David was all laughs tonight before going to bed. Here are a couple shots of the tickl-er and tickl-ee
As they say.. “and fun was had by all”.
Category: General
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VMWare Server 2 and Windows 2003
A couple times now in the past several months I’ve needed to install or upgrade VMWare Server 2 running on Windows 2003 and ran into a problem that takes a little while to re-discover the solution for. This is for future reference and to help others that may hit this in the future.
The problem is that after installing or upgrading VMWare Server 2, my host machine will no longer be able to be reached across the network. It can communicate (ping, etc) out, but not the other way around. Hosted virtual machines also have full connectivity, and they can receive communications from the networks. It’s very strange, but the solution has been to Disable Routing and Remote Access, reboot, and re-enabled it.
Once that’s done, everything is normal. Fun Stuff.
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Concentration
This afternoon, David layed on our floor with a pencil and pad of paper and “drew” for over an hour. Just quietly flipping pages and drawing all over them. He even insisted on taking his tools to dinner with us where he continued to scratch his thoughts down. All-in-all, he spent about 2 hours at it.
It’s so fun to watch him problem-solve and learn things. As he was scribbling he couldn’t keep his pencil as still as he wanted, so he steadied it with his other hand as he slowly and deliberatly moved the pencil to where HE wanted. Then talk to himself and start on the next page.
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Happy Birthday Ana!
Today is Ana’s 30th birthday! The day didn’t go quite as smooth as she wanted for her birthday (leaving work later than desired, having to get a raincheck for dinner out thanks to David’s head-first, running swan dive off of a couch, etc.) but it’s looking up!
Here’s Mom and son after having enjoyed the birthday cake (made by your’s truly).
The cake wasn’t a looker, but tasted pretty good. And I think you’d be hard pressed to find another one with “11110” in candles…
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Busch Stadium
Friday night Ana and I were able to make it to our first Cardinals game of the year. The weather was fantastic, the food was delicious, and the Cards handily defeated the Royals. What a great way to spend a Friday night.
I of course took my camera and grabbed a few frames. This is my first multiple exposure blend, courtesy of Photomatix, and I think it does a good job of capturing the great weather we had. Click to enlarge.
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Lots of Yardwork
The past couple weekends have been full of yardwork for the Johnsons. Last weekend we purchased and planted a tree out front, and this weekend we’re getting the garden all ready to go for the year. I had a cubic yard of dirt delivered yesterday to top off what went missing from last year (where does it go??). This morning I ran over to Sunbelt Rentals for a tiller and got the dirt all ready for Ana to get things planted. She’s working away on that as I type.
Kudos to Sunbelt Rentals, I was able to submit a reservation online for the tiller while I was still in bed this morning. Much better than talking to someone on the phone!
Our grass has greened up nicely – due in large part to the first aeration we’ve had done to it (thanks www.trylawns.com), followed by round 1 of Scott’s fertilizer. And to top it off, Ana’s Azaleas are starting to bloom.
Our neighborhood gets VERY windy, so I followed the advice of a neighbor and tied the tree down. Rest safe, Springfield, my tree won’t be wandering out of the yard anytime soon.
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To the Zoo!
Given the final arrival of spring (or did we just skip to early summer?), we decided to take a day trip to the St. Louis Zoo. So after eating breakfast, we loaded up the van and headed south. Upon arrival, we were greeted by quite a bit of traffic in Forrest Park and lots of zoo-goers. Not too surprising for such a nice day, but it still felt like parking at the Arch would have been closer.
David got to get up close and personal with a few of the animals, starting off with a few monkeys. Good thing that glass was there – that monkey would have been missing a handful of hair if not.
After that encounter, he was on the lookout for animals!
We had lots of fun, and look forward to going back. In fact, we purchased a family membership – so we WILL be going back. More photos available.
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Kites
I don’t know what it is, but Ana and I really enjoy flying kites. Since it was finally warm when Ana and I got off of work, we thought it would be fun to take David to the park and introduce him to a kite the Easter Bunny left for him this year.
Beautiful weather, and a good time. A few more photos in the gallery.
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Trillian Astra
I’ve been a Trillian user for quite some time, having used one of the first versions in beta form. Sadly, the current version has been showing its age and late last year I was forced to stop using it because it had become unreliable on the Windows Live Messenger platform, which I use for work. I felt I had held out long enough and the next version was nowhere to be found (well, it has been under development seemingly forever), so I gave in and went back to using multiple chat clients.
Fast forward to last week when it was brought to my attention that the next version of Trillian, called Astra, was available in a limited beta. I quickly signed up and have been very pleased since.
Kudos to Cerulean Studios for all of their hard work, it is very clear they have put alot of thought into this “chat client”. I won’t go into the laundry list of features, but will mention a few that I really like:
- Settings are tied to a single Trillian account, so I don’t have to redefine connections between the 3 computers I use.
- iPhone support coming!
- Twitter integration – tweets are listed in the main window where contacts are.
- Facebook integration – near-immediate updates without having to login to the website.
- A very well designed logging and log searching system. I rely heavily on this for work, and being able to search by date in a nice UI is great. AIM, Live, and past versions of Trillian have been lacking here.
I mention that it seems very well thought out, here’s an example. When alerts of some kind happen, there’s a small unobtrusive “popup” window that appears for a few moments and then goes away. Yeah, nothing new there. BUT I have noticed that birthday alerts from Facebook don’t just go away – you have to close them yourself. There’s a decent chance that if it just stayed visible for just a few seconds, you’d miss it completely. Good design, I like it.
I used the beta all of 2 days before deciding to purchase. Thanks for bringing my chat client back, Cerulean!
I have 4 beta invites remaining, let me know if you want to give it a try.
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