Hi Anthony... hope all is well with you.  I was sorry to hear about Kim’s dad.  I posted a message to you all to let you know that you were in our prayers. 

I love how you set up your mom’s photo site.  Very nice!!  Can you tell me what I need to do to view her movie clips?  I’d like to be able to view them. 

Thanks Anthony... next time come down too!  Love Lisa

Some movies we recently (relatively recently) watched:

A Prarie Home Companion: great movie.  Hilarious.  Especially good if you’ve listened to the radio show.  Actually it’s a lot like the radio show in some ways, except that you don’t have to listen to the annoying songs they play, because they cut to backstage scenes during the songs.

With Honors: good, sad, funny.

Blast from the Past: hilarious.  As annoying as Alicia Silverstone is, she was actually really good in this.

The Devil Wears Prada: hilarious.

House of Sand and Fog: kind of interesting, but slow.  And dark, which for me isn’t a bad thing, but Kim hated it.  It seemed to be fixated on the girl’s smoking habit for no apparent reason, which was irritating.

Sometime near the beginning of this week, our internet connection got really slow.  Web pages either wouldn’t load at all, or they’d take 2 or 3 minutes to load.  Sending email took forever.  Uploading data happened at 1-8 KB/s instead of the normal 50 KB/s.

I called the cable company and they said they could detect signal problems getting to our modem.  They said they would be able to send someone out in 2 weeks (!!) but it was likely a problem with a splitter on the coaxial cable: the splitters sometimes go bad and then the signal gets severely degraded.  The idea of a splitter dying sounded ridiculous to me, given that it’s an entirely passive device with no electrical or moving parts, but I figured I’d take the splitter out (thus temporarily disabling the TV’s signal) and connect the cable directly to the cable modem.

Unbelievably, the internet was back to its good old speedy self.  Still in denial, I put the splitter back, but now the internet still worked fine.  So apparently, either the splitter or one of the cables involved has a bad connection or a break somewhere, and moving stuff around must have bumped it back into good contact.  For now I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and maybe go jostle the whole mess around once in a while to see how the signal is affected.

Here’s a photo that I took from the back deck last night.  The orange only lasted for a couple minutes, as usual.  When I looked again 15 or 20 minutes later, the moon had gone down in the sky, so maybe over the next few days I’ll be able to get some nice red moon shots.

Click the image to get the high-resolution version.

If you’re not familiar with sudo, then this probably won’t make any sense to you.  That’s OK.  Trust me, it’s hilarious.

(Source)