Things have been busy around here.

[b]The Party[/b]

Back in November, we threw a surprise birthday party for my Mom. She was turning 75 this year. The plan was to throw the party in Massachusetts the weekend after her birthday. Robyn and I (but mostly Robyn as she created the invitations and took care of the list and dealing with the restaurant, etc – THANK YOU, BABE!) have been planning this since late summer and it was quite a challenge. It’s always tough to plan a long-distance party, but it was more difficult because I didn’t[readmore] have the addresses or contact information for the majority of my cousins and family who would be invited. Since moving to NJ more than 14 years ago, I have hardly seen anyone outside of my immediate family except for the rare (thankfully!) funeral so I contacted my cousin Doris and my Aunt Kay who’s email addresses I pulled from one of my mom’s forwarded emails. With their help, we were able to put together a list of family and friends to invite. The many on-line directories were very helpful in finding and verifying addresses and the invitations were sent with directions to RSVP.

A week before the party, my mom called (this is very unusual in itself!) and said that she was in the emergency room. She had not been feeling well for several days and had asked my cousin to bring her because she thought that she had pneumonia. My mom’s pretty tough when it comes to not feeling well, but when the pneumonia started to affect her breathing, she must have gotten quite scared. She was diagnosed with [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_obstructive_pulmonary_disease]COPD[/url] in 1991 and it’s really only in recent years that it’s begun to affect her. I’m glad she went because the docs confirmed that she had pneumonia and wanted to keep here in the hospital for several days to administer antibiotics and monitor her O2 levels. Robyn and I were not quite sure what to do at this point because if she wasn’t feeling better we would have to cancel or postpone the party in time to get in touch with everyone and let them know. Things were shakey for a few days, but my mom was discharged on Tuesday and since she was sounding so much better, we decided to go ahead.

We drove up to MA on a rainy Friday afternoon, checked into our hotel and then had dinner at my sister’s house. The next day, the party went off without a problem and my mom was COMPLETELY surprised. In fact, she didn’t even notice us or our kids until after everyone yelled “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” so I think we caught her completely off guard. I was really happy to have been able to put the party together. I found out a few days later that this was the very first birthday party that my mother had ever had![/readmore]

The “Imperial Command” has recently imposed a lot of new restrictions on what we can access on the Internet from work, so I decided to bypass their network altogether so that I could see what I needed (or wanted!) to see when I’m connected to work during 99% of my weekdays.

There are several ways I could have gone about this. First, I tried to install a light Linux distro on a very old laptop that I had laying around. But the pentium 200 with 256 meg or RAM couldn’t even handle the smallest distro I could find that still let me do what I needed to do. So, I chose to spend a little money and buy an off-lease corporate computer from eBay for $20 and install [url=http://www.xubuntu.org/]Xubuntu[/url] on it. BTW, if you’re interested in getting a second (or third or fourth…) computer, this is a GREAT way to go. I got a Compaq EVO small form factor desktop box with a 1.8 ghz processor, 256 mb RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. These are the same boxes we use in the office of Imperial Command and they get the job done. I added an additional gig of RAM to speed things up a bit. I used a USB KVM switch to connect the keyboard, mouse and monitor (yes, I only have one monitor!) and started installing. The only thing that is making me a little nuts is the loud fan in the new box – it’s got this high-pitched whine that is slowly eating away at my brain! Not sure yet if it’s the PS fan or the CPU fan, but I gotta get that thing quieted down….

Xubuntu has been great. I can’t believe that all these tech pundits are saying that Linux is still not ready for the desktop of the average consumer. The installation was totally painless and I’d say that about 75% of people would probably never have to change the default settings on their machines in order to do everything they generally do with their computers (which I’m guessing is mostly surfing the web and checking email with an occasional document or spreadsheet thrown in. Watching DVDs and most common video formats is enabled by default now, so that’s pretty much a no-brainer.

I’ve been doing a lot of customization so that I can use this as a development and testing box and generally just trying to get up to speed and make sure that I can do everything I can do on a Windows box within this new environment. So far, I’ve not run into too many things that I can’t do in Linux that I could on Windows. I installed [url=www.winehq.org]Wine[/url], but I find that things work better using Linux apps.

[url=http://conky.sourceforge.net/]Conky[/url] is great fun. Check out the screenshot of my desktop below to see my customized Conky setup.

[url=http://www.universetoday.com/2008/11/07/deepest-ultraviolet-image-shows-a-sea-of-distant-galaxies/]Check this out[/url].

This is another observation of the universe that just blows my mind. It’s just incomprehensible – each dot and speck and “cloud” a galaxy….

Each galaxy harbors billions of stars many of which, like our Sun, will have planets in orbit around them. In those thousands of billions of systems, what are the chances that life exists on many of those planets?

Yeah, we still have snow on the ground from the storm the other day.

This is what it looked like at about 10am on Tuesday:

We ended up with about 4 inches of heavy, wet snow. At some points it was coming down so hard it was almost white-out conditions. We didn’t think much of it in the AM since we were mostly just bemused that it was snowing so hard so early in the season,but as the day went on, the trees that still had their leaves began to collect more and more of the heavy, wet snow. They started to sag and then to snap.

The top of one of the big trees in the empty lot next to us came down and snagged one of the windows on that side of the house shattering the glass in the storm window. I started to get very concerned that one of the big trees was going to fall onto our house and the rest of the day became a tense waiting game as we listened to trees crack and snap all around our neighborhood.

We lost our electricity around noon so we didn’t have any lights, heat, water or internet access!! After the kids napped, we decided that we’d get out to somewhere warm. We just decided to get a hotel nearby and hole up there rather than be on the road for several hours driving to friends or family. Long story short, we ended up getting the hotel room for free anyway….that’s a story for another time.

Everything is fine now. Got back home yesterday about noon and the power came back on about 4 minutes after we walked into the house. Luckily, there was no additional damage to the house or anything in the yard although there are many, many branches to clean up this weekend.

The kids love staying at hotels, so I’m sure they enjoyed the adventure.

Yes, we woke up this morning to see snow on the ground. And it wasn’t a fluke. Big, wet flakes have been coming down for the last hour or so. I don’t think I recall it ever snowing quite this early in the year before. Ah well…makes it seem so much more cozey and warm at home.

Have you checked your 401k lately? I have not. I’m actually too scared to look at it.

Today the Dow dropped below 9,000 for the first time since 2003.

I don’t know what the next few months has in store from a financial perspective but I am growing more concerned by the day.

It’s Robyn’s birthday today. Tonight we’re celebrating by going to a nice restaurant (I can’t name it because it’s a surprise for her) and tomorrow we’re going out with her family for dinner as well. I’m hungry, so that works out well. heheheheh.

It’s also the anniversary of my first real martial arts class with Tim way back in ’86!

It’s weird how two very important events in my life coincide like that, no?