Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Took the kids down to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing today for a free tour. It was awesome! We saw a million dollars in $10 bills immediately after walking in the door! By the time we had seen all the printing presses and other rooms, we had seen well over $1 Billion (yes, B, Billion) dollars. Too bad we could not take any photos of that!

At the end of the tour, while overlooking the room where all the money is shrink-wrapped for shipping, the guide told us all to all raise our right hands. Then she told us to place them over our mouths and then to blow a kiss to “kiss it all goodbye” :-)

By all means, if you have a chance to do this tour, do it. It is fun. But the (free) tickets go fast during tourist season (which is now). We got our 3:15pm tour passes around 10:15am this morning to give you an idea. They were sold out by 11am for sure.

My kids took most of the photos today. Check em out.

I traced out our tour/walk on a neat google maps mashup called GMAP Pedometer. Looks like we did between 4 and 5 miles. Not bad for a warm summer day and three kids (6, 6, and 9 years old). They did it in style.

In an elapsed time of about 20 minutes we just received about 1.5″ of rain and another inch of hail ranging from dime to quarter size. The temperature dropped some 15-20° too! The tornado was spotted near Dulles Airport (KIAD) but never touched down, thankfully.

Combined with about 50 cloud to ground lightning strikes, I wonder how many barrels of oil that would save IF we could harness all of that energy ;-)

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My annual “man trip” takes our group (5 Mormons and a Jew - I am the Jew) to the Snowmass/Aspen area in Colorado to a trail called the Four Passes Loop. Its aptly named as it is a) a loop and b) includes four 12,000+ passes. Read more

Ever copy an address from some website which looks like this:

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC, 20500

and then try and paste it into a single input field typically offered at mapping websites like google maps, etc?

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I took some pictures of Yessica Toscanini last year when she was at the White Stallion Ranch shooting her SI swimsuit spread. I was there by chance on vacation with my family. Anyway, Portal Tucson saw the pictures and asked for copies which I was happy to provide. Check it out.

John Snow (developer extraordinaire at AOL) updated the Top Coder extension I wrote about back in Sept ‘06 which allows people with AOL mailboxes to use the special AOL mail features in Thunderbird. This is a cool extension as it brings UNSEND, STATUS and REPORT SPAM to Thunderbird users.

Anyway, as John just reported in the comments of the original post, he is having trouble getting the extension out of the “sandbox” area of Mozilla.Org. If you would like to have this extension see the light of day, please help by leaving a comment in the sandbox area. You will need to create an account on mozilla.org in order to do this. Here are the steps:

1. Visit http://addons.mozilla.org/ and REGISTER an account. Confirm the account (click on the link in the email you will receive)

2. Login with your new account and go to your account preferences and ENABLE SANDBOX access.

3. Visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4860 and leave a comment.

Thanks for your help, Carl (and John ;-)

My son, Jacob, jammed his finger hard in his little league game on Saturday. A ball was lined to him at first and he caught it, but his non-glove hand was in the glove to help aid the catch….well, the ball hit the middle finger head-on. It still hurt him a lot today so we took him to the doctor. After the x-ray, we know he has a slight fracture in his upper finger.

Splint + Tape to nearby finger for 3 weeks. No more baseball this year :-( He will have to ride it out on the D.L. And to think that his team is in first place! Bummer.