Chris Moss Online

James & I were shocked and saddened to receive the news today that our dear friend, Duncan Rogerson, passed away on Thursday. We grieve for fruitbat, for he has lost his dear partner.

Many of you know “‘bat and Dunc” who live in the U.K. and some of you have had the pleasure of meeting them on one of their visits to Frisco. We met them through our friends Mike & Tim, who were early adopters of “the internets” and enjoyed meeting and talking with people from around the world via that new (at the time) way of communicating. It was also through Mike & Tim that James & I originally connected.

Duncan and fruitbat love to travel around the world, meeting people and seeing new places and experiencing new things. They have visited us and we have visited them. We even caught up with them in 2000 when ‘bat & Dunc and James & I were in Sydney simultaneously.

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I have never understood why the accepted meaning of the phrase “your money is no good here” is that your purchases are on the house. If someone tells you that your money isn’t any good here, shouldn’t that mean that you aren’t allowed to make purchases (e.g. receive goods/services) at all?

James & I are bound for Australia in a few months. We booked the tickets today – yay! And, we get to fly on the new A380 aircraft.

One of the gifts that I received for Christmas was a device that allows me to control my iPod using the controls of the factory stereo in my car. Most significantly, this includes the buttons on the steering wheel that allow me to advance the tracks. I usually listen to my iPod on shuffle and just skip tracks I don’t want to hear then until something interesting comes up.

I installed this in my car today myself. It involved considerable discombobulation of my car, but I’m glad I did it myself.

It really wasn’t that hard and only took about 30 minutes, not counting the time I spent researching some confusing installation instructions. A car toy retailer would have probably charged $100 and it probably would have taken at least an hour of my time to get them to do it.

It works great and I love it! Now I’m ready for a road trip. Additionally, it scrolls the text (title and artist) from the ID3 tags of the music file. That’s a nice feature as well. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Merry Christmas to all of you. I hope that your Christmas was as wonderful as mine. This year’s Christmas was particularly nice, because I had the last two weeks of December off from work. It was really nice having extra time to spend with James and to catch up on my own projects as well as just generally goof off a bit. We also got to spend a little bit more time with my family at Christmas than usual.

James and I have been paying more attention to our health lately, so we’ve been eating better (well, except for at the holidays), exercising, etc. So, we have each other, our dogs, our health and we are very happy generally.

I also received a lot of wonderful gifts. Here are some of them:

- Nesting ottomans for the living room.
- 2 blanket/throws
- flannel sheets (a surprise favorite!)
- “Blue Dog Speaks” a picture book of “Blue Dog,” the subject of many works by one of my favorite living artists, George Rodrigue
- “State of Denial (Bush At War III)” by Bob Woodward
- “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
- “Following the Equator” by Mark Twain
- “American Lion” – a biography of President Andrew Jackson
- Jimmy Buffett Live in Anguilla a DVD movie and 2 disc CD of a live concert
- Rock Band for Wii
- iJuke, a retro looking jukebox that doubles as speakers for my iPod
- a device that will play/control my iPod through the factory stereo in my car (including advancing the tracks from the buttons on the steering wheel)
- a universal remote for all the audio/visual components
- an Eagles concert DVD

I got lots of great stuff! This listing was really an aide-memoire for myself because I am terrible about remembering what I received as gifts.

I put this together as a “trailer” to the vacation video that I am working on from our Hawaii trip earlier this year. This is my first ever attempt at video editing.