In 1999, my Aunt Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer. Today, she is cancer-free and the chair of the Glendale Relay for Life event. The event, in association with the American Cancer Society, is held annually to raise money for cancer research.

Way to go, Aunt Linda! :-)

To register for the event or to make a donation, contact Linda Patrick at (818) 548-3351.

The Glendale Relay for Life will take place from 10 a.m. Saturday to 10 a.m. Sunday at Scholl Canyon Baseball Field, 3200 Glenoaks Blvd., Glendale.

L.A. Daily News

K-BIG 104

Yesterday, Michelle counted to three for the first time!

Click image for video

Thursday, we took Michelle to visit the L.A. County Fair at the Pomona Fairplex. The most Michelle ever usually gets to see of animals is with our neighbor's dogs and her pet fish, Cornilius. At the fair, she had a chance to check out an assortment of farm animals including chickens, pigs, goats, ducks, cows, and horses. For the most part, Michelle kept a safe distance from the animals but remained ever-so curious.

Afterwards, she tried out the Merry-Go-Round with Mom, checked out a parade, and later rode the Bee ride with Dad.

The highlight of the visit was Michelle's first-ever pony ride. Amazingly, she took to it like a real cowgirl and wasn't the least bit frightened. In fact, she only became upset once the pony stopped.

Click Here for Video

She had a great time and so did Mom and Dad.





Click here for more photos...

One of the great things about technology is the chance to preserve old analog photography. So with this in mind, I embarked on a project to collect, preserve and restore many of our family's old analog photos. Thus far the project has resulted in the transfer of over 1300 photos to digital format.

Throughout the process I have visited many family members and borrowed many precious and rare photos. Ultimately, I've found the end result to be very rewarding and enjoyable. Photos that were either damaged, fading, or never-before seen by most family members were now saved and available to anyone with an Internet connection.

My findings included photos that were assumed lost, to photos that ranged as far back as the early 1900's.

Once saved in .TIFF format (to avoid any potential loss of quality during the saving process) the images were backed up and copied over to a new location for immediate conversion to .JPEG. To do this I made use of the excellent FREE unix command line application, Mogrify (a component of the ImageMagick package available for most unix-based systems including Cygwin, for Windows users).

Here's an example of the command line usage I used to produce my web-friendly images:

%> mogrify -quality 86 -format jpg -resize 640x480 *.TIF

The project will undoubtedly be an ongoing one as long as there are still photos out there to be collected. Beyond this, there are still many analog photos in my own collection that await being transferred.

Here's an official breakdown of Michelle's favorite words to-date:

"Ches" (Cheese), "One" (One), "Teeee" (Three), "Shh" (Shoe), "Dada" (Dad), "Daddie" (Baby), "Ish" (Fish), "Wawa" (Water), "Papa" (Food), "Juish" (Juice), "Dall" (Dog), "Da" (Ball), "Guck" (Duck), "Gu" (Good), "Eye" (Hi), "Sta" (Star).

Ding, ding... anyone out there?



I've got 6 Gmail account invites available.

Answer the following question for an account:

"What is the title of Michelle's favorite bedtime book?"