5 Day Work Weeks Are Overrated

It's Thursday and for me, that means the last day of work this week. I may blog tomorrow even though I usually don't if I'm not working. I'll just have to wait and see.

I know all I've really talked about the past couple of weeks is TV, but I'm going to talk a little bit about it again today. For one Lost is only two episodes into the new season and they've both been incredible. I don't know how, but the show is keeping up a manic pace and it's become fairly exciting and tense to watch it. It's not the kind of thing that DeAnne usually goes for, but she was just as excited about last nights episode as I was.

After my rant the other day about the possible delay of the digital TV switch-over, the House failed to pass the bill that the Senate sent through on a unanimous vote. I'm glad that the date hasn't changed. It may mean that some people aren't ready and loose signal, but it's just too late now to feasibly do anything about it. If the Democrates thought it needed to be delayed, they should have started trying to get something passed before we got within 3 weeks of the date of the switch. Besides, they have more important things to worry about than TV, don't they?

Have a good Thursday and if I don't blog tomorrow, then have a good Friday and weekend also.

--Paul

Title? I Don't Need No Stinking Title!

I'm having problems with titles this week. Sorry.

Well, I've been sitting here for about 5 minutes and I really can't find much to talk about. I'm just going to start typing and see what comes out.

Really the only thing going on lately is all of our shows coming back on. Once Heroes and Chuck start back up next week, just about ever show we watch will be on with new episodes. American Idol is still impressing me with their season so far. For whatever reason, the shows this year have been much better. I've already talked about some of the reasons why I think that is and I think those reasons are still holding true.

Work has been pretty crazy the past couple of weeks. I don't think it's going to be slowing down anytime soon either. We're facing a deadline at the end of June to be compliant with a series of new security standards and after a lot of time preparing and waiting for the final standards to come down and doing what we could, we're now in a full swing implementation. The sad thing, after June comes and goes we'll have such a backlog of other stuff to do, we'll be playing catch-up until 2010. And it's not that I'm complaining. I love my job and I'm glad to have the work. I'm just saying that work's been crazy.

With that, I'm off to work. Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

Place Your Title Here

Blog titles can be hard to come by when you do this every day.

Another excellent episode of 24 last night. The show has just been really good this year. I don't know if the time off last season gave the writers the chance to really work out everything for this season or what, but this has got to be one of the better seasons the show has ever had.

The Senate passed the bill yesterday to delay the digital TV transition. I'll try not to get technical with you, but in short, I think this will make the whole thing a bigger disaster than it was already going to be. We're three weeks from the original cut-off date and the advertising has gotten heavier and heavier as we've gotten closer to the cut-off. Now instead of each station having a firm date, they can either go ahead and cut-off their analog or they can wait until June. So let's say out of the big 4 (ABC, CBS, NBC & Fox), 2 of the stations in a market go ahead and switch and 2 wait it out until June. That means that in the next three weeks, two stations will be advertising the switch for Feb 17 and the other two are now advertising the switch for June 12. If consumer confusion was a concern before the delay, I can hardly see how the delay helps. And this is just one argument against the delay. I've not even touched on how it plays havoc with the plans and the budgets the stations already had set based around the Feb. 17 date. It'll definitely be interesting to see how many stations go ahead and switch on the original date.

Sorry for the rant there. Anyway, as you can probably tell, I'm not a fan of the delay and I don't even have an antenna.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

Another Weekend In The Books

Here we are back at Monday again. It'll be a short week for me though. I've decided just to take off on Friday. With Courtney and Edwin coming in and the Homecoming assembly at 10:00 on Friday, I figure it'll be easier just to take the day off. So, just four days to go for me.

We had a good weekend. Friday night, we went to DeAnne's step-dad's birthday party in Kinston. When you get that much of DeAnne's family together, it's usually a pretty good time and Friday was no exception.

Saturday we mainly just chilled out at the house all day. We went to Enterprise with Michael and Shae Page and ate at the new Santa Fe Cattle Co. I've known Michael since college and the same goes for DeAnne and Shae. Shae's a teacher, so she and DeAnne had some classes together. Michael recently started working at PowerSouth and he and I have been talking about getting together and doing something for a while now. We finally managed to do that Saturday night. We had a great time and we're looking forward to getting together with them again sometime soon.

So that was the weekend, now on to the week.

Have a good Monday.

--Paul

DeAnne, Destroyer Of Games

DeAnne beat Fable 2 yesterday while I was at work. She started playing it last Friday. So either the game's not as long as I thought it was or she been playing a whole lot this week. She hasn't been called to sub this week, so I'm leaning towards having played a whole lot myself.

Ladies prayer meeting was last night, so I actually got to play a good bit myself last night. Edwin and I are playing through the campaign of Gears of War 2 for the third time. We're moving pretty quickly now. We just started Monday I think and haven't had very much time to play, but we're probably 2/3 of the way through the story. Once we finish this play-through, we'll go through it one more time so that we can both get a couple of achievements for the game. We also still want to finish out the games Horde mode. we're up to level 45 or 46 of 50 on that, so we're close, we just have to take the time to finish it.

No major plans for the weekend. We're going to ride over to Enterprise with some friends tomorrow night and eat dinner at the new steak house. That's about it though. Have a good Friday.

--Paul

Almost There

It's Thursday, so we're getting close.

I thought of one other album that I've been listening to lately that's pretty good. It's the new Staind album. I can't remember the name of it at the moment and I'm going to be lazy and not look it up even though I'm writing this inside of a web browser, but it's really pretty good. It's a hundred times better than their last album, that's for sure.

Lost started back up last night and it was as awesome as ever. They've only got this season and next before then scheduled end of the show, so it should be a pretty good ride from here on out.

American Idol is proving to be more interesting this year, mainly because of the new judge, I think. She seems to fit in with the others pretty well and she's been playing the foil to Simon. The last two episodes especially, she and Simon have gotten into it more than once, usually over Simon interrupting her. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the season goes on.

It's short, but it's done for the day. Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

You Know...

You know DeAnne's really into a game when she starts fighting me for time with the xbox. DeAnne was home yesterday and after a good bit of playing Fable 2 during the day, she only let me have about an hour with it last night before she kicked me off so she could play. I haven't seen her into a game this much since Grand Theft Auto IV last spring. When Fable 2 came out and I was reading about it, I thought it sounded like something she might like, but I had no idea she would get into it to the extent that she has.

I haven't talked about music much since the new Guns N' Roses album came out. It's still on my iPod and I'm still enjoying it. I've picked up a few new things since then, but nothing that's really set me on fire. The best is probably the Gavin Rossdale album. I know that the "Love Remains the Same" single has been run into the ground on radio and I'm not that crazy about that song, but the rest of the album is pretty good. I would say that it's better than the last album that Bush put out.

There's a TV in the control room at work so I got to watch a little of the inauguration yesterday. I really just wanted to see Rick Warren's prayer. I thought he did a good job but at the same time I was a bit disappointed that he wasn't a little stronger in his wording. Maybe he was using the platform to get a foothold into Obama's administration and just didn't want to be too strong for fear of losing his chance to minister to the new President. His prayer was still good and I thought he did a good job of acknowledging the Lord as the one true God. I just wish he had said something about getting America back to a moral and Godly center.

Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

I'm Either Going Crazy...

...Or I've entered the Twilight Zone or something. I seem to have lost any and all handle on time that I ever had. Let me explain.

For one, my class reunion is not this weekend, it's the next (the 31st). I don't know why or how I got it in my head that it's this coming weekend, but up until yesterday morning when I was looking at my calendar at work, I had been operating and planning based on the reunion being this weekend. I've probably been going on about it being this weekend for 4 or 5 days now. Just to say it again (for my sake), it's not this weekend, it's the next.

So after figuring that out yesterday, we rearranged a few things and got back on track. Went to bed, everything's fine. Cut to this morning. I'm in bed, I wake up, I look at the clock and believe it to say 10 to 6:00. I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, it's almost time for the alarm to go off, you might as well just go on and get up." So I get up and start taking a shower and everything's going fine until I hear the bathroom door open. DeAnne then asks me what I'm doing up. So I told her I woke up just before the alarm and decided to go ahead and get up. She proceeds to tell me that it's only 5:00. Evidently, I only looked at the minute hand and failed to notice the hour hand was much closer to 5:00 than it was 6:00. I don't know if that's just the inherent danger in using an analog clock or what, but I was (am) up at 5:00 and not 6:00. So I guess I'm going to go on into to work early and go ahead and make up some of the time I'll be using when the reunion does roll around and I go to the Homecoming program at the school that Friday morning.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

Let's Get Another Week Started

And just like that, we're back to Monday. It's a holiday for some people.

I imagine that DeAnne's going to spend the day playing a good bit of Fable 2. She watched me play it some and on Friday she finally asked if she could play. I had a feeling that she might get interested in it when she saw the variety of things you can do in the game. She's actually not that far behind me in the main quest, but since she started playing, I haven't had as much time with it as she has. She likes to make people fall in love with her. When she enters the main town now there's a group of about 20 villagers that flock to her that all have little hearts above their heads. It's pretty amazing that the AI in the game is as good as that and it's really pretty funny to watch all the people react to her when she's just walking around.

We really didn't do anything this past weekend other than sit around and play Fable. Looking back, we'll probably be glad to have had a down weekend. We should have a busy week this week. DeAnne's helping cook a couple of meals and then at the end of the week is my 10 year class reunion. I'm really looking forward to it, if nothing else because Coutney and Edwin are coming up and staying with us for a couple of days. The reunion should be fun too though. I'll probably talk more about it later in the week though.

Have a good Monday.

--Paul

The Weekend Has Arrived

It's Friday, already. The week still seems to have flown by.

DeAnne and I are trying our best to get back into a bit of a diet routine. Sometime around the summer we pretty much quit trying to loose and just started maintaining. The holiday's weren't bad at all for her, but they were pretty hard on me. So I guess I'm the one trying to get back to a diet routine. Anyway, as part of that, we went walking around the neighborhood yesterday. It was pretty chilly, but I need to start getting my body in motion somehow. We stopped in at our preacher's new house. They're getting the finishing touches put on and they're just about ready to move in. Becky (the preacher's wife) and his children were there doing a few things so we got to see the almost finished grand tour. It's a nice house. I'm just glad to have decent people moving into the neighborhood. I always get a little nervous every time someone builds a new house out here because I'm afraid they're going to be bad neighbors. So to have your preacher moving in around the corner is a little bit of a comfort. It'll be nice to have them around.

No major plans for the weekend. We're just going to hang out and try and survive the cold. Have a good Friday and a good weekend.

--Paul

Flying By

This week seems to be flying by for me for some reason. It's Thursday already but it just doesn't seem like it should be.

Hmm...I can tell it's late in the week though because I'm struggling with what to talk about. Last night's American Idol was pretty good. I don't think it was quite as good as the first night, but it was still pretty good.

I guess part of the reason the week has flown by is that we're so busy at work. We've got a pile of new projects in the pipeline and most of them are related to new cyber security regulations that are going into effect at the beginning of July. The bad part is that just normal maintenance on the stuff we already have takes a good bit of time, so you throw in a bunch of new stuff and it just piles on and makes things worse. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but until we get past June and July, it's going to be pretty crazy.

Anyway, that's just going to have to do for today. Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

It's That Time Of Year Again

American Idol started last night. It's hard to imagine, but this is the eighth year the show has been on. I thought it was pretty good last night. They seemed to show a more even mix of good singers and bad singers. There were some really bad ones, but they didn't overwhelm the show with them. They've also added a fourth judge. Some girl that's worked as a writer and producer for a bunch of pop singers. She seems smarter than Paula but yet, not as mean as Simon. Having her has also cut into the time the others have to talk. This really helped with Paula since she wasn't able to ramble near as much as she used to, or if she did, they had to cut it out for time. We'll have to see how the rest of the season goes, especially when they get to the live shows, but I think having the fourth judge is going to work out to the good of the show. If nothing else, just taking time away from Paula makes it instantly better.

I've been playing around with a website called Slacker Radio. It's address is http://www.slacker.com. It's a streaming internet radio website. They have a good number of pre-defined stations already, but the cool part is that if you register (free or paid), you can search for artists and songs and build your own personalized radio stations. The free version puts in advertisements ever two or three songs, but they're not intrusive. They have an ipod-like device that you can buy or if you have an iphone or ipod touch they have a client you can download to those. They also have a blackberry client, but it doesn't work with the OS version on my blackberry and I can't find any information online about if they're going to offer an upgrade. So it would seem I'm out of luck on the blackberry end, but I thought I'd mention the website anyway because the create-a-station thing is pretty cool. It's easy to use and they have just about every song I could think of that I wanted. Hopefully, they'll develop clients for other devices (xbox 360?).

Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

Continuing On

So on Saturday I had a few things to do around the house, but after that, I was on my own. I watched "Eagle Eye" and it was a great movie. Another good action movie. Less blood and swearing than "Wanted" but it was still intense.

After that, I played some video games and just hung around the house. I started on "Fable II" and I really like it. It doesn't seem to be as complex as some role playing games are, but it's not as simplified as a "Zelda" game is. The cool thing is that just about everything you do in the game has a bearing on if you're considered good or evil and how well people in the towns and villages like you. The more you lean good or evil, your appearance also begins to change to reflect your standing. A lot of the scenarios in the game have two choices, one leans good and the other leans evil. You're also free to do pretty much whatever you like outside of the main storyline. You can buy businesses and homes, you can get married and have children and if you want, you can even have multiple wives and if they find out about each other, they'll leave you. I've just been playing through the main quest right now. I've bought a couple of businesses for the income, but that's about it.

DeAnne got home about 9:00 Saturday night and we just went to bed. We went to church on Sunday and in between services we took a nap and just relaxed at home. And that was the weekend.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

A Number Of Things

It's strange how sometimes I struggle to find something to write about and then at other times I have so much that I want to mention that I feel like it's too much. This is one of those times where it feels like too much, so I may break it into multiple posts. We'll see how it goes.

First, DeAnne made it back from Atlanta late Saturday night. She was pretty tired, had a couple of blisters, but she seemed to have enjoyed herself for the most part. I don't know that she'll be going twice a year like her Mom is talking about doing, but I could see her going once a year.

I tried my best to keep myself occupied while she was gone. As I talked about on Friday, I tracked the CES news pretty heavily and I watched a little of the BCS title game, but that just got me through Thursday. On Friday night, I started out by eating dinner with Dad and Sherry, then I headed home. I had changed up the Netflix list in anticipation of DeAnne being gone and had gotten "Wanted" and "Eagle Eye" in on the same day. I started watching "Wanted" and about half-way through, Bryan called me and wanted to know if I wanted to come over and watch the "24" movie from back in November. So I stopped "Wanted", headed over to Bryan's, watched "24" then headed back home and finished "Wanted".

The "24" movie was great and after watching last night's first 2 hours, it really did serve for a nice lead-in to the new season. Last nights 2 hours were really awesome. Things were moving fast and Jack was back in his old form in no time. If the rest of the season can stay as strong as these first couple of hours, then it'll be a good one.

"Wanted" was incredible. I haven't ever read the graphic novel that it's based on, but I'd really like to now. I've read that there are a number of differences, but the movie was just too awesome. It was pretty violent and bloody, so it's not for the kiddies, but the action was great, the acting was good, the stroy was cool and it was just an overall great action movie.

So that was Friday night. I think I'm going to stop there and hit the rest of the weekend tomorrow. Have a good Monday.

--Paul

I Had A Plan

Sitting here this morning, it seems like yesterday I had thought of something specific to write about this morning, but now I can't remember what it was. Oh well. I guess you're going to get random stuff this morning.

Florida won the BCS title game last night. I watched the first half and it drug on for so long and was so uneventful that I went to bed. Looking this morning, it seems I missed the best part of the game. I'm no Florida fan, but I like to see the SEC teams win their bowl games (yes, even Alabama) and I like for the title to stay in the SEC. It's just good for the conference and what's good for the conference is eventually good for Auburn.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is going on this weekend. The first day was actually yesterday but the press were let in early, so news has been coming all week on the stuff being shown. DISH has a new receiver, the 922, coming out this year that looks really cool. It has a Slingbox integrated into it along with a new guide interface and some other internet related features. A slingbox lets you stream video from your TV to any video device in your home connected to your network (like a PC) or over the internet to a laptop or even a mobile phone. I'm more interested in it for the home applications, but the internet streaming could be cool too for when I'm gone on the occasional trip. They're also going to set it up so that you can log on to a website and program your DVR over the internet. The new guide interface looks really slick too. It's supposed to be out this spring, so hopefully we'll be able to get one. We'll probably have to commit to a new contract, but I don't see us dropping DISH anytime soon anyway, so that's not really a problem.

Other than the receiver, I've seen mention of a few cool TVs and some new storage standards for flash memory that should make for some huge gains in capacity over the next couple of years. There's also USB 3.0 that's going to be out soon. It's incredibly fast. Imagine sycing a 1000 songs to your ipod in seconds instead of minutes. Finally, Microsoft is getting the next version of Windows ready for realease. It's called Windows 7 and I really think it'll be out before the end of the year. The first public beta comes out today, so that usually means they're pretty close to the final version. I think they'll try and get it out before the Christmas shopping season so that they can market it on new PCs for Christmas. From what I've read, they've made enough incremental improvements to Vista and it's so much less of a resource hog that it should be a decent upgrade and will probably finally get people off of XP.

Well, I came up with a good bit after all. Have a good Friday and a good weekend.

--Paul

Happy Birthday DeAnne!

DeAnne's Birthday is today, so Happy Birthday baby, I love you.

The sad part is, she's not even here. She left early this morning to go to Atlanta with her Mom. Her Mom has a business license, so they're going to the America's Mart market. They'll be coming back sometime Saturday night. It's the first time either of them have been, but they're going with someone that's been a couple of times before, so hopefully they'll be fine. I'd be lying if I said the thought of her and her Mom in Atlanta didn't scare me a little. It's not that I don't trust them or think that they can't handle it, I just worry about all the other wack jobs up there.

So I've got the house to myself for three days. There's a decent amount of work that needs doing, so I'm going to try and finish up a few things on Saturday. I also made sure that the movies that came from Netflix this week weren't anything DeAnne would want to watch. I got Eagle Eye and Wanted. I'm looking forward to both of those. I also have to get up with Bryan at some point so that we can watch the 24 movie that came on back in November. The show starts Sunday night, so we've got to watch the movie so that we're ready. I'm really hoping that this season is better than the last. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

The week's almost over! Just two more days to go. Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

Stuff

I haven't talked about video games in a while, so that's where we're going to start. I finished Star Wars: The Force Unleashed last week. It was pretty short and there were parts of the actual gameplay that were kind of wonky, but the storyline was great. The game serves as a bridge between Episode III and Episode IV (The original movie). You play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice and as you go through the game you get become fairly powerful. Using the force powers is pretty awesome and the physics used in the game are great. It also looks really good, but again, the best part to me was the story. I'm actually playing through it again so that I can get a series of collectibles and pick up a few more xbox gamer points. After that, I plan to start on Fable II. Of course, I'm still playing Gears online from time to time also.

Our TV shows are slowly starting to come back on. In fact, before long, there's going to be so much coming on on Monday night, that we're not going to be able to record it all. I would give anything for someone to move some of those shows to Sunday night, Tuesday or some other night when we don't watch much or anything at all. I'm not sure what we're going to do, but we're going to have to figure something out quick.

So that's all for today. Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

Prayer Request

After everything that the Lord has done for DeAnne and I in our lives, I would be remiss not to ask that you pray for someone at our church who is going through a major health crisis right now.

John Colvin, his wife Beth and their son John Luke go to church with us at Carolina. They're just a year or two older than DeAnne and I and John just found out that he likely has cancer. They're going today to see another doctor in Dothan and should know more after today's appointment. Beth has a blog of her own and she posted yesterday about everything. You can find it at http://johncolvin.blogspot.com/.

Please pray for John and his family as you've prayed for DeAnne and I in the past.

I'm going this morning to the church for a special time of prayer for them so this is going to be it for the post today. Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

Back To Business

Well, the holidays have officially come to a close and it's back to business as usual today.

I have to apologize for Friday. At some point Thursday, we picked up a virus from somewhere and it was pretty nasty. It worked on it some Thursday night and then again on Friday morning, but it wasn't until Friday night that I was finally able to get rid of the thing. I'm a little upset about it, really. I thought that I had the computer fairly well protected, but I guess there was a weakness somewhere. In case you're wondering, what finally did the trick was a program called MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. You can download it for free from http://www.malwarebytes.org/. It's a great program from all I can tell. I've used it several times now and it's gotten rid of stuff when it seemed like nothing else could. The pay version is $25 and it just lets you set up scheduled scans and runs a real-time agent in the background. Right now, I'm just planning on running a scan once a week on my on, but I may upgrade to the pay version for the real-time protection deal. If it works as good as the free program, then it'd probably be worth it.

We had a good New Year's. We hung out over at Bryan and Adrienne's and shot some fireworks and all. Nothing spectacular, but we had a good time. The rest of the weekend was pretty low-key. We watched a couple of movies on Saturday with Bryan and Adrienne and other than that, we pretty much just hung around the house.

So that's about it. Have a good Monday.

--Paul

Bah!

We're having computer problems at home (the PC this time, they actually got the internet fixed), so no post today other than this. Sorry. Hopefully I'll have everything worked out by Monday.

Have a good weekend.

--Paul

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year and God bless.

--Paul