Big news

I'm going to be a Dad! We'll have our first child (a boy!) on or around October 21st. My wife and I are very excited. We've just recently started buying outfits for him, so it's starting to seem much more "real" now. I'm going to try to get into the habit of updating more frequently, since this blog would be a great place for me to post baby pictures and videos.

And here's the first picture:

coffeecoffeecoffee

The wife and I both enjoy coffee, and a while ago we decided we would start buying beans and grinding it ourselves. When we were on our cruise, we picked up our first bag of beans in Guatemala, so we officially needed to get a grinder. I've been researching grinders, and procrastinating, but I ran out of coffee grounds this weekend, so now I REALLY need to get one! I've ordered a Cuisinart DBM-8C burr grinder, and it's on its way from Vancouver. That model came highly recommended from some coffee geeks at work, and Vancouver was the only place I could find it still for sale.

Unfortunately, Canada Post will only get it here by Wednesday. I'm not sure what I'm going to be drinking this weekend. :(

Been a while

For a little while at work, we were blocking blogs. I'm not too sure WHY, but we were. People then started complaining, and we opened them up again. However, I decided to not post from work for a bit, because they were obviously watching the traffic and decided it was a problem. Personally, I think if people take 5 minutes at lunch to update a blog, that's not costing the company much. My other alternative would be to start taking smoke breaks, and blog instead of smoking. :P

The past few weeks seemed like they were really busy, but I don't have anything huge to report yet. I'm just looking forward to having all the snow gone, and the arrival of spring. This weekend is the first weekend where the temperature has been above zero the whole time, so dinners are going to be 100% barbecue.

I'll try to post more, and I'll make my life more interesting soon. Promise!

... and we're back!

We're back from the cruise, and just about settled in again. There was a lot of catching up to do at work, and a lot of tidying, and putting things away at home. The house is a mess too. Vacations are so much work!

To quickly summarize the vacation:

New Orleans: French Quarter is beautiful, food was great, Bourbon Street is crazy. Mr. Obama, they are still horribly messed up from Katrina. Maybe you could give them a hand?

Costa Maya: Mayan ruins were neat, soldiers with full combat gear, assault rifles and grenade launchers MAY be overkill for guarding the cruise port. Or maybe not? That's a scary thought.

Guatemala: Yes, a RAINforest. I get it. It RAINS. Rains a LOT.

Belize: Too windy and rainy to go to the beach. I was looking forward to that.

Cozumel: I played volleyball on a beach in February! Woo! Booze + Catamarans = Fun.

The Boat: Food was meh, I make a better Coq au Vin. Enjoying the ocean would have been easier without smokers, and without the ceaseless ambient music that they piped out onto the promenade deck.

I may sound like I'm complaining a lot, but I did enjoy the vacation.

Last weekend on dry land!

This has felt like a busy week, but I guess we haven't done anything too crazy. I actually worked out with my wife on Tuesday, had Volleyfit on Wednesday, and played Volleyball on Thursday. Maybe I feel tired because of this whole "physical activity" thing.

Tonight is a pub dinner, shopping for cruise stuff, then I relax. Saturday and Sunday will both be reasonably busy days, and next week is going to be a crazy week at work. I think I'm definitely going to need this vacation when it comes...

Maple Walnut Fusion Cake

Today's work lunch was absolutely gourmet. For a main course, I picked up a fresh baguette to go with the leftover pot roast. My sandwich was the envy of the lunchroom.

For dessert, I have a piece of Maple Walnut Fusion Cake. It's called that because it is a cake, has maple and walnuts in it, and I have to eat it with chopsticks because someone stole all the forks.

Volleyfit

So, I did my first class of Volleyfit yesterday. The goal is to get more fit for volleyball, and to improve my skills. The workout part of it was pretty rough on me, but the teacher wasn't all that great at explaining things. He had us playing a proper 6 vs. 6 match, but he assumed that everyone was a volleyball pro, and never really explained what we were supposed to do. So now, I've got to check the internet to learn how to play volleyball, when I'm PAYING this guy to teach me. Fun times.

Windows 7 so far

I've got to say, my experience with the Windows 7 Beta has been very pleasant so far! Since I was reconfiguring the hard drives on my computer into a RAID array, I had to install it from scratch, without upgrading Vista. This is how I would have chosen to do it anyways, since I don't really trust "upgrading" an OS. In any case, I dumped anything I wanted to keep onto my Home Server, and rebuilt my desktop.

The thing I like most about the Windows 7 is that they're made an effort to make it cleaner and faster. There's no more Sidebar, like in Vista. Also, the Quick Launch bar is integrated into the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application is highlighted if it is running, and can be pinned there with a right-click if you want to keep it there. The Start button looks like just another icon, so it maintains a very clean look. Here, Chrome and Paint are running, and I've moused-over Chrome to get a preview:

It's nice, because it keeps your takbar nice an organized. If you click on app that is running, it will shift focus to the app. If the app isn't running, the click will start the app instead.

The Notification Area has also been reworked. You can configure it to hide, show only notifications, or always show anything that goes down there. Again, it's quite easy to keep that area clean.

There are a ton more features, but I haven't had a chance to play with them all yet. So far, this feels like a faster, leaner Vista with some nice UI tweaks. And honestly, that's enough to sell me on it so far.

Probably not as bad as this...

I've become more and more of a Windows geek since I started my current job. Our partnership with Microsoft grants us early access to a lot of nice software that other people can't touch yet, which is pretty fun. I've been pretty busy recently and I didn't even notice the Windows 7 Beta until yesterday. It releases today, and I've already got my keys. 

This weekend, I'm going to back everything up to my Windows Home Server, and install Windows 7 on my PC at home. Worst case, it sucks horribly and I just restore my backup. Best case, it's nice and I keep using it. Either way, it won't be as bad as xkcd thinks:

The joy of ordering online

I ran out of things to read, and I decided to order some books online from Chapters. There were a couple more obscure books that I wanted that weren't available in stores, so ordering online was the way to go. I picked out 3 zombie books from authors I hadn't heard of before, I got The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and then an Odd Thomas book from Dean Koontz that I hadn't read. The Dean Koontz book was supposed to be my "safe" book. Even if I turned out to hate all 4 of the books by the new authors, I was sure to enjoy In Odd We Trust. I liked the author, and the main character in this series is excellent. 

However, when I opened the book, it turns out it's a graphic novel. That's a mature term for "comic book". I missed that when I was going through the description online. Ah well. Here's hoping it's a good  comic book, at least.

"Overkill"?

No such thing for these guys:

Hopefully, things won't get to that point at my office. My solution is much more... discreet. I'll post a picture once I find the camera.

This Ain't A Scene

I work for a software company. Everyday, our software gets "built" out of source code so that the QA department can test the software that we wrote the previous day. Sometimes, this build doesn't work. This is usually because one of the developers was careless. In order to discourage this carelessness, we usually make the build-breaker bring in donuts as penance. Apparently this wasn't working, because one of these was left in the kitchen with a threatening note:

I think someone just started an office arms race.