A very expensive card…

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In the last few days I picked up several cards for some upcoming birthdays. Then we decided to go to a friends house over the weekend…and I thought hey lets bring the cards and we can just fill them out while we are over spending the night. Just before I left the house I was putting all of our equipment into my computer bag and thought, lets protect these cards from getting messed up, so I simply slid them under the lid of my laptop. One thing led to another and we never touched the laptops all weekend. Come Sunday night I plugged my laptop into the home network and accessed it like I always do via remote desktop and carried on with my business. After a short while I noticed I was getting some strange network errors (not all that uncommon when operating via remote desktop) and figured I would just log into the laptop directly. This is when the problems started, mysteriously the screen was bright white with no flicker / pixel movement / or anything for that manner. Upon closer inspection I noticed this…

 

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I am not one to brag….but what the hell it is time to train again

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Only 9 short months ago Hurricane and I ran the Rock n’ Roll marathon here in AZ. see pics 🙂 We are slowly starting to get back into our running regiment. Keep in mind if you go to view the pictures that I was tipping the scales at around 190lbs when we ran that race. I have since cut weight down to around 170lbs and will be around 160lbs when we run the race in 2009. I am looking to bring my time down under 5 hours. Anyone who wants to join us next year let me know.

sample pic is shown below 🙂 26.2 is the length of a full marathon…

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Texas makes a stand for America

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I was looking back through my blog and remembered about this event (see video below). Well that m’fer was actually killed back on August 5th, 2008. I am grateful that America has such protections for all who may have been prosecuted unjustly, however sometimes that protection leads to Gang-rapists sucking resources out of our America for 15 years before meeting their death. Any way you look at it I am glad to see him go. If their is any humanity left in this disgrace of a human being it was his parting words

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Valet parking, is it worth it?

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If you know Nicole and I we like to spend money but we are also notoriously frugal. For the longest time we have never used bellman, valet services when we stay at places. Why pay for something that we can do ourselves. So we stayed at Sunset Station in Vegas last weekend (which is a whole post on its own) and decided to partake in the valet services for the weekend. Continue reading →

Windows XP SP3, whats the scoop

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I have been hearing about this on several podcasts over the last 8-12 weeks, some ok and some very bad. So today I got the notice on the desktop and my laptop (not nicoles) that SP3 was ready to come in. I brought in the help of my Microsoft Home Server to do an incremental full drive image before I undertook the potential clusterf*$k of SP3 and then said, 'OK', do the update. So as I am writing this I have completed the SP3 update for the desktop and everything seems to be ok. One suttle difference I have noticed is the support for a larger desktop in RDP (remote desktop). I recently upgraded to a massive 30" monitor for the desktop but all of my power apps reside on my ultra protable laptop, so I still use it for all of my main computing source. Prior to SP3 the RDP connection resulted in a view of the laptop with about 15% of each side of the desktop lopped off with black bars, kinda like a letterbox DVD viewed on a regular TV where they lop off about 15% of the top and bottom to have good symetry. However since SP3 (about 10 min ago) the remote desktop connection mysteriously supports full screen support for my ultra large monitor. Not sure what else it will provide but for me this is awesome.

After the first week…

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So I have been back at work for 1 full week now, what must it be like?

The Good:

  • IT Department 
    • I am finally in an IT department and not a Sales department. This is a big plus that utilizes my business/technical skills and not my sales skills. I am not discounting the need for skills with selling, but the daily grind of trying to get people to buy something just wears on a guy.
  • Upper Management
    • I talk daily with the VP of Software development and every few days with the CIO, both of which have  an open door policy, which I haven’t exercised yet, but feel I comfortable that I can. In all my previous jobs there was very strict chain of command that had to be followed. I never felt like I was part of a team just a producer
    • I have met a few other executives from other business areas and they seem to be committed to helping people and following the vision and mission statements (you mean those things are for real??)

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Windows Home Server, it is awesome!

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So I have been using a NAS to store my pictues/music/video and misc shared data for the last year. I am aware of what a network attached storage device needs to perform for the home PC user. Further I have a non-techie (Nicole) in my home to let me know if things don’t just work like they should. So I installed the HP MediaSmartServer over a week ago to perform backups, share folders and provide remote access to my home network. How does it work? I will explain Continue reading →

Language converter, Priceless!!!

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So I haven’t actually used this at work yet, but found it last night. I have been coding in C# for the last few years, but have been aware that other dot.net languages have some differing functionality and popularity. Sorry but I am not looking to go further down the path and learn C++ or other more verbose languages, so for me this is a stepping stone. I want to look more at the business side of things. So I was asked at my new job to come up with a simple web application (which I love the webApp idea) to display some results that query some web services that hook into the main program at my place of employment. Continue reading →