Everyone has a birthday at the start of the year:  Alex in January, Jake in February, and Izzy in April.  Today was Jake's, but we're not having the 'big' party until Sunday, when we go to Chuck E. Cheese.  I can hardly wait. 

When we were having the last parent teacher conference at Eric and Alex's school, we saw the principal, and also registered Jake for kindergarden.  I'm sure we'll see the principal a LOT once Jake starts.  He's the scrawniest of the kids,  but he's like the Tasmanian Devil in the Bugs Bunny cartoons:  a little tornado of destruction.

Jake 5 years ago:

Jake today:

Thanks for all of the good wishes.  I'm still not sure if I'll survive yet, but hopefully things will be ok.  Before I forgot though, I wanted to show everyone that yes, I DO make my kids get haircuts every once in a while.

Before	After

I have what the kids all had last week.  I hope I make it through the night.  My wife, Florence Nightengale, told me to stop complaining and go to bed.  So I did.

Taking the pictures was fun, but it made me wish for a 400mm lens.  Or a 1200mm lens.  Or a $25,000.00 telephoto lens.  There's a fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness", and I usually just jump right on over.

I have some more at flickr and smugmug. (Why have flickr AND smugmug?  I don't know...flickr was free, and smugmug is free to people who write applications for it, so I'm torn).  I actually have about 400 pictures of the eclipse, I just need to clean them up some more.

I got an email at about 10:30 that my new laptop, to replace the horrible old Toshiba M4 I've been using for a couple of years, had arrived at the office.  So even though it's work from home Wednesday, I had to run out and jump in the car, and go to pick it up.

It's a ThinkPad T61p, with a dual-core T7500 processor, 4GB RAM, 160GB disk, 256MB Video RAM, etc, etc, etc.  It's sweet.  I booted it up to make sure it all worked, and then I wiped it out and started reinstalling Vista on it.  Using a computer that someone else installed is like using someone else's toothbrush:  you can do it if you have to, but you really dont want to.

Isn't she cute???

Tonight there's supposed to be a total eclipse of the moon.  I'm going to try to get some good pictures of it, I just hope the weather cooperates.  The eclipse starts around 8, and is over around midnight.  I'll probably not stay out through the whole thing, since I turn into a pumpkin about 10:00 and have to go to bed, but I'd like to get some pics.  I'll put up some good ones, if I get them.  (I know you will be breathless with anticipation)

They say tomorrow we might get some "Frozen Precipitation".  I hope it snows...about 2 feet.  THAT would be cool, but there's only a 30% chance we'll get anything, which is a bummer.

Everyone in the house is sick, except for Eric and me.  Alex is actually just about better, but Jake and Izzy are spewing out both ends of the old gastro-instestinal tract.  It's gross.  I warned the babysitter this morning, but she didn't believe me.  She called a bit later to admit that I was right.  Jake was pitiful this evening, I even made hamburgers on the grill, which is his favorite food.  He just laid on the couch and slept.  He'll be back to his old normal self in a day or so.

How could this:

turn into this:

so fast?  I filled him up with motrin right before bed, I hope it kicks in so he can sleep well tonight.  Izzy is kind of pitiful too, but not nearly as bad as Jake.  Once I filled her up with medicine, she was bouncing off the walls again.

He may be playing me though: I found a new place that he wrote on the wall.  He tried to deny it, but it says "Jake Loytty", and the K is backwards.  I'm pretty sure Eric and Alex didn't do it.

Again, I want to know why when anyone in this house wants to vomit, they feel the need to come and find me.  I'll believe them that they're sick, I'm tired of having to take showers at 5:00 AM to get puke out of my hair.

I'm so glad to be back home.  My flight left Seattle at 10:30 last night, and got to Charlotte at 6:00 this morning.  I got to sit with a group of salespeople who were on their way to a convention in St. Croix too...they drank all the way across the US.  It was tons of fun.

So I got home, and everyone was happy to see me, and then Jenny had to leave to go and help her parents run an antique show in Florida.  I saw her for literally 20 minutes.  When she's done there, she's going to DC to visit her customers.

In order to show my displeasure, I bought a new lens for my camera.  It's supposedly good for low light, and it seems as if I am always in low light.  The only thing I've learned about photography in the past few months since I upgraded my camera is that I hate flashes, and I never want to use one.

The other thing about the lens is that it was only 100.00.  What a bargain!  Most of the lenses I want start at about 2,000.00 so this one is a steal.  The only bad thing about it is that it doesn't have a motor, so it won't autofocus on my D40X.  I was going to buy a D80 which has a motor that would drive the lens, but I let my manager Jim talk me out of it.  Next time, I'm not going to listen to him.

This picture of Bill Gates:

reminds me of this picture of Jake:

They both look like they are up to something.  I've always figured that Jake would either be rich or in  prison when he grew up.  Rich would be better.

Today was the last day of TechReady, and now I can go home.  This morning we saw Bill Gates speak, which was kind of interesting.  I got to the place early so that I could get a good seat, but there were apparently people there for a few hours before me.  I ended up in Row 20.  Luckily, I got some decent shots of him.  Listening to him talk is amazing, even though he isnt the most exciting speaker in the world.

His talk was the fairly standard speech he gives at events like these:  that software is changing the world, and Microsoft has a huge part of that.  He focused a lot on healthcare and education, which makes sense since he is quitting later this year to devote himself to his foundation.  This is probably the last time I'll ever see him speak, so I'm glad I got to catch it on film (carrying the damn camera around all week has been a big old pain in my butt)

For some reason, everyone thinks I know alot about computers.  Sometimes I even think that.  Today, though, I solved a problem that has been bothering me for literally YEARS, and the answer was SIMPLE.

What happens for me is, when I am using a laptop, I can type away, and all of a sudden, my cursor will "skip" to a new place.  This is particularly troubling in Visual Studio and Outlook, because those are the two applications I type in the most.  It's even worse because a lot of the time, I'm not looking at the screen while I type (or not paying attention anyway), so I'll try to compile something or proofread an email before sending it, and see a bunch of gobbledygook.  The problem weirded me out so bad I even called the helpdesk at work on it once...and the guy who came to check it out looked at me like I was an idiot too. (On a side note, can you imagine the particular hell it must be to be the help desk guy at Microsoft?  Everyone there thinks they know more than you, and half the time you can fix problems by just plugging stuff in, like you can anywhere else.  But that's not important right now)

So tonight on a whim, I googled (I mean I Live Searched) "laptop cursor jumping" and found that lots of people have had my problem, and it happens on laptops because your hands will sometimes brush up against the trackpad, causing the cursor to jump.  The fix is to disable your trackpad when you are using an external mouse.  I hate trackpads anyway, and carry a mouse with me wherever I go, so turning it off was no problem.

Sometimes, people ask me questions at work that I can answer really easily of the top of my head, or I can google live search really quickly, so I get all superior and say to them "Wouldn't it be cool if there were a place on the internet where you could go and type something in and have it search the WHOLE INTERNET for documents that are related to what you typed?  That would be a neat website.  We could call it "Google" or "Live Search" or something."  Then they walk away, vowing never to ask me a question again, while I do the superior dance.  I probably should say that to myself now.  I hate when that happens.

(Oh yeah.  Since Dell doesn't officially support Vista x64 on my M1530, I had to lie to the drivers website and say I had a precision workstation instead of an M1530.  Those cunning guys at dell can't outsmart me!!!)

Today at the conference wasn't too bad.  When I woke up this morning, I got dressed and quietly left the room, because my roommate was still asleep (how anyone can sleep past 6:30 AM is totally beyond me. but anyway.) I went to the conference center and took some pictures for a while, and then I noticed that my phone was complaining that the battery was about to go dry...and then it WENT dry.  A quirk that Blackjack's have is that they have to be ON to charge them via USB, which is the only way I usually charge things.  Having a totally dead battery means you cant turn it on to charge it.  I had to get a wall charger at the AT&T store down the street from the convention center.  For THIRTY TWO DOLLARS.  It was outrageous, but I had to do it.  I'll use it a lot, because I want to get my $32.00 worth.

The sessions today were pretty good, and I think I got a lot out of it, but the best news was that when I went back to the hotel to drop my junk off to go and eat, my roommate (who I don't think left the room since we got here on Sunday) told me that he had to go home early, because his wife is expecting.  He is a really nice guy, and a fellow veteran, but I had to hide my glee as I helped him pack and threw his stuff out the door.  Now I can have some ALONE TIME and restore my karma.

Here's a picture I took this morning:

  Tomorrow I am going to take my portable GPS with me when I shoot, so I can geotag my pictures with the jury-rigged geotagging software I wrote a couple of weeks ago.  It works by synchronizing the EXIF date the picture was taken with a waypoint file exported from a hand held GPS, and I get at least ten geek points for writing it.

As I said below, Steve Ballmer can really work a crowd.  Sometimes, he looks REALLY intense.

I'm in Seattle, attending a conference. Today is the first day, and so far things are pretty interesting.  This morning I went to a class on the next version of the command prompt, powershell, which was really neat, and also the first keynote, which was by our CEO  Steve Ballmer.  While Bill Gates isn't the most exciting speaker I've ever heard, Ballmer can really work a room.  He also gets excited easily.  Apparently there is a company called "Google" that he doesn't like that much.  Oh well...

I've had a webcam for a couple of years, but never really used it for anything other than a novelty...I mean it's cool and all, but all the people I work with are about as ugly as I am, so we don't really want to look at each other unnecessarily.  Today though, after my class ended at 11:45, I had a break until lunch time so I fired up the computer to check my email and started chatting with Alex, who is home sick from school again.  It was cool chatting with him and being able to see him at the same time, even though we were on opposite sides of the country.

Tomorrow I'm flying to Seattle, because one of our mandatory fun events is being held.  The problem with being an introvert is that extroverts run the world, and think that everyone ENJOYS going out of town for a week to watch a bunch of webcasts live and going to morale events.  People who say they don't want to go either have bad attitudes or are just being difficult.

I'm not looking forward to the trip.  The worst part is that I have to room with someone (because we want to save money -- maybe someday the company will make a profit, and then I can get a room to myself).  The thing that gets me is that I offered to skip going altogether, but the extroverts who run my organization think that I should be forced to go. 

I'm taking my camera, so hopefully I'll get a chance to go and take some pictures somewhere when I'm not playing duck-duck-goose or spin the bottle with my co-workers. 

This is what happens when Jennifer goes out of town...standards just go all to hell.

I need to get Izzy into the picture somehow...

Today is that special day of the year where I pretend to like football and watch the game.  Before I was married, I would go to superbowl parties and end up talking to the women in the kitchen, because I could never get into the game.  Jenny isn't that into it either, so we're going to watch the commercials together with the kids.

Hopefully Janet Jackson (or someone younger and hotter) will take her shirt off again like a few years ago.  I don't understand why people get so excited about stuff like this, but I guess it's something to do.  I always think of this article when I'm around people who get too wrapped up in sports.

(And I also hate people who talk about how they are too sensitive or intelligent to like sports...I'm not skipping it because I want to read Proust and write poetry in the corner, I just don't get into it, it doesn't mean that I am a better person for it).

(There are lots of OTHER reasons that I'm a better person than everyone else, this just isn't one of them :-D)

I thought it was going to be calm today, but I was wrong:

1) Alex had his friend Lauren spend the night last night.  They had a great time, but Lauren got sick this morning. 
2) Eric acted up in school yesterday, so I had to help him understand that being disrespectful to adults ESPECIALLY at school, isn't good.  He's not happy right now, and I hate it when I have to, you know, act like a parent.  I always feel like an imposter, because he still hasn't done anything nearly as bad as I did.
3) Jenny's flight was late, so she didn't get home until very late.
4) Jenny had to go to a birthday party for one of Alex's friends today, and left me at home with the others.  During her nap, Izzy took her clothes off and peed in the crib.
5) Then, while I was cleaning up her crib, she found a tube of toothpaste and spread it around.
6) After the bath for (5), she ran around the house naked, and then peed ON THE FLOOR
7) Jenny just called and is bringing her friend Wendy and her kids home for dinner.

But I got to go outside and take a picture of Orion last night: