Category Archives: Misc

For today, I only leave you with this quote which is one of my all-time favorites:

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

-Douglas Adams

For a while now, I’ve wanted an iPod Classic.  I have a 2nd Generation Nano and it’s a great little device, but 4GB is just not enough.  Not only that, but I really wanted something I can just sync my whole library to (about 28GB of music/podcasts/audiobooks) and not have to pick and choose.

In the past, I would have just gone out and bought it, but since taking the Financial Peace class from Dave Ramsey, I’ve been trying to be more responsible.  After waiting for nearly a year, I decided to take the bull by the horns and put a bunch of stuff on eBay to make the money I needed.  Combined with some Christmas money, I was finally able to order it (thanks for selling it $25 cheaper, Amazon) on New Year’s Eve and I’ve been loving it ever since.

Not only is it a great device that works exactly as it should, sounds great, and holds all my music and even a bunch of episodic TV shows (Firefly, Arrested Development, and Futurama, right now), but it means even more that I wanted it for over a year–waited, saved and sold stuff to get it–and was finally able to order it.  I think that makes it an even more awesome device than it already is!

On a side note, I have been enjoying being an Amazon Prime subscriber.  For those that don’t know, Amazon Prime allows you to get free two-day shipping on anything fulfilled by Amazon.com and for $3.99 per item, you can get something overnight.  I got a 3-month trial when I ordered the iPod and I think I’m going to actually pay for the subscription ($79/year) when the trial runs out.  I’ve been ordering more “necessity” items which are not only cheaper than at stores, but also ship free thanks to Amazon Prime.

This is absolutely ridiculous.  Come on, people, the deals aren’t even that good this year.

If you hadn’t heard, Georgia has been having a bit of a gasoline shortage problem.  Because of that, my boss(es) graciously allowed us to work from home a couple of days this week.  I have a Macbook with Parallels and all my developer tools, plus I always keep the latest code handy, so I had no problem getting set up to do this.  After working from home Wednesday and Thursday, here are a few observations in no particular order:

• Surprisingly, my 3 year-old left me alone for the most part.  She was awesome!
• I got a lot done.  In my opinion, more than I would have with the distractions of the office.
• I don’t want to do it every day.
• I miss the gang.
• I miss lunchtime (a social event in our office).
• Seemingly contrary to the previous point, I loved lunch at home.  Had a great sandwich and watched Colbert all in less time than I would’ve spent at lunch if I were in the office.
• The “drive” is awesome.  I got up later, got to work earlier, quit later in the day, and still didn’t feel like I’d spent ALL DAY at work.
• Two days per week is probably enough.
• My home desk, chair, and 19″ CRT monitor suck.  My knees hurt after two straight days.

We’ll just have to see if we’re allowed to continue doing this in the future.  For my part, I feel it helped me make some good progress and between phone, email, and IM, I didn’t feel at all out of touch with the people I needed to get my job done.

Three years ago last month, my friend Specialist Joshua Dingler was killed serving our country in Iraq.  He was over there because 7 years ago today, terrorists invaded our country and killed nearly 3,000 of our citizens on US soil.

Here’s to you, Josh–we miss you.

And here’s to the rest of those that died or whose lives were changed because of what happened 7 years ago today.  I will never forget.

2 World Trade Center (South Tower) – 10:02 am
1 World Trade Center (North Tower) – 10:28 am
7 World Trade Center – 5:20pm

I know I haven’t written much.  It’s been crazy.  We have the house on the market.  Supposedly, there has been one showing, but they didn’t leave a card and we haven’t heard from our agent on whether they actually opened the lockbox or not.  He says there is a ton of interest on our house, though.  I guess that’s good.

I’ve also been devoting a lot of time to shooting and, when I can’t be at the range, collecting supplies and accessories for shooting and surfing shooting forums.  I got an awesome range bag, 3 more magazines for my XD (total of 6 now–whoo hoo), and I detail stripped my Makarov and replaced the trigger, trigger bar, firing pin, and recoil spring.  I’m hoping some new, tighter fitting parts will help it be more accurate.  It’s “Ok” but all the Makarov fans on the interwebs claim these are some of the most accurate little pistols around.  I don’t expect bullseyes at 25yds, but I’d like it to group like my XD at 7-12yds (3 inches with no bench resting).

Lastly, work has been tough lately.  Yesterday, I finally released Safe Eyes 5.2.  A few months ago, AIM updated their software to use an encrypted connection.  At that point, all of our code for logging AIM chats quit working because the data is encrypted by the time we see it.  Working with some of the great people at AIM and some very different (to me) technologies and architectures, we were able to get AIM chat logging working again, but it was a long road.  I was working in an area I was not at all familiar with.  I can honestly say that this was the toughest project that I’ve worked on in my time at InternetSafety.  It is rewarding to finally release it, though.

That’s it for now.  I know I say this a lot, but I’ll try to be more regular about posting.  Of course, baby is coming in a little over a month, so it’s going to get crazy again.  😀