Ashley graduated from 5th grade today! She was enjoying this because right after the ceremony ended she got to leave for the day. So her last day of school ended at 9:30. Here’s a few photo’s I managed to grab of her getting her diploma!
Yesterday afternoon we lost Kittywumpus! Someone ran over her in front of a bunch of school kids walking home and didn’t even stop. By the time I found her she was already dead. We love you and you will be missed Wumpus!
Wes let me spend a little of my school money on a present for my birthday; a Dell Mini 10v netbook computer. Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so I nuked the default Windows Xp install and dropped Mac OSX on it instead. Honestly, that’s the whole reason I got this specific computer; I looked up it’s compatibility with OSX and it got high marks all the way across the chart.
OSX FTW!
You can see some great compatibility guides and tutorials over at http://www.mymacnetbook.com that will walk you through the process of putting the One True Operating System onto hardware that everyone can afford, with minimal hassle. If anyone has a netbook that shows up on the compatibility lists over at MyMacNetbook and wants to give it a shot, I’ve got an OS 10.6 bootable install flash drive I can loan you.
It seems that once again Albemarle Hospital has had to go out of their way to prove how bad they actually are. I went up there today because I am having pain in my neck and back for no apparent reason. I get up to the ER desk and they tell me they won’t treat me because I don’t have anyone with me who can watch my kids. What kinda crap is that? So if I had come in and was having a heart attack I can pretty much kiss my butt goodbye cause I didn’t drag a babysitter with me. I ended up having to drive all the way to Chesapeake and go over to Chesapeake General to get treatment. Chesapeake General does not seem to have an issue with patients that have children. They told me that it appears to be a strained muscle and have me on muscle relaxers right now. This hospital will be one more thing I do not miss after Dj finally gets done with college and we move from here. Just a word of advice to all the N.C. folks out there, don’t waste your gas coming to Albemarle for anything. You will end up driving to Chesapeake for what you need in the end anyway. Just go ahead and carry yourself to Chesapeake General, save yourself the trouble.
Well, Dj and I spent Sunday getting Andy’s big gift set up for him. We decided Andy’s room seriously needed a make over this year. I spent all day painting and getting new curtains and blinds put up for him. We also went and got him a new bed and mattress. His old one had seen better days many years ago! We went with a loft bed with a desk under it since his room is so tiny. I also went with a lighter color in his room so that it doesn’t look like he is living in a dark, walk in closet, anymore. All and all it’s not too bad now. He seems to like it too, he came home from school yesterday and passed out! I’ll post some pic’s of the finished product.
Also I think we have finally decided that we will have his B-day at the place I hate the most on a weekend. Yes, we are going to brave a Chucky-E-Cheese ! There is nothing I love to do with my weekend more I tell you, and his B-day falls on the weekend that spring break starts! We will need prayers to make it out alive! He’s gonna have a couple of friends go with him so it should be a fun time for the kids. I’ll post pic’s when I get those as well!
Sorry, to anyone who checks this page on a regular basis for family news. I have been staying pretty busy lately and in case anyone is wondering why Dirk has not posted anything recently it’s because he is busier than me. We are both still working two jobs and Dirk is busy going to school right now. He is doing awesome so far, all A’s for now. He even ended up having to teach his class on Monday night. The instructor was having a hard time explaining Trigonometry to the class. After about 4 hours, Dirk asked if the teacher if he could give it a shot. Got up there and sorted the class out in about 40 min. As most of you also know by now, Dirk is not working as a trainer for Canon any longer. He had to go back to doing tech support on the phones so that he can make it to school on time each day. That new schedule started Monday and so far he hates the hours. He’s not a big fan of getting up at 6am and not coming home till 1am.
As for the kids they are all doing well, the biggest thing going for them is we have Birthday’s coming up for Andy and Dirk. I’m try to decide now what we will be doing for them, not real sure yet though. If anyone has idea throw it out there for me. I’ll consider it.
Lastly, I had a follow up yesterday with the Doctor after my surgery. Everything is looking good and I have been given the all clear to lift weights again. I’ll be starting back on that at the YMCA this evening. Haven’t been allowed to do that for two weeks now. Well I will end this here. I’ll try to get Dirk to post something, if I ever see him again. 
Well I had my surgery today, so far everything is good. I am hurting pretty bad right now but I’m hoping that will let up in the next day or so. The doctor told me that they didn’t see anything to worry to much about, the tumor they removed was the size of a golf ball. I should know more in about a week when they get the test results back from the lab about it. In the meantime I am just trying to stay in one place and not move to much. Moving hurts a lot right now! Not an easy thing to do when you have 3 kids running around the house though.
Dj started school on Monday, so far things are going well for him there too. He was out today at Hampton Roads Executive Airport, they where letting the class taxi airplanes around the strip there. I am pretty sure Dj is gonna come home asking can he have an airplane now. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet, but from his posts on Facebook I would say he probably enjoyed himself.
The kids are doing well also. It’s hard to believe that we are half way through the 3rd nine weeks already. Addy and Andy both have some work to do on their grades. Everyone has been keeping real busy though, the girls have been going to Enrichment Club every Thursday at the YMCA. They get to swim, learn about healthy eating, climb the rock wall and other fun activities. We are dropping them off on Saturday for Parents Night out as well. The sad part is since I have to work tomorrow overnight and Dj probably needs to study, we will spend out parents night out with me sleeping and Dj buried in a book somewhere. Oh well, gonna get off of here for now. I need a pain killer and some sleep! I’ll keep everyone posted on Dj’s schooling.
I gotta take a moment to brag about DJ cause I got the best gift for Valentine’s Day this year. I had been telling him that I didn’t want him to waste any money on the candy and flowers deal this year, cause 50 bucks for some flowers that will be dead by Wednesday is just a waste and I don’t need any candy, that’s for sure. DJ went up to the YMCA and got me a family membership so that I can take the kids and let them swim and all that. I had been saying that I wanted a membership for a while now! We took the kids and let them swim for about an hour while I put in a couple of miles on the treadmill. The kids had an awesome time, after that I took them all out and got DJ a steak dinner! Not a bad day all around I would say. I hope everyone else had just as good as Valentine’s Day as we did!
My ‘07 Yaris turned over it’s 100,000th mile this morning! So far the only failure has been the alternator (back at 80,000), and I think that may have been related to the deer I hit a while back. I’ve read some real horror stories online about this car, but so far she’s been good to me. Now let’s see if it can stand another 100,000 miles of my abuse!
Well technically, today was not her birthday. It was on Feb 3, but since all of us are so busy during the week we decided to celebrate today. Dj the kids and I took mom out to her favorite restaurant, Cracker Barrel. She was fine with the meal until the part where the waitress came out and sang “Happy Birthday” to her with a hot fudge sundae. I thought for a moment there from the look I got that she was gonna beat my tail right there in the restaurant. All around it was not too bad. Leave her a message to say Happy B-Day! Read the rest of this entry »
Ok so besides the update made earlier I figured I would go back a add a post just to let everyone know what’s been up lately. Dirk has not been keeping up with the posts to well lately. But considering that both of us are working two jobs right now and he is in the process of getting enrolled to go back to school, I would say that is understandable. As of right now he is supposed to be starting classes on Feb 22. However, the enrollment process is being hampered by the fact that we still need our W2’s for 2009 in order to get this process completed and a couple of forms we are waiting on the Coast Guard to cough up so that we can get the MGIB in place to pay for all this. Dj is going to school to earn his Associate of Occupational Science in Aviation Maintenance Technology and to get his FAA A&P License, and maybe a private pilot license if he has time. All this fancy talk basically means he will be able to repair and fly airplanes by the time he gets done.
Also, I had a Dr. appointment the other day. I found out that I have a tumor that they are going to have to remove. So far they are not too worried about it being cancerous but we will have to wait and see. They won’t be sure till they can get in there and take a look at it. I will be having surgery on Feb 25 to get the tumor removed. I’m really nervous but hoping everything goes ok. I’ll keep everyone posted when it happens.
We have also manged to make it past another milestone, every year around this time something happens that I dread worse than anything else in the world. The kids have science fair projects that are due! This might not seem so bad to some people but I personally hate the science fair and wish it would die. The only thing I can really see that they are trying to accomplish with these projects is to see how many forests one school can kill by using up a ton of paper. Both Andrew and Ashley turned in the projects on Friday so I am officially done with science fair for this year. Andrew decided to build a Mousetrap Powered Car this year and focus his project on Energy. Ashley decided to go a little more simple this year and do her project on different materials and how they conduct heat. But I am sure no matter how awesome the project we come up with, as in years past, the kids with the project about the moldy bread will win first prize. Moldy bread is not first place material people, moldy bread is just gross! Anyhow, as the moment that’s all we got going on around here. I’ll be sure to post an update later in the month about the school situation and the Dr. appointment when we get more news on both!
I know that everyone today enjoyed waking up to the bit of global warming that we got overnight. We can all thank Ashley for that. Ashley has been praying for seven months now that God would please send her some snow, if he’s not too busy that is. Well, she didn’t get if for Christmas like she was hoping so apparently he must have been saving up for her. We got about three inches around here and the roads are horrible. I worked overnight last night and got to drive home this morning in it. Life was all good until I hit the VA/NC state line, I was able to follow the snow plow all the way up 17 until I hit the state line. The plow turned around at the line and nothing had been sanded or plowed on the NC side of the line. Total drive home this morning was about 2 hours so I was totally over the whole snow thing by the time I got home. Of course the kids are just getting up at this point and are ready to go out in it. The kids built a snowman and part of a snow fort and made a brief attempt at a snowball fight before deciding it was too cold to be outside anymore and heading back inside for some hot chocolate. Got some good pic’s of the kids with their snow fort.
I’m trying to get the girls into model building, kinda like I tried to get Andy into it. I let them do all the painting on the big stuff, and I handled painting the tiny bits. Ash seems to like working on them, and wanted her F4U-1 Corsair hung above her bed. She did a lot of the assembly and helped with almost all the decals. Addy was kinda into it, but didn’t seem overly enthused with following through to finish her P51 Mustang. I ended up finishing that up and putting all the decals on it while she played on the XBox with Andy. She’s gonna let me have that one for work though, so I can’t complain too loudly!
I took the kids and Wes up to Fun Junktion today. It’s E-city’s version of Mt Trashmore. While the girls were playing on the playground, Wes and Andy and I went looking for geocaches.
Geocaches are hidden containers that are listed online by nothing more than the latitude and longitude of the cache. Think of it as a global-scale game of hide-n-seek. Most caches are just a waterproof container with a log book inside, but others have stickers and stuff. We only found one of the two geocaches we looked for, but it was still fun. I left my name in the log, and left a pen behind since there wasn’t one in there. The title of this geocache was “ChiaCache Lives!” I’d log onto geocaching.com and log my find, but they seem to have some issues with account creation at the moment.
I think the full version of the geocaching.com app may end up being the first paid app on my iPhone!
Dearest Stevie,
You should really look into this newfangled concept known as “strain releif” for the cables in your future products. It’s an idea where you put graduated thicknesses of material around a cable at the point where it enters a device or plug. It reduces the strain on the outer jacket and the conductors inside so that they don’t break and create problems, such as open circuits and short circuits. Go take a look at the cord on a vaccuum cleaner or something for inspiration. For an example of how this is not done right, LOOK AT ANY APPLE PRODUCT EVER MADE.
Seriously though, the cable with my iPhone should have lasted longer than a month before the cable started fraying. Strain releif on cables may not be pretty, but neither are broken, frayed, non-working or melted cables. Go google “apple MagSafe short strain releif” if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
At 11:46 last night Pacific time, my sister-in-aw Lucy gave birth to our new niece Emma Rose Thibodeaux. Emma was 7lbs, 2oz. We don’t have any pictures yet, but we’re sure they’re coming soon. Welcome to the world Emma!
OK, now that I’ve got just about everything on the site put back together, let’s have an update on that nasty AT&T business, shall we?
So, I finally received my iPhone, three weeks after I ordered it. Wes’s phone rolled in 3 days after that. My iPhone case rolled in about 3 days more after that.
AT&T did make some concessions after all the crap and misinformation that we received. They’re giving us 2 months free, plus 1000 rollover minutes, plus that $24 back that I was overcharged.
The ECO iPhone case that AT&T sells does NOT fit the iPhone. It’s WAY too tight. Also, don’t be fooled, there’s no belt loop on the back. It’s just a slip cover. I ended up giving it to Wes for her iPod touch instead. Trying to squeeze the iPhone in and out of there was a hell of a chore, but the iPod Touch fits just right.
Wes is “Okay” with her phone overall. I need to get a microSD card so I can save some custome ringtones to it for her, but overall she seems to like it well enough. She really hasn’t said much about it. I think she’s just still steamed at AT&T for their bullshit.
So how about that iPhone? I’d give it 4 stars out of 5. The flexibility is awesome. The apps are great. The user interface is the standard by which all other phones should be judged. There’s just some nagging things that kinda irk me.
The compass in the 3Gs is pretty much useless in a car, or near anything made of metal. When it’s working, it’s GREAT. When it’s not, it’ll do strange things like show you going the opposite direction of reality on a street, or show the map skewed by 90 degrees.
The phone has frozen up on me a few times. Two or three times while “sleeping”, and occasionally after running a app that uses a lot of graphics or a “heavy” web page.
There are some odd compatibility bugs with some apps. Palringo, for instance. Palringo works just fine on Wes’s 1st gen touch, but refused to pop up push notifications on my iPhone and would scramble conversations from multiple users.
The YouTube upload function of the camera has two stupid bugs; 1) if the phone goes to sleep while uploading, it kills the upload. 2) it always defaults to categorizing videos as “comedy”. This doesn’t even make sense. It *should* remember whatever the last selected category is, and use that. It would be understandable if it defaulted to the first item in the list. Comedy is the second item on the list though, why the hell does it default to that?
There should be a way to actually hide icons you don’t plan on using, aside from just banishing them to the last page of app icons.
The antenna in the 3Gs sucks. Lance has a 3G, and he regularly gets 4 bars and 3G at his desk, right next to mine. I get 2 bars, maybe, and edge. Sometimes shutting down and restarting the phone helps, but most of the time it’s just got crap for reception.
The camera lacks any kind of controls. Even my wife’s old Virgin Mobile phone AND her new Motorola free-phone have neat functions like exposure compensation and preset white balance settings. Not having that in this phone is STUPID, especially seeing as those are strictly software driven items. You put hundreds of thousands of manhours into designing the best touch-based UI man has ever seen, but you forget to add an exposure slider and a simple pull down for daylight/incandescent/fluorescent white balance? WTF?
Lastly, the headphone jack placement. I can understand that there’s not much room for it, but the bottom would be a much better place for the cord to be jutting out. Seriously. I hate the jack being at the top.
All of that said though, I don’t think I’d trade this thing for the world right now. It does so many damn things that I never knew I was missing. The ability to have what basically amounts to a location-aware, always-connected computer in the palm of your hand is incredible. Not to mention I’ve taken up posting to my flickr photostream and youtube much more since I have a camera in my pocket at all times. I’ve even opened a twitter account because of this damn thing.
So, what apps am I using? Lots of free ones. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Cheap Bastards Association. Some of the apps I’m using the most are…
I also have a home screen link to Wunderground’s iPhone optimized site on my main screen, the url is http://i.wund.com and the fullscreen wundermap on that page is great.
In conclusion, I still hate AT&T’s customer service, but I’m willing to suffer their idiodicy for this phone.
OK, so I’ve moved my site back over to powweb after that nasty little bot attack that inserted a bunch of garbage code into my site. Hopefully it won’t happen again. I’ll update things Real Soon Now, probably tonight, after I get all my other plugins and whatnot working again.
Happy anniversary to us! As of today, Wes and I have been married for 12 years.
I’d like to toss a HUGE thank-you out to Je’aime. He agreed to watch the kids for a little bit while Wes and I ran out to try and enjoy a little “us” time. YOU RULE.
So what did we do? Well, we started with a nice steak dinner at The Marina over on the Camden causeway right across the harbor from our neighborhood. I guess it was just too cold for anyone else to go out, as we pretty much had the entire dining area to ourselves the entire time. The food was good, the view was awesome, and the wait staff was on the ball. Dinner was great.
After that, we checked to see if there were any movies playing in the E-City area worth watching. Seeing as I wasn’t real keen on watching “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeekuel” the answer was “No.”
So what did we do? Well, I gotta tell you, I’m a real ladies man. I know how to really show my wife a good time. We went out to the Wal-Mart!
Seriously though, Wes had been talking about needing a new jacket and her gloves were looking pretty sad, so I got her one of each. We also went hunting for wal-creatures for peopleofwalmart.com, but we didn’t have any luck catching one with my camera. Maybe next time.
So apparently TIffany DID managed to get my iPhone unfucked last night, and it shipped at 8:18pm. It’s currently in the Va Beach FedEx facility, and will probably be on it’s way to my house Real Soon Now. OUTSTANDING WORK, TIFFANY.
Now, my phone is no longer an issue, and while I am still GREATLY DISPLEASED by the way this whole thing has been handled, I’m ready to move forward. Westly, however, is a different story.
Her Motorola phone is still jammed up for no apparent reason, and every AT&T agent I talk to has the same “WTF” type of reaction to that fact every time I call. Wes is pissed at AT&T beyond all measure.
Attention AT&T: We have a saying here in North Carolina. “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” If Wes tells me to give you the boot, I’mma drop you like a bad habit. Seriously. I’ve been trying to calm her down about this over the past few days, but she’s so thoroughly done with you that she doesn’t even want to activate her phone if/when it arrives because she wants nothing to do with you or your service. She’d rather keep pumping money into her Virgin Mobile phone than deal with you.
Hopefully you are willing to step up to the plate to try and fix your image with her.
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