Links & Blinks

A few weeks ago, our parents took a vacation to B.C. While they were away, my sister hatched a plan to give them an excellent birthday gift. My brother, my sister, Cam and I teamed up to completely remodel their two-car garage. My brother bought and installed a new garage door opener, which my dad has been dying to have for a couple of years now. My sister worked her butt off for two weeks, mudding the drywall and a number of other things. And Cam and I joined the fun, spending tons of time over one weekend painting and cleaning and installing new window blinds.

It was an excellent surprise that utterly astonished our parents. Flabbergasticated. My dad wrote about his reaction here and my mom wrote abour her reaction here. Congrats a la famille!

(And now for something completely different...)

Just for fun, I recommend that you visit the website http://wordle.net/create. You can enter a URL or type in a paragraph of text and it creates a randomized graphic with the words. Click the "Randomize" button at the bottom and it will change the layout. The trick is that words that are used more frequently appear larger. I plugged in my blog and it generated the picture shown above, and you can see that I speak fairly frequently about my loving wife Cam. ;)

As for sports, I happened to come across an ancient article written by the legendary Bill Russell, 11-time NBA champion. It was published in Sports Illustrated 1965, and he explains various tricks that his teams used to psych out their opponents. Fascinating insight into what it takes to get that competitive edge...

Finally, my good friend Battle has created his own photostream on flickr. He's still out around London creating his awesome graffiti. Keep up the good work, mon ami!