Millians, Inc.

Well, most of The Millians. Piper didn’t make the cut. Mary researched things and really missed the mark on this one. Vital details: Sugar Mountain, -2° up top, snow drift in our living room, neck goiters gaiters rock, Olivia cried, bad Chinese food, Olivia stopped crying and hit the slopes, Bogner still fits.

Olivia turned 4 on Wednesday. Two parties, naturally: one for the family, one for the kiddies. Our house looks like a bomb went off—and that’s before the kiddie party. Ugh.

What’s not to like about Patrick Duffy and The Crab? Duffy would *totally* make it to Hollywood on Idol.

Mr. Burt H. Masters passed away on July 7, 2009, at the age of 76. He is survived by his wife, Dixie, son, Michael Masters, and daughter, Mary Millians. Mike and his wife, Suzanne, have three children, Bonnie, Hope, and Kate, all of St. Croix. Mary and her husband Alex, have two children, Olivia and Piper, all of Atlanta, Georgia. Also surviving are two sisters, Susan Phillips of Big Canoe, Georgia and Jean Crittenden, of Hastings, Michigan.

Burt was born on December 17, 1932 in Denton, Texas to Dr. and Mrs. Hugh Masters and spent his early childhood years in Texas. He served in the United States Army during the Korean conflict. He lived in Michigan, Illinois and Georgia before moving to the US Virgin Islands for his retirement years.

Burt was a graduate of Western Michigan University and received his MBA from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Burt was a successful entrepreneur in a variety of businesses. He was also instrumental in forming Masters Capital, LLC, of St Croix.

Burt and Dixie have been residents of St. Croix since 2001 and recently celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary. They loved dancing and Burt was known for his “blue suede shoes” on the dance floor. They also traveled extensively on the high seas and enjoyed the social events at the Yacht Club and the East End Club.

Mary ran walked ran-walked the 40th annual Peachtree Road Race 401(k) 10K yesterday, narrowly beating Charlie Coulter, who had to borrow someone’s liver to qualify for the race. The good people at Marathonfoto provided pictures of Mary’s participation—we had to pay a little extra to get “Proof” stamped on them, but now no one can doubt she did it.

Anywho, here are Mary’s stats from the race.

• Clock Time = 1:29:18
• Chip Time = 1:11:35
• Hammertime = Can’t touch this
• Overall Place = 25106 / 50007
• Gender Place = 9607 / 23837
• Division Place = 5932 / 12982
• Peyton Place = Only primetime series ever to run episodes continuously without reruns

Mary’s second string cousin, Ben Smith, got hitched to Kelly “Stinging” Nettles today. For some crazy reason, we thought it would be “fun” to have Olivia and Piper be in some of the pictures. Huh.

Okay, I grant that the new “Faces” facial recognition/tagging feature in iPhoto is pretty amazing.

Still, that’s no excuse for showing me pictures of my dad at my age when making suggestions. It’s cool that it kind of works for cats, but damn, I don’t need to have my software remind me of what my future portends.

So I made chili last night, using a Bobby Flay recipe that featured a number of different chili peppers, including what I believe to be the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. Unfortunately, the recipe skipped over some critical steps for those of us non-cooking types.

Namely, the need to procure and wear HAZMAT gloves when handling hot peppers. Suffice it to say, I got jazz hands habanero hands, so I spent the night soaking in milk, downing Percocet and writing dictating a tersely-worded letter to Mr. Flay, who shall be hearing from my lawyers, just as soon as I get some.

To add insult to chemical injury, the chili was awful and almost burned a hole through my bitchin new dutch french oven. Meh.

We headed to St. Croix for Christmas, to see Mary’s family. Got 4 dives in: 2 at the wall at Cane Bay (old habits die hard) and 2 boat dives out past the pier at Frederiksted (new habit). We even met up with our original dive instructor, Judy. Mary still takes a half tank to equalize, so nothing much has changed.

Plus, I got to eat my favorite Eggs Benedict in the world—at Breezes—and had some pizza at Off The Wall. Good times, save for the traveling with children part. We need to find a boarding school for ages 6 months and up a nanny.

I’m having trouble with this whole auto bailout thing.

Granted, I’m high on Nyquil and have been hallucinating about the season finale of IASIP for days, but will the Car Czar have to pay the Troll Toll to get into the Boy’s Hole Soul? Shouldn’t we just let Day Man be the Car Czar and be done with it? After all, he is fighter of the Night Man, champion of the sun, a master of karate and friendship for everyone.

Day Man, aaaa-ha-aaaa!

My ongoing project to scan every photo I can find continues. I’m almost done with shoebox one. I’ve found all of my old school photos, save for 2nd and 3rd grades. Perhaps money was tight and we didn’t have the funds to score prints? Or I was so smart they skipped me from 1st to 4th grade?

Anywho, the scanning continues. As does my wish I had dropped more coin for a better scanner, as there’s only so much you I can do in Photoshop CS3 with setting a ridiculously low black point in Image > Adjustments > Curves and blurring the crap out of shadow noise in Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise. Meh.

Oh, and don’t get me started on scanning that crappy embossed photo paper that was all the rage in the 70s and 80s. Unless you scan in multiple directions and perfectly merge the scans together, you end up with a dot pattern across the entire image. Thankfully, Image > Mode > Lab Color and Filter > Noise > Median on the Lightness channel works fairly well. The more accurate FFT process requires an OSX-compatible plug-in, of which there are few, and those few are pricey, so that’s right out.

Cheap and lazy FTW, I guess.

A belated gift of a trip to Dublin for my 40th birthday.

Charlie supplied the airfare.¹

I supplied the hotel hotels.²

Todd supplied the laughter,³ the cheap bastard.

A good time was had by all, save for our livers; Charlie’s is still busy trying to escape from his body to live to die another day. Anywho, three days of pub crawl drinking reminded me that 40 is the new 60 80. Highlights included touring Guinness HQ at St. James Gate and visiting Kilmainham Gaol, a mere five hour walk from Temple Bar.

¹ I’m still not sure, but I think I was a drug mule. A drug mule who had to take two different airlines and three legs to get from A to B.

² I hate The Clarence—and that smug POS Bono—with the fire of one million billion suns. They suck deviled eggs, made by Satan himself. Any stars they had were long ago sucked into oblivion by the black hole that is their front desk customer service. If you are ever in Dublin and want to stay in Temple Bar without getting financially ass raped for a 5’ x 7’ closet room with a “hip” TV/PC that sounds like a 747 on takeoff, go to the Paramount Hotel and luxuriate in more space, better attitudes, reasonable prices and free Wi-Fi. Trust me. Further trust me that booking two hotels for one trip tends to get expensive. Further further trust me that even if AMEX says they have your back, they don’t—but they still want $450/year to act like they have your back, the rat bastards.

³ I don’t remember laughing once. That said, I don’t remember much of anything. Wait…what were we talking about?

So it’s our 8th anniversary today. Wow, it seems like only 2,920 days ago we were getting married.

Anywho, I decided to surprise Mary by posting the elaborate video I made documenting our 5th anniversary, since nothing says “Happy 8th Anniversary” like a video of your first five years together…that you made three years ago…that she’s already seen umpteen thousand times.

Alas, the original was done in Flash, I had nuked the .fla file, and I only had a .swf file to work with—not good, as converting .swf “video” to something useable these days is a long-forgotten dark art, unless you are keen on exploring the wonderful world of grayware. After spending four hours researching my automated options, I decided to re-do the entire thing. From scratch. Ooof. Like six hours later, I’m done, with a lovely 100MB file. My good friends at Vimeo will surely appreciate my effort.

My wife, likely not.

Ah, memries memories. Found a bunch of old photos, including my high school senior year spring break shots, circa May 1986. Few people would actively document their abject foolishness, but I’m not a few people.

Okay, at the request of hundreds dozens one of you, I have implemented a tag hack to create the concept of “favorite” posts in Tumblr. At the bottom of each page, where the now-floating navigation section is, you’ll see a new link for Favorites, which when clicked will show you our my favorite posts.

How did I do it? Glad you asked. Since I am using Tumblr tags to create logically grouped post categories (photos, music, etc.), I normally assign one—and only one—tag to a post. That said, I created a new tag (“favorite”) that I use for, well, my favorites. Since my layout stylistically breaks if you have more than one tag assigned to a post, I used the old CSS First Child Pseudo Selector trick to hide a second (and third, fourth, etc.) tag in the layout. So, a post can be tagged as “photo” and “favorite” but only “photo” will show. Genius, you say? I know.

Sorry, Internet Explorer 6.0 and older peeps. You don’t get to play—your layout will be all wonky. You can always join us in the 21st century, though.