Erik’s… Hmm…

My big guy, Noah, started kindergarten today.  We made it a family affair.  I worked my schedule so we all could walk Noah to school and then pick him up at 3pm when he finished today.  He did GREAT!  He marched in and was really excited to start.

Last year he did a Mon, Wed, Fri 9-2 Pre-K that gave him a taste of school and he loved it and excelled.  We’ve been talking about school for the past 3 months and he has always acted excited about starting.  Last week, the school had a parade in front of our park and the kids got to cheer their teachers on.  You can see it in his face how excited he was.

When we picked Noah up after school his class was all wearing matching t-shirts that said “Class of 2021″.  That’s nuts!  2021.  I think we’ll focus on 2008.  Noah is gonna be busy and Zach starts Tue, Thur Pre-K next week.

Noah…  Mommy and Daddy love you.  Do good this year!

click to see all the pics in the Starting School Set

I have a question for all the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (I toss in Socialists and Communists because that is clearly Barack’s plan for America) out there…

DO YOU REALLY THINK BIDEN WAS A GOOD CHOICE?

If memory serves me…  Biden was quoted barely over a year ago saying that Barack was, “not ready” to be our president.  I pulled a bit from an article on npr.org about Biden:

As Obama’s rival in 2007, Biden also criticized the youthful senator from Illinois as “not ready” to be president and lacking in foreign policy judgment

What has Barack done in the last 12 months to change Biden’s opinion?  I’d say, nothing.

Barack is a horrible choice for President!  I’d much rather see Biden running, he wouldn’t get my vote, but he’s better than Barack.

A couple few weeks ago I got a Twitter account.  I wasn’t really sure what I was gonna do with it, or how often I’d post (tweet).  Well, I’ve come to enjoy “tweeting” and find that it takes the place of some of the stuff I would blog about.  With blogging I’ve occasionally said, “that ain’t worth a blog post,” and those are the *perfect* times to write a Twitter post.

So I apologize for not blogging as frequently as I used to, but you can definitely keep up with me on Twitter, and I think you’ll find I do a much better job of keeping you up-to-date with me and the family.  I’ve also installed a new WP plugin that will auto-generate a blog post with all my Twitter activity for the day.  Feel free to leave comments on the Twitter updates just like you would on a normal blog post.

Lastly, for those of you that don’t know what the heck I’m talking about and are wondering what Twitter is you can read this great entry on Wikipedia.

Cuil still can’t find themselves…  The Cuil search engine launched today and numerous people are pointing out that when you google cuil in the cuil search engine (did you like how I used the term google when talking about searching on cuil?  yeah, it was a bad joke.  sorry.) you don’t find anything about the cuil search engine!.!.  Yeah, it is a WTH moment.  You’d think they’d index themselves and allow for google searches on cuil (yeah I tried the same joke twice in one post.  sorry) to pull up their own site.

Note to Cuil… Please try harder to be Cool.

So I saw the article on cnn.com about cuil.  I read the article and said, Hmm… lets take a look.  The first annoying thing is that they are using the word, cuil, for their search engine.  The word means nothing to me.  I don’t know how to spell it, OR pronounce it.  So the people from cuil say to pronounce it as “cool.”  Thanks for the tip, but let me tell you, now you just chopped off a crap-load of potential customers.  If you are gonna make-up a word for your business, you should have it sound like it spells.  In this case people will not be able to guess the url after hearing people talk about the site.

Now that I’m done ranting about the name of the company/site, let me get to the actual site, itself.  Searching with cuil is miserably painful.  The speed at which it returns results almost makes the site unusable.  I’m literally able to type this post as fast cuil serves results.

Yes, this has been harsh and negative, but if you are competing against Google the bar is high and cuil doesn’t come anywhere near the bar.  I’ll try them again a few more times before being done with them, but I’m not expecting much.

UPDATE:

Cuil is down.  They have this very generic page up trying to kindly apologize for them not being able to do capacity planning.

I’m testing out the new WP iPhone App. It’s pretty cool. I guess this is one of the first writing/publishing apps for the iPhone. I’ll definitely need to work on my iPhone keyboarding skills before I start using this on a regular basis.

I remembered to tivo the British Open so I had 4 hours of golf that acted as background noise for my flickr work.  By the time I was done uploading photos I had created 18 new Sets and pushed-up close to 500 pics (that’s a guesstimate on the pics, but the Sets number is accurate).  All I have left to publish is the pictures we took while on vacation and I plan on getting that done in the next day or so.

Highlights from the flickr work today:

• Vacation Day in Galveston
• Rockband Party with Friends
• Muffins with Mom at Noah’s school
• Butterfly Exhibit

Nancy Pelosi is worthless.  She is one of the most powerful women in the United States and all she has done with her power is complan about President Bush.  Is it possible to impeach a House Speaker because Nancy Pelosi is probably the worst the United States has ever had.

I’m not sure why, but I went out and got me a shiny, new, cool Twitter account.  I have no friends yet.  I don’t really know what I’m doing, or how to use twitter, but I got me an account.  So if you would like to see what I have to say on Twitter you can follow me at http://twitter.com/erikweibust.

Just wondering…  should I be pushing my twitter updates to this blog?

Roughly two months ago I started paying attention to my driving habits.  Which is good on many levels.  For one, I wasn’t the kindest, most courteous driver on the road.  I didn’t like slow people getting in my way and slowing me down.  More importantly, I drive a big 4×4 truck, with a horrible, gas-guzzling V8 engine.

So what is the MPG Challenge?  Well…  it’s a fun, exciting driving game.  One which you drive slow, and deliberate.  Very much like an old grandparent, putt-putting along.  The beauty of this game is you save all kinds of cash because your fuel efficiency gets better and better.  When I started the game my truck was getting a dismal 14.9 mpg.  Now two months later I’m getting some serious high scores.  Currently my MPG readout on the dash has me getting…

drum-roll…

18 MPG

Yeah your read it right.  I’m now getting EIGHTTEEN MILES PER GALLON in my big, fat, heavy, 4×4 truck.  And I’m not really trying that hard.  Just think if I tried…  could I get 20 mpg?  I’d be rich!

Has anybody else out there changed their driving habits?  What do you drive?  What kind of MPG are you now getting?