Foogar says

I just got off the phone with Jessica and everyone in Paducah is ok for the most part.  She said they’re expecting power to be out for a while still.  What she described was a typical post hurricane period for those in hurricane areas.  Trees and power lines are down, there are gas shortages, you know how it is.  Right now they’re in a shelter of sorts because even with gas heat, if you don’t have power for the fan to blow it through the house it’s not going to do any good.

I was going to write up this long review of the Windows 7 experience I’ve had but longer isn’t always better.  For a beta, a Microsoft beta at that, this is a very stable. As a finished product I’d say it has a bit to go though.  The beta does exactly what it was supposed to do, get people talking about Windows in a good way again.  I’d say there isn’t much of a true beta going on, bug hunting and all of that, because I see this as a PR release mostly.

While I’m on the subject I’d lake to let a couple problems I’ve had with the beta out into the open.  Java won’t install, period.  I don’t know if this is a Microsoft problem of a Sun problem but I can’t get Java installed right now.  I have not tried running the installer in compatibility mode yet though.  The other problem I had is Windows Update crashing.  I noticed this after trying to install Java so one may have caused the other but I have no way of knowing for sure.  Updates do work if you let them automatically download and install though so all is not lost.

I do like the interface changes to Media Center specifically.  That and the integration into the start menu (I guess it’s still a start menu) make things a bit faster and easier for me.  Instead of opening Media Center and then selecting to view live TV I can pop into live TV straight away.  Yay for advancement!  Who knew 20 years ago that we’d be able to turn on a TV and it’d show us live TV right then???  Enough of that, this is something I am truly excited about, sarcasm aside.

It’s the first month of a new year, the time I normally look at financial things and try to come up with a plan for the next 11 months or so.  Going over my 401k is almost funny for some reason.  Maybe I’m a bit sadistic, I don’t know, but the whole thing looks like a bad math explosion.  You take what I had 1 year ago, toss in what I can and what the folks at payroll match of that, shake it up and you get less than the beginning balance.  And I’m smiling.

You see, with the market tanked like it has been for a while my investment dollar picks up more shares.  I see it as catching things on sale in a warehouse store.  Once the market evens out and gets back to normal (which could take quite a while) I’ll have a pile of cheap investments going at normal price and be ahead of where I could have planned I’d be 4 years ago.  The thing is I’ve got time to wait for it.

I should also add that a wise man, Victor Willis, once told me that even though the market may be down you’re not out any money until you pull out.

Right now I’ve got a lot running through my head and I’m going to try to lay it out here. If this doesn’t make much sense don’t worry about it.  In the way back I took a class on creative writing and one of the exercises we did was about 10 minutes of free writing where you just put down what’s going on in your head.  I was very surprised how the thoughts managed to organize themselves once I was capturing them but I make not guarantee it’ll happen this time.

I’m sitting here at work thinking about how much I really don’t want to be here and the kid in me screams out, “You should just quit them!”  I managed to get a smile in before the responsible adult in me starts lecturing on about financial responsibility, the need to keep insurance on my daughter, and the ever popular idea right now that if you have a job you need to keep it in today’s financial mess.  Sigh, it was good while it lasted.  I should really start my own company and do something I enjoy, I guess I could go back to school and become an accountant.

Believe it or not that’s the track I started on after I hit community college.  When I started I was going to be an engineer but I liked the numbers side of it quite a bit.  I also enjoyed physics but having the class first thing in the morning wasn’t a good idea.  To this day the only thing I really remember from the class is it’d take a hell of a lot of aluminum to cool down a glass of lemonade.  After the second or third semester I took a break to get things in order and somehow I ended up going to an electronics school.

After I was degree’d I went to work for Motorola fixing cell phones because the idea impressed me.  Meh, when you break it all down it’s just a friggin radio and if I’d known that at the time I would have went to work at Rockwell.  There’s funny thing about the cellular handset business, unless you’re innovating and leading the field you’re pretty much yesterday’s garbage.  After getting laid off from a dying factory I took a government funded vacation to help my wife heal from a knee injury and later a replacement.  Oh those were fun times.

I can only sit around the house for so long before I start to go insane.  I’m not talking criminally insane here, more like when you meet someone and you know there’s something not quite right with them but you like the person enough to overlook it.  Once my wife healed enough I took a job as a 411 operator at the phone company to get out of the house.  She must have had similar thoughts because once I was out of training she went back to work during the day and I got bumped to the 4-midnight shift.  There are some crazy folks that call in during the late hours and it seems I got to meet all of them.

As a 411 operator you are told in training that you are the sorriest person at the phone company.  No matter what happened or how it happened you are very sorry it did happen.  The job itself is very mind numbing, hear what someone wants, type it in, send them the number, and average 19 or so seconds to do it.  The time restriction leads to some creative thinking but not enough to make the job fun by any means.  I think it was just enough to keep me from falling into a coma at my desk.

4 years of that gave me enough perspective to see something odd was going to happen soon, I wasn’t sure just what it would be but I did know I did not want to be a part of it and took a transfer to Florida.  I thought I’d be able to stay with family for a month or 2 and get an apartment because they’re all over the place online!  It’s a shame there isn’t a map that shows apartment listings and how close they are to the places you want to avoid.  After I got here I realized everything I could afford was in a place so bad I didn’t want my daughter or wife to live so here I am almost 3 years later still staying with a very nice member of my family and visiting my wife and daughter about 4 times a year.  1059 miles is a bit too much for a weekend trip unless you fly and I can’t afford to fly home as often as I’d like to.

I’m not really sure if it’s a good thing I came to Florida or not honestly.  On one hand the office I was working in before ended up closing down so I would have been without a job.  On the other hand people getting beat with the lay off stick have a preferred status when it comes to jobs within the company so I could possibly been put where I wanted instead of taking this job because it’s the only thing I can get with my seniority.

I believe that about gives you the back story on why I feel the way I do toward this job. The job itself isn’t bad but it’s not what I want to be doing and definitely not where I want to be doing it.  I guess it’s starting to hit me pretty hard that if I don’t start working harder to get where I want to be I’ll end up one of those bitter old men that’s always pissed off all the time.

My daughter had a VNS implanted Tuesday to help control her seizures.  The surgery went well and when she came out of it she was her normal stubborn self, yay!  It’s still too early to tell if this will help or not, right now it’s on the lowest setting so she can used to it being there and to the sensations of it going off.  Little by little it’ll be brought up to a normal working level to keep her from going crazy with the thing all of a sudden being there and going full force.

So far this week I’ve managed to just sit back and enjoy the time I have with my family.  For example this morning I woke up and noticed my daughter’s eyes opening as I got out of bed.  What’s a responsible parent to do but play a little N+ with her before she had to start getting ready for school.  While she was getting ready I got some eggs whipped up and poured our orange juice.  These are the things I miss most of all about working in Florida.  Whatever you do today enjoy your family and friends!

From the time I woke up to the time I got to Paducah yesterday I did not see the sun.  It’s very strange for me to not have that angry yellow ball of fury beating down on me now, I enjoy the change.  Until I got to Nashville I was either in a fog of some sort or a very light rain.  Jessica swears I must have been doing 90mph to make it home by the time I did, what she doesn’t understand is I only slept for about 3 1/2 hours before getting on the road.  Add the fact that I don’t stop unless I need gas to the early start and you get an early arrival.

In Tennessee I  got a chili cheese corn dog from the gas stationI stopped at.  I know I should know better than to get food from a gas station but it happened anyway.  Hey, I’ll try anything once and this really falls under that “once” .  I’m not going to say it really bad or anything but it just wasn’t good.  I was expecting some sort of mix between a chili cheese dog and fritos with chili and chese.  What I got was a chese filled sausage wrapped in a corn and chili flavored grease absorbing sponge.

So far I managed to fix the stereo, show Jessica the uses of a multimedia pc along with the XBox360 and WMC, and sort out problems with KPs video camera.  I wonder what day 2 will bring.  Maybe I’ll really get my pc set up, right now I just have it powered up and on the network so I can remote in if I need anything.  In fact I’m typing this on my machine right now since I like my browser setup better than Jessica’s.  The joys of being a geek…

I’ll be in the car most of the day tomorrow but it’ll be worth it to be home for a change.  I can’t wait to hold my daughter and my wife close for a while.  I know, not much of an update but I’ve got to get a nap in before I take off.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10129762-16.html

I’ve been saying this for a while now but as a gamer maybe my perspective is a bit biased. To me it seems there are 2 groups who like to be on the cutting edge of computing, the computer geeks and the gamers. I’m a hybrid of the 2 but leaning more to the gamer side.  The geeks are the ones using linux right now, they can do whatever they need to with no problems.  Gamers on the other hand are not having as much fun because a lot of the games just don’t play well with linux.  Kudos to id and Epic for making some of their games playable, now if more companies would follow suit I’d finally be able to build that linux gaming box.