Famille Du Pentium

Yay, one last post before I leave for Europe – A Day Out with Thomas.  They’re uploading, so if you look at it around 11AM Central you won’t see it.  Wait an hour.  See you in a couple of weeks!

Tomorrow (Friday) we’re going to Union, Illinois to see the annual "A Day Out with Thomas" event.  This is at the Illinois Railway Museum, which features a huge number of running an non-running trains that you can tour, climb on, and ride on.  The highlight of the day is a ride on a train pulled by Thomas the Tank Engine.

We’ll take pictures, as always, however Mike leaves for Zurich on Saturday so it might be late August before the pictures are posted.  I know you will be simply salivating for pictures, so here are some from last year, this year’s will look almost exactly the same :).

BTW this will be my last post until I return from Zurich on August 29. 

Tommy Thompson, the former 4-term Governor of Wisconsin and DHS secretary under George W Bush, has dropped out of the Republican nomination race.

I said earlier that Thompson was a good man, but that now was the time for a conservative candidate who does not answer to the religious right.  I had concerns about Thompson’s religious backing and alignment with President Bush.

I wish good luck to Governor and Secretary Thompson, he did a lot of great things for the people of Wisconsin, and I hope he’ll go back there and do more for them.

Find the pictures of Ethan and Aaron in soccer camp HERE.  Justin was signed up for soccer camp, but he didn’t want to play.  We took pictures of him not playng, anyway.

It’s been a while since I posted something funny (Alberto Gonzales’ congressional testimony aside…); read the fine print.

There’s a new reason to hate spammers. These rodents have recently discovered that one type of unsolicited email that almost everyone not only opens, but trusts – will go to websites as directed, accept cookies, and perhaps even give up personal information – are electronic greeting cards. So spammers now are sending “you have received an e-greeting card” emails to their spam recipients. The problem is, the emails and websites that they direct you to will take over your computer, give the spammer access to your personal data, and also will set up your computer as a “spam bot” – basically a cog in their army of machines that send more spam out.

This is extremely dangerous, especially the social engineering aspect, because when you trust the email and website of the greeting card announcement, you’re more likely to let it do things to your computer that you shouldn’t – like install software.

Here is a link about the new type of spam: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/08/if-you-think-a-.html#posts

My advice: if you receive an email that says that you received a greeting card, delete it. As the article above says, “Don’t ever read electronic greeting cards. They have officially become more trouble than they are worth. ”

Aaron, Ethan, and Justin are all in Challenger British Soccer Camp this week, learning soccer from British pros and semi-pros.  Aaron is quite good at soccer and for him it’s an opportunity to improve his skills before AYSO Soccer starts in the fall.  This year, not only will Mike be coaching Aaron’s (U12) team, but Marla will be coaching Ethan’s (U6) team. 

Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures yet, and because of the wide angle of the soccer fields, it’s unlikely  that we’ll have any (but we’ll try).