While writing some code at work the other day, I noticed something, that I had meant to blog about earlier.

I work in a .NET development shop, coding C#. One of the latest kicks we’re on at work is IOC and Dependency Injection, we use it everywhere. It’s almost a crime if you actually create an instance of an object using the ‘new’ keyword. One of the side effects of this is we have interfaces for just about everything. There are a couple things I don’t like about this.

When I think of interfaces, I generally think of the something along the lines of IDisposable, IView, INotifyPropertyChange, IDraggable, etc. These interfaces are something you implement if you need certain functionality, and they can be used by multiple classes in your projects. When you start creating interfaces for every class in your project so that you can use a service locator or some other means to create the concrete instance of the class, you end up with interfaces named IUpdateAddressView, IContractService, ILinearScheduleRepository, etc. You’re not going to have any class except for LinearScheduleRepository implementing the ILinearScheduleRepository interface, it’s specifically made for that class, so that you can write code like this

var repository = ServiceLocator.Create<ILinearScheduleRepository>();

It adds complexity and it also makes navigating to code a pain in the arse, unless you have a tool like Resharper at your disposal. If you don’t and you right click on a method or property and chose to go to the definition, you end up in the Interface, not the class that implements that interface method or property.

My other gripe with this is you end up feeling like you’re coding in C/C++, where the interfaces are the equivalent of header files. You can no longer add a new method or property to a class, you must first go to the interface for that class and add your method or property there, then you can go to the class and implement it. It’s a pain to always have to remember to do that, since that’s not something you would generally have to do in C#. I don’t really like having to code for some tool that we’re using. Another place we do this is having to occasionally mark a method as virtual, so that our Mocking tool doesn’t call it when recording your expectations. There’s no other reason for that method to be virtual, but we have to do it if we want to Mock a test (which is something else I’m really not a fan of, but I will save that for another post).

I can see some benefit in IOC and Dependency Injection, I guess it’s just a case of the usual going overboard on the latest buzzword/development craze that we tend to do at my work. Maybe one of these days we’ll go the “let’s try and do a nice simple, non complex” implementation, the kind of thing I enjoy, but I doubt it. I can already sense that our next project will be Silverlight with Prism, Entity Framework, and some Fluent and maybe automapper thrown in just for fun.

Tags: development

Happy New Year! Can you believe another year has passed us? I’m not going to do any year in review, resolutions, goals, this time. Just saying 2009 was a pretty good year, and I hope 2010 will be even better.

Tags: personal

I've been on a bit of a zombie kick lately when it comes to books. I don't know what made me purchase so many zombie stories, but I enjoyed all of them.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks



This is a fantastic book. I think it would make a great movie. The premise of this book is that an actual Zombie War took place, which almost wiped out human civilization. The book is told from the point of view of the people involved in the war. It's a great premise for a story, and it is well written; I highly recommend it.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - Jane Austin, Seth Grahame-Smith



This is an interesting take on a zombie story. While not one of the better ones that I read, I still enjoyed it. The author expands on Jane Austin's classic novel, strategically inserting zombies into the story.

Breathers: A Zombies Lament - S. G. Browne



In the world of this book, zombies have always existed. They're just a part of life. For some reason, when some people pass away, they return as a zombie. This book takes a look at what the world would be like if zombie's were just a part of every day life. The main character, Andy, was in a car wreck with his wife. She died, but he returned, coming to life after his funeral took place. The story follows Andy adjusting to being an outcast. He lives in his parents basement, sees a therapist, and attends a zombie support group. The story takes a pretty good twist, and is more a humorous look at zombies than a horror story.

Jailbait Zombie - Mario Acevedo



This story deals with vampires and zombies. It takes place in modern day America, where vampire's exist, but have kept hidden from humanity. The undead have started appearing, and the vampires are wiping them out, before humanity sees that there can be a such thing as supernatural creatures. The main character, Felix Gomez, is sent to track down the source of the zombies, and in the course of that search, comes upon a sixteen year old girl who wants to become a vampire because she has some debilitating disease. It's a good book, told in the manner of old noir detective novels.

Tags: books, zombies

Paige and I just returned from what has become our annual vacation to the Southwest. This trip lasted a little over a week, we left Friday, Oct. 2nd, and returned yesterday, Saturday, Oct 10. During that time we squeezed in a lot.

We spent Friday evening thru Sunday afternoon in Albuquerque, NM, enjoying the annual International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta. We had a blast. The weather was perfect for the two days we went to the event, although there were some strong winds in the evenings, which prevented some of the events from taking place.

Sunday afternoon we had some time to kill before heading north to Santa Fe, NM, so we swung by Petroglyph National Monument. There are a couple different hiking trails you can take, we opted for the easier one that would only take us around 2 hours. There are somewhere in the vicinity of 25,000 petroglyphs in the park, the path we took showed us around 100 - 200.

We spent Sunday evening thru Wednesday morning in Santa Fe, NM, one of our favorite haunting grounds in the Southwest. No matter how many times we go there, we thoroughly enjoy it. We happened to be there during events commemorating their 400th anniversary and also Hispanic Heritage Month.

While staying in Santa Fe, we took a day trip to the Taos Pueblos. This is located just north of Taos, NM. The Taos Pueblos allows you to view the Native Americans living in their traditional way. We enjoyed this visit a lot, and took lots of photos.

Wednesday morning we set out for Monument Valley, UT. This is quite a trek, it takes around 6 1/2 hours to drive there from Santa Fe, NM; but, it's truly worth it. This time we stayed at The View Hotel, which is located in the park itself. The view from our balcony was amazing. We could see both mittens and the other butte which are in pretty much all photos you will see of Monument Valley. We arrived just in time to see the sunset. We stayed there Wednesday thru Friday morning.

Friday morning we headed back to Santa Fe, NM, for one more night in our favorite city. We flew out of Albuquerque the next afternoon.

This was a great trip, and one I'm sure we repeat many times in the future.

Tags: vacation

I switched internet service providers when I moved into my new loft. It wasn't something I set out to do, but in the end I am glad I did it.

I've been using Comcast for my ISP for the past 3 years. I never had any issues, the service was usually always there, maybe dying during a storm; and the speeds were great. I never had a bad word to say about them, but I think that has to do with the fact that I never had to deal with their customer service.

When I moved to my new place, I had it set up so that in the morning, my old service would be shut off; and in the evening, my new service would be turned on. A technician showed up in the morning at my old place, and shut off the service. That evening a technician showed up at my new place to turn on the new service. I used my old cable modem, and the technician had everything hooked up; but I was not authenticating in their system. Of course the technician did his job, now it came time for me to sit on the phone with customer service trying to get my service hooked up. Long story short, I went back and forth between customer service telling me there had to be something wrong on my side; and technicians saying everything was fine on my side (which it was, I was hitting the internet fine, just couldn't authenticate so that I could use the service). After a couple weeks of this I said screw it.

I had heard of a new service in Atlanta called Clear. Unlike your usual options of DSL, FIOS or Cable, clear uses WiMax. The best way to think of this is to compare it to cellular phone service. Clear is sending out their signal, and my WiMax modem is picking it up. I signed up for the 6MB service, and so far any time I run a speed test I am getting up in the 5+ MB speed range. Clear also offers a mobile service, where you can plug in a USB modem to your laptop and have their internet service on the go, but I'm just not that big a geek. I can't think of any time I would need that, so I opted not to do it.

I'll admit that it's not as super fast as my cable modem service, but it's fast enough that I can surf, stream and upload photos with no problem. So far I am very happy with the service, and hopefully it continues.

Tags: personal, clear

I've moved out of the house I was renting. This is actually pretty old news, seeing as I moved into my new loft back at the end of June. I'm living in a one bedroom 1400 sq ft loft in a place called The Warehouse. This is the same loft complex that my friend Paige lives in. At first I was hesitant to move into the same complex, seeing as there's no better way to ruin a good friendship than to invade each others space; but I think we both enjoy our time to ourselves so much, that this hasn't really been a problem. Even though I live up the hall and around the corner from Paige, we can go days without actually seeing each other. It's also great for the times that we do want to hang out, because I can just walk over and have a drink or two, and then leave. Before I would have to drive 6 miles over to hang out, and then drive back, after drinking.

My place is pretty nice. It's basically like you would think a real loft is. It's one big room, with an upstairs area that's become my office. I have windows upstairs, and a sky light in the bedroom, otherwise my unit is on the interior, so I have no windows on the first level. I have a laundry room, a bathroom, and a decent sized kitchen. My dishwasher is one of those units you wheel over near the sink, hook the hose up to the faucet, and plug in. I was a little scared the first time I used it, because I didn't know if I would hook everything up to where there wasn't water shooting out all over the place, but it was painless and worked like a champ. It's not the greatest place, but it's good enough for a single guy that wanted to cut some expenses and move out of the house I was renting. I'm saving around $600 a month with the move, once you take into account the lower rent, no yard service, pest service or security monitoring service. I also live within walking distance of MARTA, which I take to work, so I'm not really spending any money on gas, and when the weather gets cooler I can walk to the station.

Tags: personal

I've been ignoring my blog for too long. Even if no one except a couple friends read this blog, and maybe the occassional developer stumbling across a post; I've still found that when I am blogging I get interested in side projects, which give me my fodder to blog about. I've been ignoring my blog for too long, and my site in general, and it's time to get back into it.

Tags: personal

Now that I participate in the ‘Social’ aspect of the web (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) I kind of forget about my blog. There are some friends of mine that this is still the way they know what’s going on in my life, so I guess I should bring them up to date.

I got a new car. I lease my car. I know, not exactly the best thing to do financially, but I’m one of those people that likes a new car every 3 - 4 years, so for me leasing is good. The lease on my previous car, a 2005 Black Mini Cooper Convertible, was ending in September. I liked the car so much that I decided to look into getting another one. This time I opted for a red one, with the white bonnet stripes. I picked it up June 5. I have a 3 year lease on this one. Figure by then I will be 40 years old, and I can maybe look into getting my mid-life crisis car.



Next, I got a new place to live. I’ve been renting the house I am currently living in going on 3 years now. I figure that’s long enough. I really don’t like the house all that much, I just hate moving, so I’ve kind of stuck around here. One thing I really don’t enjoy about this house is that it’s surrounded by so many tall trees. I dread any time there’s a huge storm, because I am just waiting for one of the trees to fall on the house. One did fall last month, but it fell away from the house. Still, I heard it falling and ran to the window to watch it. My new place is a loft. It is a 1 bedroom 1 bathroom which measures 1400 square feet. It’s in the same loft warehouse as Paige, so that will save me some miles on my new car, since most of the miles I put on are from driving between here and there. The place is mine starting July 1, I need to be out of here by the end of August. I plan on moving over the course of July and being out of here by the beginning of August.

I’m still working at Turner. I guess with the economy the way it is I’m just happy to have a job. Work has its good and bad moments. I’m still working on the Silverlight project. It’s coming along nicely, but the project isn’t being run all that well. I’ve just kind of stopped caring, figure I’ll just come in and do the work. I hate when work gets that way, hopefully things get better soon, so I start enjoying it again.

Paige and I are taking a quick little vacation next month. We’re heading down to Florida. We’re both on a saving money kick. That’s one thing I am happy about with the new car and the new place to live. The new car is $100 less a month, and once I add in rent, yard service, alarm, and pest service, I’m saving around $600 a month getting the new place. It will be nice to not shell out so much money every month. We may take another South West trip in the fall, but otherwise we’re doing little getaways, and have been grilling out on the weekends to save money on eating out.

There hasn’t been too much else going on. I’m spending my free time going through all my stuff, finding stuff to donate and stuff to throw away. I tend to do that when I move. Since my new place is pretty much a huge room, I’m not going to have a place to just throw a bunch of boxes of stuff, so I figure I need to get rid of the clutter.

Tags: personal

The Nintendo DSi came out recently, it’s an update to the Nintendo DS Lite handheld gaming system. This update provides a couple things

• Camera
• Wi-Fi internet browsing
• SD Card Slot for adding a card with music on it (MP3 Player)
• Interface similar to Nintendo Wii, where your home screen has a slot for all of the different things you can do, and any games you download.
• DSiWare store and games.

I gave my Nintendo DS to my niece, Payton. My nephew, Bryceson, and niece, Jayda, each got one for Christmas, and Payton had been doing chores to earn money to buy one. Since I was getting rid of mine I gave it to her and let her spend her money on games.

I did buy a game to go with it, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. I was a big fan of GTA Vice City, and while I knew this wouldn’t be as big and extravagant as that, being on the small screen, it was getting rave reviews. It is lots of fun. The developers did a great job of bringing the game to the handheld platform.

Tags: video games, nintendo ds

I tell you, since I started reading on the train ride to and from work every day, I’ve been plowing through some books. It’s been a little over a month since I finished ‘The Stingray Shuffle’, and I just finished the last of four more books by Tim Dorsey.



I’ll tell you one thing, the author is very consistent. The first book of his I read, ‘Triggerfish Twist’, was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Five books later, and I’d have to give them all the same rating. The books are well written, very imaginative, great plots, great characters, and hilarious. I have one more, ‘Nuclear Jellyfish’, but I’m taking a break and moving on to something else starting next week.

Tags: books

I just finished another novel by Tim Dorsey, and I can now safely say that he may have become one of my favorite writers.



The premise of the book is that a book written almost a decade ago, called ‘The Stingray Shuffle’ is suddenly starting to sell like crazy. This catches the eye of the publisher, who let’s the author know, and he sets up a book signing tour. Thing is, the reason the book was selling so well is that a drug cartel chose the book as a container for selling drugs through the bookstores they were using as the front for their drug operation.

The main character of these books is Serge A. Stroms, a serial-killing local Floridian historian. Serge is okay until he’s off his meds, which is pretty much all of the time. Serge has a great way of killing people. It’s never just something simple, it’s always very elaborate; like when he makes a guy swallow a bunch of bullets and then puts the guy in an MRI, so that the bullets are pulled out of his body by the powerful magnets. This makes for fun for the coroner when he sees all these exit wounds for the bullets, but no entry wounds.

While Serge is a serial-killer, he’s also one of the most likable characters you will ever read about.

I have 6 books by Tim Dorsey, I’ve already started on the next one. I’ve started taking a book along with me for the ride to and from work on MARTA. I used to just listen to music, but this helps make the time pass even more quickly; plus it helps me get through the huge stack of books I have sitting at home.

Tags: books

For the most part, my exercise is always aerobic. I’ve been trying to shed some pounds and keep them off. While this has been working out nicely, all though I have let it slip a little over winter and gained back 5 lbs; I’ve decided to try to add some strength training to my routine. I’ve happened upon two exercise programs that I thought I would give a try.

The first is called ‘100 Push Ups’, and, as you can probably guess from the name, the goal of the program is for you to be able to do 100 push ups. You don’t start off doing 100 push ups. If you follow the program, you should be able to do 100 push ups by the end. The program is a six week program, divided into 3 days a week. Before you start doing any training you first have to test yourself. In testing yourself, you do as many proper push ups as possible, before your arms give out. When I tried this I performed 25. I used to be able to do a lot more than that, would do at least 50 a day in JROTC back in high school when I would do something to get in trouble. I’m still pretty happy I was able to pull off 25 though.

The test helps you chart out the coarse of the training program. You print out the grids for each week, which are provided on the web site, for free. You look up the number of push ups you performed in the test, and this shows you how many push ups you do for each day of training. I just started the first day of training, figured it’s best to do it Monday, Wednesday and Friday. For my level, on the first day, I did 10 push ups, 12 push ups, 7 push ups, 7 push ups, and 10 push ups, with 60 second breaks between each set. Man, my arms were like jelly at the end, but I was able to do it, for a total of 46 push ups. I’m sure I will feel this tomorrow.

Come Wednesday, I will be doing 10, 12, 8, 8 and 12, for a total of 50; and by the end of the week it will be 57. I figure I can stick with this for 6 weeks. I’ll be interested to see if I can do 100 push ups easily come the end.

I’m also looking into the ‘200 Sit Up’ program, which should help with the stomach. I need to get a mat to work out on, all I have around here are hard wood floors.

Tags: exercise

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga was one of the first Lego video games, but it’s the last one I got around to playing.



The other two Lego video games I’ve played, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman, I ended I playing until I reached 100%. I’m not doing so with Lego Star Wars. I am currently sitting at a little over 80%, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve gone through all of the levels in free play, and I have all of the Red Bricks, True Jedi’s, and Mini Kits. What I have left to do are all of the time trials, and I’m really not interested in doing that. I’ve already been through all of the levels a couple times each, no need to do it again in under a certain amount of time. While I usually try to get 100% on a game, I’m happy retiring this one early. It’s a fun game, very well executed, and I enjoyed playing it.

Tags: wii, video games

I would list Christopher Moore as my favorite writer, his imagination and humor are the best; but, Tim Dorsey may have just taken over that spot. I’ll be able to tell when I finish a couple more of his books.

I just finished reading “Triggerfish Twist”.



This book never slows down. The characters, and there are a lot of them, are some of the best written characters I’ve seen in a book. The book takes place in Tampa, FL, a town that had just been named the third best town in America to live. This happened by mistake, when the company in charge of making up the list of best towns transcribed the crime rate incorrectly, causing the town to jump from the lower three hundreds the year before, to third this year. A family, the Davenports, move to Tampa as part of a job relocation. While the neighborhood they move into looks nice, they soon find it’s definitely not. I enjoy humorous books, and this one is funnier than any other I have ever read. The situations and characters that Tim Dorsey can dream up are amazing. I found this author through a recommendation when I purchased the last Christopher Moore book. I can definitely see how people that like Christopher Moore like Tim Dorsey. I purchased a couple of his books, so I will be able to see if he’s as consistently funny as Christopher Moore.

Tags: books

Here’s some of the current music I am listening to.

Riverboat Gamblers: Underneath the Owl



I discovered this group a few years back while listening to punkradiocast and have been hooked ever since that day. This newest album of theirs was released this past February, and I purchased it on iTunes over the weekend. This is a great album. Riverboat Gamblers are from Texas, and apparently put on a great show. They were the opening act for a concert Paige and I went to a while back, but we were fashionably late and missed them, so I’ve yet to see them play live. This is just great rock music.

HorrorPops: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill



While I mainly listen to punk rock, I have always enjoyed rockabilly and psychobilly music. HorrorPops fall into the latter category. This is their third album, release early last year, and is just as great as the first two. The lead singer and upright bassist, Patricia Day, is beautiful and has a great voice. HorrorPops kind of walk the line between The Cramps and The Misfits. Great music.

Devil Doll: Queen of Pain and The Return of Eve



I came upon Devil Doll as a recommendation from Amazon when I purchased the HorrorPops album. I listened to a couple of the samples, and I ended up purchasing both albums and wasn’t sorry with the purchase. I don’t really know how to describe the music; it’s a mix of rockabilly, punk and swing. Colleen has an amazing voice, and apparently is also a very accomplished musician.

Classic: The Bouncing Souls: How I Spent My Summer Vacation



I have ever Bouncing Souls album, but this is my favorite. True Believer is a great song.

Tags: punk, music

I just finished reading the new Christopher Moore book, “Fool”.



Christopher Moore is my favorite author, and I think Fool ranks up there as one of his best books since “Lamb”. Although it was a little of a slow start, this new take on King Lear ended up being an offbeat, easy to read, delight. Even if you’ve never read any of the other books by Christopher Moore, I recommend picking this up.

Tags: books

I bought my first Gregory Maguire book a few years ago. It was ‘Wicked’. This was before it was made into a broadway play. I’d never heard of the author, I just saw a book that said it was the story about the Wicked Witch of the West and thought it looked interesting. I bought the book and ended up really liking it. I thought it was very creative to take a story and tell it from the point of view of one of the other characters. It had a great back story, you actually saw that the Wicked Witch was a nice person when she was younger, an activist, and a good friend. After that I read a couple other books by him: ‘Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister’, ‘Mirror, Mirror’ and ‘Lost’. I just finished reading the two other books in the Wicked series.

Son of a Witch



This is the story about Liir. It is thought that Liir is the son of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, but even he is not totally sure of that. This story follows him leaving the Witch’s castle after Dorothy kills her, and his adventures there after. While not as good as Wicked, it’s still a good story, and very well written.

A Lion Among Men



As you can probably tell from the title, this story revolves around the Cowardly Lion. It starts when the lion is young, and follows through the time he is with Dorothy, and up through the time where he is searching for Liir, because Liir is thought to have the spell book the Wicked Witch used. This story is great, I almost like it as much as the original. The ending is great, and ties up a couple loose ends from the second book.

I recommend reading all three books if you enjoy fiction and are a fan of the Wizard of Oz. Gregory Maguire is a great writer, he paints a great picture of Oz, he’s very imaginative and is a joy to read. I also recommend his other books, all of them have been great so far.

Tags: books

Paige and I took a nice, quick, little vacation a few weeks back. We went to Key West, FL. We left on a Thursday and came back on a Sunday, thinking this would be the perfect amount of time to do all the exploring we needed to do. Looking back; we wish we would have had a couple more days. We had a spectacular time. You can view the photos here.

Tags: vacation

My gift from Paige this past Christmas was something I had been wanting for a while, but have never gotten around to purchasing. Since I am cursed with a beard that grows in fast, I have to shave often (it should be daily, but that doesn’t always happen). I’m not a fan of all the new disposable razor blades, with 4 blades on them and costing a lot for refills. I was always a fan of the shaving kits you would see in the old movies, where you lather up a badger hair brush and use a safety razor to shave. This was my gift from Paige, and I love it. She got me the following:

Omega Shaving Soap



This comes in its own handy bowl.

Old Original Badger Hair Shaving Brush



Parker Safety Razor



I purchased a 10 pack of double edge steel blades at CVS for $4.99; which is a lot better than the price of those disposable blades I used to buy for my Mach 3.

The first time I shaved with the safety razor was a scary experience. That’s a pretty freakin’ sharp blade, but I made it through unscathed. Once my face was lathered with the shaving soap, the blade just glided across my face. I made sure I didn’t apply a lot of pressure. At first I couldn’t even tell it was actually removing my beard it moved so effortlessly, but I stopped and looked and ran my hand across it, and it was super smooth. If you want a manly shave, get yourself these products. After the initial investment, which isn’t all that bad, you only have to get yourself the blades; so in the long run you will save money. The shaving soap lasts a while, as will the brush, as long as you take care of it.

Tags: personal, shaving

I finished Tomb Raider: Underworld earlier today. It was enjoyable, and the story was very interesting. My only gripe about the game is the controls weren’t all that great. There’s just some games that don’t translate all that well over to the Wii controls.

Once I was finished with Tomb Raider I collected all of the games for the Wii and my Nintendo DS that I have finished, and I took a trip up to GameStop to trade them in for store credit. I currently have a little over $250 in store credit. GameStop was crowded, so I didn’t bother spending time looking for a new game. I figure I can survive on Guitar Hero: World Tour for a while. I’ve finished the game, on Medium, but I haven’t achieved 100% on all the songs.

I also recently finished another book, “Plague Ship”, by Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul.



Clive Cussler is the author of the Dirk Pitt series of books I used to read. Once the Dirk Pitt series finished he branched out into a series of books with Jack DuBrul which encompass the “Oregon Files”, named after the ship that the characters reside on. He also started a series with Paul Kamprecos which is the “Kurt Austin” adventures. He recently teamed up with his son, Dirk Cussler to pen the new Dirk Pitt series, which is about Dirk Pitt Jr, the son of Dirk Pitt from the original books. All of these have a couple things in common: they take place around water, they have the over the top, taking over the world bad guys, and they are meant more for a fun read that anything else. I don’t know why, but I’ve found that I enjoy these stories. Plague Ship ranks as one of my favorites from the Oregon Files series.

Tags: wii, video games

Paige and I enjoyed a nice dinner at Agave Restaurant to ring in the new year. It’s that time of year again, time to make some resolutions.

I think this year instead of making some big overall resolutions, I’m going to list some things I’d like to start or continue doing.

• I got myself out of debt earlier this year, and have done fairly well at keeping myself out of debt. I do still use my credit card to pay for stuff online or for our trips we take, but I make sure to pay it off either at the end of the month, if I can, or within a month or two if I need the time. This year I plan on continuing to stay out of debt.
• When I was younger I used to draw all the time. I have a lot of great drawing tools lying around, and I really need to get back into it.
• I haven’t been playing the guitar as much as I used to, so I need to get back into doing that.
• While I have been good at not getting into debt again, I haven’t been doing all that well on putting money into my savings account. I’ve set up automatic deposits to try and resolve this. I have two big expenses coming up this year, my lease on my car runs up in September, as does the lease on the house I am renting. I have been renting this place for 3 years now, and am thinking of either looking into getting a place of my own, if I have the money and the housing market allows it; or at least move somewhere else and rent, for a change of scenery.
• I’d like to live more frugally this year. Just because I can afford to eat out often, or get Starbucks coffee daily, doesn’t mean I have to. I’m going to try to stick to eating out on weekends or during the week for special occasions, and cook meals at home during the week. I’m also thinking of cutting out the trips to Starbucks, or at least cutting it down to once or twice a week.
• Through exercise and monitoring myself using the Wii Fit I was able to lose 15 pounds this past year. Now, I have gained some of that back over the holidays, so I need to get back into working out and keeping the weight off. I also need to broaden my exercises beyond aerobic and get some strength training in too.

Tags: new years, resolutions

Shortly after I finished Lego Batman I purchased two new games for the Wii. Call of Duty: World at War and Tomb Raider Underworld. I finished Call of Duty yesterday and have now started playing Tomb Raider Underworld.

Call of Duty: World At War



I’ve been playing the Call of Duty games since they started coming out for Playstation 2 many years ago, only missing Call of Duty 4 because it wasn’t released for a system that I own. Call of Duty: World At War is a first person shooter that takes place in the final days of World War II. You play two characters, an American and a Russian, whose stories intertwine. The American conflict taking place with Japan, and the Russian conflict taking place in Germany. Just like Resident Evil 4, I found this game perfect for play on the Wii. This game supports the Wii Zapper, but I found it too hard to play that way because you have to be able to press the buttons on the WiiMote, which is hard to do when it is in the Zapper. Using the WiiMote to aim your weapon gives you better precision than using the joysticks when playing the game on other systems. This game has online play, but that’s something I’ve never been interested in, so I didn’t play that part, just the single player campaign mode. It’s a great game, definitely recommend it if you are into first person shooters.

Tomb Raider Underworld



Tomb Raider is another game I have been playing since it first started, back on the original PlayStation. I haven’t started playing this yet, so I won’t have a review until I’m finished. Most of the Tomb Raider games have been good, but there were a couple that felt thrown together just to release another title in the franchise. Hopefully this one isn’t one of those.

Tags: wii, video games

I picked up the new J. K. Rowling book, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” last night while grabbing a couple things from Kroger. It was already 40% off, plus I used my Kroger card to get additional savings, it cost around $5.

For those of you not up on Harry Potter, one of the stories from this book was mentioned in the final Harry Potter book. This book is short, around 120 pages, and can be read in about 1 hour. It contains 5 stories, and commentary on each story by Dumbledore. I would liken this to something like Grimms Fairy Tales. Each of the stories are very short, and convey a message. The commentary by Dumbledore is the interesting part. If you’re a fan of Harry Potter, it’s a good quick read if you can find it cheap.

Tags: books

I just finished a great book called ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’, by Stieg Larsson.



This book caught my eye one day while I was at Barnes & Noble, and after giving it a once over I figured I’d pick it up. I haven’t read many mysteries lately. This mystery is what’s known as a ‘closed room’ murder mystery, akin to what Agatha Christie would write, where a murder has taken place, and because of the circumstances, you know who all the suspects are. In this case the suspects were all trapped on an island, where the only access was a bridge, that was closed due to an accident.

It wasn’t until I finished the book, and read a quick blurb about the author, that I found out he had passed away in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscript for this novel, and two others. He was 50 years old and died of a heart attack. The two other books are being released in the coming years, and if they are anything like this one I will plan on reading them.

I recommend this book if you are into a good mystery.

Tags: books

It took a while, but I finally finished Lego Batman on the Wii with 100%. I used the same strategy I used when playing Lego Indiana Jones. I saved up the points I earned along the way and found and purchased ‘invincibility’ and ‘score x 6’. These allowed me to get through the levels easier and also to earn enough points to purchase anything I needed.

It took me a while to figure out that you go through this game as both Batman and Robin, and also as each of the villains. It’s actually an interesting way to tell the story. Usually when you are playing as Batman, you show up to the scene after the villain has already done their deed. Now, when you play as the villain, you play the backstory that leads up to that deed.

Overall I think I enjoyed Lego Indiana Jones more than this one. The first reason is Indiana Jones followed the story from the movies, so it was something I could relate with. Secondly, while this game was entertaining, it seems like it was just created to milk the franchise. I still need to play the Star Wars series, but I think I am going to take a break from the Lego games for a while.

Tags: wii, video games

I just finished reading two more books.

A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich



I have been on a little bit of a history kick lately. The story behind this book is actually pretty interesting. In 1935 a 26-year old Gombrich was tasked with writing a history book that could be enjoyed by children and adults alike. He completed the book in 6 weeks. The way he made it enjoyable to children is the text isn’t littered with dates. Instead he will tell you about on piece of history taking place, such as Julius Caesar in Rome, and when he tells you about another piece of history he would say it happened around the same time as Julius Caesar or maybe 100 - 200 years after. This helps you put everything into perspective, without constantly having to see tons of dates. I guess this makes it more of a history book you can read instead of one you would want to use as a reference book.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away) by Bill Bryson



I love Bill Bryson books. He could write about the most boring subject in the world and make it both an interesting and humorous narrative. This book is a collection of weekly stories that Mr. Bryson wrote for Night & Day magazine, one of the Sunday inserts for a newspaper in England. Bryson had lived in England for a while with his English wife and kids and had recently moved back to America. His stories are a mixture of what is different between America and England and also is used to introduce English citizens to some of the American traditions. As always, he is very funny, and this is a very entertaining read.

Tags: books

I stayed in town for Thanksgiving, my mother is in Virginia picking up my grandmother to bring her down to Columbus for the week. I am heading down to Columbus for the weekend to visit them.

Paige and I had a nice little Thanksgiving. We had dinner at a restaurant called ‘The Palm’. The Palm is located in Buckhead in the Westin hotel. We made a night of it and got a room at the hotel. It was nice to have a night away and still be in town. The dinner was good, except for the lobster bisque, which had a fishy taste. We both ate too much, didn’t have room to have a couple after dinner drinks.

The Westin is next door to Lenox Square mall. We walked over and watched a little of the Macy’s tree lighting ceremony, headed back to the hotel for dinner, then walked back over to look at the tree, hoping we could walk off the full feeling, but that didn’t work. The tree isn’t all that great looking either, shame such a big tree had to give its life for that. The next morning we walked over to the mall and did some people watching. There weren’t as many people out shopping on Black Friday as we thought there would be, but there were still a good bunch out there. That’s the first time I’ve ever ventured out to a store on Black Friday, I try to stay away from stores this time of year.

Overall it was an enjoyable Thanksgiving.

Tags: holiday

I have uploaded the photos I like from the vacation Paige and I took to the Southwest. I still have to go through my photos from Sedona, which is taking a while, because we were there for 4 days and went to a lot of different places.

You can find the latest photos over in the photo section of my site.

Tags: photos, vacation

After hearing all of the horror stories about the long waits and issues with early voting, I was preparing for the worst today, but it never happened. My polling place is an Elementary school within walking distance of my house. I left my house at 9:15, was back home by 9:45. Voting took a total of probably 10 minutes. Lovely!

On a side note, this is the first time I’ve voted in a while where I voted for someone because I really felt strongly about them. Usually voting comes down to which person do you hate the least, the lesser of two evils.

Tags: voting

After finishing Lego Indiana Jones I went out looking for a new game to play. I enjoyed the Lego game so much that I purchased the Lego Batman game. I’ve played the first level so far and it’s just as fun as the Indiana Jones game.

I also found that Guitar Hero World Tour is now out. I purchased the game itself, instead of going for the whole kit at the moment, just didn’t feel like spending that much. If you purchase the whole kit you get a drum set, guitar, and microphone. This new guitar hero is competing with Rock Band. The game is fun, and I may end up purchasing the drum set at a later date, because there are some good drum songs on it; but I will hold off for now.

Tags: video games, wii

I just finished reading another Thursday Next novel, by Jasper Fforde, called Something Rotten.



This is the fourth book in the Thursday Next series and it is probably my favorite. Jasper Fforde has to be one of the most imaginative authors I’ve ever read; it’s amazing the stuff he comes up with. This story is very funny, entertaining and well written. I recommend this series to anyone that enjoys quirky humor and a fun book.

I have his newest Thursday Next novel, First Among Sequels, but I think I am going to take a break and read something else right now. I purchased a couple classic novels, you know, the stuff you were forced to read back in grade school. I figure I’ll appreciate them more now that I am reading them for my own pleasure. I also have a couple other books sitting around that need reading. Will get back to Fforde later on.

Tags: books

Yes, you read that title correctly. I installed the latest version of the Microsoft OS, Windows Vista, on my MacBook. I didn’t install it in a virtual machine using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, I actually used BootCamp and installed it directly on my MacBook in a separate partition. I did this for two reasons. Number one: I didn’t use VMWare Fusion or Parallels because my MacBook is one of the old ones that can only support up to 2 GB or RAM, so I would only be able to give my virtual machine around 1 GB and still have a responsive Mac. Windows Vista wouldn’t be a happy camper under 1 GB of RAM, especially since the reason I installed it is for reason number two. Number two: I realize at the end of the day, even though I love Apple and my Mac, the thing that brings home the paycheck is Microsoft development. We are getting into serious development at work now using .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0. I need to have a machine at home that I can use to work on, and I’d rather not have to lug around a laptop back-and-forth to work every day.

Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.

I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.

Tags: microsoft, apple, vista

When I purchased Wii Fit and did my first weigh in, I came in at 185 lbs. Now, I’m not some chunky guy, but a 5’7” guy weighing in at 185 lbs tends to have some signs of love handles. I set my goal in Wii Fit to get down to 170 lbs. I set a goal of 3 months, figuring 5 lbs a month may be achievable. It’s taken a little while longer than that, but I weighed in at 170 yesterday. Now, my weight tends to head back up a couple pounds on the weekend, since this is when Paige and I head out to eat, but that’s fine. My next goal is to get down to 160 lbs. Wii Fit says my ideal weight is 148 lbs, but that’s just too skinny for me. I used to weigh that much back when I was around 28, and when I look at old photos my face was very skinny. I think 160 may be a good stopping point. To achieve this goal I pretty much just try to watch what I eat. I try to weigh in on the Wii Fit every day at the same time, and use it to work out when I have a chance.

Tags: wii, fitness

I came across this web site the other day that is very helpful and super simple to use. It’s simplicity at its finest.

The site is called Umbrella Today. It asks you for your zip code and returns a YES or NO on whether or not you may need an umbrella today. You can also sign up to have text messages sent to your phone to let you know when you may need an umbrella.

Tags: websites

While I mostly read fiction I try to fit in a non-fiction book or two when I can. Lately these have dealt with American History. When I was in high school and college I was always more interested in World History or Medieval History, I didn’t develop an interest for American History until later.

I just finished reading a pretty good book by Kenneth C. Davis, “America’s Hidden History”. This book deals with some of the unknown facts or back stories around the events and characters in a couple events from history, such as the Revolutionary War, or the Pilgrims. I found it a very interesting read, and Mr. Davis does a good job of keeping you interested in the subject, which can be a hard thing to do when it comes to history.

Tags: books

Paige and I returned earlier this week from a nice southwest vacation. We’ve come to really enjoy traveling to the Southwest, and this trip did not disappoint.

We started our journey in Phoenix, Arizona, which is where we flew into. We took the rental car from there to Sedona, Arizona, for a stay at The Enchantment Resort. This is the place we had stayed on an earlier visit. This time we did a lot more exploring of ruins and trails. We were there from Saturday to Tuesday.

The next leg of our journey was The Grand Canyon. It’s a beautiful big hole in the ground. We got there to experience the sunset, and took photos the next morning too, before heading off to our next destination: Monument Valley.

Monument Valley, Utah, is amazing. This was another one evening stay, with lots of exploring.

The next leg of our journey was Albuquerque, New Mexico. We timed our trip perfectly to experience the first day of the International Balloon Fiesta! We lucked out with the weather, although it did get too windy the first evening to experience the balloon glow. The next day was too windy and rainy, so they canceled most all of the events.

We finished our journey in our favorite spot, Santa Fe, New Mexico. As always, it was a perfect experience.

We both got a lot of photos using our new cameras. It will take a while to go through all of them and get them up on Flickr, but I will post them when I get them up.

Tags: vacation

I’ve read some reviews, have seen some mentions in forums, and have heard some people talk about it at work, so I finally got around to checking out MP3 downloads from Amazon. Most of the time I purchase my music at Downloadpunk, but they don’t have everything I’m interested in. I’ve purchased a couple CD’s from iTunes, usually using a iTunes gift card. While their selection is great, and I pretty much just listen to my music either on my iPod or one of my Macs, the fact that a lot of their music has DRM on it does kind of suck. The music isn’t in MP3 format, instead it’s in AAC, which is a wrapper around MP3 that allows Apple to place their digital rights restrictions on the music. This usually limits your music to being played on certain computers, so you can’t share it with anyone.

Amazon has a competing music store. I don’t know if it’s as big as the iTunes store, but their selling point is that there is no DRM and also the price is usually a little cheaper. iTunes does carry some music with no DRM, but you actually have to pay more to have the privilege of getting the non-DRM music.

There’s a group I listen to, a psychobilly group, called HorrorPops. They’re a great group and I have their first two CDs, ‘Bring it On’ and ‘Hell Yeah’, and I saw they have a third CD called ‘Kiss Kiss Kill Kill’. This CD is available on iTunes for $9.99, but not in a non-DRM version. I checked out Amazon and they have the same CD in MP3 format for $8.99. I decided to purchase it from them. You have to download a small program, which is a downloader application. When you purchase the music you download a .amz file, this file is used by the downloaded to download your purchase. The cool part is once you finish with the download, it imports the music into your iTunes application. It’s now ready to be listened to and synced up with your iPod.

I was pretty happy with my first purchase. The download was very quick using the download application, and all of the music sounds great. It’s at 256 kb for the bit rate, which is very nice. I plan on making future purchases I don’t find on Downloadpunk on the Amazon site.

Tags: music, amazon, mp3

I purchased a new game a couple weeks ago called “Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures”, and I’ve been having a blast playing it.



If you’ve never played one of the Lego video games, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you think Lego games are only for kids, you are completely wrong. These games can be pretty tough. There’s a Lego Star Wars game and also a Lego Batman game; they all operate pretty much the same. You first play through each level in Story Mode. In this mode you follow the story line of the movie. This game has all three stories in it: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade. You play as Indiana Jones and you’ll also usually have one or two other characters on the screen too, which you can switch to when you need to use one of their talents (women characters can jump higher, short characters can climb through holes, etc). The game follows the story lines pretty closely, adding little puzzles along the way. Once you finish a level you can go back through the level in Free Play mode. In this mode you will have access to additional characters that you unlock along the way, and they can allow you to access parts of the level you couldn’t in Story Mode, so you can find additional secrets and treasure.

I have finished the game in Story Mode. It’s not tough to finish if you are persistent. You can’t die in this game, you just lose some of the treasure you’ve accumulated along the way each time your life force goes to zero. You use the treasure to purchase additional characters and abilities, so it is best not to get killed too often. Once I finished the game in Story Mode, I was only through with 67% of the game, so now I am going through in Free Play mode, trying to find all of the secrets for each level.

I definitely recommend this game to anyone who likes a game with puzzles to solve and also is a fan of Indiana Jones. There’s a lot of humorous stuff thrown in, including cameos from various Star Wars characters, which are actually Easter Eggs that you are supposed to find to get 100%.

Tags: wii, video games

If you install the software I spoke of in an earlier post: “Read/Write to NTFS on external drive with Mac”, you will be able to run a virtual machine from your external drive. You need to have write access to the NTFS drive to run the VM. You may think that running a virtual machine from an external drive would have bad performance, but it’s actually just as responsive as if the files were on your machine. The only times I’ve seen operations take an extended amount of time is when you perform a Suspend, or when you take a snapshot of the machine. The great part about running the VM from the external drive is it lets you keep the space on your laptop/desktop. My MacBook has a 60 GB HD, and my average virtual machine is weighing in at 30 GB, which is a huge chunk of space to give up.

Tags: development, mac

I recently finished the third book in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, “The Well of Lost Plots”.



Jasper Fforde has to be one of the most imaginative writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Like I said, this is the third book in the Thursday Next series, the first two being The Eyre Affaire and Lost in a Good Book. Thursday Next is the main character in the series, she is a SpecOps agent working for The Literary Detectives. Her teams job is to police the book world, looking for fraud, changed story lines, missing characters, etc. In their world the literary detectives can jump in and out of books, and the same can happen the other way, fictional characters leaving their books and entering the real world. The stories are great, full of humor and great characters. I’ve already started reading the next in the series, Something Rotten, will probably have it finished sometime this week or next. If you enjoy a good, humorous, fictional story I recommend the series, as well as Jasper Fforde’s other series dealing with Nursery Crime.

Tags: books

Paige and I went to the STP (Stone Temple Pilots) concert last night at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, GA.

Our night started off interesting. We decided to drop by P. F. Chang’s to eat some appetizers and have a couple drinks before heading to the concert. We generally don’t eat at chain restaurants, aside from the occasional visit to Ted’s Montana Grill for a bison burger; but there’s not much choice in Alpharetta when it comes to restaurants except for chains. When we arrived at P. F. Chang’s, we saw there was a long wait, so we headed up to the bar area. Unfortunately we could only find one seat at the bar, so Paige sat down while we ordered drinks. The manager walked by and started talking with us, saying it was kind of crowded due to people dropping by before the STP concert, we told him we were heading there and wanted to grab something to eat before going. He said the wait was around an hour, but he would see what he could do. Maybe 15 minutes later he comes back and directs us over to a table. Then he proceeds to provide us with a card for a free appetizer on our next visit, and also said one of our appetizers with our meal would be on the house. Paige and I just looked at each other wondering what we did to deserve this. We felt bad that we were only eating appetizers, not exactly spending a lot of money, but I did end up giving the server a 100% tip, and we plan on writing in to P. F. Chang’s to let them know how great we were treated.

We arrived at the amphitheatre in time to see one of the opening acts, Black Leather Motorcycle Club. We got our double Jack and Coke and headed down to the pit area, where we ended up running into some friends. Once that act was over I headed back and got us two more drinks and got back in time for STP to start. I saw STP a long time ago, probably 94 - 95, when they opened for Butthole Surfers. I think that concert was a little better than this one, they just had more energy. Paige and I both thought that Scott Weiland performed the STP songs better when we saw the Velvet Revolver tour earlier in the year. This show wasn’t bad, it just didn’t have any stand out performances. It was great to see STP again, they do have great music, and hopefully Scott will hang around long enough to record another album.

Tags: concert, music

Paige and I went to the Styx/Boston concert last night in Alpharetta, GA, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre. Styx was the opening band, we came in after a couple songs, but caught a lot of their good songs, so that was fine. Boston played for probably an hour and a half, and it was pretty rockin. They are both great bands to see live. you should see them if you get a chance, even if they don’t have all the original members.

Tags: music, concert

A few months back I was involved in developing a prototype of an Executive View application, using WPF technology. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the project, mainly due to us using Tangerine, a pre-developed application from Infragistics. While it did help us get the prototype out the door in a timely fashion, I didn’t want us to go the route of just building on top of that application. Luckily we didn’t go that route. It was decided we could use Tangerine as a reference application, which is what I was pulling for from the beginning.

This week will mark the first iteration of The Executive View development. We are doing it in .NET 3.5, with a Silverlight front end. It will be a nice diversion from the project I was working on, which will be nice. I’m not the biggest fan of Silverlight development, mainly because here I am trying to get out of Microsoft development all together, and I’m going to be learning a totally new development environment. At the same time I guess it is pretty cool to be developing using the newest, cutting-edge technology. We’ll see how it goes.

Tags: .net, development, work

Paige and I spent the evening planning our next vacation, which we will be taking the end of September, and beginning of October. We are going on another trip to the South West, this time adding in a couple stops we haven’t done before.

We plan on starting off at The Enchantment Resort in Sedona, Arizona. This is the resort we stayed at on our previous trip. It’s a beautiful place to stay, so we are happy to be staying there again. We plan on doing a bit more exploring this time, and also would like to head out on a photography jeep tour, getting to use our new cameras (although we both plan on bringing our old point-and-shoot cameras too, can never be too careful).

We will be heading to The Grand Canyon once we are done in Sedona. We plan on staying 1 day there.

We will head to Monument Valley, Utah, after that. This will be another 1 day visit.

We will spend a couple days in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after that. We are coinciding our trip with the 2008 Hot Air Baloon Fiesta, which should be really cool, and a great photo experience.

We will end our trip with a couple day stay in our favorite place, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This vacation will be a little different than our others, due to the fact that we are traveling around and doing so much, but it should hopefully be lots of fun.

Tags: vacation

Most of the time I research a book before I purchase it if it’s from an author I am unfamiliar with, but a while back as I was perusing the shelves at Barnes & Noble I came across a book that caught my eye: “Lonely Werewolf Girl”, by Martin Millar.



The beautiful illustration on the front caught my eye, so I took a closer look. I am a fan of stories that deal with Werewolves or Vampires, plus this book appeared to have a bit of humor thrown in too; so I went ahead and purchased it.

When I started reading it there was one thing I found weird, the length of the chapters. Now, this story takes place in Scotland and in London, and jumps around between 5 or 6 different story lines, so I understand having new chapters for each story line, but most of the chapters averaged 1 - 2 pages, with the longest chapter being probably 5 - 6 pages. The book is 558 pages and comes in at 236 chapters. Usually when I read a book I try to read a chapter or two an evening, with this that would have taken a couple minutes.

The story revolves around a werewolf clan whose leader had just passed away. Two brother werewolves from the clan want to try for the Thaneship, but the voting by the council doesn’t favor either brother to victory. There are a couple werewolves in the clan that weren’t present for the voting, having moved off to London to start their own lives. The story revolves around these other family members, the two brothers battling, killing, and doing anything else they can to get the vote to go their way, a fire elemental queen that is obsessed with fashion, her crazy niece, and a couple college students caught in the middle. Throw in a guild of humans that hunt werewolves, and you have a pretty good story. Kalix, the youngest werewolf, is the main character this story revolves around, but most characters get equal treatment.

I’m glad I picked up this book, and will look out for other books by this author, it’s a great read.

Tags: books

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

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

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

Paige’s work had a company function at Atlanta Zoo yesterday. I haven’t been to the Atlanta Zoo since I was very young, according to my mother, and from what I am told the zoo really sucked back in the day compared to now.

We had a great time. Paige recently purchased a Nikon D80 Digital SLR, and got to try it out yesterday. We got about 3/4 of the way through the zoo, a couple hundred photos, when she looked at some of the photos she had taken, and noticed she had the camera set on the wrong setting, causing the photos to be blue. Also, she wasn’t shooting in RAW format, which is one of the reasons for shooting with an SLR, you have a format that has all the information about the shot so you can work with the photo later in a tool like Aperature or Lightroom. We went through the zoo a second time (all in all we were there around 5 hours) so she could retake photos. I didn’t mind. Aside from it being very humid, it wasn’t overly crowded, and the kids that were there were very well behaved. We had a great time.

Tags: zoo

The DRM project I am working on at work has been going on now for about a year. We should have a usable product in production, but we found that after all this time in development, the application is quite unusable. I don’t think there’s any one thing or person to blame for this, but if I can think of anything we could have done differently, I’d point to us spending too much time working on polishing the application up to look all pretty for the customer, while neglecting the actual day-to-day use.

We got a pretty good talking too, and management went into crisis mode. Here they are selling the application to all the users, everyone wants it, but if the user were to sit down with it they would find it was very slow. The architecture and design we chose for our application just wasn’t suited for the amount of data that it would handle. We were told we had 3 - 4 weeks to get it working. We tossed around a couple ideas, and finally came up with spreading the saving of data out over time, instead of trying to save it all at once. It was a huge change, we would basically be redesigning a large portion of the back-end; but as of Friday, 3 weeks into the crisis mode development, all was working well. We have a couple things to take care of this week and next, but overall, the big work is done.

Hopefully management learns a lesson from this, and we can concentrate on getting the core functionality of the application working, instead of worrying about the window themeing and animated cursors, and pretty icons.

Tags: work

My mother called me this evening wanting the one thing I dread: “Long Distance Tech Support”. Being the member of the family that knows a lot about computers, I am used to providing some form of tech support a couple times a year, but I hate doing it when it’s hardware support, and that piece of hardware is not right there in front of me.

Apparently there was a pretty bad storm last night in Columbus, and the power flickered on and off a couple times. Even though my mother’s computer is hooked up to a surge protector, this afternoon, when she tried to turn it on, nothing happened. All of the other computer peripherals: the monitor and printer, worked perfectly. But not the computer. So she gives me a call. She’s hoping there’s some kind of fuse or reset switch on the back of the computer, but I tell her I don’t think there is, and without being able to get my hands on the computer, I don’t really think I can be of too much help. I tell her maybe the power supply got fried, and she may need to take it somewhere to have it looked at and possibly get that piece replaced.

After I got off the phone with her, I went over to the Acer support site. I find that her one year warranty expired June 12. Isn’t that the way it always is : ) I look through there knowledge base and come to an entry about the machine not powering up. I give my Mom a call back and tell her to try one of the steps they mention. She should unplug the power cord from the back of the machine. Next she should hold down the power button for 30 seconds. After that she should plug the machine back in and try to power on the machine. I told her that sounded weird, but possibly that’s a built in way to reset the machine after a tripped breaker. She gave it a try and it worked. She sounded so happy. My mother doesn’t use her computer much, it’s powered off more than it’s powered on. She checks e-mail every other day or so, and if she’s bored she may hop on and play some solitaire, free-cell, or go to one of her puzzle web sites. I’m glad this tech support call had a happy ending without any money needing to be spent.

Tags: tech support

My nephew, Parker, celebrated his 1st birthday over the weekend. I went down to Columbus to attend the party. He is such a great kid, very well behaved. My Grandmother and Aunt were in town too, so I got to hang out with them also. All in all it was a great weekend.

Here's Parker in all his Auburn clothing and facial decals; that's my mother holding him.

Tags: nephew, birthday

I just finished reading another book: Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. This book is a collection of short stories about life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation.



There are 22 stories in all, and each one is a pleasure to read. They were the basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals.

I am also reading a book called Material World: A Global Family Portrait



This book is like an earlier book I read, Hungry Planet. In Hungry Planet, a husband wife team stayed with families and learned about the way they eat, taking photos of all the food they buy in a week. This book is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of food it deals with the families possessions. It's interesting seeing what the average family around the world owns. I find this book most interesting because since I have moved into this house I am renting I have slowly been getting rid of anything I no longer use. It's interesting the amount of junk we have. I donate a lot to Goodwill, but I still have a lot I can go through and get rid of.

Tags: books

Turner Broadcasting, in Atlanta, is split amongst a couple places. They have a main campus, which is very nice, and they have a floor in a building in midtown. For the past 4 years I have been working at the nice campus, but that all changed, and now the department I work for is in the building in midtown. When you've worked at a nice private campus, it really sucks to have to move to a building shared by other businesses. We also went from having a personal parking deck, to having a couple parking decks spread out over a couple block radius. One good thing that came from the move is I have started taking public transportation to work. I should have done this a long time ago. Driving in Atlanta sucks, I live 12 miles from work, and if I don't time it correctly, it can take up to an hour to get to work or back home. I live within 2 miles of a MARTA station, and it drops me off within 2 blocks of work, so I will start saving money on transportation and also not put so many miles on my car.

Tags: work

I just finished reading a great book called "Handling Sin", by Michael Malone.



The book starts off with the main character, Raleigh, finding out his father checked himself out of the hospital, bought a new Cadillac, and was last seen withdrawing a lot of money and driving away with a teenage black girl in his car. Later Raleigh receives a call from his father saying he would like Raleigh to come meet him down in New Orleans, they live in North Carolina, but he needs to do a couple things before coming. The bulk of the book revolves around those things he has to do. Michael Malone is a great writer; his characters are great, and he is very funny. This is a long book, over 600 pages, so it took me a while to read, but there was never a dull part in the whole story. I definitely recommend it.

Tags: books

If you start Cisco VPN on a Mac and receive an Error 51 Unable to Communicate With VPN Subsystem error, you need to restart the VPN subsystem. Open a terminal and type the following

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

That should fix the issue.

Tags: fix, vpn

Occasionally I work from home. I used to bring home my work laptop and VPN into work off of it, but we got new machines, and I opted for a desktop. I just like having a desktop for development. It's more powerful, and is cheaper to upgrade.

Since I got a desktop I started working from home a different way. I installed the Cisco VPN software on my Mac, and I also installed Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection. This way I could remote into my machine at work and just work off that machine. There would be an occasional flicker of the screen while it's refreshing, but all-in-all it worked well.

Since I occasionally have to work in Visual Studio .NET 2005, and other times in Visual Studio .NET 2008, I decided to just have those environments running as virtual machines. That way when we go to VS.NET 2008 full time, I won't need to perform an uninstall, I can just delete that virtual machine and start using the VS.NET 2008 virtual machine exclusively. It also helps in the future if my machine gets borked, I can just revert to an earlier snapshot of the VM.

Since I am running off a virtual machine I've found it difficult to work from home using my previous technique. Remoting into a machine, then running a VM on that machine is pretty painful in the lag that occurs.

I decided a better option would be to just get VMWare Fusion for the Mac, and load the virtual machine directly onto my Mac and run it from here. Since I am VPN'd into the company network the VM connects to the domain with no problem (except I have to remember to have my machine at work off the network or I will get an error because of the duplicate machine names on the network). I ordered a copy and just tried it out and it works great. I will try to work some this weekend on the WPF project, and if all goes well, I may just start bringing my Mac to work and working off of it. My goal is to only use Windows for development and Outlook, all other stuff I can just do from my Mac.

Tags: apple, development

So, you would think a computer geek like myself would have had some sort of decent phone, maybe a smart phone of some sort, or even better, an iPhone, since I am a big fan of Apple. But, that wasn't the case. My phone was a basic, run-of-the-mill, phone. No camera, no keyboard, no fancy operating system, a very basic WAP web browser; it was pitiful. I'm not a big gadget geek, so I never needed much more than I had. The biggest thing I would like to have is a keyboard, because I text message on my phone more than I talk. It's a pain typing messages with a phone keypad.

That all changed earlier this week. I used to be on Sprint. I never had a problem with their service, and their coverage was always good. I've heard bad things about their customer service, but I never once had to speak to their customer service over the 6 years I've been a customer. The biggest problem with Sprint is their selection of phones; it really sucks.

Paige has an iPhone, and I think it's a great phone. The design of it, the touch screen interface, it all rocks. I'm just not a fan of AT&T, so I didn't want to switch over to them. I ended up going with Verizon wireless. I've heard good things, plus we get a nice 22% discount on service through Time Warner. Along with switching over to Verizon I upgraded to a nicer phone. I got the LG Voyager VX10000.



As you can see, it has a touchscreen and it opens to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. That right there is enough for me, but it also has a couple other features that are nice

• 2 Mega-Pixel Camera/Camcorder
• Full web browser
• Stereo Sound with VCast support for Music, Movies, TVShows and Games
• Navigator - Built in GPS with turn-by-turn directions
• Not a Microsoft Operating System

I've been super busy at work, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and really get a feel for the phone yet. I loaded in my contacts, made a few phone calls, and sent a couple text messages, that's about it.

My phone bill went up around $35 a month to have all these luxuries, but that's not too bad.

Tags: phone

If you don't count my car loan, which I tend not to, once todays payment on my credit card balance clears, I am debt free. We got our bonus at work, and I put the full amount to paying off that debt. Sucks I had to spend it on that, but I'm happy to finally have it paid off. I've been working at it for a while, and now it's finally gone. This is great, especially with the way the economy is going these days. No mortgage and no credit card debt, pretty good state to be in at the moment. The big thing will now be to make sure I don't rack up that debt again, which should hopefully be easy now that I've gotten my life down to where I can pay all my monthly payments with 1 paycheck, so I always have money going into my savings account.

Tags: money

I see that Sunday alcohol sales has come back up in the news lately. This time it's because some minor league baseball team is in Gwinett county, and they want to allow sales of alcohol at the stadium on Sundays. For those of you who don't know, Georgia doesn't allow the sale of alcohol on Sundays; unless you go to a restaurant. I can go buy cigarettes, lottery tickets and stop off at the adult video/bookstore on Sunday, but no purchasing of wine or beer. It's a religious thing. For some reason there's this whole mixture of church and state down here. It's a stupid law, especially in modern day USA where you have people who either don't believe in God and religion, like myself, or you have people of religions that have the holy day on a day other than Sunday. People down here want to allow each county to vote on it, but our Governor, Sonny Purdue, won't allow it. This is the same idiot that held a prayer service for rain because of the major drought we are having in the South. Of course they scheduled the prayer service for a day where rain was in the forecast, so it looks like prayer actually does something. If prayer were real the rain would have formed over the south, and not come down in the traditional storm front that moves down from the north, but you can't talk to these people. Anytime the discussion of alcohol sales on Sunday comes up the bible thumpers say it's all about time management. I should just buy enough wine or beer before Sunday so I'll have some around. I never had to deal with this growing up, because even in the south you can purchase alcohol on Sundays on a military base. I doubt we will ever get a chance to vote on it, but it would be interesting to see what happens if we could. I would think it's more money for the state, seeing as they're giving up an entire days worth of sales tax on those sales. People who live on the border of other states head over there on Sundays, giving their money to that state.

Tags: religious idots, bible belt

Since I left Kimberly I have been working to get myself out of debt. When her and I split I had over 20k in debt. Now I am down to a couple thousand on one credit card, which I will be paying off over the next couple months. Once all of that is done I plan on getting my finances in order and concentrating on saving, investing and retirement. I figure the best way to go about this is to come up with a budget. I subscribe to a couple financial blogs, and recently saw a link to an article about a budget called the 60% Budget. I looked it over and thought this might be a good way to start going about coming up with a budget for myself. The 60% Budget breaks down like this

60% of your gross income should be dedicated to "Committed Expenses". These are

- Basic food and clothing needs
- Essential household expenses
- Insurance premiums
- Charitable contributions
- All bills
- All taxes

10% for "Retirement" expenses
- 401(k)
- IRA or Roth IRA

10% for "Longterm Savings"
- Investments, like stock, bonds, etc.

10% for "Short Term Savings or Irregular Expenses"
- Savings account
- Vacations
- Repairs
- New Applicances

10% for "Fun Money"
- Spend on anything you like.

I use a software program called iBank to track my Checking, Savings, Credit Cards, Investments, and it has a budget feature, so I am going to use this to start tracking all my expenditures to see if I can stick to this budget. It will be nice to have everything working well, so that my savings, investments and retirement funds have a consistent inflow. I may open a couple ING savings accounts, that way I can have one set up for Vacations, one for Emergencies and one for my regular savings, but I haven't decided.

Tags: money

I read that not too long after I quit Facebook, due to the Beacon privacy concern, there was enough backlash in the Facebook community to convince Facebook to offer the option to not have Beacon enabled. Since I quit Facebook, or better yet disabled my account, since you can't really ever leave Facebook, I received a couple invites from friends, so I decided to re-enable my account. Don't know how often I will use it, but figure it will be like my Linked-In account, something I log into every once in a while.

Tags: social

I was going through my iTunes library making a 'Classic Punk' playlist and thought I'd share what I consider to be some of my favorite songs. A lot of the punk I listen to is from the 70s and 80s, so a lot of these will be from around that time period.

1. If The Kids Are United - Sham 69 : I love the video I found on YouTube for this, looks like it's from some kids variety show.

2. Your Generation - Generation X : Great song from Billy Idol's old band, Generation X.

3. BloodStains - Agent Orange : I love the riff in this song, a great skate tune.

4. Jilted John - Jilted John : Great old punk.

5. Amoeba - Adolescents : Another classic skate tune.

6. First Time - Boys

7. Brickfield Nights - Boys : Love this song

8. The End of the World - The Avengers : awful video, but a great song.

9. Homicide - 999 : This is a great old punk band.

10. Rich Kids - Rich Kids : punk boy band

11. All This And More - Dead Boys

My playlist is currently up to 76 songs. I'm not going to post them all today, will break it up into an occasional posting.

Tags: punk, music

The Adicts are the longest surviving punk band with all the original members. The formed back in 1975 in Ipswich, England. I listened to them back in the day and have gotten back into them recently. For Christmas I received an iTunes gift card, and I used it to purchase Made In England. This CD contains 25 of their greatest hits, and it's definitely something everyone who enjoys punk music should have in their collection. If you are interested in hearing them, here they are performing 'Viva La Revolution' and great song.

Tags: music, punk

I haven't ever really been big on office productivity software. It's the one category of software I always find I spend more time battling the software than getting any particular use out of it. In my day-to-day job I open the occasional Word document or Excel spreadsheet, but it's very rare for me to create one myself, unless I am throwing together a design document, which I find Word an awful tool for, but it's what we're provided. At home it's pretty much the same, not much use for office software, but I do like to use a spreadsheet every once in a while, so I broke down the other day and purchased iWork. Now I know I could use the free OpenOffice.org, or the NeoOffice version for the Mac, but I find them to be rather bloated and providing the same hindrance that I find with Microsoft Office. There is a version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, a new version comes out next week, but it costs over $300, plus it's pretty much the same version as on Windows, which I'm not a fan of. Instead, I decided to try out Apple's office suite, and I actually find that I like it. It costs $79, and it contains a Word Processor called 'Pages', a Spreadsheet application called 'Numbers' and presentation software called 'Keynote'.

Pages has two different modes, 'Word Processor' or 'Page Layout'. I like the separation, so you have the tools available that you expect when you are doing each mode. It's fully compatible with .doc and .docx, being able to open and save in those formats, so you can still exist in a Microsoft world.

Numbers is pretty amazing. Never thought I'd be a fan of spreadsheet software, but I threw together a budget spreadsheet in no time; it even has a graph. To create a comparable paige in Excel I'd have to have the help file open or do web searches. It's just very straight forward in Numbers. Again, like Pages, it supports .xls and .xlsx formats, so it can be used at work.

Keynote is what Steve Jobs uses for his MacWorld presentations, and they always turn out great, so I know it's a great piece of software. I don't find myself doing many presentations, but if I get the chance to I will definitely use Keynote.

Overall, I am satisfied with my purchase. Office suites have been around for a while, and they've become behemoths, with little new innovation coming out, so it's nice to see Apple throw in some new features and new takes on how to do things.

Tags: mac, apple, software

Happy New Year! Here's to a great 2008.

Paige and I had a great time this New Years. We took a break from our usual going out to a restaurant and toasting in the New Year. This year we rented a villa at Callaway Gardens. It turned out to be nicer than we thought. The villa was very big, the only issue we had was there was too much furniture in it. You couldn't walk around without almost knocking your knees into some dangerous piece of furniture.

As part of staying at the villa we got full access to the park. This time of year there aren't many people visiting Callaway Gardens, so we didn't have to fight the crowds. The fun thing to do is going to the butterfly exhibit. We both took a lot of photos. I will link to mine once I have them off the camera and processed.

We brought along food and cooked ourselves a great meal. We bought a bottle of wine and sparkling wine, which we used to toast in the New Year. It was a nice evening.

I'm not doing my usual New Years Resolution post. Not resolving to do too much this year. My debt is under control, so I plan on keeping it that way. I could stand to lose some weight, so I will work on that. About the only other thing I can think of is trying to get back into taking pride in my job and working at Turner. Lately I've looked at the job as an 8 hour chunk of the day that stands in the way of me doing stuff I enjoy, and it hasn't always been that way. Guess I need to sit back and look at what it is I'm not liking and see what I can do to change it for the better.

Have a great year!!

Tags: holiday, resolutions

Since I don't subscribe to cable I have to make good use of my down time. I spend a lot of this time reading. I've always enjoyed reading, and I find it a great way to pass the time. I thought I'd highlight a couple books I read this past year that I thought were good.

Hungry Planet: What The World Eats - The premise of this book is an interesting one. A husband a wife team, one a writer the other a photographer, travelled the world and found families that would let them live with them for a week. The family would do their weekly grocery shopping and a photo would be taken of all the food that the family bought. A family recipe was also included. What makes the book so interesting is to see the various kinds of foods, how healthy some parts of the world are compared to others, and to see how much is spent on food by various cultures. Every story in the book was interesting, and the photos were spectacular.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - Yes, I realize I am 36 and this is a kids book, but J. K. Rowling writes in a way that makes it entertaining for all ages; plus, I read the other six books, can't very well not read the last one. I thought all the books of the series were great. It's a great story, the kind of thing I wish was around when I was young, maybe I would have read more. This book nicely wraps everything up.

You Suck: A Love Story - I love Christopher Moore. I have every one of his books, and I find them all entertaining. This book is a continuation of Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, so I recommend reading that one first.

The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime - Jasper Fforde has two lines of books that I read. First is the Nursery Crime books, which features Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division of the Reading Police Department. In their world there is a such thing as fictional Nursery Rhyme creatures, and it makes for a great story. His other line of books are the Thursday Next series, which I also recommend. Jasper Fforde has a lot of the humor and great storytelling that Christopher Moore has.

People's History of The United States - I've been reading this book for a while. I pull it out at lunch when I have a chance and read a few pages. Howard Zinn is pretty controversial, and you shouldn't take everything in this book as fact, but it is a great history book. It's basically a book of history told through the people that lived at that time, through journals, newspaper articles, interviews, etc. This kind of lets you cut through the censored media to see what was really going on at the time, but it also presents you with a new problem, since a lot of this writing can't be backed up by hard facts. Still, I recommend it to anyone wanting to see the history of The United States from a different view.

Tags: books

It's the day after Christmas, and I am back in Atlanta. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Columbus, GA, visiting with my family. My sisters were busy with their families Christmas Eve, so I didn't see them until Christmas Day, when we all met at Beth's house for our annual Christmas dinner.

This is the first Christmas that we didn't attend church on Christmas Eve. The past couple years we have gone to my sister Beth's church, as she is the only one in the family that actually goes to church more than once a year. This year my Mom wasn't interested in going there, so we spent Christmas Eve around the house. We were going to head out to catch a movie, but the more we thought about it, it just felt good to sit around in front of the fireplace, watch a little TV and talk.

My mother and I have a new tradition, we head out to Denny's for breakfast on Christmas morning. We've found if you get there early enough, around 8:30 or so, there isn't a wait. After that we both head home and nap for a little while before heading over to Beth's. Once we're at Beth's we eat then give the kids their presents.

It was a nice Christmas. I don't really expect much from the holiday any more. I am glad we don't do the whole gift exchange thing with the family and only concentrate on the kids. It relieves a lot of unneeded stress of trying to find a gift. The holiday has become way too commercial.

Paige and I exchanged gifts Sunday evening. She got me art supplies. I used to love to sit down and draw, and have really wanted to get back into it. I need to set aside time for doing it.

Paige and I are renting a villa at Callaway Gardens for New Years. We usually head to a restaurant and toast in the New Year there, but decided to try something different this year. We both enjoy staying away from annoying drunk party goers, which is why we aren't heading to a New Years party. Will be nice to toast in the New Year together.

Happy Holidays!!

Tags: holiday, vacation

This past weekend was my birthday, I am the big three six. I had a great birthday. I spent it with friends. Paige, Robin and I went out and had a great dinner at Eurasia, in downtown Decatur. Robin gave me this great gift, a History of American Beers. A galvanized container with 6 different types of American beer from the past, and a book on The History of American Beer. I also got a great gift from Paige, Super Mario Galaxy. I played it for about an hour, and it's amazing. I love games that are all about game play and not just fancy, realistic, graphics.

Tags: birthday

Tomorrow is our final build, barring any major bugs that need to be fixed, before our soft launch to a few customers next week. It's amazing how this agile development has produced a very usable application. We've spent the past couple iterations doing a lot of front end work. The back end and services seem to be working well, we haven't had to touch any of the code in a while. We've learned a lot about agile development along the way. We've gotten better at many aspects so it doesn't seem as overwhelming as it sometimes felt. We still have a lot of development to do, this is just us getting it in front of the users so they can start banging on it, giving us feedback.

Tags: development

Paige and I returned from our short little vacation in Santa Fe Sunday. We had a great time. There aren't many tourists in Santa Fe this time of year, so the city was even quieter than usual. We stayed at the same hotel as last time, The Inn of the Anasazi. We actually got the same room as last time too, room 218. Paige's Mom stayed next door. Paige's sister, her husband and their dog stayed at a hotel a couple blocks away. The weather was great, more wintery than the 70+ degree weather we are experiencing in Atlanta. We're both glad we had visited Santa Fe before, because we didn't really do much sight seeing this time. We mainly spent the days eating, drinking and hanging with her family.

Tags: vacation

I came back from my short vacation to a surprise. My external backup drive was no longer booting up. I tried a couple times, but from the sound of things, the platters aren't even starting to spin, plus I get no activity light. This wasn't too much of an issue, because it seemed to me that the drive was near death, so I purchased a new 500GB drive and started moving stuff off one drive to another. I probably have 90% of my music over, and all of my photos. I lost a lot of my new TV shows I have downloaded, but I have watched all of them, so that's not an issue. The one file I did lose though is the file used by RapidWeaver, the software I use for my web site. RapidWeaver is a great piece of software, I got it as part of one of those Mac bundle things they run every so often on MacUpdate or MacHeist. It's not so much drag and drop web development, or straight HTML coding, although you have the option to do that. It's more along the lines of you add a new Contact Form, fill out a couple fields, and the form is generated for you. Same with my blog. I add a blog page, all the catagories and tags, RSS info, etc, then start typing blog postings. RapidWeaver takes care of the themes, publishing, etc. I like it. Since I lost the file I had to create a new project. I will slowly add back all the pages on my site. For now I just have a home page, contact form and my blog. I have placed the file on my laptop, so Time Machine will now be making back ups, in case I need to recover the file again some day.