Jenny was gone again this week, and I surprised her by putting up the Christmas lights outside while she was gone.  It's safe to say that I am not the most handy person in the world, so she is always happy when I can accomplish a small task without having to go to the hospital or call the Fire Department.  I hate this picture because I took it on a tripod and everything, but it was tilted, and I didn't have enough picture to correct the tilt without cutting stuff off.  I'm supposedly getting a tripod with a level on it for my birthday, so that will be cool.

Another thing I did while she was gone was feed the children.  From seeing this picture of Izzy eating her breakfast on Wednesday, you wouldn't be able to tell it, but I actually fed them almost EVERY DAY.  I got tired of hearing "Mommy doesn't make us eat peanut butter and jelly for breakfast" and "I don't want hot dogs again", so I broke down and made oatmeal.  One day Alex got mad at me for not making the right KIND of oatmeal, so he got to eat nothing for breakfast.  I was half expecting a note home from school about how I should feed them every day.  (And I didn't take the food away from him, he was just too pigheaded to eat cinnamon and spice oatmeal instead of maple and brown sugar oatmeal for breakfast.  I left it on the counter and said he was welcome to eat it, but he wasn't getting anything else...  and he's eaten cinnamon and spice oatmeal at least 100 times, and he likes it, he was just "testing his boundaries".  Little bastard.)

Eric is a a strange kid...he hates (and I mean HATES) to write, but he will read anything he can get his hands on.  He's 9, so I am starting to show him some of the stuff I liked when I was young.  I love to read, and I'm trying to get the kids hooked on it...it's one of the reasons we don't let them watch TV during the week (and again, we're the MEANEST PARENTS EVER for doing this). 

I'm using a cunning plan to get them hooked...I've only done it to Eric so far, but Alex will probably be ready by next year:  I gave Eric the first Harry Potter book, and told him that if he read it, and could intelligently discuss it with me afterwards, I would give him $20.00.  It worked like a charm.  Then, I gave him the second HP, and told him I would give him $10.00 after he read it.  I kept giving him less and less, until we got to $1.00 to read "Harry Potter and the Painful Rectal Itch" or whatever the 5th book was, and then I stopped.  It was kind of like drugs; I gave him enough incentive to read them until he was hooked, and now he's off and running.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at Barnes and Noble, killing time for some reason.  Bookstores are dangerous for me, and I usually can't go in without blowing way too much on books.  But anyway, I saw Ender's Game, and remembered how much I loved it when I was young (I don't remember when I read it for the first time, but it was big when I was in the Army, so I was >17).  I got it for him, and he started on it today.  I had to go downstairs at 10:00 to tell him to stop reading and turn the lights out.  I love it when a plan comes together.

The pictures are not staged, he came up to my computer room in the attic to get me to print a story he had to write (type) for school.  He grabbed it off the bed I keep upstairs for when I need a nap really bad, and I had to kick him out at bedtime.

(After re-reading Ender's Game, it's not as good as I remember, but I still recommend it)

If you are using MSN Messenger or Windows Messenger, add northpole@live.com to your buddylist, and then you can tell Santa what you want without having to write him a letter.  Computers make all of our lives easier, don't they?

Eric is 9, and he's started to doubt Santa...but now that he sees that I can IM with the man himself, he doesn't DARE think that anymore.

I take a LOT of pictures.  Over Thanksgiving, for example, I took about 900 in 2 days.  Since I am still trying to learn how to take decent looking pictures, I've already deleted about half of them, and I'm trying to see what I can do to make them look better. 

One thing that I started using was smugmug.  About 2 or 3 years ago, someone broke into my house and stole my good computers that had all of the digital pictures on them.  Of everything that got stolen, the pictures are the only thing I really miss.  (it's too bad I wasn't at home to greet the guys who came in)

Since then, I back my pictures up to multiple computers at home, I take them to work every week or so, and I wanted to back them up online as well.  When I was talking about the problem with Jim, he mentioned that smugmug might work for me.  It turns out that for 150.00 a year (75.00 for the first year with an employer discount), I can store as many pictures as I want, and I also get a whole bunch of other cool features:  custom domain names, built in print ordering, good looking galleries, custom permissions, etc.  I set up photos.loytty.com to point to smugmug, and so far I've been really happy.  I might even get rid of the rest of loytty.com and just use smugmug for photo sharing;  I've had loytty.com going for about 10 years now, and the software I wrote to resize and reformat the images I upload is kind of creaky.

The problem with my hobbies is that they are getting more and more expensive.  I need a tripod that doesn't wobble in a stiff breeze too.

When I got home today, Jake looked like this:

So I said "Son, why is your shirt all wet?" and he said "I was playing with my submarine in the sink" (He got a toy submarine at Discovery Place the other day).  He apparently wanted to look at it from underneath the water.  The funny thing is that he will explain what he was doing like it was the most natural thing in the world, and that you are some sort of idiot for even asking.

He's either going to be a millionaire genius or a criminal.

Alex's current way of expressing his displeasure with any perceived injustice is to say "it's not fair!" or "no fair!".  This is caused by lots of things:  if one of the other kids gets to sit next to me, or if Eric gets to their favorite warm coat in the morning, or someone gets anything nice that he doesn't get.  I hear about fairness about 10 times a day, and it's getting really old.  So I have added "It's not fair" to the list of things you can't say. 

The only other thing that have been specifically banned around here was calling someone "a dumbass"...for a long time, that's what I called people who drive badly.  It was about the first thing Alex ever said clearly.  It wouldn't have been so bad except he said it to a preacher. 

I'll be hearing about THAT for the rest of my life.

This is Alex when he was about two.  He still gets this look on his face when he is  campaigning against injustice.

I'm a very traditional person.  One of the things that we've started doing in the past few years is inviting everyone to our house for Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because you don't have to buy presents, you don't have to stress out about who to send cards to, you just have a big meal.  Jenny always goes way overboard and makes enough food for an army, and everyone has a great time.  This year, we're having my parents, both of my sisters and their assorted kids and husbands, my Aunt and Uncle, one of my cousins, some of Jenny's cousins, the babysitter, and a few other people I've forgotten about.  It's going to be great.  Jenny went and got the first set of groceries we are going to need today:  $380.00 worth.  With judicious use of coupons and the frequent shopper card, she got it down to a little over 300.00, but still...its EXPENSIVE to feed all of these people.  She doesn't pick up the turkey until about Tuesday either.  Luckily, my mom and dad are so relieved that they don't have to host Thanksgiving at their house that they sent a check to cover the food.  So now everyone's happy.

We also have to clean everything in the house so that my mom and dad will think that we are neat.  This afternoon the kids cleaned their bedrooms, Jenny did the downstairs, and I did all of the bathrooms.  It's really weird, because I generally hate to clean, but I don't mind cleaning bathrooms that much.   The bathrooms need LOTS of cleaning, because with 3 little boys living here, they end up peeing all over the place.  When Jake and I cleaned his bedroom, I found that he had smuggled a screwdriver into his room and removed all of the screws from the bottom sets of hinges on his closet door.  I asked him what he was trying to do, and he said "I don't know.  I have issues."  I feel sorry for whoever his kindergarten teacher is next year.  The funny thing is that when he explains what he was doing, he looks at you like you are a complete moron...I mean, doesn't EVERYONE take their closet apart?

I can't wait for Thursday, it's going to be great!

Today I went to Beattie Park in Matthews to take some pictures and learn how to work the camera better. I've just moved from a point and shoot snapshot camera to a more sophisticated digital SLR.  It's really interesting.  I went with my friend Jim, and he showed me some basic stuff, and I took about 300 pictures to try to understand the different controls and settings on the camera.  I got about 4 decent shots out of the 300 I took, but since the whole exercise was to help me understand how the camera worked, I'm not upset.  I'm glad I didn't try to learn how to take pictures back in the film days, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the patience to learn it.  The great thing about digital is that you can take all the pictures you want, and it doesn't cost anything more.

One trick that Jim showed me was how to take 'ghost' pictures.  You set the camera in shutterspeed mode, crank the exposure time to about 10 seconds and take a picture of a person.  About 5 seconds into the exposure, you have them run out of the shot, and it looks as if they are ghosts.  Eric and Alex and I had a good time with that this evening. 

There is a class that Jim took a few months ago that taught him all sorts of great stuff.  I'm going to sign up for it Monday.  One of the bad things about the trip today is that I saw how much a good tripod helps.  The one I have is really flimsy, and will have to be replaced.  Any excuse to buy a new gadget, right?

I've been playing with the Zune 2.0 software and firmware for the past month or so, and now that it's public, I can post what I think:

Things I like:

1) The social setup, where I can see what my friends listen to, and maybe get some ideas for new things to hear, is neat.  I think it really sets the Zune apart from its competitors.

2) Wireless sync is great, and it even supports WPA on my home wireless network.

3) Zune 1.0 devices (like my 30GB Zune I got last year) are upgradeable, and you can use all of the new features on them.  That's cool

4) being able to sync dvr-ms files for tv shows I've recorded is cool  It kills the whole "Portable Media Center" idea, but now I can take one device on the plane instead of two.

5) Even though this was in the v1. product, a subscription to listen/download whatever songs I wanted from the Zune marketplace for 15.00 a month is the single biggest reason I love the Zune.  While I have to pay 15.00 a month, and the music will go away when I quit paying, it's really nice to be able to experiment with new music.

Things I don't like:

1) Removing Auto-Playlists is a huge issue for me.  What I used to do with the Zune is create playlists with criteria like "Pick all of my favorites where Pink Floyd is the Album Artist" or "Give me 1 Audio CD worth of 4 star rated songs".  Now, you can only rate something as "Like it", "Don't like it" or neutral.  I don't really mind that, since I pretty much only used one star (for stuff I hated) and 4 stars (for stuff I liked).

2) Not being able to sort by genre stinks.  I used to take all of my Christmas music (all 26.6 hours of it) and play it shuffled.  My coworkers loved that.

3) When I try to sync to my Zune, I keep getting an error that says (more or less) "You've selected too much to sync, get rid of some stuff that you don't really want",  AND THEN THE SYNCH STOPS.  I am having a hard time figuring out what to get rid of, and I think that the software should continue the sync until the device is full.

Overall, I love the new software, and hopefully Santa will be good to me this year and bring me one of the new devices.  I've had music players from iRiver, Creative, Apple and Microsoft, and I like the Zune best. 

Today is a great day to say thanks to all of the Veterans you know, especially the ones who are still serving in harm's way.

This is me when I graduated from Airborne School, in June of 1985.  There is a lot more of me than there was then.  They called the glasses "Birth Control" glasses, because there's no way you can talk to a woman without having her laugh at you while wearing them.

One of the things that we have to do at my job is take standard corporate "blah blah blah" training.  Luckily, all of it gets batched up and sent to us about once a quarter, and we get to take an afternoon and listen to how we need to leverage synergies and skate to where the puck is, nail jello to the wall and have laser-focus to create a diverse driver of innovation (and yes, I know people who talk like that).  There are whole cadres of people who come up with this stuff, and they have spreadsheets about which teams are finished, who isn't even starting, etc.  On my team, we compete to see who can blast through it all fastest, while still being able to pass the tests at the end of the training.  This quarter, I was done first, so I sent this out to everyone on my team:

I'm DOUBLY awesome because I play Christmas music all this month and next.  My co-workers are lucky to have me around.

I was checking out Amazon today, to see if there were any books that I couldn't live without.  (There are, but I am poor this week, so I cant buy any.).  Anyway, Amazon has started a deal where you can build a website showing all of your amazon purchases, and exchange ratings, reviews & conversations about them.  I've wanted to catalog my books, but amazon has always made it hard to get your purchase history out, and I don't want to type in catalog information on all of my books.  You can see what books I've bought, what is on my wish list, and laugh at my taste in movies.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this, since it seems to define me by what I've bought, but I suppose there are worse ways to define me.  One thing that this shows me is that I buy too much crap on the internet.

I suppose at some point all of the social networking sites that there are will collapse into a few, or maybe the services will be so narrowly focused that I'll want to have a bunch of different ones.

Today was the official start of the Christmas Season at the office...you could tell it was the start because we had the Christmas Light Lighting Ceremony.  My colleagues are already tired of it, but since I have to listen to them talk about NASCAR and crap like that for the rest of the year, so they get to listen to Christmas music around Christmastime.

Notice the festive decorations in my cube:  the lamp like the one in A Christmas Story, a Santa hat on Darth Vader, and of course, the beautiful holiday lights. I should have taken a video so you could hear the carols playing.

It's supposed to be in the 30s tonight too, so if we could only get it to snow, we would have a REAL Christmas Miracle!

The good thing about being the oldest kid in the family is that you don't have anyone undermining your belief in Santa Claus for a while.  Eric is starting to doubt, and tonight he told Alex all about how Mommy and Daddy bought all the presents.  Alex didn't believe him.  After Alex went off to do something else, Eric and I had a talk, and I told him that I didn't mind if HE started to doubt Santa Claus, but he didn't need to mess it up for anyone younger.  I think I left him with enough ambiguity to continue to believe, if he wants to.

Since Jenny went back to Washington, I had to buy my computer a present:  MacOSX 10.5.  While it was for my websurfing family-room computer, a MacBook, rather than my usual computer, I think I deserved it.  After hearing about upgrade problems, I decided to do a clean install, and things seem to work well.  The development tools are kind of primitive, but it sure is pretty.  A lot of people ask me how I can have a mac, when I work at Apple's arch-enemy.

It's easy:  I'm a geek, not a fanatic.  I like Windows and OSX.  If I were forced to choose one (and only one) to use for the rest of my life, I'd pick Windows, mainly because of:

- Better development tools.  Better team development tools.  Better development environments (you can't beat .NET as a general purpose development platform)

- Better device support.  While the mac is much much better than it used to be, you can still get more interesting hardware for the PC. 

- Better graphics, better graphics hardware, and better games.  Look at the great games that have come out for Windows this year:  BioShock, HalfLife2: Episode 2, STALKER, Company of Heroes and Crysis.  While Macs seem to be getting some love from EA, it will be a long time before enough developers start treating the mac as anything other than an also-ran.  I'm not all that much of a gamer, so this isn't a big deal for me.

While that's why I would choose Windows over a Mac if I had to, I kind of like using both.  The mac UI is beautiful, and it's a great websurfing machine.  Since you can get Office for both, I can even do real work on it every once in a while.  I even have a Mac at work, a dual G5 that is really cool.  The only problem I have with it now is that it's a few revisions of the OS behind, and there are no more security patches being written for it.  As long as we don't get a new slammer inside the firewall, I'm in pretty good shape.  (I hope)

I read in this article from the Chicago Tribune that after a taste test, Starbuck's Punkin Spice Latte got the lowest grade, a C, in their Punkin Spice Latte Shootout.  The only reason I bring this up is because I work with a gentlemen who has an unnatural affinity for Punkin Spice Lattes.  Here is the review in question:

380 calories, 13 g fat, 51 g carbs (2 percent milk)
The pitch: "A delicious blend of pumpkin and traditional fall spice flavors combined with our signature espresso and freshly steamed milk, and topped with whipped cream and pumpkin pie spices."
First thought: A warming cup of that robust Starbucks aroma. Pumpkin flavor is not too intense.
On second thought: After the whipped cream melts into the beverage, the resulting color resembles curry. Is it just me or do I sense a hint of savory crust-like aftertaste?
McGrade: C

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, savory crust-like aftertaste.  Makes me want to put on a pink tutu, jump in my miata, and rush right out to get one.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.