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I’m not exactly sure how it started. I think I laid down on Abby’s bed after prayers and saying goodnight and we just talked for a little bit. I then did the same thing with Tyler. Now, they ask for it every night. Abby calls it talk time and Tyler just asks if I can lay with him for a little bit. I enjoy it. After a busy day of every imaginable distraction, it is nice to just lay down and talk individually with my two oldest for a little bit. I think they enjoy the one on one time they get. After I am done talking to them they now repeat the process with Jenny. I think she likes it too. Be warned, if you have a lot of kids, this could become a very time consuming tradition to start. I only have two kids old enough to do this with and they don’t have any problem making this one on one time last a little while. It brings out the talkiness in them. I guess we’ll just have to be done having kids.

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We ate dinner out on the deck today since the weather was so nice. Afterward, Abby started getting her blankets and pillows out and made herself a little bed on the lawn. She wanted to sleep outside. Too bad she has school in the morning. Maybe next weekend we can sleep in the backyard. We’d better do it before it starts getting too cold. The other picture is from the other day when they wanted to paint. Tyler is such a crazy boy. But, whenever you call him that, he says “I don’t like to be called that”. We pretend like we had forgotten every time and we just continue to call him crazy.

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I hate to brag, but my baby is just so dang cute. I just can’t get enough of her. Here are a few pictures of her from the past couple of weeks. Do you just love the blonde wig? Abby got it at the primary party. I’m surprised we were able to get those pictures as she really didn’t like having it on.

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Pioneer Children Sang as They Walked and Walked and Walked and Walked. Elementary School Children Scream and Yell as they Walk and Walk and Walk and walk. Abby’s whole elementary school had a walk-a-thon to raise money for the school. Everyone in the whole school participated. Abby hit up some of her aunts and uncles and grandparents for pledges. Her basic approach was “Will you give me money?”. It seemed to work. Maybe I should start trying that. Anyway, Jenny volunteered to help out and would mark the kids’ laps for them to help them keep track. I went over and walked some laps with Abby and Tyler too. Here are a few pictures from the walk-a-thon. Abby and Tyler had a lot of fun and Abby did 25 laps!

My kids are so much fun. I think I’ll keep them.

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First of all, what a crappy picture. I am sitting in my bed and I took this picture from my cell phone. I could have gotten out of bed and gone into the family room to get the “real” digital camera but that would require getting out of bed and it is currently 1:04am so I’m too lazy to do such a thing. Even though my phone takes 2 MP pictures, the color saturation is aweful.

Anyway, back to the subject, TV. I have a Windows Media Center PC in which I installed a TV tuner card several years ago. This allowed us to schedule our TV shows to record automatically and we could watch them at our leisure. Bacially it is Tivo but the Windows flavor of it (and no subscription charges). Well, about two months or so ago I fried the TV tuner card by not shutting the computer down when putting in an eSata slot for an external hard drive. I pulled another device that was using up a slot and set it on top of the tuner card. There was a spark and the lovely smell of burning plastic and….the TV tuner card was toast (Lesson: always turn the computer off if you are opening the case for any reason, end of story). I cursed myself several times and went about researching the newer tuner cards (the one I had was discontinued). I found the one I wanted. It is the WinTV-HVR-2250. It has two twin tuners in it. So, I could record two analog channels and/or two digital channels at the same time. A nice little upgrade since the old tuner could only record two analog channels. I ordered the new tuner card from buy.com on August 21st which should have been plenty of time before the new season of shows started back up.

I was expecting the new card to arrive anytime. But, apparently this new card is new for the manufacturer too and there isn’t a huge supply available just yet. Tonight was the season premier of two of our shows, “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Office”. We definitely were not prepared for it. Since I had all TV going through the Media Center PC, streamed to our TVs through the network via an Xbox 360, I haven’t actually hooked up cable to anything but the one jack for the Media Center PC and one TV/VCR in the excercise room. So, as you can see from the picture, I grabbed my rabbit ear antenna and hooked it directly into the TV in our bedroom. Both of our shows start at the same time, 8:00pm. We decided to watch Greys and record The Office to watch afterward. So, we searched the house for a VCR tape that we could record “The Office” on while we watched “Grey’s”. Just recording via a VCR is ghetto. You can’t start watching what you are recording until it is completely done recording. How lame is that? We used to purposely start watching one of our scheduled recordings about 10 minutes after it started recording as we could then speed through the commercials and catch up to live TV by the end of the show. We don’t even know where the remote is for our VCR so we actually had to WATCH commercials. Who does that anymore? (and no, we couldn’t just get up off the couch and push the Fast Forward button on the front of the VCR, so shut up!).

It was a pain having to hurry and get home in time to get the kids in bed and be in front of the TV at exactly 8:00pm so we wouldn’t miss anything on Greys. Life without a DVR of some sort is just so much more stressful.

Now, one nice thing was that we got to watch Grey’s in High Def over the air. But, even that was pretty hokey. We found that the digital signal would change depending on where we were sitting on the bed as we watched. I had to sit in just such a way and could not bend my legs. Jenny, on the other hand, had to keep her knees bent. If she would straighten her legs the signal would drop out. I felt like I was 5 years old when we had to put tin foil on the ends of the antennas to get a better signal. I just about did that very thing until we found our special spots that made the signal come through. We stayed in the same positions for two hours while we watched Grey’s. Our legs had cramped up by the end but at least we got to finish the show.

I hope and pray that the new TV tuner card will ship soon. While we don’t watch very much TV, it is so nice to have what few shows we do watch automatically get recorded and not have to think twice about it. Long live the DVR!

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It’s official. Makenna’s first words are…….. “Hi Dadda”. She says it all the time. I’ve been practicing with her and since she loves her daddy so much, she decided to make those her first words. She is “scooting” around everywhere these days. She is still working on the crawling thing. She knows how to get up on her knees but when she wants to move, she just uses her arms and toes to drag herself around. She is a very happy baby and only really gets fussy when she hasn’t eaten for a while or when she has been in her carseat far too long. I know I shouldn’t brag, but I just have the cutest kids ever.

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Often when you buy a new computer, the manufacturer gives you the option of having Microsoft Office pre-installed. This seems rather convenient since you don’t have to install Office after the fact. Your other option is to order a retail version of Microsoft Office separately either online or at a retail outlet and install it after you receive your new computer.

So, which is better to do, OEM or Retail?

The answer is Retail. When you have Microsoft Office pre-installed on your computer, you are getting the OEM version of the software which is licensed for THAT computer and THAT computer ONLY. When that computer dies, that license of Microsoft Office dies with it. You cannot install it on your next computer.

A retail version of Microsoft Office comes with different licensing. Typically with the retail version you are allowed to install it on two computers. The two computers should belong to the same person though such as a person’s desktop computer and laptop computer. The Student/Teacher version goes one step further and will allow you to install it on up to three computers in the same household. Also, if one of your computers dies, you can have your retail license reset by Microsoft and install the retail version on the dead computer’s replacement. It is not tied to the “Original Equipment” it was installed on.

So, if you have more than one computer (and even if you don’t), get a retail version of Microsoft Office so that you don’t have to buy an individual copy for each computer and so you can still use your Microsoft Office license on a future computer when your current one dies.

And, to save even more money, you could install the Openoffice.org office suite for free. It is compatible with the Microsoft Office formats of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. If you have a fairly complex Excel or Word document, it may have some formatting issues especially if you use pivot tables in Excel or if you are accessing a database. But, for the common everyday spreadsheet and/or text document, it will work just fine.

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My oldest daughter Abby is in 1st grade now. I can’t believe it. She loves riding the bus to school. Jenny carpooled with a friend all through kindergarten so the bus is something new and cool to Abby. She has made friends with one of the boys in our neigborhood and they sit together on the way to and from school. This is a little video of her on her first day of first grade. She is a cutie.

abby 1st grade video

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I have just installed Firefox 3.0 on my computer. I used Firefox back when IE didn’t have tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is an absolute must in a browser. My problem with Firefox back then was its memory hogging issues. It would use a ton of a system’s memory and had to be restarted to free it up. Once Internet Explorer 7 came out and had tabbed browsing, I switched back. IE7 had much the same issue with memory. The two browsers seemed to stockpile memory and just keep adding to the amount they would steal with each new tab you opened. A big part of the problem was that they didn’t give the memory back even if you closed tabs. So, Firefox 3 claims to have made great changes to the way they use memory. I have set Firefox as my default browser and will use it for a while to see if it really has improved. If it has improved, Firefox will be my new browser (for now). I am betting that IE8 will improve its memory consumption as well and by that time I may switch back. Either way, I find it very useful to keep the two browsers installed and use whichever one serves me best.

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I have a Windows Media Center PC that I use as our TV hub for the entire house. Through Xbox 360s we can watch TV that is being recorded through the Media Center PCs. It’s a great little setup and makes it so that I can watch any of our pre-recorded TV shows or live Tivo-like TV from any of the TVs in the house. I also have it setup so that we can see our movie library and we can watch any of those with the push of a button.

Well, about a week or two ago, I was adding another hard drive to allow additional capacity for our movie library as I had already filled 1 TB of space with movies and needed more room. I got another 500GB eSata hard drive and had opened the case in order to install the eSata ports onto the back of the computer. The TV tuner card had an extra little input area that was using one of the slots. I did not need this so I was removing it to allow space for the eSata card. After removing it from the slot, I set it on the tuner card just below it so it would be out of the way while I installed the eSata ports. The metal edge touched a couple of contacts on the tuner card. There was a spark and the smell of melting electronics and the tuner card was toast.

So, we have not watched any TV for a couple of weeks. Saw only a few days of the Olympics. Streaming the movies still works fine but TV is a thing of the past. I have ordered a new card that allows both analog and digital TV to be recorded and can record 2 channels of each (double dual card). It was out of stock at the place where I found the best price. I ordered it thinking they would get it in stock and ship it fairly soon. Well, it is still on backorder and we are starting to get a little worried. Our shows will be starting soon and I’m not sure what we’ll do having to watch the shows when they are actually broadcast instead of recording them and fast forwarding through commercials. I can’t imagine going back to the old ways of watching TV.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the new tuner card will ship soon but let this be a lesson to you that even when a task inside your computer seems pretty simple and shouldn’t require you to shut down the computer, shut if off anyway. If not for the sake of the components, then for your own safety. Who wants their fingers fried in addition to their computer components? If I had followed this advice, we would still be recording and watching our favorite shows and I wouldn’t be out another $120.

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