This year was the first time in my 13 years of marriage (13 years as of the 27th!) that we didn’t spend Thanksgiving with either my family or the wife’s. It was just us and the kids for Thanksgiving this year. It was nice and quiet; we didn’t go out and get a huge turkey, just the breast of one. The normal casserole’s and side dishes, and of course, pumpkin pie for dessert.
I spent most of the weekend configuring and optimizing my wireless network. Having experienced the fact that not one but two of my neighbors have wide-open wireless networks, I wanted to lock it down as tight as possible. So now it’s WEP enabled, and requires a MAC address known to my router to get in. No pingbacks are allowed from outside the LAN either. Quite nice.
Aside from that (and eating leftovers), it was mostly sitting around enjoying the broadband, watching football, and not shopping. I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, but damn, the frenzy here on ‘Black Friday’ is just out of control. I prefer sitting home (or in the case of many people, sleeping in. We had a neighbor get up at 4am to be in line by 4:30…and that line stretched completely around the store!), and watching the news about the frenzy. Martin? What about your corner of the world? You guys get crazy there in Oslo? And how about you Sarah? Same sort of craziness?
Regardless, I hope that those of you that celebrated Thanksgiving had a nice and safe holiday.
About a year and a half ago, I discovered that I was able to get on my neighbor’s wireless network. Since then, I can’t bring myself to dial in anymore. Just way too slow, though the wife dials in all the time with her Windows laptop. Myself, if my PowerBook can’t get online through the wireless, I don’t get on.
Recently, I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about using the neighbor’s wireless. First I was just doing some news surfing and getting email and stuff. Recently, I was trying to work from home, and I had to move large Photoshop files back and forth, and I just know that was throttling his connection. So, I finally took the leap and signed up for broadband last night. Went to Best Buy, got a Linksys cable modem (plus an 80 dollar rebate for it), a D-Link Wireless router, as well as the broadband subscription.
I also plan on getting a VoIP service, and then dumping Verizon all together. I don’t think it’s right they can charge me for “services” such as touch-tone dialing and dial tone…
So, I’m finally entering the 21st Century! Only 5 years late…typical of me. I get that from my dad though. He bought an Apple IIe around when they first became available, something like 1983 or ’84…and he held onto that same computer until around 1996! I think he’d have kept it even longer if his new secretary had been able to use it at all.
Still makes me laugh when he tries to use a mouse 
The family and I went to a Halloween party on Saturday night at my friend Krysta’s house. She usually pulls out all the stops for a party, and Saturday night was no exception. She decided on a Harry Potter theme, and decorated her house accordingly. She had gotten some coverings that looked like castle walls and covered all her walls with them. She had shots of various alcohol in small potions bottles, sugar quills, cauldron cakes, and butterbeer, just to name a few of the treats. She had various rooms in her house decorated as well: There was the grand hall, where she had several candles floating by the ceiling (small battery operated christmas-like candles hanging from fishline), an owlery, with several stuffed owls and feathers on the floor (Glad there were no owl pellets!), a Golden Snitch room, with Snitches all over the place and one tied to the fan going around and around, and finally, a Potions room down in the basement with potions homework on the wall.
We had a great time. The wife went as Ms. McGonagal, Sarah as Mrs. Norris, and Cody as a Dementor. Myself, I went as Hagrid and won a prize! The wife should actually get the prize, as she did a great deal of work on my costume. We spent probably a total of 10-15 hours on the wig alone. We couldn’t go the easy route and buy a wig and beard, noooo, we had to make it from scratch. But it turned out excellent.
It’s been a busy few weeks, and it’s only going to get busier. I have several papers coming due in my English class, birthday parties for both kids, and then we’re smack-dab in the middle of the holidays. What this all means is that, most likely, the changes I’ve been wanting to make to the site here will be put on the back burner. Gotta have those priorities and this site is low on the totem pole.
I’m going to be still posting, it’s just the small things that are bugging me (why the background color keeps changing from blue to yellow and back to blue, the static page links, the cursor, the edit tag…it goes on) will be allowed to bug me a bit longer.
It’s been awhile since I’ve hoarked up the site good n’ proper, so I thought I’d tweak something and now all the stuff in the sidebar is nice and hoarked. Hoo-AH!
My son and I were slated to go camping this weekend, and as I’m writing this on a Saturday morning, you can probably guess that didn’t happen.
We met the group we were going to go with at about 3:30. The new Isuzu Trooper we’d gotten about six weeks ago (as a result of the wife’s accident last July) was loaded with the camping equipment, ice chest and miscellaneous other stuff. It was to be a “guy’s weekend”, with just a bunch of dads and their sons. So we’re caravanning up to our campground, when the Trooper starts acting like it’s popped out of drive. I check, and it’s still OK, at least according to the transmission. I drop it down to third, watched the RPMs shoot up, and realized the transmission was gone. Either the clutch plate went south or something else. About that time, the oh-so-helpful “Check Trans” light came on the dashboard. Bit too late, but thanks for the notice.
Last night, Sarah and I went to see the Big Apple Circus. It’s a one ring circus, and is one of the better ones, if not the best, that I’ve been too. When I was younger, my grandmother took me to see The Ringling Bros. Circus, and I was so excited I probably wet myself. Three big rings! High wire trapeze artists! Clowns! Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!
Well, it was the Lions and Tigers and Bears (oh my!) that actually turned me off the big circus. Animals like that are not meant to be caged and forced to stand on platforms and jump through burning rings of fire. I went when the legendary Gunther Gebel-Williams was performing. He did his act with kindness and respect towards the big animals. Later in the show when another performer was doing his bit with the cracking of the whip and yelling, I noticed Gebel-Williams off to one side of the cage, sitting down and scratching a jaguar through the bars. The jaguar looked like my cat does when getting scratched, just simply content. No other animal trainer that I saw that day treated those animals with the kindness and respect that he did.
After that, I refused to go to any circus where they had big, non-domesticated animals. And this is where the Big Apple Circus comes in. They had one horse and a dog show. The rest was all performers. And it was wonderful. The one ring makes it intimate and pretty much ever seat is a good one. They were safety conscious (none of this trapeze without a net crap) and interacted with the audience quite well. They are also involved with the community, and according to their website, they are a “not-for-profit” performing arts institution committed to kids and their families”
In short, it was simply a wonderful way to spend an evening with my daughter.
This past Wednesday, Sept.14th, my dog, Dan, ran out in front of a car and was hit. My wife called me at work and as I pulled up to the house, she and my son were leaving with Dan in the back of the car to the vet’s.
Twenty minutes later my son came into the house in tears. Dan had died on the way and never really had a chance.
He should’ve lived to be an old hound dog. It’s not fair that his life was ended by a three and a half-ton SUV. I always pictured him resting on the front porch, grey muzzle resting on his front paws, snoozing in the sun, dreaming of chasing rabbits. Not to have his last few minutes of life end in agony.
Naturally, the kids were upset, but kids being kids, have bounced right back. The wife and I are having a much harder time. I actually came into work a bit early this morning to write this, knowing I’d probably get choked up. And I am. I miss my dog. He used to sleep under my feet while I was watching TV and would sneak into my bedroom at night and curl up on my side of the bed. Knowing he’s not here makes me feel horribly guilty for yelling at him for stupid things like barking, or damn near breaking my arm while on the leash, trying to going after a squirrel.
So goodbye Dan. You’re no longer on the leash. Go chase those squirrels and rabbits and bark your head off with pure joy. You’re a good dog. I’ll miss you.
Well…that was relatively painless.
At least as far as the WordPress move is concerned. While cleaning up my home directory, I inadvertantly deleted my Gallery directory and all the pictures I’d uploaded. That was fun. So I spent some time re-uploading all the pictures only after I re-installed Gallery.
Now, if I can get the WordPress Gallery plug-in to work, I’ll be SUCH a happy camper.
Well…Shad’s Pad is moving at least. I’m going to be moving it to a sub-domain of my other site, and by doing this, hopefully, it’ll clean up some of my crap (you should see my home directory. Stuff everywhere), as well as making this whole WordPress Gallery plug-in easier to configure. Apparently it has problems with the /~shad/ bit in the url.
Besides, I get tired of typing the ~. I always miss it and end up tabbing somewhere else.
So, the new url will be http://muse.harleyroads.com. DNSis taking a bit to update (as always) and when it does, I’ll post a redirect here. So you can either update your bookmarks (all three of you) or just let it redirect you when the new sub-domain is up. Hopefully, this will encourage me to work on my long-neglected Harley site as well.