Here's a pretty cool article on a species of ant in the Amazon that kills off all plants in an area except the particular type of tree they nest in, creating "devil's gardens".

Ants, not evil spirits, create poisonous devil's gardens in the Amazon rainforest From Stanford Report

I love the Space Shuttle and am glad to see NASA launching again. Like many loves, mine is a bit irrational. I know the Shuttle is a glorified truck built from 30 year old technology, but I still love it. I know it sucks money away from other programs that might advance science more quickly. I don't care.

This was the first time the boys really saw a Shuttle launch. They, of course, thought it was cool. We got to talk about how the shuttle works, what we learn in space, and how people get to become astronauts. It was a good conversation, one that got the boys thinking about science and hard work. The Shuttle program has already paid dividends to my kids.

Anyway, I'm glad to see the Shuttle back in space and wish the crew the best of luck. Godspeed, Discovery.

My good friend Mychal Schwartz is running for Renton Municipal Court judge (Renton is a town in the Seattle area near where I live.)

Mychal is a very smart guy with a good heart and a very dry sense of humor. Even in college, he was always thoughtful and sincere. He's done great things since school in his public service through the King County and local municipal courts. I'm confident he'll make a great judge (and not just because I want someone to write off my speeding tickets...)

Unfortunately, since I'm not a resident of Renton, I can't vote for him, but those of you who do live in Renton should seriously consider him. You can learn more about Mychal at his website, ElectMychal.com.

On a side note, it's kind of amazing to me that my former classmates are running for office and holding all kinds of important jobs. Guess I'm getting old. Maybe someday I'll have an important job too...

I'm not a big bicycle racing fan, but I do love the Tour de France, mostly to watch Lance stick it to everyone (especially the French -- take that, you Froggies).

I do follow the TDF every year, but this year, my favorite coverage is on Chooky Fuzzbang, a blog by my friend Tony (yes, another Tony). Good commentary and explanations.

http://chookyfuzzbang.blogspot.com/

It's good to be a dad.

Michael (4) and Andrew (7) had prepared nice gifts in class. Michael gave me a clay duck he made in class; the beak had fallen off, but I think it's lovely (it's kind of tough looking now, like Michael.) Perhaps cooler was the card he wrote; his writing has improved dramatically and has progressed beyond his name. The Star Wars lightsaber scene he drew was a nice, traditional touch.

Andrew made me a notepad in class; the title was "Obi-Dad", which I love, even though Obi-Wan was really a bit of a screw-up.

A nice round of golf at Newcastle (on a stunning day), a lovely brunch, and an afternoon nap pretty much topped off a great Fathers' Day.

I seem to be on a bit of a Star Wars binge today...

Anyway, my new favorite blog is Darth Side. It's Darth Vader's blog and the writing is hysterical. In the most recent post, he's complaining about the contractors they're using for the second Death Star construction. He ends by looking forward to the picnic lunch his office is packing for his visit to Endor tomorrow. Sublime.

I also like Darth's management philosophy: "Shape up or sputter to the floor unconscious -- that's my motto." Hmm, maybe that will get IE 7 out faster... "Punish one, teach one thousand", as I always say.

Awesomely funny.

Andrew (7) and Michael (4) have really gotten into Star Wars lately. It's actually kind of neat that we're able to share this since I was about Andrew's age when the first Star Wars movie came out. We even managed to find some of my old Star Wars toys at my parents' house for them to play with.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make some photos and maybe videos of the guys holding light sabers. I found some pretty simple techniques on the web and earned high marks for "cool dad" this week as a result. (Let me tell you that the image of Michael with a light saber is terrifying.)

Along the way, I found some amazing Star Wars fan films. These are amateur movies with a Star Wars theme. Some are meant to fill in gaps between the movies, others are just spoofs or (mostly) light saber battles. In any case, they're amazing. It's incredible what people can do with modern technology. The reason I got into software development and am still doing it after all these years is that I'm super excited about how software can help enable more people to exercise their creativity by lowering the barriers to entry and production. I think word processing did this for writing, digital imaging did this for photography, and now digital videomaking is doing it for filmmaking.

Super neat stuff.

Check out TheForce.Net for a good list. I especially like Revelations, Broken Allegiance, Duality, and the whole Pink Five series. (Not all are links to TheForce.net)

This is one sick and funny knife block. I'm surprised no one ever did this before. Too bad you can't buy it. By Vice Versa.

Thanks to Gizmodo.

This is a very slick site that displays the popularity of different names over the past hundred years or so. Looks like there were a lot of babies named Tony when I was born. My parents were so trendy...

Name Voyager

Thanks to Chooky Fuzzbang for this link.

We went to the Washington State History Museum today in Tacoma. This was our first visit. It's a surprisingly good museum; Andrew even proclaimed it was "better than Chuck E. Cheese" which, for him, is saying something. (I admit, this may have been because of the train exhibit where they let you play with Lego trains and Lincoln Log stuff.)

There exhibits where well done, covering Washington's relatively short history in reasonable detail with a good mix of reading, hands-on stuff, and multimedia. The museum is in the recently restored area of Tacoma near the Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Art Museum. The whole area is pretty cool, although it was empty today, despite being a beautiful Sunday. I imagine people in the area (like us) are still not used to hanging out in downtown Tacoma. I hope it improves. They've done a good job.

Anyway, we'll be going back again.