Jim Dalrymple.com

I know how messed up this sounds, but my dog Twiggy managed to take the site down for several hours today. A thunder storm overnight drove the poor dog crazy and she ended up in the server room downstairs.

Like most dogs, loud noises like Fireworks and storms sends them scurrying for cover. When the storm started Twiggy managed to get herself under the small shelf I keep the server on, tore out some cables and took everything offline.

We found her this morning, still under the server caught up in cables that had her trapped. It took a couple of minutes to get her unhooked from everything and then get the server back online.

I talked to my parents last night and told them all about Michael’s accident. Then we talked about how freaky my accident was compared to what Michael went through yesterday — the similarities are kind of incredible.

When I was 11 or 12, I had a similar accident to Michael. Most people don’t know, but I have a false tooth in the front — it came out through my lip when I crashed. For many years I had a mustache, which hid the scar, but over the past few years the scar has almost disappeared.

Here are a few of the similarities:

Jim: Riding down a hill a few hours before my soccer game and lost control of my bike.

Michael: Riding down a hill a few hours before his soccer game and lost control of his bike.

Jim: Went over my handlebars and knocked out my front tooth.

Michael: Went over (or sideways, we don’t really know) his handlebars and knocked out the same front tooth.

Jim: Two strangers (a young man and woman) stopped and took me home.

Michael: Two strangers (a young man and woman) stopped and took him home.

Jim: When I got home, my father said I just stood in the driveway bleeding. When I approached him, I stuck my finger through my lip where the tooth came out. I don’t remember most of that.

Michael: He got out of the car and just stared at us bleeding, not really knowing what to do.

Jim: My parents got the tooth (I’m not sure if they went back or if the people that brought me home picked it up).

Michael: I went back to the accident scene and picked up the tooth off the road.

Jim: My parents took me to see Dr. Christie to have my tooth put back in my mouth. We then went to the hospital.

Michael: We took Michael to see Dr. Christie (yep same guy) and he sent us to the hospital.

The next day, Michael and I both looked about the same. I feel so bad for him.

The Worpress development team has taken a respite from developing new features for an upcoming version to issue a point release for the current stable version. The issue according to the Wordpress Web site deals with a security issue.

The developers didn’t say exactly what the issue was, but they did say that the issue was not public yet. They recommend every update to 1.5.1.3 as soon as possible.

If you are not able to update, they said to delete the xmlrpc.php from your Worpress directory.

I seriously thought my heart was going to break as I watched my 10-year-old son lying in the hospital, covered in blood. earlier today Michael was driving down a steep hill on his bike and lost control. Besides the fact he lost nine teeth, we know very little about what happened.

Mike left the house with his friend to spend the afternoon bike riding—the last thing Monique said was “don’t race down the hills.” A few minutes later she walked into the family room and said “I hope he listens to me about going down the hills too fast—I would hate for him to crash and knock out some teeth.”

She turned around, walked to the front door as a strange car drove up and stopped in front of our driveway. The passenger’s door opened and a young woman got out with Michael, completely covered in blood. Monique screamed and I ran to the door.

After we made sure he had no broken bones, I hopped in the truck and went to the accident scene to recover the missing tooth. It was still in the middle of the road where it landed. I grabbed it drove home, picked everyone up and went to our dentists office. He quickly told us to go to the IWK Childrens Hospital.

They took care of us pretty quickly at the hospital. First they had a doctor check him out, both physically and mentally—until then Michael had no idea where he was or what happened to him. He checked out okay, although they were a bit concerned about him.

When the dental sergeon came, he didn’t have good news. He said they could not put in the front tooth that got knocked out. In addition to that, they had to pull three other teeth because they were so loose. To make matters worse five other teeth had to be wired in place or he would lose those too.

Even though those teeth are now wired in place, Michael will have to go through five root canals in order to save them. The doctor said those teeth are already dead.

Michael spent two or three hours in surgery this afternoon. We left for the hospital at 1:30 pm and arrived home at 8:30 pm.

At least he is alive and has all his limbs, eyes and was wearing a helmet or it could have been much worse.

It’s a Big news day for Apple. The release of iTunes 4.9 brings podcasting to the mainstream, as Apple puts it. They have 3,000 podcasts available to preview download from a new directory within iTunes. I sat down this morning and chatted with two Apple executives, Greg Joswiak and Eddy Cue about iTunes and the iPod.

Apple rolled it’s iPod into one line of color iPods today, which is a good thing, I think. I’ve had one of their 60GB photos since it first came out and love it—not as much as my Shuffle though.

Anyway you can read what Apple said about the iPod and iTunes in separate stories I did earlier today at MacCentral.

Wow, if you thought there was no money in online gambling, you would be wrong. An ex-porn business owner, her husband and two others will cash in $1.4 billion and have shares worth an additional $6 billion.

According to the Reuters story, Ruth Parasol and her husband Russell de Leon, both lawyers, are each set to cash in around $370 million and still own a combined stake worth about $2.7 billion.

Anurag Dikshit, group operations director, is the biggest shareholder. He will cash in shares worth about $720 million and still own a 30 percent stake worth over $2.6 billion.

Marketing director Vikrant Bhargava’s remaining 9 percent stake and cash from the IPO should be worth almost $1 billion.

The downside—and there always seems to be a downside—the group could face jail time if the U.S. decides to clamp down on online gambling.

Thirteen years ago today, Monique and I got married. At that point in our lives it was really a formality—we already bought a house, had joint checking accounts and had lived together in an apartment for a couple of years.

That many years certainly brings with it a few trials and tribulations, but all in all it’s been quite a journey. I can’t imagine life without Monique and luckily, I don’t have to.

Smartest thing I’ve ever done.