I often enjoy watching a show on Hulu when having dinner at home. Tonight I put on an episode of The Good Guys, a new "opposite buddy cop show" with Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks.

One of the limited commercial interruptions was a public service announcement about exercise featuring Michelle Obama and Elmo on Sesame Street.

I immediately thought of the two great Muppet moments in The West Wing episode "Eppur Si Muove." The first is the scene where First Lady Abbey Bartlet played by Stockard Channing gives Elmo a checkup. Having recently given up her medical license, Elmo wonders aloud if Bartlet should proceed.

"Do you have a diploma you could show Elmo? Can Elmo be frank? This laughing is not filling Elmo with confidence!"

The other great moment is the culmination of many height-related jokes at the expense of C.J. Cregg played by Allison Janney. I think this single frame from the scene during which no dialogue is spoken stands on its own.

According to the Muppet Wiki, the following politicians have appeared with Muppets on television or in person: Kofi Annan, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Christopher Dodd, Queen Elizabeth II, David Gergen, Mike Huckabee, Glenda Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Ed Koch, Wim Kok, Ralph Nader, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Johannes Rau and Christian Wulff. In addition, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen attended a movie screening with Muppets and Kermit has even appeared several times on Hannity & Colmes.

After our successful outing to O'Leno State Park in January, I decided to join Mom and Ross on another camping trip. We were interested in trying the campground at Florida Caverns State Park; however, the Blue Hole camping area is closed for renovations from 15 March through 15 July 2010.

We instead made plans for the Memorial Day holiday weekend at the nearby Three Rivers State Park. The thirty-site camping area proved to be ideal and rather private, considering our proximity to another site, the Lakeside Trail and the small road to the campground boat ramp—which turned out to be a concrete slab suitable for small watercraft only.

There is not too much to do at Three Rivers, but it was perfect for what I wanted. The Lakeside Trail, starting behind our campsite three, offered a pleasant and mild hike through the woods and up to Lake Seminole in parts. There is also a wooden fishing pier on Lake Seminole, which was nice to visit numerous times per day.

While not exotic, we did encounter several species of wildlife including white-tailed deer, armadillos, cardinals, loud frogs and one juvenile rough green snake. Most of all I enjoyed spending time with my family while sitting next to our campfire, drinking Tusker beer from Kenya, far from the lights of civilization.

On Sunday, the second day of the trip, we drove to Florida Caverns to take the tour and explore the area. Ironically, our guide was Park Ranger Frank with whom I last toured the cave. It was nice although I was spoiled by the last visit—there were twenty other people with us this time. Afterward, we hiked the Bluff Trail and walked through the Tunnel Cave, a one-hundred-foot passage through a section of the bluff, before heading back to Three Rivers.

Though typical for the area this time of year, the weather was not particularly ideal. Periods of strong thunderstorms did nothing more than muddy the paths and campsite. The heat and humidity coupled with voracious mosquitoes made our usually leisurely hikes along the trails a bit uncomfortable.

Despite all that, we made the best of our situation and the weekend was an overall success. I am not sure when we will be able to plan another camping trip but I am looking forward to it. Possible destinations include the popular Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park if we can manage to reserve a campsite and Suwannee River State Park.

I have collected several pieces of Sutro Tower art in the past several months. It was bound to happen as I regularly seek out new and interesting information and links for sutrotower.org, including popular culture items and artwork.

The first acquisition was Green Sutro Tower, the third limited edition Gocco print by A Minor Thread artist Charlie Wright. I had seen the earlier editions of this print but never got one before they sold out. Green Sutro Tower is hand cut 5.5 by 4.25 inches and printed on 80 pound Mr. French stock in green ink. I love the simplicity of this work and the peaceful scene it portrays, reminding me of my time spent in the city.

For my birthday, Pam and Omar thought it would be fun to get something Sutro Tower related and did so perfectly with SFCA Sutro Dark, a t-shirt designed by PremiumPop. It is not quite Local but I really like this design and the pseudo-retro styling. SFCA Sutro Dark is color art screened on 100% cotton.

The most recent purchase was of Sutro Tower 2 (6 of 12), a limited edition color linoleum block print by 3 Fish Studios artist Eric Rewitzer. 3 Fish Studios is no stranger to Sutro Tower art, but I was particularly fascinated and impressed by the manual production process documented by Eric on his blog. Sutro Tower 2 is hand pulled 9 by 12 inches and tricolor linocut. I am drawn to the texture of this piece, the detail of the lines and the framing; a true hero portrait of the tower.

I am sure this collection is only beginning, however I must get frames and display these pieces before acquiring more. Future additions will be documented in the Sutro Tower Art photo set on Flickr, if not here.

When I ordered a custom Lenovo ThinkPad W500 (specifications) last month, the estimated ship date was 22 March. I was therefore delighted when on 22 February I received an e-mail indicating my new computer was on its way.

The slim box arrived via UPS on 24 February having flown across the ocean from China, spending two days in US Customs along the way. My excitement only grew as I extracted the notebook from its minimalist packaging, connected the battery and fired it up for the first time.

My first impression of the factory software install was positive. There was a minimum of third-party applications installed and no pop-ups or prompts to buy or install anything. A temporary partition with recovery media images was included in lieu of a DVD. The only annoyance was having to use Lenovo's clunky application to extract the data before reclaiming the disk space.

Fortunately, I have no real need for recovery media. I copied the contents of a Windows 7 Professional 64 DVD to my SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB flash drive and booted off it. Windows was installed and operational in eleven minutes. There were a few pieces of hardware that required vendor drivers but that was a simple matter to resolve, especially with Lenovo's System Update 4.

Over two weeks later, I continue to be impressed by the performance and stability of my ThinkPad. Applications like Firefox, Photoshop, Outlook, 7-Zip and Google Earth run quickly and smoothly, even when under high processing loads. Furthermore, the speed of the computer is not affected while multiple processes consume system resources. Multitasking, indeed.

I have found numerous sites and forums where people share their Windows Experience Index score as computed by the Windows System Assessment Tool. WSAT quantifies the performance and capability of a system's processor, memory, graphics card and hard drive, producing a subscore for each. The lowest of these subscores, which at present range between 1.0 and 7.9, is also the reported base score. These are the results of my assessment test.

As you can see, the W500 performed excellently during these tests. I was a bit surprised at the 2D graphics score (5.9), but the Mobile Intel 4 video chipset appears more than adequate in real world use. When graphics performance is required, the ATI Mobility FireGL (6.4) takes over. I was most entertained if not unsurprised by the scorching hard drive performance score (6.7). I definitely made the right decision by selecting the solid state hard drive.

Instead of using additional benchmark tools to spit out more figures, I decided I would time the boot and Windows loading sequence. For starters, POST takes four seconds from pushing the power button to when the OS starts to load.

With the wireless network and Bluetooth adapters turned on, it took Windows thirty seconds to get to the login screen. With the wireless and Bluetooth turned off, the time was reduced to 17 or 18 seconds.

Windows is immediately ready to use after I log in, with all services and start-up applications loaded and running in under eight seconds. The ThinkPad W500 and Windows 7 seem to be a match made in heaven. Only time will tell if the reputation of the ThinkPad line stands, though based on what I have seen thus far I have no reason to doubt it.