The public beta of the new Internet Explorer is available for download. I just installed my copy, and now I have to reboot the computer in order to complete the setup. I wonder how it will compare with Firefox.
While I’m on the subject of the Blues, I want to share a few photos I snapped near the end of the Canucks/Blues game last Monday.
This photo was taken from our seats during the first period. We had a pretty good view then!
Here’s a photo of Christian Backman of the Blues, as he was on a breakaway.
He scored. 
This is a photo of the Canucks goalie Maxime Ouellet after the Blues scored an empty-net goal late in the third period to ice the game at 4-0. I like this photo for quite a few reasons. One, because you can see the goalie’s sweater tinted red from the goal lamp. Additionally, you can see just how close we were! This photo was taken from the very front row. It was pretty incredible to be so close to the goalie.
This is the back of the net. Yeah, we were pretty close. 
Hope you guys enjoyed the photos! As I look back, it’s hard to believe we got to witness that in person! Pretty neat stuff.
Paul and I went to the YMCA this evening to work out. I’ve been getting back into the groove of exercising since the two-week hiatus I took due to working at the shop. My hope is to average three workouts a week during the winter, and usually I try to go on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Later tonight, Paul, Jude, and I drove over to Earth City, Missouri, in order to spend some time at Dave & Buster’s. We ate a late supper there, and then began playing some of the games. We mainly played the football and basketball games, the dancing game (entitled either “2 Exceed” or “Pump It Up”), and the horse-racing game, which has become one of our favorites.
Even though the arrow layout is different on this dancing game than on our home DDR pads (four diagonal arrows and a middle button versus the up/down/left/right arrows we have), I was able to do pretty well! I caught on to the new arrangement fairly quickly, and I was able to do much better than I did the last time we visited D&B. There are still many people who can smoke me, but at least I have shown improvement.
While at D&B, Jude and I watched the completion of the Flames/Blues game on TV. When we started watching, it was tied at two goals apiece, and overtime had just begun. There was no score in the five-minute period, which meant a shootout! The Blues ended up winning the shootout 3-2. Good deal.
Speaking of the Blues — in a comment, Matt alluded to the recent trade of one of their stars, Mike Sillinger, to the Nashville Predators. As I came home this evening, I learned that they shipped another star, Doug Weight, off to the Carolina Hurricanes. It’s sad to see these guys go! I mean, it’s not like the Blues are in contention for the playoffs or anything, but still! Do we really have to have a fire sale and dump all of our good players? 
I suppose they’re just trying to make this a “rebuilding” year. I don’t follow hockey that closely (take one look at the Blues’ record and then guess why ;-)), but I still like to pull for our local team!
Well, that does it. I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow!
This afternoon, the entire family (that is, all 16 Arndts) caravanned over to Cici’s Pizza in St. Louis. After lunch, we headed over to the City of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, and eventually ended up at Fort de Chartres, an 18th-century fort built along the banks of the Mississippi River. I remember going there approximately six or seven times in my life, and I remember we always enjoyed running around the fort. The chubs seemed to have a really good time too, and we managed to come away with some good photos and videos of the trip.
Since it was such a gorgeous afternoon, a few of us broke out the softball gloves and decided to throw a ball around on a grassy area outside of the fort. It was the first time in a little over two months that we touched the softball. It’s hard to believe it, but our 2006 season is only two-and-a-half months away. I very much remember my last at-bat of 2005. It was in our championship game, and I hit a home run. That was a special way to end the year.
Jude and I played volleyball this evening, and Wizzy accompanied us. Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t able to witness us win any games. The first two games were very close, but the third was a little more lop-sided. Ah, well. We’re 10-11 so far over the session, and next week we play our final three games. We’d have to win out in order to finish with a winning record. If we can go 2-1, we’ll finish at .500. So… we’ll see how it goes.
Paul, John, Mark and James went to the St. Charles Family Arena this evening in order to attend the 2006 Winter Jam concert, which features Newsong, Newsboys, Zoegirl, Hawk Nelson, Tobymac… and somebody else; I can’t remember who. I probably would have gone too, if it were not for volleyball. I bet they had a fun time, though! I really like a lot of the older songs by Newsong and the Newsboys.
We are heading out to Cici’s for lunch. James has brought his laptop along, and through the nifty setup we have here, we are able to get online. We’re moving at 60 miles per hour, and I’m making a blog entry. Pretty cool stuff!
Oh, and don’t worry… I’m not driving. 
Well, it’s been a great Saturday.
In the morning, I left with Dad and Paul in order to have a meeting in regards to the upcoming “Cardinal Country” TV show we’re putting together that should air in the St. Louis area on Charter Cable. We’ve been talking about different ideas as far as logos and titling goes, and I think we’ve made a good amount of progress today. I hope we’re able to decide on something soon, so we can then use that artwork on business cards, shirts, microphone flags, the website, et cetera.
This afternoon, I scoped a couple of short depositions and began typing on another. I… think that’s about all I did in the afternoon, although that kept me busy for several hours.
In the evening, I drove over to the Balassis’ house in order to pick up Philip, Seth, Jacob, and Nathan, who had spent the day there, playing games and such. Anyway, while there I chatted with Maggie and Joey for a little while, before eventually driving the guys back home through the heavy rain.
Later this evening, I played some DDR with Mom. She has been playing pretty often, and I have kind of slacked off a bit lately, so we had some really close matches! She beat me quite a few times! Of course, I wasn’t very familiar with the songs, but still! Mom’s a force to be reckoned with.
Then even later this evening, I co-hosted our FamTeam Live webcast. Lots of fun!
While I’m thinking about this, I’ve got to mention it. I’ve been using a new keyboard over the past couple of days. I actually swapped with James — for the time being, anyway. Well, for some reason, I’m having trouble with this keyboard. It’s causing more typos, although I don’t feel like I’m hitting the wrong keys. The keyboard just has a different feel. In particular, I’m finding that the letter “T” is giving me troubles! Maybe I just need to apply more pressure or something, because a lot of my T’s aren’t being registered. Oh, well.
Guys, I would appreciate your prayers in regards to something. It seems as if I’m having a bit of a problem with corrupted images on one of my hard drives. Certain pictures that I have recently downloaded from the digital camera are now unviewable or have artifacts and other signs of corruption.
I can’t understand exactly what’s going on. I’ve had a problem previously where running CHKDSK in Windows XP would give an error message where it would seemingly delete files. When I had that problem, I managed to recover the files by running CHKDSK with the /F (fix) flag and also by using a data recovery program.
I’m not exactly sure where to go from here. See, none of the files appear to have been deleted, so there’s not really anything to recover in that sense. In the past, if a file was accidentally deleted, I could try to use a recovery program to get it back. But what do you do when the file exists but is corrupted? As I type, I have a scan going using RecoverLost Data, but I doubt that that will help anything.
I guess what I’m wondering is, is anybody aware of a way to repair JPGs? What bugs me more than anything is that this just happened out of the blue. Thankfully, I have most of my photographs backed up, but it’s very disturbing that this would just happen.
If anybody has any insight on this type of thing, I’d love to hear from you. To clarify things — it appears that all of the files are there (in JPG format), and the file size seems to be consistent with that of the non-corrupted pictures. Or, even if you don’t know how to fix this, if you have any information about what could have caused this to happen (hard drive fragmentation, perhaps?), please get in touch with me.
Either way, thanks for the prayers in regards to this. I sure hope I can, for one, repair/recover the already-corrupted files and, two, find out the cause of this in the first place in order to avoid having to go through such a thing again.
There are certain days where it would be mighty handy to have a way to flag a given entry as protected or restricted. But alas, I haven’t ever gotten around to coming up with such a system for my FamTeam blog. I’m aware, by the way, that a similar feature is available in Xanga, but since my Xanga blog is merely a “satellite” for my real blog, using Xanga’s protected-post feature isn’t helpful. Oh, well. This may mean I have another project for my FamTeam blog.
After nearly three weeks, I finally went to the YMCA again. It was hard to go during the two weeks of working at the shop, so I had kind of gotten out of the rhythm of going three times a week. I went to the downtown Y this afternoon, though, and played a few games of basketball before working out. Incidentally, there’s another brand-new YMCA in the area — this one in Waterloo — so I may just check that out sometime soon.
I would like to take this opportunity to invite each and every one of you to take 77 seconds out of your day to go view the Video Of The Day over at FamTeam.com. It’s a clip of the south rim of the Grand Canyon, recorded in September of 2005. This evening, I was just looking through this footage again, and I was blown away at the beauty of the Canyon. It’s hard to believe that I actually saw that in person. It’s gorgeous. Has anybody else visited the Grand Canyon?
In other news…
In addition to doing a decent amount of deposition work today, I spent a few hours working on Dad’s laptop. HP was kind enough to actually send a replacement hard drive (as it’s a “consumer-replaceable” part, in their eyes), so that meant I didn’t have to ship off the laptop. Thank God! Anyway, the actual hard drive swap took three minutes, and then it was a matter of reloading Windows XP, installing the programs, restoring all of the backed-up files, et cetera. He’s good to go now, though.
Speaking of laptops, I went over to Grandpa and Grandma Arndt’s house this evening in order to set up a wireless network in their house for the laptop they recently bought. This wireless stuff still fascinates me. I don’t seem to ever get tired of it!
This evening, at 5:36, I received a call from Paul, asking me if I was interested in going to tonight’s 7:00 Blues game against the Vancouver Canucks. A friend of ours was going to the game and had an extra pair of tickets, and he was wondering if we would like to use them. I immediately agreed, and then I went on to ask Jude if he wanted to come. We were both eager to go, so we took care of a few things and got ready to leave for the game.
We arrived in downtown St. Louis approximately 6:30, and we parked a good eight or 10 blocks from the Savvis Center. Instead of paying to park in the attached garage, we decided to walk a little bit and save a few bucks. We found a parking spot on Pine Street, so we stopped and started jogging towards the arena.
Eventually, we met up with our friend, who gave us the tickets. He showed us to some very nice seats, probably a good 30 rows back, and he went on down to his seats, which happened to be four rows behind the glass.
Well, we were pretty thrilled to be in these seats. I was happily snapping away pictures throughout the first period, and we were having a blast watching the game. Mike Sillinger of the Blues scored a goal, and St. Louis had the 1-0 lead entering the first intermission.
About halfway through the intermission, this friend of ours came up to us and told us that there was a pair of empty seats near them. So Jude and I followed him down, and we ended up sitting in the third row, directly behind Blues goalie Curtis Sanford!
I couldn’t believe we had such great seats! Needless to say, I was snapping photo after photo. I got some pretty good shots, but I was having a little bit of trouble with getting the right settings. The speed of the game and the fact I was shooting through glass made it kind of difficult. Despite that, though, I managed to come up with a few really nice shots! I even got a picture of a breakaway goal by Christian Backman in the third period. That was pretty neat.
As the Blues were leading 3-0 in the third with just a few minutes remaining, a few people sitting in the front row got up and left. Jude and I decided to move up a few rows, and we got to watch the final minutes from arguably the best seats in the house! We got to a very close-up view of the empty-net goal by Petr Cajanek to seal the deal with 40 seconds left in the game.
So, to recap… we got free tickets, free parking, and we ended up sitting in the front row by game’s end. Thank You, God! We had a blast. The icing on the cake was the fact the Blues won (4-0), snapping their nine-game skid. They’re still the worst in the NHL, but at least they didn’t play like it tonight.
I’d like to share a couple of my photos sometime soon. I was disappointed that I didn’t get that many spectacular shots, but I got quite a few pretty good ones.