Sometimes, Alex is seven going on twenty.  He told me the other day that he wanted to start wearing deodorant, because he is "hitting puberty".  He was highly offended when I laughed at him too.  All of the kids get frustrated when I tell them to quit being in a big hurry, and that they'll grow up soon enough, and they think I tell them that because I like to torture them.  In reality, I'm trying to grab as much time as I can with them while they think I'm pretty cool.  Soon, they wont want to be around me, and will start using their peer group as their arbiter of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. 

While he still listens to me when I talk to him about most stuff, he didn't listen to me today when I said that the kid version of a scary movie (I looked and it was rated G, so it couldn't have been too bad) might not want to be something he watches right before bed.

Well, it WASNT a good idea, and he didn't listen, so he came to get in bed with me in the attic just a while ago . (I'm sleeping up here while Jenny is recovering -- and it turns out that I LIKE sleeping alone).  He's a horrible wiggler, and I don't think he's showered today, so my bed will smell like a wet dog.

I'd like to wrap up the feeling of trust and love that I get from him when he wants me to protect him so I can replay it in the future when he's decided that I'm an idiot.  If my experience with my dad is any example, I will get stupid around the time the kids become teenagers, and wont stop being one until their mid-twenties.

I finally broke down and released a beta version of the SmugMugAPI library I've been working one for the past couple of weeks.  I've been working on some different applications using it (a screensaver and a WPF-based upload tool) and I've gotten to the point where I haven't had to change the library code in a while.

I hope someone finds it useful, but this is truly a "scratch your itch" kind of project:  it does just what I need :-D.

If you DO take a look at it, there is a CLI application that you can use to upload to your smugmug account, just run it without parameters to see the usage.

Anyway, it's been fun to write, I hope someone gets some of out of it.

Yesterday we went up to Hickory to see my parents and sisters for a Christmas visit.  We had to leave a couple of hours early so that Jenny could go and see the doctor (and you DONT want to know why), but it was nice to see everyone.  The kids were happy to have a SECOND Christmas, but Eric was doubly excited because he got to go and visit with his favorite cousin Will.  They spend all day playing with legos and discussing if Darth Vader could beat a Bionicle in combat (Eric says No, Will says Yes. The discussion goes on for hours).

Anyway, since Eric is gone, Alex feels lonely, so he and I spent a lot of time together today:  we went to get a haircut, mail our Christmas letters (we didn't want to wait until the last minute or anything) and pick up Chinese food for Jenny.

Alex played video games a lot today, until I kicked him outside.  His buddy Lauren showed up too, so he finally had someone to talk to. (Someone who understands the problems of being seven better than me).

The problem with Jenny being sick is that I am in charge of picking out clothes for the kids.  I'm not as fashion conscious as Jenny is.  Note Jake's boots...he wears them everywhere; he'd wear them to bed if we let him.

Even though I have no taste in clothes, Izzy is always cute.

I miss Eric though.  My sister says he's behaving, which is good, because I threatened him before he left.  In my family, my goal is to have one of my sister's kids misbehave more than all of mine.  The odds of that happening are usually pretty bad; all of the children behave about the same, and since I have 4 of the 9 grand children, one of mine is the worst almost 1/2 the time.  My mother always lies and says that they all behave well....that's what Moms are for.

I like Dell hardware.  It's certainly not perfect, and it isn't the best that I've ever bought, but they are so prevalent in my life that they are the standard by which everything else is compared.  My personal opinions of computer hardware vendors are:

For a while, I built my own machines...which is great, and you get a really nice rig, but it's a pain to try to remember what goes best with what:  I save time by letting Dell get me something that works, and then messing with it. 

I mentioned last week that I was buying a new computer as my reward for sitting in the hospital with Jenny.  It was easy to talk myself into getting it at 3:00 AM when I was trying to sleep in the most uncomfortable recliner in history.  (people say that's all part of being married and blah blah blah.  whatever.  I got her to agree to the purchase too, so it's kind of like it was her idea.  While she was taking all of that percocet, I could talk her into just about anything).

The other rationalization I had is that the laptop I have at work is old and busted, so I decided to just get another one so I wouldn't have to ask for an upgrade (I'm saving my "asks" for when I do something like give Bill Gates a wet-willie at the company Christmas party).  Anyway, the machine showed up on the 24th, so I've had a great time installing everything and getting it up and running.  After I made sure everything worked, I put the 64 bit version of Vista on it.  (What's the point of having a 64 bit processor and a machine capable of holding 4GB of RAM if you cant use it all!).  Dell has decided not to support 64 bit on any of their machines.  I hate that.  It was fairly easy to get Vista x64 running on the machine, but I thought I would post the recipe so that when I have to do this again, I will be able to find my instructions.

The install is straightforward.  The only problem is that Vista doesn't have drivers for the wireless or the wired NICs, so the machine can't get to Windows Update to install all the other drivers.  To get around this, install Vista normally, and then download and install the network drivers:

Marvell 88E80XX 10/100 Ethernet Controller

Intel (R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN

Both packages contain 64 bit drivers along with the 32 bit ones, so you will be up and running pretty quickly.  The only issue I had was that the wireless drivers wouldn't work until I rebooted.

A trickier question was the fingerprint reader.  I would have sacrificed it were it not free, because I was trying to keep costs down (the machines start at a very nice 999.00, but go up rapidly from there - since I was using some Christmas money for it, I wanted to save), and because they are easily defeated.  The fingerprint reader was free though, so I went ahead and got it.  The drivers for it on the dell site wouldn't install on Vista x64, but the manufacturer has drivers at uptek.com.  There isn't really a way to use it that I can find, but at least the big yellow ! goes away in device manager.

Another thing I did to save money was to skip bluetooth, which I quickly decided was ridiculous, because that means I can't connect to the internet through my phone or use my bluetooth mouse unless I use a dongle, and who wants to do THAT?  Luckily, my favorite mother in law gave me a gift card, so I used part of it to get an internal bluetooth card for a whopping 11.00.  What a bargain.   The only thing I lack so far is an Express Card smartcard reader for when I have to vpn to work.  I have a USB one, but that's lame.

UPDATE 21 January:

As to the question if the WiFi catcher works, yes it does.  You need to install the 64 bit version of the Dell QuickSet application.  Since Dell doesn't have drivers for x64 available in the support section for M1530s, you have to lie to the support website and look at drivers for the Precision M6300.

UPDATE 12 February:

You can get drivers for the trackpad at the same place as above.  This is useful for turning the trackpad off in case you keep accidentally rubbing your hands over it and making your cursor jump around.

UPDATE  18 March:

In order to  get better graphics drivers, you can go to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com and  install the latest and greatest drivers.  For some reason, the downloadable drivers from NVIDIA wont install on mobile versions of their video cards, so you have to fiddle around a bit to get things to work.  You can do things manually (as Ben mentions below) or grab what you need from laptopvideo2go.

Not a lot is going on here tonight:  for some reason, I can't sleep. So far I've:

- worked on the smugmug api application at http://www.codeplex.com/smugmugapi.  I'm actually about done with the API itself, and I have a CLI sample finished too.  I've been working on a sample in WPF, but since I don't know squat about wpf, I have to figure out how it all works.  The biggest problem is that wpf applications are expected to look good, and I can't make a good looking GUI to save my life.  I'm also going to do a powershell cmdlet, but that's further down the list.  I'll do a release as soon as someone asks, or when I finish the wpf sample.

- chatted with my cousin with MSN Messenger.

- lusted over 300mm lenses at amazon.  photography is turning out to be only marginally less expensive than computers as a hobby. 

- read for a while: 

I'm actually about ready to go back to work, and I don't officially start back until January 3d.  I was also hoping that it would clear up a bit so that I could go outside and take some more pics...but weatherbug says that it's not going to be clear for a while.  I hate when that happens.

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a good time on vacation...or a good time working...or whatever.  I'm sleepy now :-D

I love Christmas...we're having a great time so far, the weather has cleared up so we've been able to go outside some and have fun.  My sister-in-law got engaged to her boyfriend last night, the kids are all super excited and can't wait for Santa to come, and my niece is flying in later today.  Everyone's here togther and it couldn't be better.

In honor of the season, there's two videos:  the first is Linus telling us what Christmas is all about:

and the second is the greatest Christmas song of all time:

Merry Christmas everyone!

I have this great 64 bit computer, with 4GB of RAM and all that, but I can't view thumbnails of my RAW pictures in explorer, because Nikon wont release a 64 bit version of their NEF codec.  They have a 32 bit one, and I hear that a 64 bit version is in the works, but it's been over a year. 

At any rate, I took some full moon pictures tonight, it's getting easier; I'm going to go out again later tonight or tomorrow night to see if I can get some better detail.  I got a gift certificate from my company as a Christmas present, and I used it to get Complete Digital Photography, Fourth Edition, by Ben Long.  It's really great so far.  I still have no idea what I'm doing.

Check out Jim's photo of the same thing.  You can really tell the difference between using a 135mm lens and a 300.

Since the big kids are out of school now, we went to see a movie yesterday.  We went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and everyone had fun.  It was rated PG, but there wasn't anything I was uncomfortable having an 8 and 9 year old see.   The plot follows on from the original National Treasure movie:  a historian (guy), a computer geek, and another historian (girl) run around the world, solving puzzles, making wisecracks, and finding treasure.  In the end, they find the treasure, the two historians end up falling in love, and everyone's happy.   I can't STAND movies that don't have happy endings.

I believe that someone said "hell" or "damn" in the movie once or twice, but after riding in the car with me for more than half a decade, both Eric and Alex have heard lots worse.  Unfortunately, they heard it from me.

I hope everyone is having a good Christmas break...the presents for my cohorts at work finally got here, now I have to decide if I should hand them out:  none of them have been very good this year.

It's Paul Anka singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit".  (I saw this over at Fake Steve Jobs)

After my not-so-hot moon pictures yesterday, I went out away from all of the streetlights near my house and shot a couple of new ones today.  I know you are saying "wow, it's the moon.  again.  how original", but I'm having fun.  I put some of these at http://photos.loytty.com, where I put the "better" pictures than the snapshots of the kids I have at http://www.loytty.com.

It was neat going back behind all of the developed land and sitting in the dark this evening.  I was waiting for an axe murderer to find me.  Either that, or it would start raining so I could dig a hole in the ground and sit in it for a few hours, so I could remember what it was like to be in the army.

I also tried to take a picture of the constellation orion, but I had to leave the shutter open so long that the stars started to blur.  That, and some clouds started moving in so I had to stop and come home.

And it's about 32F out there now...it's cooold. 

I know I was complaining last night about my shots of the moon, but I messed around with a couple of them in photoshop this morning and they aren't as bad as I though.  I'm trying again tonight, with a faster shutter speed, because that will supposedly give me better detail.

I've been trying over the past couple of days to get a good picture of the moon:  it's been clear, but the pics havent been very good.  Yesterday they were overexposed, and today they are kind of blurry.  Yesterday, I went Manual with an f/22 for 15 seconds... as you can imagine, it was a big white blob.  Today, I went F/22 1/60 sec, and it was exposed ok, but very blurry.  I was on a tripod with a remote shutter and everything, so I don't know what I was doing wrong.  Tomorrow, I'll try something different.

I'd like to blame the equipment, but I'm sure the fact that I have no idea what I am doing has something to do with it.  I'm glad I didn't have to learn with film: digital is so much nicer when you're clueless.

Since I have to take some vacation before the end of the year or risk losing it (I can only carry over 1 year's worth), I am off until January 3d.  To keep myself occupied, I'm playing with the developer features of SmugMug, the place I upload photos to.

I just checked in the first drop to http://www.codeplex.com/SmugMugAPI.  It's basic, but it works pretty well.  The sample program, sendtosmugmug, can be used to upload files and directories to smugmug.  Once I have a decent amount of the API covered, I am going to make a powershell cmdlet to use.

Here's an example of how to use the code to upload a picture:

private static void uploadSingleFile(Dictionary<string, string> arguments)
        {
            string fileToUpload = "";
            string albumToSendFilesTo = "";
            string userName = "";
            string userPassword = "";


            arguments.TryGetValue("-F", out fileToUpload);
            arguments.TryGetValue("-A", out albumToSendFilesTo);
            arguments.TryGetValue("-U", out userName);
            arguments.TryGetValue("-P", out userPassword);


            if (File.Exists(fileToUpload))
            {
                SmugMugAPI api = new SmugMugAPI(userName, userPassword);
                List<string> fileList = new List<string>();
                fileList.Add(fileToUpload);
                api.postPicturesToSmugMug(fileList, albumToSendFilesTo);


            }
        }

  Before I started programming, I was a history major.  I didn't learn anything people were willing to pay me to do, but I'm a vicious Trivial Pursuit player.  All of the people I work with wasted their college careers studying engineering and silly things like that, except my friend Greg, who has an MA in History (from a real college too).

He's the only one who understands my IM picture.  He retaliated.

All of this is worth it, both because Jenny is getting all fixed up, and because since I am staying here with her despite it being uncomfortable makes it so that she can't say anything when I buy myself a new computer. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I'm back at the hospital for the second night of fun.  I got about an hour of sleep last night, but then my wonderful goddess of a mother in law came and relieved me so I could go home and take a shower (and talk to about 4 customers and nod off during a conference call and try to find out about our support options in Israel.  that was fun) and then a nap.  Then, I had to feed the kids (I was a great parent and gave them McDonalds) and come back to the hospital and stay with Jenny again.  She originally was going to come home after one night, but she's staying a second night  to enjoy watching TV that isn't child friendly and take percocet.  (and YES, I realize that she's repairing herself from having 4 children, several of whom are probably mine, so I'm not bitter or anything. I'm just cranky).  Jenny's been a real trooper, I'm very thankful that I'm not a woman.  Although, I have to admit, I've seen things yesterday and today that no man should ever see.  I'm serious.  I'm hoping that with a couple of years of therapy and perhaps some electroshock treatments, I'll be able to forget.  

Other than the whole "not wanting to look at gross stuff" issue I have, I could have been a doctor.  The guy who worked on Jenny used superglue to put her back together in some spots.  How hard can that be?  I mean, if they can use that, I'd win the Nobel Prize for medicine because they could probably use duct tape too.  I've actually done first aid with gauze and duct tape, so I could probably get credit for a couple of years of med school for what I already know. 

I know that I'm not making any sense, but I'm tired.  Hopefully, we will be out of here tomorrow by 9 or so, so I can finish figuring out what to do with my customer before my vacation starts Friday afternoon.  I ordered Christmas presents for the people who sit near me too, and I'm hoping that they'll show up by Friday.  Otherwise, they'll get nothing for Christmas.  None have them have been particularly well behaved this year, so I suppose they deserve getting nothing.

Well, we finally got a room at the hospital, and now we're settled in for the night.  I can't fall asleep very easily here, mainly because I am old and not used to sleeping anywhere other than a bed.  It was easier when I was young, to sleep anywhere almost on demand, but I'm too used to comfort now...  so I'm surfing the Internet and goofing around.

One of the great things about working at Microsoft is that there are some freakishly smart people there.  Usually, people in my job are either really good with customers or really good technically (or able to make other people think you are one or the other, which is kind of what I do).  There are a very small number of people who are really good with customers AND 'freakishly smart'.  While I generally hate people like that because of my overwhelming jealously,  there are a couple I really like working with.  One of those people is currently in China, adopting a baby.  Check it out over at Kenneth's space.  His new daughter is a doll:  what a great Christmas present.

So Jenny had to have surgery this morning, to take care of some female stuff.  (I'm kind of hazy on the details, because it's all kind of weird down there).  She was in surgery for a while this morning, and she's still in recovery.  Hopefully soon, she'll be back in her own room.

Her mom came with her this morning while I took care of the kids and got everyone going at home.  Jenny says I make her nervous before she has surgery, so she didn't want me to come until AFTER it was all done.  I told her that if she had died, she'd feel really bad about not having me there.  That wasn't  the right thing to say.

The good thing is that we get "free" wireless in the waiting room.  This is just like being at home except there aren't any kids here.  My MIL just left, so now I'm here alone.  Hopefully, they'll let me stay here tonight, I'd hate if she had to be here alone.  Of course, she's getting the good drugs, so she's probably in pretty good shape right now...it will start hurting tomorrow.

After I posted last night, I was walking downstairs to get ready for bed.  When I turned the corner to walk downstairs, I saw this on the steps in front of me:

He's always looking for an excuse to crawl in bed with us, so I guess he was waiting for me to go to bed and got tired.  He likes to sleep on the bed in the attic when I fall asleep there.

So my wonderful wife bought me a new tripod for my camera as a birthday gift.  It came yesterday, so today Jim and I had to go and try it out.  We went to an overpass over one of the busier streets in Charlotte around nightfall and took some long exposure night shots.  Strangely enough, another photographer came to the same place at the same time to take the same kind of shot.  Even stranger, he was from Microsoft, and neither Jim nor I had ever met him.  It was really kind of weird.  Anyway, the place we went is kind of well known as a place to take pictures, so it wasnt a totally random event.

The way the pictures work is that you put your camera up on a tripod (so it wont shake) and then trip the shutter for 30 seconds or longer, so you get long trails made by the taillights of the cars going by.

We got some good pictures, I'm still trying to get the hang of the new camera, and the best way to do that is to take a lot of pictures and make a lot of mistakes.  Some of the pictures turned out pretty well, I'll post them to http://photos.loytty.com and put some of the nicer shots up here.