4:58 pm - Wooh After an easy start this morning, I was able to get home by 4pm, which is nice. I found time to get some stuff done around the h... Mood: Excited Event:My life
Gilly is getting so big - 24lbs, five teeth. She almost looks like a little toddler now! I started to put some videos of her on YouTube, which seems to be the best way to share them with friends and family. The common response to the videos is to send me photos of their own family, and JJ from VMware and Amy from HDS have sent me a few photos of their own little babies around the same age as Gillian.
I think I've lost count of the number of people who've sent me this YouTube link. It's actually pretty funny. We printed out the '1980s' and 'Today' images at the office and stuck them on the wall.
After almost a year, we're almost done with the repairs to the house. New deck, new roof, new siding, rebuild patio, along with some decent landscaping in the back yard. Maybe by the time winter comes around, we'll be ready to enjoy the hot tub and give Gillian her first taste of snow (not literally!).
On the baby front,Gillian is having great fun at day care and even made a little friend already. I'm sure she'll have a more interesting time once she's able to sit up and play with toys, but she seems to be enjoying watching the other children and getting lots of attention.
A couple of time each week I'll have lunch with Brandi from my office. Usually we'll grab something from the sandwich or pizza places on the other side of E9th, or we'll treck over to the Colonial Market place to the Stadium Hotdog stand with real curly fries. More often than not, Brandi will literally inhale all of her food, as if she's not eaten for a while (which is usally the case).
We had her and her friend Bob over for dinner on Thursday, and we cooked up some giant steaks. As usual, nothing was left for scraps and even the cats didn't get any fatty lumps of meat to chew on. Maybe one day Brandi will learn to eat every day, rather than binge then not eat anything for a while.
Quite a few updates around here. We've spent a lot of time working on the house, mostly decorating and replacing lights and other things to make it more cozy. So far we've got a couple of rooms almost done, including our bedroom and my office. Now we just need to work on our baby's room and cleaned up everything downstairs. Now we've got the attic to store stuff, everything is looking much more organized.
I upgraded my install of Cacti today, along with moving to rrdtool 1.2, which turned out rather nicely. I'm not sure if I like my fonts right now, but they do the trick and everything is readable.
I decide to blow away my laptop and reinstall it with Vista Business and Office 2007. So far it works okay, although there are a couple of apps that don't work right anymore - Nero being the top of the list. I honestly don't see what is so exciting about the Aero interface - It seems about as useless as Windows XP. My biggest problem with it is that most of the icons and tools are larger, so I end up with less display real estate to use.
* Gillian is starting to sprout teeth (or as we call them 'toofers'). So far she's in the 95% for height and weight, which I'm told is pretty good. She's starting to stand up and is able to put stuff into her mouth now.
* I'm onto my second weekend where I'm doing nothing at all. It feels great. After about a month of weekends with things planned, being out of town, or just running around like a crazy person, it's nice to relax for a while.
* We got Jess a PSP to play with - Not had time to mess with it much yet, but I might try to throw some DVDs on it for trips.
* Heading out to LA for VMWorld in a couple of weeks which is going to be nuts.
Well, tomorrow is our due date and nothing has happened so far. We've got another doctor's appointment this week, but who knows what will happen. Maybe we'll not even make it that far.I did find some cool stuff on cafepress.com for the baby, including this neat little emblem.
I picked up a little outfit and a teddy bear with it on, but I might find something for Gillian's room we can hang, maybe one of those square tiles.
My parents picked up a webcam, so we can do video conferencing once Gillian is born. I tried a whole bunch of different applications, from Microsoft Messenger to a bundled thing from Logitech, but nothing worked quite as well as Skype. In fact, it was the only thing that would do video larger than a postage stamp without it looking like it was made of lego. I've also set it up at home so I can watch the cats from work during the day, although the novelty of that wore off after a cople of hours.
I was able to get Vista installed on both VMWare Workstation and VMWare ESX 3.0 without too many problems. Once the VMWare Tools were installed, it started to run at a decent pace, although most of the fancy graphic features are missing as the video for VMWare was rated a one out of five.
I setup our HP photo printer on my Linux workstation today, and expected to spend an hour or two getting everything to work. Once I figured out which driver I needed from linuxprinting.org, all I had to do was apt-get it and configure CUPS through the web interface. I've not setup a Linux printer for a while, but it was about as brain-dead as it comes... I remember years ago having to patch GhostScript for my Epson and messing around with foomatic for hours.
I spent the weekend working on building out the attic so I can mount some equipment up there. 2x4s are pretty easy to work with, so I was able to construct something fairly elaborate in a day or so. I started facing it with 3/8" plywood, so things can be easily mounted to the whole thing.
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