No Matter Where You Go, There you Are

The weekend started with my Company Christmas party Saturday night.  The food was so-so as usual but the company was great as always.

Sunday started with a harp recital with my nephew Joiey at a small chapel on the Texas Women's University campus in Denton.   The chapel was very small (max of maybe 40 people could fit, which made for a great room filling sound.

From there we went to Prestonwood Baptist Church for dinner buffet and their Gloria presentation staring John Tesh. 

And, since we are on the subject of music; Here is a Trans-Siberian Orchestra primer to get your ready for their Dallas appearance on January 3 2009 (yeah, it's going to feel weird seeing them after Christmas)
YouTube TSO Channel
YouTube TSO Search

I also just found that TSO will be featured LIVE on Rockline tonight (12/15) ! The episode will replay on 12/17 and is available for online replay on Rockline

And to stick with the music theme here are the artists getting heavy rotation on my Zune,
Iced Earth
Hammerfall
Avenged Sevenfold
Shadows Fall

We attended my nephew Roger's wedding this weekend. 
The wedding went off without a hitch and a great time was had by one and all.

We have noticed this before but last night it was taken to the extremes.

For some reason Rusty likes to howl (if you can call his screeching a howl) at the callers voice on the answering machine.
He doesn't mind our voice during the greeting but he flips out when the caller starts talking.  We aren't sure if he does this while we are gone but we know he does it when we are home. 

Basically someone called with a caller-id of either Private or Unknown which we let roll to the machine.  The calling machine didn't catch our machine picking up and kept talking for a minute or till I answered and hung-up the phone.  Heather was in the study, I was upstairs and the dog was in the living room howling, and howling, and howling.  We both had to go to him to get him calmed down.

wheeeee

 

You're incompetence cost my dad his job of 10+ years.  Sorry if anyone is offended by that but current Dallas ISD budget shortfall (if one can call $84 million a 'shortfall') is ultimately the fault of the superintendant of the district.  Just like a real corporation the head guy bears all respsonsibility.
Dallas ISD to layoff 1000+ employees

On a brighter note the Found New Hardware wizard came up again this week.
HP xw6600

The current config of my main system is the box above with a Quad-Core 2.66ghz Xeon processor, 8gb ram, 2 nVidia Quadro NVS 290 video, 500gb, 250gb, 1tb drives. Monitors are 2x 19" 1x 24" flat panes.
Plans are to add the second proc and another 8gb ram next year

My Grandmother Jo fell and broke her hip which required replacing the hip.  She spent a few weeks in the hospital and rehab center before heading back home.  She then decided that she was tired of having to keep up with the house she has lived in for 48 years (yep, they bought the house brand new in 1960.)  She found a retirement community that she liked and fit her budget.  The Waterford is located off Park Row in Pantego, Texas.  We got her moved in without too much trouble and she seems to be enjoying her new lifestyle.

 

Of course there is a downside to her move.  She is moving from a three bedroom house to a one bedroom apartment.  This results in quite a bit of stuff that needs to find a new home.   The plan is to empty the house out, then clean it up and paint it in preparation to sell it.

 

Heather and I took a couple of weeks off from the moving & organizing to allow Heather to recuperate from surgery to remove cysts and other growths caused by endometriosis.  She was pretty sore after the surgery but is no worse for wear after recovery.

We just got back from eight fun filled days at Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida followed up by two days at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

We stayed at the Contemporary Resort near the Magic Kingdom within Disney world.  Disney world is ~46 square miles, yep 46 square miles.  It is comprised of 4 theme parks (Epcot, The Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios) and two water parks (Typhoon Lagoon, Blizzard Beach) and Downtown Disney.

We had multi-day multi-park tickets that allowed us to park hop to our hearts content.  Which we did, we basically spent the early part of the day at a theme park till the heat or rain kicked in.  We then waited out the rain at the hotel.  Then we would go to the water parks in the afternoon and evening. By staying at a Disney resort we were able to take advantage of Magic Hours.  Basically the park opens early or stays open later exclusively for resort guests.

On the way back home we stopped at Pensacola NAS to visit with Tarren and to see the Naval Air Museum.

Highlights:

The great travel provided by Disney.  The hotel we were in (The Contemporary) has a monorail running through it that goes to Epcot and the Magic Kingdome.  There are city sized buses to the other 4 parks that make up Disney world that run about every 20 minutes.

Seeing an American Bald Eagle at the Animal Kingdom.  He spread his wings out in this shot right after dropping a squirt that would have covered the entire windshield.

The nightly light show in the lagoon outside our hotel room.  This was really cool they are basically lit up billboard type things on boats that put on a light and music show every night.

Finding this image of PC Guy finally getting revenge on Mac Guy.

Lowlights:

The goofy sinks at the hotel.  Not to cast any aspersions on the designer but he can’t be married as there was almost no counter space in the bathroom.  Not to mention the weird shape and almost no slope towards the drain that makes it almost impossible to rinse anything out.

The rain.   We were in Orlando for 9 days, of those it rained on 8 of them.  Not just a little rain either, we’re talking serious thunderstorms that went for 1-2 hours.

Totals:
Miles driven:  2657
Fuel: gallons of gas 162 @average of 3.04 = 640.32
Average of 16.3 MPG
Number of e-mails on my corp account while gone: 3830

It is the  5 year anniversary of my blog.

no other interesting content to be seen here, move along.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...
"A strong cup of coffee in the morning can feel like a life saver. Now, one of the largest and longest studies of coffee drinking suggests that coffee may indeed boost your lifespan – providing you drink enough of the stuff, that is.
The study tracked 129,000 men and women over two decades. It found that people who consumed several cups of coffee every day were less likely to die of heart disease than those who shied away from the stuff. Heart disease is an umbrella term for conditions including heart attacks, stroke, and arrhythmia."

WOOT!!! hmm… Problem is I only drink 3 cups day, so I might need to increase my intake (alright, they are big cups)

In other news Grandma Jo is home recuperating from her hip replacement and doing better every day

I've got to vent for a second so bear with me.

I have a massive impact case (we call them critical situations, or critsits) from one of our large enterprise customers last week, think millions of dollars lost per minute of downtime.  Needless to say I have been spending a lot of time on conference calls with the customer and our dev team. 

On the way to the twins baseball game on Monday afternoon we saw a 7 year old boy trying to catch his dog that had gotten out, unfortunately the dog ran out into Keller-Hicks road and was hit.  It was a small dog and went under the center of the vehicle but he was still in sad shape.  Heather and I helped the mother get everyone into a vehicle to rush to the vet.  We aren't sure what the outcome was but are hoping for the best for little Rocky.  On the bright side the boys won both games of the double header. 

During yesterdays storms we lost power at the house for about 45 minutes.  After it came back on our big screen wouldn't power on.  Just a flashing status light.  From minimal research on the internet this is either a blown fuse (hope) or blown capacitors ($$$).

Later that evening as I'm sitting on the couch typing a status mail to the customer above summarizing our latest concall Heather turned on the light to sit at the kitchen table. Pop, there goes a light bulb.  I looked up at that point and said "well with the way this week is going I'm afraid to go to the bathroom for fear something will come off in my hand"

and now back to our regularly scheduled programming ....

Update  (or should that be downdate?) : 5/11/208
Grandma Jo broke her hip sunday night   She had hip replacement surgery on Tuesday.  She is pretty sore but otherwise ok.

I just got back from yet another trip.  This time I was in Seattle to attend training at our Sammamish facility.  This was the first time in six years I had full reign and a rental car while in Seattle.  I took my laptop with a Streets and Trips 2008 (with GPS receiver) to assist in navigation.  The trip started off bumpy as I went to precisely where I had input as the location of my hotel and yet it wasn't there.  After a quick paperwork check I realized I keyed in the address of a Holiday Inn instead of Larkspur Landing.  After getting checked in I headed out to find the office to save stressing Monday morning if I couldn't find it.  Good thing I did as I once again keyed the wrong address into Streets, 52nd instead of 51, sigh; at least I did all my aimless wandering on Sunday afternoon while the traffic was light

Later in the week I headed up to campus to say hi to a few people and wandered around the area.

The week went very well with one exception.  Sunday night I went to Applebee's for dinner, as usual ordered my burger medium rare, I received a well done burger, the server stated that they cannot cook them any less, ick.  Night 2, go to the 'The Keg' sports bar (on Factoria in Bellevue for those keeping score at home), the waitress assured me that they even though they have to thoroughly cook the burger theirs is moist and good, she was wrong.  After a long next day I went to Outback since it was on the way back to the hotel, the waitress there assured me they would cook my burger however I wanted it, she was right, the burger was fantastic!!!.  And for those keeping score, yes I went to Seattle and ate beef for 3 days; sorry I'm a creature of habit.  I did have salmon my last night in town.