Thanksgiving 2008

Today is going to be like every other Holiday – a whirlwind.

We’re leaving in about 30 minutes to drive to Nazareth to have dinner at my sister-in-law Brandi’s house. After that, we’re heading back up here to see my family, and then it’s bedtime for us since we both have work tomorrow.

So what am I thankful for? In the big picture, lots of things. 2008 has turned out to be a lot better than 2007 was, even with all of the issues we’ve had along the way this year.

On the short side however, I’m very thankful I don’t have to do to work all day and I get to all as much free food as I can fit!

The Weekend That Was

We’re at the end of another weekend that didn’t quite turn out how I planned. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

The weekend started off with me without a car. My car is in the shop so that meant I have to share Jess’s. So I get up relatively early on Saturday to run some errands before she has to go to work. My first stop is across the river to Kingston to get a haircut. I make it over there around 11:00am and I am greeted with a 45-60 minute wait for a chair. Not having that much time, I say ‘screw that’ and head on to my next destination – the liquor store. After last week’s podcast I ran out of vodka and wanted some for this week’s cast. I make my way over there and pick up the goods. Now that we have acquired alcohol, it’s off to the grocery store for some weekend supplies. After spending 10 minutes and $30 there, I finally head home to have lunch with my wife before she has to leave for work. Once she leaves for work, I have a small list of things I want to get accomplished. Six hours later, I have managed to accomplish 2 of those things. Knowing this is probably all that is realistically going to get accomplish, I retire to my computer and get some coding done there. After a few hours, it’s time for our weekly podcast, when I realize I have nothing to talk about. It has been a really slow week for tech news and I am coming up empty handed. I put out a tweet to all my compatriots and no one has anything either. Looking at a very grim podcast, we decide to forego this week and meet back next week. That leaves me the rest of the night to have a few drinks and play some bad 80s music louder than is probably recommended.

Sunday greets me with cold temperatures, and a light dusting of snow on the ground. I rise from my bed, climb over the wife, and try to figure out what I want to do with my last day off before Thanksgiving. I decide on a few things, but then like most things, they fall through. What I do end up doing is watching some Stargate Atlantis, including the saddest episode ever filmed. I’m not afraid to admit that I get a little teary eyed every time I watch it. Once I recover my manhood, I make my way to the attic and locate all of our Christmas decorations. Since my busy time at work has ended and Jess’s has just begun, I decide to make things easier for us and bring all the decorations downstairs. With everything in one room, we can decorate at our leisure. Once that was done, I did some Christmas shopping online for my niece and nephew, and purchased some Christmas music from iTunes.

Getting into the spirit of things, I call my dad and we talk about the upcoming deer season. Afterwards, I call my wife at work to talk to her on last time today. She won’t be getting home until after I am in bed and I won’t be seeing her again until I hand the car off to her tomorrow afternoon. We talk about our plans for Thanksgiving on Thursday, and other small talk. This year, we are going down to my sister-in-law Brandi’s house. It should be interesting since she is hosting not only her family, but her husband’s family as well. Jess lets me know what time we have to be there, and we discuss a possibly trip we may be taking for her birthday weekend. She still hasn’t decided if she wants to go away or not. If we do go away, now is the time to go. Gas prices are the lowest they have been since the beginning of 2005, and the hotel we looked at back in April is 1/3 of the cost it was back then.

That pretty much sums up my weekend. Not a bad weekend, but in the same breath, I wish I had sometime to play some games. I guess I’ll just have to find some time during to week to get some gamage in.

Having Cake And Eating It Too (It’s Not A Lie)

On January 27, 2008, I made what is for me, a life changing decision. Did I get married? No. Did I have a baby? No. Did I get my nipples pierced? No. What I did do is was buy a Macintosh and leave the world of desktop PCs behind me. In the months that followed, I was quite happy with my decision, even becoming somewhat of a preacher-boy for the OS X platform. I had wanted a Macintosh for years, but it wasn’t until my experiences at i/o Computers that I needed to leave the PC world behind. After fixing other people’s computers for 3 years semi-full time, I was so sick and tired of viruses, spyware, the Windows Registry, legacy drivers, and root kits that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Hell, when my main rig died on me in June 2007, it took me months to look at it and to get it back up and running. In fact, it sat on the floor of my computer room for a good 3 months until I even looked at it. Once I determined it was the video card that had fried out, I ordered a new one and installed it. But by the time that happened, my main computer had been down for almost 4 months. In that time, I just used my laptop and was content with that. Plus, once my main system was up and running at full speed, I ditched it again in 3 short months for my new Mac.

Where am I going with all of this? Well, as much as I love my Mac, there are still some things I need a Windows environment for. Most of these tasks can and have been handled by my laptop, but there is one aspect that nothing but my main rig is suited to do – play games.

I brought my PC down from my filing cabinet a few weeks ago and made room for it on my desk. I hooked the keyboard and mouse up to it, something that hadn’t been hooked up in quite some time. Prior to this, the tower itself just sat on top of my filing cabinet with just a power cord and an Ethernet cable hooked into it. I was using the system as a media server for the house and accessed it via Remote Desktop. Now however, I was getting the itch to play some of the game I have, but have never played or finished. There was only one problem with this whole setup – I needed a second monitor. Leaving the world of CRT monitors behind with my Mac, I searched for a solution to share my monitor. First, I thought a simple DVI switch would be perfect. After researching the solution, I was stunned by how much they cost. For the cost of a switch to share the same monitor with my Mac and PC, I could buy a whole new monitor. I looked online to try and find the same monitor I already had so it would be a nice mirror image on my desk, only to discover that this model has been discontinued. The only place I could find one was eBay, and quite frankly, I’m not willing to buy a monitor on eBay. My last option was a manual KVM switch. Since I didn’t want to use the same keyboard and mouse between the 2 systems, I needed a KVM with a manual switch that had dual DVI inputs. Yeah, sounds easy, right? Wrong. Everything I was finding was right around a solid c-note. Being cheap frugal I decided I would just switch the monitor cable manually. Well, that lasted about 2 weeks before that really got old. So, last night I finally broke down and brought my old 19” CRT monitor down from the attic and hooked it up to my PC. I had forgotten how bad a CRT looks next to using an LCD for the past 11 months. But, it was a free solution, and it did what I needed it to do without constantly switching cables. So today after editing episode 21 of Growing Up Geek, I rearranged my desk to a point where I can use my Mac and my PC seamlessly.

I now have the best of both worlds. I can work on Mac, and then game on my PC without switching anything and not moving.