I have six Gmail invitations available. (One GIG of mail storage available FOR FREE.) Any takers?

Jim Vote, my nephew, is the Grand Knight at Aquinas College Council #13501. All of the Brother Knights at Council #13501 worked hard to get the group going. A short time ago, Jim received a notice that the College Senate at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids Michigan was going to vote on whether or not the K of C Council was going to be recognized by the Senate.

Now…I want to remind everyone that the Knights of Columbus is the LARGEST CATHOLIC FAMILY FRATERNAL SERVICE ORGANIZATION IN THE WORLD! I want to also remind everyone that according to ‘their mission’, it is a college ‘…rooted in the Catholic Dominican tradition…’ that was ‘…founded by the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids in 1886…’. Also, ‘…Aquinas has a Catholic heritage and a Christian tradition.’ Okay, with all of this in mind, you would think that this is a match made in heaven.

Last night, the Student Senate met to decide on the council’s status with the college. THEY WERE DENIED RECOGNITION!!! Can you believe it? The young men were told that because the K of C membership does not permit women, it was discriminatory (my words, not theirs). All of the council’s activities were for the entire community, not just the men. Also, I was told by a reliable source that while the meeting was going on, there was a member of the council that was trying to get a group of young women together to become the council’s ‘ladies auxiliary’…and succeeded in getting 10 women to join their cause. It was to no avail because they could not find the meeting location.

As a member of the Knights of Columbus and staunch supporter of the Dioceses of Michigan, I feel that any funds coming from the Catholic Church to Aquinas College should be CUT until they realize WHO THEIR FRIENDS ARE! The Knights of Columbus was designed as a service organization to support Catholic widows and orphans. Does that sound discriminatory to you? Okay, maybe not cut the funds, but at least talk to…oh, I don’t know…how about Adam Cardinal Maida, who is A PROUD MEMBER OF THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS! (In case you didn’t know, my friend, Bishop Kevin Britt, was the Bishop of Grand Rapids and had passed away earlier this year, so Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Maida (another friend) as ‘…apostolic administrator [of Grand Rapids] until such time as a successor is named and installed.’)

This is a personal plea to THE STUDENT SENATE OF AQUINAS COLLEGE IN GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN: PLEASE RECONSIDER YOUR DECISION AND RECOGNIZE THIS COUNCIL! WE DO!!!

Ben Poole has a funny entry in his blog about ‘The Usability of Infants’. Funny stuff, especially for a geek like me.

Ben got this from A Heuristic Evaluation of the Usability of Infants.

Rocky Oliver, the Lotus Geek had a blog entry regarding a new article at the developerWorks (aka Lotus Developer Domain aka LDD aka Notes.net) about how to get into blogging using Blogsphere. It’s a nice article. You can get directly to it here.
Thanks Rock for the heads up!

I received this e-mail from State Executive Secretary Ralph Walters:
Ralph and Kari Theisen are the proud parents of a baby girl, Isabella Margaret Theisen born at 5:26 p.m. yesterday.  Isabella weighed in at 6lb 13oz and is 20.5 inches long.

She was 3 weeks early but mom and baby are doing fine (Ralph too).

Ralph is the State Membership Director of the Knights of Columbus. Kari and Ralph are the nicest people in the world. Isabella is lucky to have great parents like them, and they are going to be the best parents. God bless them!

Two Disney related stories this morning…

Frank Thomas, Legendary Disney Animator and One of Walt Disney’s ‘Nine Old Men,’ Dies at Age 92
My thoughts concerning this are mixed. Yes, he was 92, but I also get this gut feeling that as Disney leaves traditional animation behind, that Frank saw this as a time to leave. I imagine that if Disney still had an animation studio in Florida, they would be having tributes about Frank (between all of the hurricanes). He died on Wednesday…did anyone else notice?

Disney’s Eisner to leave company in 2006
The funny thing about this was that it wasn’t announced from California or Florida, but from London. Stockholders against Eisner (see SaveDisney.com for details) are probably crying a collective ‘It’s not soon enough!’ He has been talking a lot lately about who is going to replace him, so I guess that this shouldn’t be that much of a shock. What is funny is that he’s not quitting, he’s retiring. Nice move…that way, you get all of your benefits. I’m sure that even in his ‘retirement’, he’ll be working somewhere making more money.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been attempting to install Lotus Workplace 2.0 on a Windows 2000 machine. Starting with the number of downloads I’ve had to do (HINT: Don’t do all 35…you don’t need them!) to the ‘pre-installation’ process (if you don’t know LDAP yet, you will!) to the Installation Guide (I’ve had easier times reading binary language), it’s become one challenge after another. After some good-natured ribbing this morning at my expense, Bruce Elgort suggested that I blog about my experiences. I’ve been writing some notes down, so I figured that I would eventually get around to it.
As it so happens, life imitates blogging, and I find out thru the RSS feed from the IBM Redbooks – Lotus domain site that there is a draft Redbook on LWP 2.0 Deployment. From the superficial read, it looks like just what the ‘Doctor Notes’ ordered.
Go check it out at the Redbooks site.
Updates forthcoming…

I think that I’ve reached ‘that’ point with my Handspring Visor Deluxe. You know, the point that makes you feel like you can’t use it effectively anymore. For a while, I’ve been syncing it up with my Yahoo! account so my wife can see my calendar. Starting a few days ago, it stopped syncing any entry that I do on Yahoo!. I’ve been seeing that some others have had problems recently with it, and suggested that the latest version of Intellisync for Yahoo! might do the trick. The problem? It only works with Palm OS V4.0 and above. My little device is not even V3.5. This is just another problem that I’ve had with it.
Most of you would say, ‘Just go out and get another one,’ but the problem with that is that the Pride is trying to move to a better part of the Pridelands, so purchases like this are out (for now). I guess that leaves me doing everything from the PDA and then updating it by hand on Yahoo!. Does anyone else have any other suggestions?

To make a long story short, I purchased a DSL router and installed it over the weekend. It was routing the website properly, and it still isn’t working right with my dynamic ip client, but I hardcoded the IP address to my dynamic ip service, so it should work for now.

Today they re-released the sequel to ‘The Lion King’. The last time it was released, it was a ‘direct to video’ release. This time, it’s a two DVD set, including a bunch of bonus features. If you pre-ordered it from Disney online, I think you got a lithograph. Jennifer and I talked about doing that, but we missed the deadline. Oh well, I guess that’s why eBay exists. And in case you were wondering…Yes, I already own a copy from the first time it came out, but you can never have enough ‘Lion King’.