Christmas 2009 – Part 1

Posted on 12/26/2009 by Trev at 12:19 pm

Christmas has been great this year. Not only was it Jackson’s first Christmas, but I also got some pretty kick ass gifts this year as well. Here are some of my favorite gifts:

From my beautiful wife Jess, I received several new shirts. These were no ordinary shirts, but some very sweet geek shirts from Think Geek. Here are my favorites.

Streampunk Skeleton

Ship In A Bottle

Ecto-1 in Pac-Man

Ports

All of the great gifts from my wife were acquired on Christmas Eve, where we spent a nice, quiet night home alone with our son.

Then on Christmas Day I got to do something I haven’ done in years — spend it with my family. We had a great day telling stories, opening gifts, and laughing. One of the highlights for me was having my grandmother, who is 92, there for Christmas. It was nice seeing her have a great time with all the grandkids, and great-grandkids, under one roof. Gift wise though, I got lots of great new clothes for work and around the house. Although, as nice as they were, I would say that this was my favorite gift from Christmas Day.

Apple Magic Mouse

Finally I can ditch the cursed artifact known as the Apple Mighty Mouse and have a real mouse that’ll really scroll. In fact, I have been using this mouse now for a little over 12 hours and I can’t image every going back to a Mighty Mouse.

I have work today from 2pm-10pm. After that, it’s home and off to bed. I’m off tomorrow and that means it’s Christmas — Part 2. The second part being my wife’s family. We’re heading down to see her dad and his wife in Easton in the morning, and then her mother and sisters in the afternoon in Phillipsburg, NJ. Then it’s back home, find room for everything, and back to work the next day thru New Year’s Day.

So far though, this has been one great Christmas!

Christmas Eve 2009

Posted on 12/24/2009 by Trev at 5:09 pm

So here it is again, Christmas Eve. The past few weeks of hecticness, spending, baking, and wrapping all boil down to this. Like it or not, in a few short hours, it will be Christmas Morning.

Me? I’m sill stuck at work right now. I have been done with eveything I needed to do for almost 2 hours now. Sadly, I still have well over an hour to go until I’m allowed to go home to my family. However, I did get a nice surprise this afternoon.

I called Jess to see how she was doing and she said she was just chilling at home while Jackson took a nap. After a few minutes of chit-chat, she let me go. I hung up the phone and went back to work. About 3 minutes later, I see her Jackson come walking into my department. Here, she was in her car in the parkingmlot when I called her. She decided to bake me and my co-workers some chocolate chip cookies and surprise me by bringing them up personally. It was a really nice treat. Since we weren’t busy, I was able to sit with them for quite a while, and even got to feed Jackson when he woke up from his nap. After about an hour, Jess went home to work on her cinnamon buns for tomorrow morning and dinner for tonight.

Our plans for tonight are quite simple. We’re going to have a nice dinner, open some presents, and maybe have a few drinks. Tomorrow afternoon, we’re off to my parent’s house for the day. This will be the first time I have spent Christmas Day with my family in about 4 or 5 years and I am really looking forward to it. Add to the fact that we’re getting a winter storm tomorrow, and the fact that we’re only traveling about 5 minutes away makes me even more happy.

For right now though, I’m off to find a way to kill the rest of my shift.

A Snowy Weekend

Posted on 12/20/2009 by Trev at 3:07 pm

This has been a good weekend so far. Yesterday I woke up extra early for a day off (6am) and was out of the house by 7am to go do my Christmas shopping for Jess. After a stop at the bank, filling up my car, and making a quick stop, I was at the mall by 7:40am. I was out of the mall, arms full of bags, by 9am. Two more stops, and I was done with all of my shopping by 9:45am. I even managed to pick up Jackson a new bear hat and a Christmas sleeper!

After I got home, Jess was just getting out of the shower. I played with Jackson for an hour or so and we were off to do some group shopping. After picking up some meds at our vet, we were off to Sam’s Club. ONce we survived the madness that is Sam’s Club on a Saturday morning, we decided it was time for lunch. Where should one go around noon on a Saturday for lunch? The same place one should go everyday for lunch of course — Abe’s hot dogs!

Jackson was a bit fussy during lunch, which we took as hunger. Unfortunately, when we tried to fed him, he pushed the bottle away and spit out the formula. As it turns out, he just wanted to sit there and stare at the bottle. Weird, but then again, he is my son!

After lunch, we needed to head across the river to Kingston. While there, the snow storm we were waiting for finally arrived. It was nice sitting there in the car while Jess was shipping some stuff out at the UPS store watching the snow fall. Once she was done there, I headed to the state store and picked up some alcohol for Saturday night. Since it looked like it was going to snow all night, why not stay in where it was safe and warm and have a few drinks.

After all of that, we headed to my parent’s house for a few hours. Jess needed to pick up a package there, we needed to drop off cookies, and as a bonus, my dad was baking his Christmas poppy seed bread. They were even nice enough to feed us dinner while we were there. Bonus!

Once we left my parent’s house, we headed to the grocery store and stocked up on everything we don’t buy at Sam’s Club. Once we got our order (and saving over $27 with our Gold Card!!) we finally came home and put everything away. Once settled in, we put Jackson down, had a few drinks, and played Mario Kart Wii. What a great day!

Today we all slept in and are relaxing around the house. We ended up only getting about 2 inches of snow last night, so at least that was easy to clear this morning. Right now, I am doing some house work. Well, technically I’m writing this post, bu you know what I mean. Later on we’re bringing down all of the presents from the attic and wrapping them up.

So in summary, I had a weekend full of snow, fun, and family. What else could you ask for?

A Good Night To Stay Inside

Posted on 12/10/2009 by Trev at 9:54 pm

Archive Project: Complete!

Posted on 12/10/2009 by Trev at 2:45 pm

I have now gone through every single iteration of Twev1701.com that archive.org had and transfered all of the missing pre-Movable Type posts to the database. Granted, there are some huge freakin’ gaps in the archive, but this is the best archive I could find of my site that had some of my missing posts. The oldest post in the archive now dates back to September 16, 2002.

I wish there was a way to get pack all of my old posts from the days of using NewPro and Coranto, but sadly, I think this will be the best we will ever get to that dream.

To celebrate, I think it’s time to fire up the PS3 and play some ‘MK vs. DC’. FIGHT!

Is Simpler Really Better?

Posted on 12/10/2009 by Trev at 1:48 am

I have been asking myself this question for the better part of an hour now. I should be sleeping right now, but I ended up taking a 3 hour nap on the couch after dinner with Jackson and am wide awake now. Thank God I am off tomorrow else I might be in a little bit of trouble right now.

Anyway, I started going though on of my favorite time killers Archive.org. I typed in my original site’s address (twev1701.com) and started making a local visual archive of my site. In doing so, I started reading all of the old posts.

Time for a quick history lesson. My site started back at the end of 2001 with the purchase of the twev1701.com domain. I then purchased hosting, and tried to figure out how to make my own blog. I ended up using a program for the actual posts called NewsPro. It was a PERL based program, and quite easy to install and use. The downside was that it used its own database, not my MySQL. This meant that when I needed to re-install NewsPro or change servers, I could not do a simple dbase backup and restore. To be honest, I never really thought about that. I never could have imagined back in 2001 that I would still be doing this 8 years later. Anyway, when the time did come for me to change servers, I upgraded to the newest version, which was then called Coranto. In doing so however, I lost all of my previous posts. Eventually, years later on January 27, 2004, I installed a true blogging script called Movable Type. Then, a few short months later in April of 2004, tragedy stuck when I was screwed over by my then web host and lost not only my domain, but my entire site. Luckily, I had a backup! I then purchased the twev1701.net domain name that I use to this day, and got myself a new web host. In doing so, I decided to switch over to WordPress. I converted by local copy of my Movable Type dbase, and viola! I still use WordPress to this very day.

Why the huge history lesson? Because in looking back at the old twev1701.com archive, I got to thinking about 2 things. First, has my website become so complicated now, that the fun of tweaking it is gone? Secondly, am I the only person who misses static pages instead of dynamically generated database driven pages? I know it’s very 2002 thinking, but color me nostalgic. Don’t get me wrong, I love the automation that modern day scripting has afforded webmasters such as myself. But there’s still something to be said about a nice, hand coded site.

Another thought I had (and a project for another day) while looking though the archive is to go back and salvage as many old pre Movable Type posts that I can and adding them to my WordPress database. The one nice thing about that is that I can preserve the date and time of each post. It would only take a few hours to do, and I think having the inclusion of these vintage posts would benefit my site overall. Yep, it’s settled. That’s another project added to my list.

Mixed Bag

Posted on 12/9/2009 by Trev at 11:44 pm

I’ve been feeling nostalgic, inspired, and creative the past few days. This had led me to revisit old projects and really ponder what I could turn them into with the knowledge and resources I have today.

I fear no good can come of this.

Winter Is Finally Here

Posted on 12/8/2009 by Trev at 2:04 am

It looks like winter 2009 was officially ushered in by the snow on Saturday. Since then, the temperatures have barely risen above the freezing mark. In fact, they don’t look to top 32 degrees until the next storm rolls in on Wednesday morning, bringing not snow this time, but our dreaded friend ice.

Sliding into work on Wednesday morning should be fun!

First Snow of 2009

Posted on 12/6/2009 by Trev at 10:24 am

Yesterday was one of those days that will be remembered for years to come.

The day started out early (8:00am) with me cleaning the house and moving various pieces of furniture. Jess’s family was coming up to do their cookie swap, Jess’s birthday dinner, and her birthday party as well. To accomodate everyone in our house, I had to move my computer back into Jackson’s room, and setup our 6 foot banquet table and 8 folding chairs. Now to do this simple task in a house as small as ours, is like one of those old sliding puzzle games that has one piece missing. You have to move one piece at a time, and to get something from one side to the other, several pieces must be moved, and then moved again. Long story short, about 40 minutes later, the computer was moved a whopping 15ft away and the table was up.

The weather men earlier in the week had talked about snow this weekend, but truth be told, we didn’t lay much creedence in it. Every time we want snow, we get rain. Every time we want rain, we get sun. And when we want sun, we get monsoon. Sense a pattern here? Anyway, Jess was out with her mother shopping the in morning and I was feeding Jackson. Then around 10:30am or so, I spotted something come flying past my window. It was snow! It was light and fluffy, and gently falling to the ground. I wasn’t sure how long this would last, but I wanted to savor every minute of it. As it would turn out, I didn’t have to. After a good 90 minutes, it was coming down increasingly harder. As I sat at the table eating some left over sweet & sour chicken, the radio reported that they had just increased our snow totals. The valley cities were now getting 1-3 inches and the Pocono mountains were looking at 3-6. This was great!

I called my sister over to watch Jackson for a little while so I could run out and grab a cake for Jess and pick up her present from my parent’s house. The snow was not sticking to the roads, but that was just about the only surface it was not sticking to. It was that wet, fluffy snow that has the beautiful characteristic of laying on tree branches and filling in the holes of a chain link fence. It literally blankets everything and gives everything you look at that wonderful Holiday feeling.

A few hours later, Jess’s family showed up and they started decorating cookies. Afterwards, the kids went out into the yard and started building snowmen. I was curious, so I went out with a measuring stick to see how much had fallen. According to my yard, we had about 4″ of snow on the ground around 3pm.

Around 4:30pm, we had a very nice dinner, immediately followed by an ice cream cake and brownies. Even Gavin managed to sneak over for some cake! We started to cleanup afterwards, and everyone was gone by about 7:00pm. Jess and I hung out for a while, enjoying the Christmas lights, snow, cookies, and some TiVo goodness. A few hours later, we headed off to bed together. All in all, it was a great Holiday day.