The Christmas Season

This has been a great Christmas Season! In a way it started in November with our first family trip to Disneyland. Since then, Mama Lizard took the herd back for a day and we went last week when her parents were in town for the Poinsettia Bowl. A win there would have made the season better, but it was a pretty good game.

Disney "Cars" characters were definitely the hit of the gift giving. Everybody got something, including all the little lizards getting Cars sheets. Who would have thought sheets could get them so excited?

The best gift came from Little Princess's Greatest Aunt Kathi. Enjoy some pictures :)

Network Security

One of the things I'm interested in is computer security. For a while I've recommended people check out http://www.grc.com to check their security with Shields Up!, as well as read about DOS attacks and try some of the other security tools.

Recently, one of my students noted that Steve started up a Podcast. Well, I bought an Ipod this summer and just started listening to the Podcasts this week. Great geek stuff! I was especially surprised to hear that I missed the story that WEP is now 98% crackable in two minutes.

On an unrelated, but still security related note, I also started playing with a new program today. If you want to increase your protection from the outside, try playing with Sandboxie. This seems to have some potential for those who are a little more adventurous ;)

Enjoy!

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I knew...

there was a reason men want sex so much. It's purely so the women in our lives can enjoy the benefits.

Health Benefits of Weekly Sex | Newsweek.com

Don't worry, dear. I'll sacrifice myself for your health and well being :)

Good food. Great friends.

This Thanksgiving was definitely a new experience for us. For the first time, we didn't have family to share it with, or our adoptive family, aka Little Dude's Godparents. But thanks to missing a Church breakfast our Marriage Encounter community was running, and getting some sympathy for the back I had just wrenched, other friends called and offered for us to join them.

We're not talking close friends. My wife and I went to the same school as B. We shared similar careers with him as well, except we quit about 1/4 of the way through. OK, we decided our family was more important. (Very few regrets there) At one point, B cost my company a significant amount of lost work (Gotta love government contracting). Oh, and their daughter has been our babysitter a couple of times. So really not a lot in common. :)

It was great. We got to try Thanksgiving brined turkey as well as smoked turkey for the first time. And, we got to try some of Pioneer Woman's incredible sweet potatoes. They really can be dessert as well as a side dish. I'm seriously considering making an entire Costco bag of sweet potatoes, instead of just a third, for Christmas with my family.

Is it a sin to enjoy sweet potatoes like this? Now if only our kids would eat them. Then again, that just means more for us!

Life moves pretty fast....

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
- Ferris Bueller

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, and full of new stuff for the family.

1. Disneyland. Our kids had never been. We got there about 10am, and left just shy of midnight. Everybody had a blast! Favorite ride? Splash mountain!



2. Teeth. Muscle Man lost two teeth in short order. One of them came out while he was sleeping and Monkey Boy found it for him on the carpet. Thank goodness the Lizard Wife was able to make a Tooth Fairy Pillow in time!

3. Bicycles. I convinced Muscle Man to try his bike without training wheels. He did OK the handful of times we did it during a picnic/BBQ. The next day I took all four kids to a local school with a nice open area. I pushed MM once to get him started and he took off.






I really have to figure out how to get better quality of the cell phone. The good news is the Lizard Wife got some better video with her camera in our back yard.

Oh...MM also upgraded to a 16" bike. It's a reach, but I'm guessing the growth spurt he started this week will make it easier!

Why does my wife homeschool?

Because it's needed?

A friend of ours once said we should have as many kids as possible. Why? We've got good genes. We're strengthening the gene pool. Something about two arguably successful graduates of the Naval Academy.

So why do I ask this? This past weekend was our church's fall festival. This is a time for families throughout the parish and neighborhoods to gather, have some fun, and raise a little money for the church.

I was walking to trade in game tickets ("Win" and "Star" tickets) for prizes for the kids, when I heard a teen-age kid yell to his friend as they were headed in the opposite direction. Not a problem, but out of 6 words, at least two can't be said on TV.

It's been a long while since I would let something like this go. I yelled "Hey, hold on a minute" to get his attention. He looked at me and started walking away from me. He's walking his BMX bike, so I grabbed the seat to get his attention. I might not have been raised to respect every authority, but when I knew an adult or someone senior to me in the Navy is talking to me, I stopped to listen.

This kid didn't want to hear me out. I've got four kids, 8 and under. I'm not letting this go. I got him to face me by putting my hand on his shoulder (I know...yellow light is getting pretty bright - no witnesses except his friends at this point - it'll be my word against his), and I explain that he is "on church grounds at a festival with hundreds of families around" and that I would appreciate it if he toned his language down.

Any guesses on his response? Yep...he cursed in the process of saying he didn't care and it doesn't matter.

At some point in here, he threatens to go get his dad. I told him to go ahead. "I'd love to talk to your dad." He says his dad would be angry with me because he would have to interrupt his dad's "relations". "I don't care. Go get him."

They started away and I didn't think anything of it, going on the "buy" the toys for the kids.

A bit later I'm walking around and find the kid and his friends watching me. At one point they were actually taking a video of me with their cell phone. I'm not sure what for. Maybe to show a father holding his son at a church festival and not bothering anyone?

Regardless, the next thing I know the kid is in my face again and saying I had no right to stop him earlier. He said he was going to get my information and sue me for putting my hand on his shoulder. I told him it had been 30 minutes since I told him to get his dad the first time, and that I hadn't left yet. I welcomed him again to go get his dad, and I'd give his dad my information.

That was the last I saw him. I waited around for over 20 more minutes. Would his dad have tried to "beat me up"? Would his dad kicked his backside in for talking back to an adult? It's amazing how twisted reality can be for some people.

So...back to my original question. Why does my wife homeschool? For one thing, we are trying to raise our kids to be 100% unlike this kid. For another, I don't want to expose my kids to people like this or the parents that let them get that way.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that our kids seem to be pretty smart :)

Sorry, had to vent that a little bit. Growing up I could never have imagined acting like that, nor could I imagine my kids acting that way.

I'm OK with Dell.

So for a while now I've been having problems with the sound card on my Dell D620 laptop. As long as it was trying to play a sound, it would erupt in solid static at max volume. Headset? Same thing. It was odd because after a few minutes it would go away.

Over time it got to where it didn't matter for how long I let it go. So Wednesday I decided to contact Dell Tech Support. The best move I made was to use Chat instead of the phone. I got connected right away. I also didn't have to worry about an accent!

The end result, after running the Dell built-in diagnostics, was that there was a problem with the sound card (Duh!) and the motherboard had to be replaced. In the past I would have a DHL rep show up on my doorstep with a padded box, ready to take my life away for an indeterminate amount of time.

Not this time! We're talking late Wednesday night they asked if it was urgent and I would need next day support. They shipped a new motherboard to a local tech, and he showed up today. About an hour later, the motherboard was replaced and things were almost 100% back to normal. That's better service than when I had to mail it in, and that was usually one day in each direction for mailing, plus time in the depot.

The only problem I had was the Intel PROset Wireless software giving me fits. It had some Profile issues to include this error:An internal database error occurred when saving/updating the profile.

Repairing the software installation a couple of times seems to have fixed that...but not until I was on the phone with Dell's Wireless Techs.

We'll see how this holds up...

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