Category Archives: General

General

The “Official” Christmas Wrap Up

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Well Christmas is over. We finally had the “official” gift exchange with the boys when they got back from their fathers house at about 10a.

I received Black Label Society – The European Invasion-Doom Troopin – Live DVD from Andy and an iTunes gift card and some damn comfortable slippers from Jake. The perfect gifts. I’m not really the “slipper” type, but I have to day, I’m digging them.

Andy received a digital camera and a Flickr Pro account, along with Call of Duty 3 for the PS2, along with some other miscellaneous items like a pedometer and a mp3 holder for when he goes running.

Jonna received a gift basket containing chocolate, cheese, crackers and the like, along with a bottle of her favorite wine from the boys.

Christmas Morning - Jake Gets a Car Jake received his first car. He’s had his permit for quite some time, but Jonna drives a rather large Suburban thats pretty hard to learn to drive in, and with my commute I’m rarely in the mood to take him driving in the jeep after I get home from work. We figured that the car would serve a few purposes – give Jake something he could actually drive comfortably, teach him some responsibility by paying for half of it – treating his half as a car loan from us, and give him transport to and from work.

Jonna went through a lot to ensure that the gift was presented in a way to maximize the surprise factor for Jake when he opened it. She created a fake video game case, in which she wrapped the car key. The boys are used to getting video games for Christmas, and Jake is a game freak that knows just about every game on the market. I’m not sure what moment was cooler, watching him try to figure out what this game was that he had never heard of, or when he opened up the case to find the car key – and then tried to figure out what the key meant.

We went to great lengths over the last month or so to absolutely convince him that there was no way a sixteen year old would be getting a car for Christmas (he’s asked a lot), so I think the fact that he actually got one was a genuine surprise.

Overall, Christmas this year was quite successful. Each of us got a few things that were important to us and it wasn’t completely over done. From the car perspective, it was more of a practical decision than anything else – and it went over really well.

The one regret that I have about this years festivities is that Jonna and I decided to not buy for each other this year. I love giving her gifts (though I have a hard time finding things that really mean something), so for me not having that this year was a bit of a disappointment. However, we did do a lot of focusing on the kids and when it comes right down to it, thats really what Christmas is all about – isn’t it?

An Early Christmas

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For the last sixteen years, we have normally split Christmas with Kelsi to Christmas Eve for Dad, and Christmas Day for Mom. This has worked out very well for us over the years.

This year was a little different. Kelsi is involved in marching band and her schedule is impacted by football and basketball games that she has to play at. We also, over the past 5 years or so, have lived about an hour away from each other, which makes drive time an issue for both Mom and Dad.

One thing I never realized until Kelsi started band is that the schools are on completely different break schedules. This isn’t too much of an issue until Kelsi goes on break – which she normally spends about a week with us. This year, the difference in breaks caused her to have a game during her Christmas break that she had to go home early for – so we celebrated with Kelsi on the 22nd, exchanging gifts with her.

I would be really interested in the statistics around kids who actually live with both of their parents these days. It seems to me that most of the kids that I run into are children of divorced parents. Schools should really look at that, as the scheduling that goes on makes it really difficult for these kids to spend time with their non custodial parents (especially when they live an hour away).

But I digress …

Our family has reached one of those really interesting stages where everyone is very hard to buy for. We all pretty much have the things we “need” and we don’t really have a lot of wants that are practical enough for Christmas presents, so many of this years gifts were cool ones that addressed things that each of us like, but nothing fancy. The highlight for me was getting a framed picture from Kelsi of one of her entries for her photography class. I can’t tell you how cool it is to get a gift from your child that is actually the fruit of a class where they are doing something they really love. The picture is of a church in Chicago (you can see it on her Flickr page).

She also picked up a book for me called Quintessential Tarantino: The films of Quentin Tarantino by Edwin Page. I’ve been a Tarantino fan for years, so a gift like this was something that hit a total sweet spot for me. The book explains Tarantinos work and highlights the methods he uses in his writing and directing. It also highlights the many similar vehicles he uses across movies that link them up. Very cool gift.

For Jonna, Kelsi presented The Office Season One and Season Two.

The boys received DVD sets of their favorite shows, along with a couple of vinyl albums for Jacob, who along with Kelsi for some reason prefers albums over MP3s. Go figure!

Kelsi received the following from Jonna and Dad for her combined Birthday / Christmas gifts:

We’re entering into a weird stage in our lives. Our kids are getting older and have their own things going on. Even though we all just took an hour to exchange gifts on Friday, it was still a great time to have everyone together focused on giving to each other.

Of course, there are pictures available in the photo album.

Home IT Check List Status – The Vacation Posts

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I thought I’d give a small update on my Home IT duties that were pending at the time yesterdays post went up:

  • Upgrading the Kids Memory – It winds up that the machine they have, an HP Pavilion 700 series, is maxed out at the current 512M. Bummer.
  • Recovery Disks for Windows XP machine – I got all of my data centralized into one place on the Windows machine – ready to burn to DVD – when I realized that I don’t have a DVD writer on the laptop. Once I realized I’d have to burn 4-5 CD’s worth of stuff, I abandoned the idea of rebuilding the machine for the evening. Since the weather is so beautiful today (hey, at least its not snow), perhaps I’ll do it later in the day. I’m currently copying everything up to the Linux box, which can then be migrated to the Mac, and a DVD burned with all the data.
  • 80G hard drive swap – Taking the main server down takes DNS and external access to the internet – things needed for things like homework – so I didn’t complete this either
  • Setting up the network printer upstairs – This also has to be done today, since the connection was eaten all day yesterday

All in all, yesterday was pretty productive. I was a tad disappointed that the Pavilion wouldn’t take any more memory, but overall I got a lot of things done that have been waiting for quite some time in the queue.

I also got an unexpected treat. Back in August I had thrown a link in my del.ici.ous links about Bryce, a 3D rendering program, being released for free for a limited time. I had downloaded it back then but had never done anything with it. I used to love this program back in the day and would spend hours playing with it. I’m not really the artistic type, as I tend to get extremely frustrated when I try to do anything even remotely resembling “art”, but I loved that program.

Last night I was able to expose Jake to it, which was pretty cool. He loved it and spent some time playing around with it starting with a base landscape that I threw together just to show him what it could do. I found it extremely cool to share something like this with him from back in the day that he was actually interested in seeing. For me, it was cool to play around with an old friend again and to share it with one of the kids and actually have them find it interesting. Those moments come few and far between as the kids get older.

I’ll end this with the final rendering of what Jake was working on last night, while I go check my file copies from the Windows box.

Jake Plays with Bryce

Our First Day of Vacation

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This is the first year since we’ve been married that Jonna and I are both in IT. This week marks the first available time that we’ve had to take vacation this year. Unfortunately, she had to work.

I figured I might as well catch up on some of my “Home IT” duties that I’ve been neglecting for a while, so after sleeping late and missing giving the kids a hard time for having to go to school while we sat around being lazy on vacation all day, I started taking care of the ol’ network here at the Labs.

Here’s the list of what I have done so far:

  • Andy has been dependent on Jonna’s laptop to pull music on his Creative Zen Sleek MP3 player for a number of months. He had some troubles getting the software installed on the kids machine. This, of course, involved installing five bajillion XP patches and Media Player 10 before I could even get to the point of installing the drivers for the player. While I was at it, I figured I might as well install IE7 as well. I finally got both the MP3 player and Napster working. I know this because I verified it by loading a few Steve Vai songs on it for him. Lets see how long it takes him to notice. 😉
  • Performed a complete virus scan of the kids computer. Thankfully, its clean
  • Running, I think for the first time, a defrag on the kids computer. Its run 3 hours so far and is only 1/3 done
  • Began rsync backups of the Linux server to the Western Digital WDG1U2500 My Book 250 GB Hard Drive I bought over a month ago for just this purpose.
  • Cleaned out my Google Mail inbox of all junk mail (as long as I could handle that tedium, anyway)
  • Actually cleaned off my desk (well, the working area anyway). There’s still a lot of work to do here, but I can at least say I started. That’s got to be worth a few “husband points”

On the list for later:

  • Buy another 512K for the kids machine, bringing them up to 1G. Just doing routine maintenance on their machine annoyed me. 512K just isn’t enough to run Windows anymore.
  • Create recovery disks for the Gateway Windows XP machine and back up the data to DVD so that I can rebuild it and get the boot time down a tad from the 10 minutes it takes now. I want to start using it for things I don’t want to use the Mac for (like running The Gimp).
  • Swap an 80G hard drive out of a machine just retired here at the Labs into the Linux server
  • Set the kids machine up to print to the network printer (would have done this earlier, but the machine was unhooked so that Jonna could plug her two laptops into the network)
  • Buy a tarp to cover the the furniture on the patio

Sure, it may not sound too relaxing, but its stuff that has needed to get done for a long time. I think the pay off will be not having all of this hanging over my head the rest of the week.

Quotiki: A Social Site for Quote Man

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As I was upgrading our Subversion software to 1.4.2 yesterday once everyone had left for the holidays (I’m really trying to keep up on this), I started browsing through LifeHacker, a site that Jason Calacanis has mentioned quite a few times on the Gillmor Gang and on his personal blog.

While browsing the site, I came across an article on Quotiki, a social quotes site.

Now anyone who knows me knows I love to collect quotes, so this site has me absolutely fascinated. Its a Digg like site where readers submit quotes and vote on them. For each quote, you can tag them, and it automatically provides “further reading” recommendations for the originator of the quote via Amazon.com.

The really fascinating thing to me is thinking about how the simplest idea, like making a web site for quotes, can keep my attention for so long. Rather than a web site completely built around the idea of making money, this site peaks my interest as a quote freak and gives me the opportunity to buy related materials from Amazon if I choose to do so. Rather than feeling that the money is being ripped from my wallet, I can buy something if I choose to if it is relevant to me at the time. Chances are, with someone like me who is fascinated by other peoples viewpoints and small glimpses of brilliance, the time will come where they will probably get one or more sales out of me just because I’m there doing something I enjoy.

The real question to wrestle with this is how you apply the concept in a corporate environment, making your customers feel that they are getting value out of you without making them feel like you are just after their piece of your total “revenue dollars”.

This is what I’ll probably spend the rest of Thanksgiving break thinking about. I’m that pathetic.

SVK Tutorials now under Creative Commons License

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After quite a few requests by people to use the SVK Tutorials for various things, I’ve decided to license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This license includes commercial use of the works.

After all the work I did seeking permission to play independent music on the podcast, and finding it so much work given an already busy schedule, I realized that I’m actually causing the same level of frustration for people when it comes to the tutorials. Obviously people have found them useful enough to ask to use the content — and I never say no — so why make it such a difficult process?

I’m really glad that these have been useful to people and it makes perfect sense to me to release them on this license.

So have fun with them and stop asking me for permission to use them. 😉

Dad Takes Kelsi Driving

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Photo by rbieber

We have two kids with drivers permits right now and yesterday was the first time I actually took Kelsi out.

Overall, she did really well. I don’t remember being as nervous when I started driving as she was, though I’m sure I was. Thankfully, she felt comfortable driving with me, as it seems I didn’t freak out too much.

It’s so weird to hit this milestone. There’s nothing that makes you feel old like watching your baby grow up. Where did all the time go?

Value Stream Mapping Software

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I’m looking for software that does Value Stream Mapping. As with mind mapping, this process is an extreme pain without a tool to do it. If you know of any good software (or component add ons for existing software like Visio), please leave a comment on the blog. Of course, the first preference is free, but I’d love to look at commercial software as well.