for dinner tonight at Johnny Rockets because Zoe’s been asking to go there and she’s off to sleep-away camp for a week tomorrow and she’s a little nervous about it and so I wanted to do something nice for her on her last night at home.

Zoe finally pushed back after eating half a burger, quite a few of Beth’s fries and my onion rings, and most of a Oreo Cookies & Cream shake, saying she was stuffed. And I started lecturing her on how she had to eat everything on her plate if she wanted to grow up to be big and fat like her dear old dad and didn’t she want to grow up to be just like me, she could be bald and have a white goatee and hairy arms and fart on command and…

And that’s when Beth leaned in and interrupted me, telling Zoe, “Just ignore him.”

I tell you, I get no respect.

I don’t really have a point for this entry, I just wrote it because I can because I’m in the bathroom keeping Zoe company while she takes a shower. And let me point out that although I’m sitting on the can while blogging, I’m not taking a dump, so settle down all you nancies.

I think I love having this wifi-house-with-a-wifi-laptop thing. I can geekerize from every corner of the house now. Why, I could even write a blog entry while sitting on the toilet and taking a dump, for example.

I am the Computer God for my family.

First, here at my house, I have blessed us with the miracle of wi-fi. I would have done it sooner but I didn’t need it. Now that my new job has hooked me up with a laptop with a wi-fi card, well now it’s time for the home network (another of my many blessings upon the household) to go wireless.

Secondly, there’s the tech support for sex racket I’ve got going with Beth. She sleeps with me, and in return I fix her computer when it breaks and set her up with webspace and blogging software and make sure her PC is protected from virii and spyware and generally do all things technical around here.

Thirdly, my mother calls me frequently for tech support. Her email won’t send or she can’t get online or her porn won’t download — it’s always something with her. And always it’s “Do you think it’s a virus???” So she called me the other day to announce that her computer wouldn’t boot up, that it kept getting “some kind of error about a system disk.” So I went over there to check it out (because putting eyes on my mom’s computer problem du jour is the surest way to know exactly what’s going on) and I told her to “go make it do whatever it’s doing” so I could see exactly what she and it was doing. And voila, it booted up just fine. Because I am the Computer God and her computer feared me.

Fourthly, tonight, my sister-in-law with her PC vs Mac iTunes issues. She ripped all her CDs — hundreds of them — on her Windows XP PC, which naturally ripped everything into WMA. Then she became a Mac convert and now she A) can’t play her WMA files on her Mac iTunes, and B) can’t move them from PC to Mac without burning them to CD, which takes for freakin’ ever. So I hooked her up with my old ethernet hub (now unneeded because I have blessed myself with wi-fi, as noted above) and instructions on A) how to connect the PC to the Mac so she can move the files and B) import and convert them into iTunes.

Fifthly, I help Zoe play her Nick Jr. games on her computer and set up her iTunes and download the new Gwen Stefani mp3s for her and generally make sure she’s the wiredest little kid in class.

And finally, my brother, the oddly enough not-gay musical theater composer, and his ongoing issues with converting his MIDI compositions to mp3 so he can share them with his collaborators, but his ancient 486 PC can’t handle the load and is so kludged up from his attempts to “fix” things by deleting files that are mysterious and strange to him that he’s lucky it will boot up without exploding, let alone actually run any kind of application at all. So I hooked him up with a probably-hot Dell Latitude laptop running XP Professional that I bought for $300 from some guy on Craigslist that I don’t need it now since I got a spanky Mac G4 from work. The Dell is light years ahead of the computer he’s been using and so his head might explode from the sheer excitement of A) having a computer that doesn’t take 20 minutes to start up and B) having a pristine, blank canvas of perfectly configured strange and mysterious operating system files that he can delete with blissful ignorance of what these files are actually for and what impact deleting them might have. Which means that in about ten days I’ll start getting calls from him about “Dude, I deleted this extra file I found called “command” or something like that and now I’m getting a weird error message that I can’t remember but I think it said something about “fluffy-puff marshmallows” or something and now my computer is playing everything backwards. What should I delete to fix it?”

I am the Computer God for my extended family. And fortunately for them, I am a benevolent one.

We had another episode of “See Chuck squeal like a little girl” around here last night. I discovered that the Game Show Network is showing reruns of The Amazing Race every night at 9:00. I stumbled across an episode I hadn’t seen before and realized that I missed a few seasons of The Amazing Race before I got hooked on the insanely addictive wonderfulness of the show and that now I get to see them every night at 9:00. Tivo has been activated.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m thinking of hosting a Texas Hold em poker game in my room at Journalcon but I want to know there’s interest in it before I get my hopes up. So I’m doing a handy dandy poker poll. If you’re coming to Journalcon in San Diego this October, I’d appreciate you answering the following questions.

So whaddaya think, folks? Should I fire up Casino Night at Journalcon or not?

Two of my former coworkers have popped up on the blogosphere: Terry with Thoughts and Babblings and Rantings, and Kevin with A Fool Uttereth All His Mind.

Check ’em out!

Journalcon.

Beth and I signed up tonight. We’ll see you there.

One last (maybe) test post via flickr.

This is a shot from the highest part of Beartooth Highway. The picture doesn’t do justice to how breathtaking it was in person.

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Originally uploaded by chud.

Still playing with the flickr settings.

This is where I had lunch on my second day riding through Yellowstone Park. I picked up a sandwich and a Snapple at a restaurant in Red Lodge at the foot of Beartooth highway and stopped here in Yellowstone to eat.

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Originally uploaded by chud.

In honor of the new digicam, I’m monkeying around with the settings on my account over at flickr. This is me testing the “blog this photo,” posting to the Lunchroom from flickr. Woo.

This is a picture I took at Yellowstone a few years back. I think it’s probably the best one I’ve ever taken. I used this as my desktop for my work laptop back when I had a work laptop.