Monday morning at work.

First off, I found the coolest application over at Recommended. Go to the site PortableApps.com. there you will find portable versions of many applications, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim Chat Client, and OpenOffice. “Portable” means that you can drop the program, such as Firefox Portable, onto a USB key drive (or other removable media) and the program will run directly from the removable drive WITHOUT LEAVING ANY INFORMATION BEHIND ON THE LOCAL COMPUTER. This means you can take your web browser with all your cookies, cache, and favorite bookmarks to any computer (school, library, work, home). The same for your email (using Portable Thunderbird), and your Office documents (using Portable OpenOffice). It is very cool and worth checking out.

This weekend, I mowed our lawn, washed our dog, and, of course, went to Concord for a test-run of NH Blog-Con. After meeting Joanie and having lunch at the Common Man, Original Cindy and I went over to the Steeplegate mall. I bought two new, inexpensive pipes (I’ll post pictures later – try not to swoon when you see them), and Cindy, amazingly, didn’t buy anything but a DVD.

On the home front, this is going to be a short week for me. I have Wednesday to Friday off (plus the weekend). Original Cindy and I are going camping at Lake George, NY. When I say camping, I don’t mean RV-with-a-television-and-all-the-amenities-of-home camping. We will be camping in an actual tent. We don’t have any activities planned, other than horseback riding, and a trip to the Great Escape amusement park.

Hopefully, Cindy will be well enough so we don’t have to cancel our trip. I won’t go into details, but she is going to see a doctor today, and I hope they can help her quickly. Otherwise, we may have to postpone our trip, which would suck since this is our last weekend without the kiddies.

Today, as planned, I headed over to Concord, NH for what was to be a BETA test of Blog-Con. Basically, I wanted to check the location out in preparation for the real thing.

Joanie from Grain of Salt, the other organizer of the NH Blog-Con (aka, Blog Free or Die), was there, and my wife tagged along as well.

Atmosphere: 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% other gases (water vapor, argon, carbon dioxide, others).

Ambience: We sat in the upstairs lounge which was very comfortable and well appointed. In addition to a well-stocked bar, there were comfortable chairs and couches set around the lounge in case you didn’t want to play bar-fly. A selection of cheese and crackers was set out for anyone to help themselves to.

Food: I ordered an open-faced sandwich called “the Nightmare” and a pint of Sam Adams. Joanie had a pint of Demon IPA and a Quiche. The wife, Original Cindy, had the Chicken & Spinach Canelloni. We all agreed that the food was excellent.

Customer Service: The waitstaff were friendly and responsive.

Overall, it was a great place, with plenty of room to spread out. It should work very well for New Hampshire BLOG-CON 2006 — Blog free or Die.

Dana Asks:

If mineral spirits were distilled, would the condensed matter be refined mineral spirits or something different? For example, a solvent bath which is contaminated. If distilled would the end product still be mineral spirits (allbeit somewhat cleaner or would the distilling process change the chemistry to such a degree as to make it ineffective?

Mineral spirits (sometimes called white spirits or Stoddard solvent) is simply a distillation fraction of petroleum. In other words it is characterized by its boiling range. Mineral spirits can be fairly crude (using a broad boiling point range) or fairly refined (using a narrower boiling range). The composition of mineral spirits varies depending on the location and the company doing the distilling.

If you have a contaminated solvent bath of mineral spirits, you can distill the contaminated bath and you will end up with mineral spirits if you use the right boiling range. Your distilled mineral spirits may not be the exact composition of the original mineral spirits, but it will still, by definition, be mineral spirits, as long as it falls within the typical boiling range for mineral spirits.

I hope this answers your question.

Since its just me and my wife this month (the kids are in Las Vegas with their bio-dad), I thought I would make a list of some of the crazy/stupid stuff the wife and I do:

• We chat on Yahoo. . . even though we are sitting right next to each other
• We always kiss 3 times whenever we kiss goodbye *peck* *peck* *peck*. We get offended if the other person tries to rush off with only one or two pecks.
• Although I frequently call her “Original Cindy” in these posts, my actual pet name for her is “Boo”
• Her pet name for me is unprintable
• She is a devoted fan of V.C. Andrews, and is in the process of trying to read every single book she has ever written
• We are both very weak-willed when it comes to the other person. We can pretty much talk each other into almost ANYTHING
• Every time I sit down to work on my Blog at home, she asks “What is a ‘blog’ again? I still don’t get it.”
• Our 3-year-old Godson is autistic, and we love him like he is our own son.

What sort of weird, quirky things do you and your spouse/significant other do?

The Official NH Blog-Con will still be held on October 14, 2006 at 4:00 pm at the Common Man in Concord.

This is just a rememinder that there will be a mini-Blog-Con this Saturday (July 29th) at 1:00 pm. I am heading over there to do some shopping (manly shopping, that is – tobacco, books, power-tools) and to check out the Common Man and see what sort of place it is.

If you are in the area and want to check the place out as well, just show up. If not, then we’ll see you in October!

I don’t know who to blame this on, so I’m blaming it on the internet in general. . .

In order to clean up my sidebar, I had moved my Blogroll to a separate page. It turns out, however, that if your blogroll is not on the main page of your blog, then technorati (and probably other tracking services) won’t see that you linked to those other blogs.

So in order to make sure my linkageness gets “credited” on technorati (et al), I have moved my blogroll back to the main page of my blog. So there. My sidebar is all cluttered up again.