TKO!?

With as much traveling as I've been doing the last few weeks it's been tough to keep up to date on American Idol. Inexplicably I missed Archuleta Day while we were in Chicago. To make up for that faux pas, Alison and I have been voting all night long. Archuleta is easily the best singer to ever have a shot at winning American Idol but David Cook will sell far more cd's regardless of who wins. Here's a taste of one of Archuleta's performances tonight:

New HDD!

I know I'm a nerd and this post will probably prove it. A couple of weeks ago we thought that our hard drive had crashed. I've been wanting a second hard drive and this scare helped us to realize that $150 is not too much to pay to preserve our priceless pictures and videos. So last night, I installed a new hard drive in our computer. I was excited as soon as it arrived and I've been excited ever since. The hard drive that I purchased is a Samsung 750 GB 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache SATA 300 (and of course, it's already $10 cheaper than when I bought it).

We now have 1.05 TB (that's terabytes - i.e. 1,000 GB for you computer unsavvy folk) of storage in our computer. I haven't been able to defrag our original hard drive for months because it has been so full (you need 15% free space to defrag properly). After installing the hard drive I set up a couple of partitions. One partition is used for nightly backups of our original hard drive and the second partition is used solely for our Media Center DVR (aka TIVO). Now we have room for more than 150 hours of recorded TV (to add to our collection of more than 50 movies already stored on the computer). The computer spent 16 hours backing up everything from the old hard drive onto the new and now we can breathe easy knowing that our data is safe (relatively speaking, of course).

Potpourri

Potpourri was always my favorite Jeopardy category. There's been a lot going on that I haven't had a chance to write about. This weekend was a busy one. We had a birthday party Thursday night, wedding reception Friday night, wedding, wedding dinner and baptism Saturday, baby blessing Sunday and we went the Bees game tonight.

My niece Maddie got baptized on Saturday. She's my parents oldest grandchild so every milestone that she reaches is obsessed about more than any other. It was exciting to see her take this step and then try and remember some of my baptism. I don't remember much. I was baptized while my family lived in Ohio. I do remember getting a candy bar from my Grandpa Squire though ;).
Tucker and Rachelle's little baby boy was blessed on Sunday morning. Keaton Tucker Steed was born just over a month ago and was blessed while Kevin and Alysia Bischoff (my sister and her husband who live in Las Vegas) were here. It's always nice to see them, but they were probably a little stressed because their 3-year old daughter suffered a concussion after falling off of her bike on Saturday.

Tonight Alison and I went to the Bees game with her parents and brother's family. It was an exciting game that the Bees won 11-4. We had to leave after the 6th inning for Ada to go to sleep but we saw the majority of the offense from both teams. The starting shortstop for the Bees (Casey Smith) had 3 errors in the first inning. The Bees are lucky to have only gone down 1-0 during that time. He also went 0-3 from the plate when Alison and I left. Needless to say, he wasn't having a very good day.

My Windows Live Hotmail account was upgraded to 5 GB today. Take that all of you gmail users with 2888.426690 MB and counting and all of you yahoo mail users with a measly... ok, I just checked and yahoo mail users get unlimited storage. I take back everything mean that I said. For a while there, I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Alison and I rarely watch anything except sports, news, The Colbert Report and American Idol on TV. Last Tuesday we were just flipping through the channels and we stopped on ABC. There was a show called Just For Laughs on from 7:00-8:00 PM. We were both laughing so hard that we were almost crying. It's a candid camera type show that was obviously filmed in another country. There is no dialog, only music to cover up whatever language was originally spoken in the show. We both highly recommend it to anyone looking for a laugh.

School starts a week from today - yuck. I just found out a couple of days ago that one of the classes that I was looking forward to taking has been canceled. What a joke. Maybe I'll take a Poly-Sci class or something.

Idol Overload

The last couple of days have been "American Idol Overloaded." I didn't watch Idol at all the last three weeks (because I was inundated with school-work). I finally got caught up the last couple of days. It worked out well because I was working on some agendas for my church calling on my laptop while AI played on my computer. I'll now make it official - I'm officially on the Blake or Melinda bandwagon!

**Update: My sister loved Blake's last performance so much that she asked me to create an audio file of it. Feel free to download it here if you so desire.

Sanjaya's Girlfriend...

Because it is spring break, I got to watch American Idol today rather than on the weekend. I've always wondering who is crazy enough to vote for Sanjaya. Tonite we got our answer.
A photo is worth a thousand words...

My Favorite Super Bowl Commercial

Here is a video of my favorite Super Bowl commercial. It really is quite ridiculous.

Video: Garmin Super Bowl XLI Commercial

This is a little taste of what Ben and Jenn will be getting in the mail...

'Truthiness'

Well, well, well. Did I call this one or what? In last January over Civil Rights Day, the Squire family (my parents, Alison and I, most of my siblings and their kids) was down in La Verkin. While there we played a 'Cranium' type game. One of the little challenges was some sort of a word game. I used the word 'truthiness'. Nobody believed that truthiness was a 'real' word. I, on the other hand, knew that this word had staying power. And now, this word has become the Word of the Year!

First off, congratultions to Stephen Colbert and his genius. Secondly, congratulations to me for being so quick to assimiliate into the Colbert Nation...

You can read an AP article on cnn.com about how 'truthiness' was voted the word of the year here. There was also a Newsweek article written on Stephen Colbert titled "America's Truthiness Teller" that you can read here. It first appeared in the February 13, 2006 issue. Now try and use this word in your everyday speech.

Ken Jennings on the Colbert Report

This video clip is from The Colbert Report on September 14. Ken Jennings was the guest. He just moved out of Alison's parents ward and so I have actually met the guy a time or two when I visited their ward (before he was a celebrity). In case you don't know, Ken was on Jeopardy for 75 days (he won 74 of those days) and left with more than $2.5 milliion in winnings. He is on the Report (pronounced Repor') publicizing a new book that he wrote about his experiences.

You can visit his personal website here, but even more interesting is the Wikipedia article on him here.


Video: Ken Jennings on the Colbert Report
ps. Happy Friday the 13th. Nothing bad or crazy happened to Alison or I...