Ana and I have taken this week off, something we’ve wanted to do in the past but never gotten around to. Well, so far it has been move-move-move. Yesterday it was going to several stores to cash in some of our gift certificates, followed by an evening dinner with our highschool physics teacher Mrs. Langford and her husband Dr. Langford. We had a very pleasant evening, and ended up talking with them until we left around 10:30pm.

Today it was running all over town getting me an eye exam and new glasses.

I now have 2 new pairs of glasses – one regular, one Rx sunglasses – and a third pair ordered for playing recquetball (also Rx). It had been a few years since my last eye exam and my prescription only changed a little bit, but I can see noticably better now. Who’da thought!

Tonight (in probably 15 minutes) we’re heading over to Ana’s family’s for yet another holiday party. It’ll be fine I’m sure, but we’re just a little worn out.

That’s it from the Johnson household…

Merry Christmas everyone! Ana and I hope that you all have a great holiday season, and may your travels be safe.

My parents recently gave me their Tivo since they were switching to Insight’s DVR. I’m already using Insight’s as well (dual HD tuner) so I don’t need the Tivo for its recording capabilities. Instead, I have installed Galleon and now have mp3s, among other things, in my family room.

The introduction of yet another device into the entertainment center finally forced me to spend some time really configuring the remote I purchased a few years ago. We now have everything driven from the one remote, with macro buttons to quickly do things like watch a dvd, watch cable, and listen to music.

A couple days ago, in an effort to clean out some of the comment spam my blog has been experiencing I deleted quite a few comments and accidently took a few legitamate ones with them. Sorry Scott, I know at least one of yours was accidently wiped out.

Following David’s lead, Happy Holidays everyone.

We have also been able to get our house decorated.

The tape drive I purchased back in 2001 finally came in handy today. I was able to restore my important data (code, documents, etc) from 10 days ago (would have been more recent if I had seen the drive acting flaky a week earlier) and photos from a bit further back. Luckily I have many of the missing photos still on the hard drives of my laptop and desktop machines. So, all in all, I really only lost a lot of music I spent a few days ripping. Whew, what a relief.

At the time I purchased the tape drive, it was around $300 and I questioned the necessity of the device – that was a pretty expensive purchase for me at the time, being a student and all. Today, without it, I would have been willing to pay a LOT more than $300 to get my photos and data back.

Over the next few weeks I plan on getting a better backup solution in place. I was extremely lucky this time, as I became lazy and my backup machine offline for a few months. It was less than a couple weeks ago that I started getting it back online and performing backups. I NEVER want to experience that aweful feeling ever again.

My fileserver at home just lost its storage drive. Shit.

All of you that have a DVR at home, set it to record a show called Random/1 on A&E and give it a try. Ana and I think it’s a pretty amazing, real-life show. Go to the website and look around to get an idea of what it’s about.

Last weekend was Jay’s bachelor weekend of sorts. It started with some LAN games on Friday night, followed on Saturday by paintball, a tool shower, and more LAN games. Talk about exhausted on Sunday.

That was my first time playing paintball and it was awesome! I’m very glad I decided to buy the gear and look forward to playing again.

Where the hell did November go??

Here it is, the first of December, and we have snow on the ground! My coworkers and I (those of us in the “POD”) have our window blinds open and christmas music playing loudly. Currently playing: Bing Crosby singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing/It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

note: the POD is a group of 4 cubicles arranged in a square, a nice collaboration environment.

Currently playing: Frosty the Snowman