Another year come and gone...

Yes, its December 30th; tomorrow is new years eve. What a year! Christmas was fantastic this year, particularly given that we decided to reduce the gift-giving action to a minimum. The laptop that I'm typing this on, though the sexiest laptop I've ever used, has nevertheless pretty much tied up my monetary resources for the next four months in credit card payments, and as we know, money is pretty tight all the way around. But as usual, Cynthia's gifts were the most creative and will be the most memorable. Rather than getting Kevin and I material stuff, she bought us all tickets to see Jeff Dunham at the Convention Center. For those who've not heard of him, he's a ventriloquist, without a doubt the best in the business! I thought that ventriloquism had been pretty much played out by now, but oh my GOD this guy truly takes the art to new heights!

We busted up laughing so much that we all had sore throats by the time we got home. I'd already seen his shows on Comedy Central, including the xmas show, but there's nothing like seeing him live. Something that we will never forget! Cynthia's so good at that. I still have vivid and fond memories of the glider flight that she gave me for my 39th birthday. I can't even TELL you what a great time it was, though I have ample pictures from it that I'll post as soon as I figure out how.

We went to Cynthia's aunt's house in Golden for some xmas festivities, and we did a late gift unwrapping at my parents house in Broomfield. Good times all around! My parents had great gifts for us, and they seemed pleased as punch with their gifts as well. It was a nicer evening than the previous ones that week; it's been bitter cold around Colorado this month. But the cold let up that day, and though the trip from the Convention Center to home was rather crisp, overall it wasn't too bad.

What else... I wrote a review of this new laptop, the Hewlett-Packard HP HDX 18, and I sent it to a guy at notebookreview.com yesterday. Still haven't heard back; if they don't publish it then I'm hoping I can get it published somewhere else in cyberspace, if only as an example of my writing style. I'm a technical writer at heart, and it would be nice to have a portfolio piece of some kind to show people. I worked on it for days, and even took some good pictures of the laptop to go with the review. Supposedly notebookreview.com pays $40 to $60 per review, all in Paypal funny money of course, but we'll see if they get back to me.

I have sort of a Jones to do some online courses, so as to continue ye olde learning process. I ordered a course catalog from my old alma mater, Colorado State University, but from what I can tell, they still don't have this whole online learning thing down real well as yet. Most of the few courses they offer relate to a major of some kind, and there were only one or two courses that I saw per endeavor. My sister has written course descriptions for Capella University, a solid online school in Minnesota, and I keep meaning to check them out. As long as the prices are reasonable, I see no problem with taking all the online courses I can get.

Kevin will be going to online high school starting the upcoming semester. Brick-and-mortar school has not been kind to him, a situation which I PROMISE you I can relate to! If ONLY there had been online school when I was in high school. All of the learning, none of the bulls$%#$t; who could ask for anything more? We'll see how it goes, but I don't see how it could be any worse than this past semester for him. The whole structured learning thing isn't for everyone, and though you have to be willing to do the work in order to get the benefit (in EVERYTHING you do), the WAY in which the work is done can in some cases be adapted to fit the learner. We'll see if said adaptations will help to get the job done.

Oh my God, the dog just FLEW out of bed and went running out to bark at the neighbor dog, right as Cynthia is trying to sleep!! URK!! Overall it's been a much better year around here for Charlie the Italian Greyhound than last year. We were going to get an IG from an actual IG rescue group, but we've found that breed-specific rescue and breeding groups tend to be real snotty about who they allow to adopt their dogs. They have all these strict guidelines as to how many hours a day you're home vs. how many you're gone, what you feed the dog, all kinds of stuff that's really not any of their business; they just mainly need to know that the dog won't be abused. But they even send mouth-breathing "adoption agents" to your house to make sure that your home will be an acceptable one. Our answer to such zealotry and snottiness: "Bite me!!" So we adopted from the Dumb Friends League, and had quite the opposite experience: they were really helpful in all kinds of different ways, they gave Charlie plenty of time to meet us at the shelter, they gave is verbal and printed advice on how to raise an IC, and we even got him fixed and got a microchip embedded in him as part of the adoption. How cool was that!

Charlie is skittish by nature, and he still doesn't fully trust me, though he's completely taken to Cynthia and Kevin. He's a mama's boy, and he clings to Cynthia like white on white for the most part. Which is justice, since she's the one who most wanted a dog and the one who's worked at a vet's office before so knows something about raising dogs in general. Charlie started out with severe house training issues but has gotten a lot better.

He pretty much ruined the carpet in the dining room, but as it happens, that turned out to be a good thing! Cynthia was reading the Castle Rock want ads last spring and came across an ad from a clearinghouse in Denver that was selling Pergo-type laminate hardwood, really good stuff at a reduce price. I was skeptical, of course; claims of "overstock" to me usually rank right up there with claims that there's a large sum of money awaiting me in Russia!! But we went to this warehouse in Denver to look at it, in this dump of a neighborhood (really made me appreciate OUR hood!). The color of the slats turned out to be this nice deep dark brown, and the quality was excellent. So we loaded my SUV and Cynthia's station wagon full of laminate hardwood. I should have taken a picture of the cars; we totally turned them into low-riders!! Which like I say, fit right in with the hood! We thought about installing it ourselves, but in the end decided to have it done. That was definitely the right move; they made it look SWEEET! That floor is just uber sexy now! We're now considering getting hardwood for the loft as well, though again with the economy the way it is, that's ways out.

Cynthia got a superfly new job last month at MX Logic, doing tier I help desk work. They filter spam e-mail messages out of their customers' e-mail systems. Pretty cool stuff! That leaves me at the school system, doing tier II computer support. Cynthia commute is now about 10 to 15 minutes, and I'm jealous!! Mine is still like 45 minutes. DOH! I like the school district; it's the town it's IN that sucks IMHO, and ultimately that town may be too much for me to handle. It's the crime capital of the state, yet cops still seem to somehow find time to dork with me in the course of driving from school to school. Some WEIRD people out there too let me tell ya!! So I may someday have to give it up, but for now I stick with it.

One of our co-workers gave us a kitten in June, and she is of course EPIC cute! We named her Kawaii; Kevin is a student of Japanese and tells us that Kawaii is Japanese for "cute". Fair enough, since she is DEFINITELY that!! It's a very good thing that we got her, too, because Sampson the orange tabby cat STILL has not come back. Cynthia and Kevin fear the worst, but I think he's still out there, and he'll come back in the summer sometime. We didn't know just how much of an outdoor cat he really was, until he started slipping out the dog door this spring. Little twerp! But we have a lot of good pictures and videos of him to remember him by in the even that he doesn't come back.

Well that's the update for now; I'll figure out how to get pictures on this thing and get some up!


--Brian

A Cool November Evening 11-6-08

Hi all,


We haven't posted anything to this blog since that summer day when we initially switched to this blog site from the Microsoft one. Tonight seems like a good night, though; Cynthia is sleeping, and Kevin and I are installing Windows Vista 64-bit on his computer. Cynthia has a particularly nasty headache, has for a couple of days now. Tonight is especially bad, which is a drag because she has a job interview tomorrow. With her asleep, that leaves Kevin and I to hang out in his room while he reinstalls apps and games on his computer.

A little history here: Kevin got parts for a new computer last summer. EVGA SLI 780 motherboard, 4 gigs RAM, Intel 9360 (I think that's the model number) quad-core processor, Coolermaster 690 case, NVidia 9800 video card, the works. But he didn't want to run Vista on it because of all the problems he's heard about, so we left XP on it. Then a couple of weeks ago he was chatting with a friend in world of Warcraft, and his friend was saying the he runs Vista 64-bit and it works fine. So Kevin said he'd run Vista on his computer as long as it was the 64-bit version. That's muh boy!!

So I inquired at work and was able to score a copy. So tonight we installed it; it was the fastest installation of any Microsoft OS on any computer I've ever been witnesss to. Most of the time has been spent trying to install World of Warcraft, with all the huge patches thereof, and also trying to get Command and Conquer III: Tiberium Wars to work. Kevin JUST got C&C to work a few minutes ago by installing the latest patch, and he'll finish the WOW patches tomorrow. He also installed Bioshock, and it worked fine right off the bat.

Another good thing about this evening was that I actually made dinner from scratch. I'm like the world's worst cook, so any time I do anything for dinner other than processed foods or going out, it's a switch for me! It was pretty simple what I did tonight: We had tacos a few nights ago and there was still some ground beef left over, seasoned quite nicely. I just laid some chips on a plate, sprinkled the ground beef, and shredded some cheddar cheese on top, nuked it for a few seconds, and voila! Nachos Bel Grande. We nibbled on it while Kevin's computer was downloading stuff. It was a really good time, probably the best since he and I constructed his computer last summer.

Our new comforter for the bed in the master bedroom arrived today, which was great. Cynthia found this really cool-looking purple comforter set from JC Penney; it goes perfect with the bed itself and the other furniture in the room. Nice and heavy too! Cynthia is the absolute master at accessorizing the house; she should really have her own interior design business! She really knows her stuff.

She knows her restaurants as well. We went to a really great sushi place on her recommendation on Tuesday after the election. It was definitely a night to celebrate; we got Obama as president and we got rid of a particularly nasty co-worker as well. So we went to Hapa Sushi, right off of Quebec between Orchard and Belleview. Really amazing food, and all the familiar sushi rolls as well as some new ones. Great atmosphere too. And of course plenty of good alcoholic drinks, always nice for celebrating. We went with Anna, our good friend who used to work with me at IHS.

Our cat, Sampson, has been gone for the better part of a month now, and we're all pretty bummed about that. Kevin and a friend of his went out yesterday and posted signs with Sam's picture on the mailboxes in the area. Sam also has our phone number on his collar, so we're hoping that someone calls. He's been getting happier and happier feet as time goes on; he used to be OK in the house, then he started slipping out the garage door when we left it open. Then he started getting out the dog door into the back yard, but at least he'd stay in the yard, catching mice and birds and such. But he was gone for longer and longer at a time, and finally this last time he hasn't come back. There's always the chance that he got hit by a car or something, but I personally don't believe that; I think he's just being an outside cat somewhere--possibly sloe by!

Well I'm falling asleep here so I'm going to sign off. Later!



--The Doley Family

Finally got pissed at Microsoft Live Spaces, so we're now here...

Hi all,


This is a continuation of our unofficial family blog at Microsoft Spaces; the address is bdoleza.spaces.live.com. Or WAS I should say. We just busted butt to get VMware Fusion installed on the Mac laptop we're using so as to be able to use Microsoft Internet Explorer, since that's the only browser that will work with MS Live Spaces. We got it all install, ran Explorer in the Mac, then type up a blog--only to have it tell us when we tried to post it that the "service is unavailable". That was kinda the last straw; we decided that this is WAY too much work for a simple blog. So now we're at Blogspot; it even knew who Brian was from the e-mail addres!

Here's a copy of the blog that I just TRIED to post in Spaces:

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For the last few weekends, we've had various things going on around the house, so a free weekend is always welcome... Not that we haven't been having a good time on the weekends. Meredit and Al came down last weekend, and we went up there a few weekends before that. Last weekend Brian went to the annual Scottish-Irish Festival (scroll down in my photo albums to see the photos from the Scottish-Irish fest from a couple of years ago). I'll get the photos from this year's up when I get them.

Right now I'm using Internet Explorer inside of VMWare Fusion for the Mac. I've really taken quite a liing to this Mac laptop that I'm using through work. The apps are faster and more elegant, and there's not as much code bloat in the apps or the OS. The MAc font smoothing pretty much blows, but other than that I like it. I still need to install Firefox and Office 07 for the PC. Nothing to do around the house though; it rained all day yesterday so we don't even have to water.

I haven't updated the blog in forever; I used to do it on the Dell laptop that I have through work, but I haven't used that one in a long time. When I'm on the big PC, I'm usually either playing World of Warcraft or working on pictures, and I never seem to have time to blog. I've been doing a log more with the pictures I've taken lately; I've been using the Photoshop RAW file capabilities of the new CS3 to re-do a lot of them. I've also been adding tags to the JPG files of said pictures, for easier searching. Yes I know its CRAZY geeky!

Work has been crazy, with the start of school and all. I've still been able to take some time to enter some random thoughts in Twitter though (using Twitterific for the Mac). What else... Alex, Alex and Dee came over today; they're playing Magic the Gathering and throwing the ball for Charlie the dog and geeking out on Macs. In other words, the ideal Saturday! Cynthia has had a migraine the last couple of days sadly, but it seems to be getting better. She's had some good job prospects come up lately, so we're hoping that one of those comes through.

Kevin's back in school; he was out a week because of the cold I gave him hehe!! He's doing well otherwise. He's getting taller every day! And he's taking Visual Basic in school. Hell, I want to take VB!!

As it is I'll havee to settle for geeking out on the Mac which I better get back to hehe!


--Brian

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