A close-up of the newest member of the family.
December 2004 Archives
9 lbs.
20 inches
Everyone is healthy, happy, & tired!!
We hope everyone had a good Christmas. We certainly did, Ethan had a ball opening presents and loves his new "choo-choo".
It looks like our biggest present will come tomorrow, as Colleen is scheduled for a C-Section tomorrow morning. The new baby is too big (almost 9 lbs. at her last ultrasound) and the doctors don't want to risk another birth like Ethan's. Looks like we will have a full house for the event, as pretty much all of our immediate family will be in town tonight and tomorrow as we prepare.
Hopefully we will have pics up tomorrow of the new baby and his or her big brother!
One of the benefits of working at St. Francis University is that we get 14 days off for Christmas. Every year, I create a list of things I would like to accomplish during this time. However, I typically find that the only thing that gets completed during this time period is catching up on my DVD viewing. So this year, I've decided to publicly write my goals in order to create some form of motivation to actually complete some of this stuff.
1, Organize my digital music collection - I have tons of MP3s, WMAs, AACs, etc files. I honestly can say that at least 1/3 of my collection has come from unknown sources. Primarilly, I believe these mysterious songs have been from a combination of Shanizzle spending an entire day downloading music and stuff that I backed up off of people's computers that I've fixed with the intention of deleting. Regardless, my music collection has grown unmanageable and I am going to covert all of the files to a common format and organize them in a usable fashion.
2, Since we have moved here, our clothes washer has been powered through an extension cord stretching the length of our basement. I am going to expand my handyman horizons by either installing an actual outlet in the laundry room or by making the extension cord a more permanent item.
3, Begin researching what I'll need to create a "digital picture frame" utilizing an old laptop computer and my existing wireless network.
4, ????
5, Profit
I know these goals are lofty for a person whose wife is expecting a new baby any day, but I shall overcome.
Interesting piece here... If it ends up being true, I'm going to be pissed that I talked myself out of buying Google stock.
(Note: May take a minute to load)
Due in a very roundabout way to the Megaconference, CERMUSA's ambulance is being featured in a USA Today on-line article (Not sure if it is going to make the print version, will find out later this week). It's great news for CERMUSA and hopefully will gain some publicity for all of the hard work that the CERMUSA team (especially Dave & Vicki) have put into the ambulance!
If you haven't already, I strongly suggest "upgrading" to Thunderbird as your email client rather than using MS Outlook or the like. Thunderbird has some impressive SPAM filtering as well as some nice RSS features. A goal of mine with my latest computer was to make it as open source as possible, and between Firefox, Thunderbird, & OpenOffice, I'm running in a almost MS Free environment (other than the OS, of course). The only problem I've had encountered is that some of my Excel files won't open in OpenOffice, but that's a pretty quick work-around.
CERMUSA will be demonstrating our Wireless Ambulance in this year's Megaconference, so if you are availiable from 11:45 to 12:15 tomorrow, check out the live stream.
When I woke up today, I realized just how much I hated Canada and all that it stands for. I'm glad others feel the same.
CERMUSA has just created a new RSS Feed.
Subscribe to keep up with the exciting things going on here at CERMUSA.
My brother and I just returned from an inadvertantly long trip (I just enrolled in calendar reading classes) to Chicago for our friend Sean's wedding. We wondered around the city and made the following observations:
* iPods seemed to be everywhere. We hit the Apple store the day after Thanksgiving and it was a mad house. Seemed like everyone on the train had one.
*Chicago is a lot bigger than Pittsburgh. A lot bigger. I think we could have stayed for a week and not have seen half of it.
*Taking photos in the subway doesn't work.
*Large sculptures showing closeups of a person's face are intriguing yet somewhat frightening.
*I immediately felt out-gadgetted in the first 30 minutes I was there. The first guy we sat across from on the train had 2 cell phones sitting on his suitcase and then pulled out yet another one half-way through the trip. The 2 guys beside him each had PDAs out the entire time.
All in all, it was a fun trip. We checked out Millennium Park, the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry, and a tour by the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
It was good to see old friends and really enjoyed the trip.
