Bullet points for the weekend:

• Church plant plans are moving right along. Looking like the start date might be the beginning of the year.
• Tonight will be my first night all week of just coming home from work and being home. Too many evening activities makes for a long week.
• Major weekend activity: tree trimming and collecting brush. Hiawatha picks up brush starting Monday.
• Waiting to hear whether or not I get a freelance website development job. Hoping I do.
• You know you’re short on sleep when the Diet Pepsi doesn’t really help things any.
• The new Iron and Wine album (The Shepherd’s Dog) is really good.
• The new Radiohead album is good as well. I don’t usually dig Radiohead, but the new album is quite accessible.
• Meebo (my browser-based chat client of choice) just released a Firefox plugin that’s actually pretty good. Not perfect yet, but beats having to keep extra FF windows open.

That was pretty random. Sorry.

• Had a productive weekend; got the lawn mowed, some concrete patching done, led music at church.
• Miserable weekend as a sports fan: Cubs played terrible and got swept; Huskers got mauled by Mizzou; Hawkeyes ran into a freight train called Penn State. At least the NHL season is new, so Dallas can’t be too far out of it yet.
• I’m headed to Oklahoma City for training tomorrow. Can’t imagine it’ll be too exciting. Let’s just see if I can get somewhere on time this time. My recent luck with flights hasn’t been good. Flying United this time.
• Listening to the new album from Iron and Wine. It’s good.
• I am officially now a Company Designated Engineering Representative (DER) for the FAA. I have only partial approval authority at the moment; it’ll take time and experience to get full approval authority.
• It’s been a week now of just bringing a bottle of pop to work in the morning rather than filling my mug at the convenience store. It’s going OK. I have decided, though, that Coke Zero is too sweet for me – I like Diet Pepsi better.

Twitter is being upgraded. So the Twitter maintenance page tells me. Normally this is something I’d just post a Tweet about, but, well, Twitter is being upgraded.

Oh, the irony.

So most of the recent posts here have been just links to other stuff. Sorry about that. Have been doing lots of reading lately, not so much writing. Most of my writing posts here have been of merely the logistical bullet-list variety. Today I have a random assortment that isn’t entirely logistical, but is in a bullet-list; maybe there’s something you’ll want to comment on, though.

[Voice in my head: "you fool, you just fell victim to one of the classic blunders!..." which is blogging about blogging... desperate, I know. Humor me.]

So, in no particular order:

• I still owe everybody a post on music in New Orleans. If I ever remember to up a little video to YouTube, I’ll write the post.
• Have you ever choked yourself by having saliva “go down the wrong pipe”? It just happened to me. Weird.
• I have lately been listening to a series of lectures by Don Carson on the book of Revelation. (You can download them here.) The amillenial viewpoint has always been a mystery to me (being raised a good dispensationalist and all), but Carson, along with a few things I’ve heard from N. T. Wright, has given me the most reasonable case yet for that position. In a lot of ways it seems to make more sense. Anybody got a book recommendation that might help me think through it some more?
• I’ll be traveling to Seattle in a couple weeks for an industry committee meeting. Gonna meet up with my old college roommate while I’m there. Should be fun.
• Immediately after I get back from the committee meeting I’ll be preaching during our Sunday service at Noelridge. Still trying to decide on a text.
• Sorry, Geof, I already have a web project lined up for my trip to Seattle. It doesn’t have anything to do with any Square Pegs.
• Last but not least, congrats to my internet friend Dan who is getting married this weekend!

I told you it’d be random.

Update, one too good to pass up:

• I just watched my wife beat on a peppermint candy with her cell phone.  Hilarious.

• We had three neighbors over for supper last night. It was quite a good time. And the pork loin that Becky did in the broiler was delicious.
• The trip for the weekend will be to Lowe’s for some blackjack for the roof and maybe a basin wrench.
• We got an estimate on our tree in the front yard last night. It’s developed a nasty split and if we don’t do something soon we may lose some or all of it. Sounds like we can get it cabled up and should be able to save most of it.
• Planning on just spending the weekend with the family. It will be nice to not have much to do.
• I’m teaching Sunday School and leading worship at church on Sunday. Already have the music planned, but still have to prepare for the class.
• Note to the FAA: planning a conference in New Orleans in July? Not such a bright idea. Ah well, I’ll sweat along with the rest of them.
• Got Harry Potter book 2 from the library yesterday. For some reason I got a LARGE PRINT copy. Ouch.
• Today is my last day in my current position at work – after eight years, it’s time for a change. Hoping it’s a good move.

Yep. Four in a row now. What are the odds?

Dang, I had to ask that. Now I’m gonna have to calculate them.

Probability of a winner is 1 in 8. So the chances of me getting a winner with my first bottle was, well, 1 in 8, or 0.125.

Probability of a winner each time I get 2 bottles is [1 in 8] * 2, which is 1 in 4, or 0.25.

I’ve now gotten the initial winner plus three more winners in sequence. The odds of that, according to these back-of-the-envelope calculations, are 0.125 * 0.25 * 0.25 * 0.25 = 0.001953125, or to put it another way, 1 in 512.

Cool.

Last week I bought a bottle of Diet Pepsi from a vending machine. I opened it up, and woohoo! The cap was a winner – buy one 20 oz bottle, get one free.

I held onto the cap until Monday, when I was having a bad caffeine craving. So I redeemed it, and when I opened the second bottle, guess what? Another winner.

Fast-forward to today. I turned in that winner and got another two-fer. I opened the second bottle, and guess what? Yep, another winner.

I think it’s a trap.

Laura decided to come into our room about 4 o’clock this morning. She needed to go back and sleep in her own bed, so that was a struggle from about 4 to 5. I’m OK with that, hey, it’s part of parenting, but I really want to know how my dream was gonna turn out.

I was one of a group of about four people, and we were heading into some medical office to interview someone that the authorities didn’t want us to talk to. We had Dr. Greg House along to help out. And he was wearing one of those cool little chain mail headscarves that the knights wore in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It could only get better from there… right?

We were sitting in a conference room at work the other day and there was a large pad that someone had written on in a previous meeting. I don’t know the context of the meeting or the notes on the pad, but what was written on the pad was this:

• Outgoing
• Energetic
• Sociable
• Responsible
• Respectful
• Flexible

We took a minute to be amused at it, and then one of my co-workers asked “so what word shall we add?”

We all thought about it a second, and another co-worker chimed in, “Inflatable?”

It was all downhill after that.

I’m sitting on my PC waiting for the Microsoft Visual C++ .NET development suite to install. And on one of the little information boxes that it brings up while I’m waiting, it highlights one of the benefits of MSVC++.NET:

A “mature and intelligent” developer community? Intelligent, perhaps, but when I think about most of the coders I know, mature?!? To quote Groucho Marx, “I’d never join a club that would have someone like me for a member.”