Thought I would put Halo 3 down long enough to write a new post. Christina and I have been playing online against Tim, Kristi, and Dave who all have an Xbox and the same game. None of us are really that great, so instead of playing (losing to) the 14-year-olds on Xbox Live, we just kill each other instead.
But, between being slammed at work still (35 emails/day since 1/1/09, about 3-4 times higher than normal), posting on facebook more and more, and Xbox games the ole blog has gotten stale.
I don't have many real updates anyway. I should get some pregnancy photos of Christina and post them up since she's really starting to show now and is just past the halfway point. I've been trying to source an optical flash slave unit for an old light set I've got. The voltages on the light set is way too high to plug it directly into a camera like mine, so I wanted the optical trigger so that the external light set fires when my camera's external flash fires. Product is discontinued though, so I'm going to call around to certified repair shops for the company and see if they have any extras.
We're going over to Tim and Kristi's on Sunday for a Superbowl Party. The party will be fun, but I'm not too excited about the game itself. Plus, they say the commercials won't be as good as in past years because of the economy. I like the Steelers better, but as a Gamecock fan I guess I should really pull for the team who's never won the big one instead of the team who has won a lot. So, I guess go Cardinals?
Other than that I don't think much is going to be slated for the weekend. Which I don't mind right now at all...
You're looking at a South Carolina snow day. Just about all of the school districts in the area closed all day.... last night, before any of this "massive blizzard" hit this morning:
All we got was a 10 a.m. delayed start at USC... bah.
Man am I glad this was a three day weekend. Couldn't have come at a better time.
I used to think I was busy at work - pulled in 30 directions at once... hah, I had no idea. This last week was the week from hell... and there's still stuff I haven't had time to get to that is fairly important and urgent.
At least for the most part the email migration went smoothly - everyone got moved over and can check, read, and send email from their new accounts. There's a lot of cleanup work left with some individuals and fake resource-type accounts that aren't people. Other than that it's starting to slow down a little finally. By the end of this next week all the major stuff should be sorted out. Then we go back to day-to-day type stuff and also going around to every desktop moving over old Groupwise email archives. Fun fun...
Retail therapy helps with a week like this so Christina and I went and got new phones. I was really getting tired of txt'ing on a numberpad anyway and have wanted a Blackberry or iPhone for a while. Well, the only Blackberry that competes with the iPhone in my opinion is the Blackberry Storm, but when I used one on launch day back in November it was slow and laggy. A faculty member at work had one Tuesday or Wednesday that I used and it was much faster - they released a new software version that fixed many of the bugs.
Needless to say, it's a cool phone. Does pretty much everything the iPhone can do but it's on Verizon and it's a Blackberry so it handles email and some other things better. Plus the touch screen highlights items but doesn't select them until you press down and click the screen... hard to describe, you have to use it to really understand. I like it a lot more than the way the iPhone works though. Anyway, I got Best Buy to sell me the phone for $100 less than Verizon wanted because they had a deal on it that week and gave me the Verizon "new every two" credit which they didn't have to honor. Hard to pass up at that point.
Christina got the LG Dare which is a good touch screen phone too with a full QWERTY keyboard so she can txt more easily also now. She didn't need the email features of the Blackberries and since each Blackberry phone on your account requires a separate data plan, she just got the Dare instead since it can do everything she needs to do. Not that I need email either since that just means I'm checking work email on demand, but it's not like I was told I had to do that by bosses... I just want to know what's going on myself, so this just makes it easier.
But, between work and facebook and the new phones and xbox games, my blog has been slacking, I know... along with a lot of other things in life.
Having today off work is good though - we're getting the house back in order from the holidays and travel and I'm getting other miscellaneous things done like burning CDs of the Christmas photos for people... things I haven't had the ambition to do lately... just been coming home from work and the gym and just zoning out for the most part.
This week defintely kicked off the chaos. And it'll be nothing compared to next week.
There are so many details with this email migration Monday still left to be ironed out, but I guess the big stuff is ready. We've had so many people lost on what's going to happen - people really don't like change. Those folks don't really upset me though, that's understandable - it's the people that caught me Friday afternoon about an hour before I was supposed to leave with some great comments:
"So.... what's going to happen on Monday?" "Did I need to archive my email or something?" "So do I need this Outlook thing before Monday?" "We couldn't really understand the emails you sent out"
Keep in mind that we've been telling them about this since November, asking them to archive and run an Outlook install link. Literally the email for the Outlook install said "Click this link and it will run automatically". Apparently that's confusing?
So, it's people like that who bother me - like they're helpless and clueless and need to be walked through everything. Felt like asking them to let me know the next time they go use the bathroom so I can assist in wiping them. It's ridiculous. You're an adult. Read the email. It's *not* that confusing, just do what it says.
Anyway, next week should be even more fun... I'm sure despite telling everyone time and time again how to first launch Outlook so it works right and not to send emails anymore using Groupwise we will invariably get lots of people doing both things wrong. And that'll be on top of the 30 or so folks who weren't using Groupwise in the first place - we have to visit their computers in person after migration to reconfigure whatever software they were using. And we have to log into and set up sharing for 105 resource accounts (generic non-people email accounts folks share) because the sharing from the old system doesn't transfer over to the new system... oh, and I don't really have a list of who has permissions to what either for those 105 accounts.
Lots of fun ahead of us. Which is why I'm enjoying this weekend so much. Went out to dinner last night with Tim, Kristi, and the kids. Slept in until 10:30 this morning. Tonight the gang is getting together for dinner, xbox, games, movies and most likely an adult beverage or two. Nice, lazy unproductive weekend.
Happy New Year! Hope 2009 is the best yet for everyone. I know 2008 for us will be really hard to top, but having the birth of our first child to look forward to will go a long ways towards that.
We had a very good holiday break - hectic with all the travel, but still a great time seeing family. And to go from 20 degrees and snow to 80 degrees and swimming pools really was an interesting contrast. Both were equally enjoyable though no matter what the family in Michigan may say about the snow - we were very glad to have a white Christmas!
About the only big downside to the break was our awful showing in the Outback Bowl. The team looked as unprepared as they did against Florida and Clemson - just not sure what's going on. Maybe our coach has been working on that golf handicap a little too much? They had no intensity at all and made mistake after mistake after turnover after turnover...
Still, being there in the stadium again was fun. Had a good time until the opening drives for each team. Went downhill from there. I have a few photos from the game too, but I haven't bothered putting those online.
Other than the game itself, the time in Florida was great. Lots of swimming and great weather. New Years Eve I went out to Channelside in downtown Tampa to meet up with Brian and some of the guys he plays poker with down there. Wish I would have brought a camera, the view of the downtown skyline from the parking garage was impressive lit up at night. We also visited Myakka River State Park south of Tampa on Friday - took an airboat tour of the lake to see birds and gators and such.
And I did finally put the rest of the photos from the trips up. There are 16 pages of photos on my Pbase site link below. Lots of cute photos of Carson and Anna in there as usual:
Too lazy to make a small photo for this post... also that gallery starts with all the photos from the Zoo, so if you've seen those already the new photos start at the bottom of Page 3.
