What's it all about, Alfie?

Today we went to downtown Naperville for a nice brunch at Flat Top Grill and then walked around the downtown area for a while. We enjoy the downtown, and we stopped in to talk to our friends at the running store, and looked in on the newly moved 'Two Bostons' pet "stuff" store. Very fun.

We had tickets for RibFest, and were hoping to see Hewey Lewis and The News in concert, but the place was totally packed. We walked around for about 45 minutes trying to find a place to sit on the grass, and there simply was none. Liza and I were stunned because when we came to see KC and the Sunshine Band several years ago, there was an entirely different layout of seating in front of the main stage. They have literally cut it by 75%.

We were bummed, but we decided to try and make the best of it while we were there. It was a nice night, but not what we had hoped for.

Today we went downtown Chicago to do a little fun shopping at the Magnificent Mile and then take in a show - hoe metropolitan! I got to go into the Apple Store - very impressive. We went to the Hershey's Store and listened to a few street musicians. It was a lot of fun.

Had it not been for the rain.

Yeah, it was chilly and rainy, but that didn't damper our spirits too much. It was great seeing the sights for a little bit. Then it was time to go see the Blue Man Group. What a show! I really enjoyed it, and realized that we don't take the kids to enough theatre and we need to. I was lucky to see about a show a year when I was their age, and we need to see more than one every couple of years.

If you get a chance to see it, do see it. You'll be glad you did.

Today starts the wonderful three-day July 4th weekend that we're turning into a nice 4-day weekend that is going to be our "Staycation" for the Summer of 2009. The kids are busy, Liza is busy, and there isn't a lot of time to take a big week-long vacation, so we're doing things around the area and having a lot of fun.

Today was the Water Park and a great Kane Count Cougars ball game. It was a decent time at the water park - a little chilly for my tastes, but the kids liked it plenty. Liza didn't get a toe in the water all day.

The Cougars played the Peoria Chiefs - the AAA Farm Team for the Cubs. Turned out that A. Ramirez was playing that night and the KCC had a 9-year high attendance of over 14,000! It was a good game, the Chiefs won, but it was the three errors on the Cougars that really was the reason.

After the game, they had a great fireworks display there. It was directly overhead. We lay back in the grass and looked up at the fireworks. It was amazing. We felt like we could reach out and touch them. Fantastic night.

Wonderful is the Twitter update!

Today I got a tweet from the OmniGuys saying that OmniGraphSketcher has gone Final 1.0. Great news, with a raft of changes in this cut the application really is ready to go. I'm glad I got in on this as I do love visualizations and graphs, in particular.

Had to get it.

This morning I saw that the Mozilla crew finally released Firefox 3.5! This is great news as I have been waiting on this for a long time for work. I'm hoping to see the performance of Firefox 3.5 on Windows to be up to snuff and capable of handling my web pages without crashing. The initial results seem to indicate that it's possible that this version of Firefox is far better at memory usage than the previous versions - and even better than Google Chrome! That would be great.

Even if that's not the case, it's nice to see Firefox making a big move in the JavaScript area. Very much appreciated.

Well, I've had my iPhone for a few days now, and I have to say they were 100% on the money. It's a fantastic little device. The keyboard is great - I have no problems typing on it, and the auto-correct helps me when I do make a mistake. The speed of the 3GS is great, and the ability to use WiFi and 3G is really nice.

Of course, it's the price that's blowing me away today. I expected to pay a lot more for the service, and so in comparison, it seems very reasonably priced. Love it.

I've picked up a few apps, but nothing major yet. I think I need to get a nice SSH client, but we'll see how that pans out with the apps being certified now for iPhone OS 3.0 - maybe there will be something new coming out that'll blow my socks off. There are a few updates I'd like to see - specifically WordPress for iPhone, but I can wait for that.

I great little device. Amazing. Now I just need to find a clip/holder so it'll fit on my backpack...

Looks like one nasty little bug was in the RC 1 of OmniGraphSketcher, so this morning they released OmniGraphSketcher 1.0 RC 2, and I picked it up. Supposedly, it' had to do with a crash associated with editing text labels, but I just think it's great that they are responding to the reports of users as quickly as they are.

Then again, I'd have had it out as well, so maybe they're just good coders.

Well, the Twins are the champs of the Panther Sports Club Slow-Pitch Ponytail league (8 to 10 yrs.) again this year. That's two years in a row, and they did it (typical) nail-biting style. The game was a heart-stopping ride for all, but in the end, they pulled themselves together and started playing like the team they have been all year long.

Coming from behind 4-9 in the bottom of the sixth to score 8 runs and be on top 12-9. They then held off the Cubs, scoring only another two runs in the top of the seventh to win 12-11. The Cubs played tough, had very good pitching, but in the end, the girls came back and played up to their ability and that was the game.

Major congratulations to Angelina. She had a great game from start to finish.

This morning I decided to upgrade Firefox on my laptop to 3.5 RC 3 just to see how it goes. I don't use it as much on my laptop as I do on other machines, so it's a perfect testbed to see how it runs. I will say the icon is subtly new, and that's nice, but I'm really more interested in the JavaScript and rendering performance as that's where a lot of my work is now focused.

Well... more when I know more.

They have done a lot with OmniGraphSketcher to get it to 1.0 RC 1 status. I have to say that I enjoy the tweets from the development group as it makes sure I'm kept up to date of any happenings the team has to share. This update is pretty extensive with improvements in speed, import data handling and general UI issues. It's getting better and better.

Very nice to see.