Tim and Valerie

Got a bunch of picture albums coming your way. Sorry Josh, I meant to combine them but due to the way I had them organized in Picasa each subset got it’s own album when I uploaded them. I gotta look into reworking how I’ve organized my pictures on the backend to support a different upload structure.

Anyways, how’s everyone doing? Well, Valerie, David and I are doing alright, as you can probably tell. Usually the lack of updates is a sign that nothing major is going down, life is pretty stable. It also means that I am capable of conveying most day-to-day sentiments through other mediums like twitter or facebook. I know it sounds sad, but blogging used to be the du jour way to keep in touch with friends and family, and now microblogging services and social networking sites have utterly taken it over and dominated it. Plus, lets face it, blogs are a lot of work. It takes some time to sit down and think about 5 coherent sentences you can put together to make up a post, it’s crazy. Plus the time commitment involved, it’s nothing like twitter where all I need is a cell phone, a signal, and 15 seconds at a red light to punch out <140 characters of random immediate musings.

So in that light, here are some twitter-worthy items that never made its way onto that site.

• You know why I hate SUVs? Because I can’t see around them when I drive my car. Simple as that. And no, I refuse to buy one just to keep up, that’s an example of a Prisoner’s Dilemma that I don’t want to perpetuate.
• Wordpress 2.8 almost broke my theme. I’m now scared to continue updating my site.
• I’ve added all the new picture albums to my picture page above. Clicky for fun.
• My entire vacation was spent sick with Strep Throat. It sucked all the fun out of the vacation.
• But I did read most of the first two books in the “A Song Of Ice And Fire” series. I’m crapping my pants that HBO has picked up the rights to it and is making a series out of it. If you like Tolkien, or gritty realistic fantasy (think swords and knights, but scarce mention of magic), then you’ll love this series.
• Skype is pretty awesome, but it suffers when you have little to talk about, and lacks the same intimacy as being around someone in person.
• In 3 more years I (think I) can apply for an antique license plate for my 20 year old Honda Accord. Weird to think about, isn’t it?
• “The Fashion Show” on Bravo stinks, and “Top Chef Masters” is a weak imitation of the original.
• What happened to a gradual entrance of Summer? The last two weeks have brought the proverbial heat hammer down HARD on us. Blistering heat, ugh.

Ok, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here. See you all in another month, LOL.

Enjoy the pictures, seriously. 

Popularity: 1% [?]

So much stuff happens and I just don’t post like I used to. It’s been over 4 months since I last posted a video, even though we’ve shot a ton and I’ve even edited and uploaded one to youtube, I still haven’t posted. Got a crapton of pictures since the ones I’ve uploaded from his birthday in February, but I  haven’t uploaded any. So in an effort to make amends, here is a video of David attempting to use a spoon for the first time. Don’t be shocked at how old he seems, he’s really grown up fast, and putting together a montage video of clips to show his progression would take a lot of time. I still plan on doing something like that, but when time makes itself available I will.

Life has been pretty steady for the most part. Valerie and I are slowly making improvements to the house (having a rambunctious 16 month old running around hinders things), we’re slowly saving money, and hoping the market picks back up so we can upgrade our digs. Thankfully my 17 year old car still runs like a champ, there haven’t been any huge outlays of money (other than the leaky roof), and David is in good health. He did come down with a 3 day episode of Roseola that he kicked pretty quickly, that’s about the only thing he’s gone through. No new teeth other than the 8 he’s sporting. He’s had 2 haircuts, mastered walking, almost mastered running, mastered disobedience, climbing up on the couch and ottoman, taking things out of buckets/drawers and putting things back in, drinking from a sippy cup, self feeding, and the words “mama, dada, hot, hello, bye bye, elmo, go go, love you” and the sounds of the horse, sheep, goat, pig, dog, duck, and probably a dozen other things I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Guess it’s time to start thinking about a sibling? Eh?

Speaking of, you rayd.org fellas better get with the babymaking, David needs someone to play with!

Popularity: 2% [?]

I probably should have put something up sooner than now. I really have no excuse. I am lazy.

Probably the worst part about me not posting like I said I would was that I wound up not posting as a means of saying that “posting every day” was my true April Fools Joke. My actual joke was actually pretty clever IMHO, despite the naysayers. Haters, all of you. (By the way, I wound up talking to 4 people who DID fall for the joke, so suck it haters).

This month has been interesting.  I spent a week out in the northern California (San Jose/Santa Clara) area, just south of San Francisco/Oakland. We have a datacenter out there where I was doing some training, as well as getting some training done on some Symantec products. San Jose is a pretty remarkable city, they boast of themselves as “The Heart of Silicon Valley” and they’re not joking about that moniker. I wound up seeing the headquarters of HP, EMC, Brocade, AMD, Symantec, Yahoo!, Cisco, Apple, Intel, Google, and many more that I’m probably just plain forgetting. Besides all of the jaw dropping at the big names in the area, I made sure I got a few things accomplished…

• I drove up and visited Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco one evening. It’s a touristy-type family friendly area on the north shore of the city, with lots of things for kids to do and tourists to waste their money on. I bought David a little cheapo Alcatraz onesie that had it’s colors run after one washing (I got my money’s worth on that one). While up there they had signs all over that Dungeness crab was in season, and I decided to stop at this place called Boudin’s and have a sourdough bowl of corn and clam chowder because they make their own sourdough there and I wanted to try the sourdough too. Fantastic dinner.
• While out in California, I HAD to try an In-and-Out Burger at least once, since I hear so many good things about the chain and they aren’t on the east coast. I’m not talking about a Carl’s Jr. (or Hardees), I’m talking In-and-Out. Well, it was a good burger, but nothing to write home about. Definitely the best fast food burger I’ve ever eaten, but not worth the hype.

Those are the two notable things from the trip, other than the semi-notable kickass cafeteria food that Symantec’s corporate headquarters had. It was more than enough to make up for the fact that they disallowed all IPSec and RDP traffic into and out of the building. Lame, but at least the food was fantastic.

Sorry, no pictures. I spent most of my time sitting indoors either conducting training or sitting in training sessions. Not the most notable of trips, but it was effective. Sitting in an airplane for 5 hours though sucked. Especially the guy who sat next to me on the way back, had the worst fart gas ever, and the 14 kids on the trip (most of whom were well behaved except for this unruly 3 year old Indian boy that was the most ill-behaved little bastard I’ve ever seen).

I’ll post again on what David’s up to, since I know you are all interested. Little man can take up an entire post on his own.

Popularity: 3% [?]

(First off, I wasn’t kidding when I said a post a day, beyotches. Get used to the T-DOGG being back up in here, flooding your RSS feed reader with stupid posts, yo!)

This post will be brief. I spent most of my alotted writing time looking up a swanky media player just to play one song for you (that media player is Anarchy Media Player) and the song is Like A Boss by The Lonely Island.

It’s only a minute and a half long, and it’s NSFW, but well worth listening to it. If you can’t bob your head or laugh out loud to this song, then you must have something wrong with you.

This song is done by the same guys that brought you I’m On A Boat and Jizz In My Pants.

http://www.thelonelyisland.com/ The Lonely Island – Like A Boss

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last week, while eating dinner with my family, my brother chimes in with a subtle but telling rebuke regarding this site.

“You know, for those of us living in Athens who don’t get to see you, it’d be nice if you updated your site once in a while with, you know, stuff. Maybe a picture or two.”

Touché.

I have managed to go the entire month of March without an update. I’ve resolved numerous times to put something up to read, as we have been up to some things that merit mentioning, but when push comes to shove nothing gets done.

So instead I’m going to put something up every day for the month of April. You want something to read? You’ll get something to read.

I wanted to wait to post this, because it’s another week out, but if I go another week I’m sure to get roasted even more, so here goes.

There is another reason I’m heading out to California. I’m going to be a contestant on Bingo America on the gameshow network (GSN).

I won some online contest to be a contestant for season 3 of the show, and while that doesn’t mean much, I’ll film my part in the show and it’ll air in a couple of months.

I wanted to wait to post pictures of the whole thing and my part in it, since it’s gonna be pretty awesome to be in a gameshow, even if it’s some bunk thing that airs on a channel that nobody really watches. I’ve had to sign a bunch of release forms and get travel arrangements done to do it, and I’m bundling the trip in with some work stuff that I needed to do out in California anyway, so it’s gonna be pretty awesome.

When I know more I’ll post more. But stay tuned!

Popularity: 3% [?]