One Week on the Brink

red-crossLast week has been tough on the whole family. We’ve been to the ER twice, and straight to the doctor’s office once.

Last Sunday night I managed to drop the hot tub cover on my foot. I managed to limp through the whole day Monday, but by Tuesday morning I was in extreme pain. At Kim’s behest I went to the ER and had them look at my foot. While it was not broken, they ordered me off the foot and issued a splint and a pair of crutches.

Wednesday started off normally enough — when you consider I was on crutches, but while proctoring a midterm exam I was informed that Kim was suffering from extreme abdominal pains. Another trip to the ER ensued, this time the diagnosis was kidney stones.

Thursday started with I both at home, struggling to get the girls out the door for school. Unfortunately, by midday the school nurse called to inform us that one of the girls was running a high fever. After picking them both out, we found that Tessie has a temperature over 103°. After a long night, we managed to get her to the doctor the next day for diagnosis of H1N1 flu.

The rest of the week was pretty much a long bout of all of us laying about the house trying to recover. Thankfully, Little Allie has been a trooper and helping us all. Currently, I’m much better, Kim is still waiting for her kidney stone to pass, and Tessie is running an intermittent fever. This next week looks to be at least a little better than the last, but there’s still a lot of recovering to go.

Windows 7 mini-review

Windows7Credit where credit is due, Microsoft’s upcoming release of Windows 7 may just be the best operating system Microsoft has ever released. In using it lightly, I can say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Microsoft’s latest effort. So far I’ve mostly spent my time in operating system set up and maintenance operations, but Windows 7 feels snappy and looks visually appealing. While I have not spent an extensive amount of time using Windows 7 in day-to-day context, I have found that many of the annoyances so prevalent in Vista are no longer evident in the newest incarnation of Windows.

The biggest feature missing from the latest and greatest version of Windows is the ability to install and run from an external USB hard drive. After spending a bit of time trying to achieve this functionality, I’m convinced it’s about time Microsoft just got its act together and implement this. The Macintosh has been booting from external drives for more than a decade; it’s about time Windows caught up.

That said, welcome back Microsoft! It’s been a long time coming, but you’ve finally made another OS worth crowing about!

101 things in 1001 days, revisited

So September 28, 2009, my experiment in completing 101 things in 1001 days ended. By my own tally I only completed 43 of my objectives. At one level this is an abject failure; on the other hand, a large number of life changes may make this a reasonable outcome. In the past three years, I’ve met my future wife, had open-heart surgery, gotten engaged, began life with a new family.

In the next couple months, I plan on restarting my 1001 days with many of the remaining objectives my previous list, as well as some new ones thrown into the mix. I look forward to starting a new challenge, along with the new year.

Free Trail-a-bike

General cleaning and organization has led to a few surplus items. We’re generally taking them to goodwill/local charities, but if something seems like it might be useful to friends, I’ll list it here. The first item up for grabs is a Trek Trail-A-Bike; this let’s budding cyclists hitch a ride behind a parent. Our looks like this one:


mttrain201_silverblack

But we don’t have the flag. Let me know if you’d like it. E-mail or phone is best. Thanks!

Wedding Update

topper
Or announcement, or something. What we know at the moment:

Kim and I are getting married at the Memorial Chapel on the UMCP campus on 10/10/10.

For the numerically geeky out there, in binary that’s 1010/1010/1010. Or if you take it as a binary number: 101010 = 42 in decimal. And I don’t need to tell you the meaning of the number 42.

The ceremony will be at 6pm with a reception afterwards. There’s plenty of room at the chapel — it seats over one thousand, so anyone and everyone is welcome there. The reception won’t be the same situation.

We also have a cake topper, all the way from France. That’s it at the top of this entry; and we have an idea of what we’d like the cake to look like.

I think Kim has tentatively found a dress she likes.
But, we’re still looking at reception halls, photographers, etc.

More details as they become available.

France 2009 photos

kim+sandroI finally got around to posting the photos from our trip to France on my Flickr photo stream. I didn’t bother editing the photos at all, otherwise I’d be posting them to the photo blog. Let me know which photos you like, and I’ll edit them for the photoblog.

You can see them here.

There are more pictures from the Tour de France including some panoramas I took on the new website:
http://visitletour.com/index.php?tid=6

Mini-Bar

minibarOn Friday night, Kim and I had the great pleasure of eating at the Mini-Bar by José Andrés.

A six-seat dining experience nestled within Café Atlantico, Kim had to work a bit to get reservations (call one month in advance @10 am). We were rewarded for our efforts by a 28-course tasting menu of “molecular gastronomy”. Most dishes were just a bite or possibly two, so 28 courses wasn’t the ordeal that might be imagined. Most of the dishes are amazing delicious, and all incredibly interesting to behold. Surprisingly, the chefs (2 for just the six seats) assemble and plate all the food before your eyes, and are willing and able to keep a running commentary of the ingredients and techniques employed in creating the meal.
The service, like the food, was impeccable. At the suggestion of our server we paired the meal with a 2005 Domaine William Fevre Chablis Les Clos. In the end, we had a throughly enjoyable (albeit pricey) evening.

Keeping SSH sessions alive

terminalSince I just had to re-remember how to do this, I thought I’d post a quick note. To keep SSH sessions alive you just need to create a file: .ssh/config. In this config file you can just add:

Host *
ServerAliveInterval=60
KeepAlive=yes

This works on the relatively recent (last 3-5 years) versions of OpenSSH that come with MacOS X. There’s probably a similar mechanism in older/other versions of SSH, but I haven’t researched it too deeply.