My family flew some kites on a recent vacation to the Outer Banks area of North Carolina.

My kite was a parafoil:



My dad flew a cool Red Baron replica:

To save money on the addition we decided we would do the painting. We missed the fact that this meant we would have to do most of the caulking! Kristen has been busy doing that and filling the nail and screw holes.





The crew did a really good job at this corner junction between the old house and the addition. All of the trim, old and new, will be painted with a fresh color before we are finished:

We got our bicycles down out of the garage this weekend and I even rode to work this morning.

I didn't notice until just now the terrible condition of my tires:



These are the original tires, at least 12 years old. The harder outer rubber is peeling off to reveal a much softer rubber interior. With luck, I'll make it home safely tonight.

The other day I stumbled upon a web page that attempted to take control of my browser. I saw a series of pages and had great difficulty making them go away.

I happened to be sitting in front of a non-critical Linux desktop, so I figured it would be interesting to see what this web page would do:

Some serious scare tactics going on here.

The next part of the site pretended to scan my hard drive for viruses. It pretended to find many serious problems on my computer:

When I finally grew tired of this malicious web site, I tried to close my browser tab. The web page threw up a wonderful warning that tries to scare the pants off the poor visitor and also started a download of a windows executable:

If you refuse to check your system, press "OK", and you agree to be responsible for all the system malfunctions, erratic behavior, and data loss.

Wow, that's scary! What poor computer user wants that much responsibility?

Lucky for me, I am using Linux and Firefox, and in fact none of the Win32 viruses really existed on my machine. The site is very convincing, however, and it is easy to see why there is an epidemic of malware-infected Windows computers all over the Internet.

We have declared the new server space project "Done!" and have started to move in the servers.





There are some complexities with our situation of sharing physical space with one of the world's largest collections of Lepidoptera:

One side of the house exterior has been trimmed out.

edit: The trim boards are made of cypress and will be painted the same color as the rest of the addition to simulate board and batten siding.





Inside the addition, the new openings for doorways have been cut into the old exterior block: