I had a nice big letter from the I.R.S. in the mail today. I was guessing it wasn’t my stimulus check, since I knew I made too much money to receive one of those. At first I thought, “Oh, No! I’m being audited!”. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but, still, I don’t know if you ever get a letter from the I.R.S. that’s good. This one says I owed them some money. See, I forgot that last year I received money from my Aunt’s estate, not some gigantic inheritance, but still, it was money that should be considered income. I totally forgot about that, had filed it away, and I never put it in my tax return. Now I receive the letter saying I owe them $1,500. I guess this is when it’s handy that I had started an “emergency fund”, unfortunately it currently has $1,200 in it, started the fund not too long ago; so, while it will help cover this unexpected expense, it puts me back at square one.

Tags: taxes, irs

I ran into some issues this past week using VMWare Fusion, it wasn’t issues with VMWare, it was an issue with our companies security software and an expired certificate I couldn’t get to install due to a script never running when I logged on using VMWare. To resolve this issue I have stopped using VMWare for the time being and have decided to remote into my work machine. Microsoft makes a version of their remote desktop client for the Mac, so I decided to give that a try. The lag on the connection was awful. I would be typing and the letters were always a step behind. This is tolerable for a quick task, but not to sit there all day coding. I decided to check out other options and came upon a free tool called CoRD, which works great. Connecting to my work machine is fast, and even though there is the occasional lag, it was nothing near what I was experiencing on Microsoft RDC. I spent all day yesterday coding with no issue. I highly recommend CoRD for anyone needing to remote into a Windows machine.

Tags: software, apple, mac

A few months back Paige purchased a new camera, a Nikon D80. This is a Digital SLR. It’s a very nice camera. After a month of using it she decided she would have actually liked to have gotten the next step up, the Nikon D300. I’ve been wanting to get myself a DLSR one of these days, since I enjoy taking photos so much, and would like to have more control over my shots than a point-and-shoot camera can provide. I told her I would gladly purchase her camera from her, since I saw how nice it is, and how nice the shots are that it produces. She got her new D300, which she took to Asheville and St. Augustine; and I purchased her D80. I haven’t used it yet, since all I bought from her is the camera body, had to purchase lenses separately. The lenses should arrive this week. I got a basic lens, which is good for portraits or any other type of shot where you don’t need to zoom. I also got a basic tele-photo lens for zooming in on subjects. I purchased Aperture, a software program for the Mac, similar to Adobe Lightroom, which is what Paige uses. It’s made for dealing with RAW images, which is the format DSLRs produce. I’ll need to learn the ins-and-outs of the camera, but it should be fun. I’ll be posting my photos I take on my site.

Tags: camera

After playing Guitar Hero III for a while I found that I was growing tired of playing the same music all the time, so I decided to go purchase Guitar Hero Aerosmith. For those of you that don’t know, this edition of Guitar Hero revolves around Aerosmith, guiding you through phases of their life. You play a lot of their songs, but you also get to play songs from bands that they enjoy: The Clash, The Cult, Lenny Kravitz, Stone Temple Pilots, etc. It has a lot of old Aerosmith songs, which is cool since those are the ones I enjoy most. It’s nothing groundbreaking, pretty much the same as Guitar Hero III, and you may not enjoy it much if you aren’t a fan of Aerosmith; but, if you are a fan and you’d like some new songs to play along to, it’s definitely a good purchase.

Tags: video games

Paige and I took a couple quick vacations the past two weekends, we both needed some time away from work and Atlanta.

Our first vacation was spending July 4th weekend in Asheville, North Carolina. We headed up Friday morning, it’s not too bad a drive, around 3 1/2 hours. We stayed at the Renaissance hotel, which is located within walking distance of the town, which is nice. We spent the first day exploring the town and ended the night watching the fireworks display, which was a nice show. We woke the next morning, planning on heading to Biltmore House, which is 10 minutes away; unfortunately my car wouldn’t cooperate. It wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. I figured I must have left a light on over night, causing the battery to drain. I called roadside assistance, and they sent a tow truck to jump the car. The tow truck driver was the spitting image of Larry the Cable Guy, from the look to the accent. Once he jumped my car we decided to take a trip on the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway. There weren’t many scenic views, but we made a couple stops, and saw a wild turkey, which was cool. When we got back to the hotel I turned off the car, and just for kicks decided to try and start it again, to see if all the traveling had charged up the battery. The car was dead again. We were both happy I never turned the car off while we stopped for the scenic views, we would have been stuck up in the mountains. We spent the evening walking around the town, it was very nice. The next morning I had my car jumped again, and we headed out to Auto Zone to get a new battery. Once that was done we headed over to Biltmore House. It was definitely the highlight of the trip. It’s a beautiful house, and the gardens are great too. We finished the day by stopping off at the winery, taking a tour of it, and attending a wine tasting. We both thought the wine wasn’t going to be all that great, but it ended up being surprisingly good. We sat down and had a cheese plate and some more wine before heading home. Our overall thoughts of the trip? We don’t think we will go to Asheville again. It’s not that great a town. We were expecting something more along the lines of Santa Fe, which is more of an artist community, there weren’t many galleries in Asheville. Also, there are a lot of dirty hippies there, which isn’t the nicest thing to see everywhere. We did enjoy Biltmore, and would gladly visit and stay there, but not Asheville.

This past weekend was a two part trip, and it wasn’t just Paige and I. We left Thursday morning for St. Augustine, Florida. Neither of us had been there, and we have both heard good things about the place. It is about a 5 1/2 hour drive from Atlanta. We met Paige’s Mom when we got there, she flew down from Pennsylvania. We stayed at The Hilton, which is very nice. Much like Santa Fe, where no building can be larger than the church steeple, St. Augustine does not allow any buildings to be larger than two stories. So, instead of your usual high rise hotel, the Hilton is spread out amongst 19 buildings, looking like a small village. The rooms are very nice, and it’s right across the street from the water, and in the heart of everything. We were there from Thursday to Saturday, and never had to use a car. St. Augustine is beautiful, about our only complaint is it was hot and very muggy, but that’s not the city’s fault, it’s ours for heading down to Florida in July : ) It was great to see Paige’s Mom again, she’s a very nice woman. We left Thursday to head over to Lake Panasoffkee, which is where Paige’s grandfather lives. We were visitng him for his 90th birthday. We met up with Paige’s sister there, and I also got a chance to meet other family members. We were there for the day, leaving the next day back to Atlanta. It was a great trip, maybe not the most relaxing vacation, but we still had a great time.

Tags: vacation

After a little more than a year of development, or at least I think it’s been that long; not exactly sure when this project started...our application was released to production today. I think as a team, and as an organization, we have learned a lot about the agile development process, and see where we made our mistakes, and see where we can improve as time goes on. Our future iterations should be a lot smoother from this day forward.

Tags: work