I’m back!

I apologize for the lack of interesting and informative posts about my life lately. There has actually been a lot going on lately and I just hadn’t had the time until now to sit down and write. Tammy and I had a great time on the fourth of July in Columbus. We went to the Riverwalk downtown and watched the fireworks from atop a parking deck with a lot of her family. It was a great view. We could see fireworks in the distance from other towns too. We also went to Salem Camp meeting which actually just ended yesterday. Most of Tammy’s family goes to this every year (some even come in from Texas) and it was great getting to catch up with everyone. Not to mention the great food

This past week was pretty rough at work. I had to go in early on monday to fix a file to send to a vendor so I could go press check so I could deliver a project that day. Then a hard drive went out one of our servers after I got back from the press check but luckily the backup system I came up with worked great and we didn’t loose any data. Even still, I had to stay late and finish all of the work I didn’t get to whilst I was working away on the server. It ended up being a 12 hour day. Wednesday I had to stay late again. By Thursday and Friday I started getting sick which was no fun. I got a lot of sleep this weekend and actually feel like I’m alive today. After church today, we went down to Riverdale to visit with my grandmother and take her out to eat. She’s a talker so Tammy and I basically listened to her tell stories the whole time, but I’m glad we got to go visit with her.

Next week we don’t have a lot planned. This coming weekend we are going down to Savannah to visit several people we haven’t seen in a while which should be a ton of fun. Plus, I miss going to Savannah.

what happens to e-waste?

Being in the printing business, in college and in the workplace, I’ve been taught to pretty much recycle everything from paper to the used waste ink. But, I’ve always wondered what happened to computers people throw away. This is what computer recycling firms here in the US call recycling?! Now I’m really glad I convinced my employer to donate their computers to an education for the homeless program.

Interesting thought…I wonder how big of a problem this will be in like 10 years when all of the people in developing nations that are getting their first computers and gadgets now, start chunking them in the garbage?

Read the full article here.

Six Flags Monday!

Yea for 3 day work weeks!! Tammy and I skipped out on work yesterday to go to Six Flags with April, Chad, Emily, Laramy and Chelsea. It was only like the best birthday party ever! It was great just to have the day off and have fun. We got to the park about 11am and stayed until 9:30. We rode just about all of the rides.

Here are some things we found out:

• The front row on the Goliath is definitely worth the extra 20-30 minute wait
• Don’t stare at the tire in the center of the Wheelie
• Don’t try to look backwards while riding the Wheelie
• Six Flags Johnny Rockets is a substitute for The Varsity
• Free refills are a good thing until about the 12th cup…then you start feeling the caffeine.
• The Georgia Scorcher is the most uncomfortable ride there.
• The Superman is awesome when it’s not broken

After Six Flags closed we all went to Fellini’s for salad and pizza and stayed way too late (so tired this morning).

Needless to say, this was seriously the best birthday I have ever had.

Mexican Saturday

Tonight was a lot of fun. We went to La Parilla with April, Chris, Chad, Emily and Chelsea to celebrate my birthday! It was so much fun getting to hang out with everyone. After we ate yummy mexican we all went back to our apartment and ate some awesome cake that Tammy spent like all day baking.

How awesome does that cake look?! It was every bit as awesome as it looks an more.

cell phones & popcorn

Check this out. Kind of weird

Here is another version posted on this site:

http://www.koreus.com/video/telephone-portable-mais-popcorn.html

A weekend to relax

Tammy and I have literally traveled every weekend for the past two months. It’s been a lot of fun having a lot of stuff to do but it was great to just take the weekend off and just relax for a change. We didn’t do a lot yesterday except sleep in and clean up the apartment. Today we went to visit Tammy’s grandparents, which was a lot of fun and we went to eat at Olive Garden for my birthday. Can’t beat that

the bird and the bee

So this morning before we headed out for church, I pre-ordered our copy of Relient K’s new ep. We were listening to music this morning while we were getting ready for church and a Relient K song came one and I thought I should see if they are on tour (indeed they are but they are playing outside in Atlanta) and they have their new ep that is coming out in a few days advertised on their site.

So since Relient K is awesome and they are Tammy and I’s favorite band I went ahead and ordered it. I has 13 new songs and 13 remixed ones so it should be pretty good.

hypermiling

So since gas is currently $4.05 in Atlanta, I’m looking for any way to improve the gas mileage in our 626. Even though we don’t really have a commute to speak of and the car gets around 30 mpg on the highway, we take a lot of weekend trips and it really adds up fast. I saw this segment on the news the other day about hypermiling which has a lot of good ideas. Basically, the guys said to slow down and take it easy especially when driving in the city. I’ve been trying to think about how I’m driving and incorporate some of these techniques:

using hills, which I found is more effective with a manual tranny due to reduced engine drag
coasting to a stop when possible so I don’t use my brakes as much
slowing down 5 mph on the interstate
not accelerating heavily on surface streets and at signal
running fuel injector cleaner every oil change

Things I need to do to the car that may help out is change the spark plugs, get the brakes done and change the fuel filter. Hopefully, after I get these things done, I’ll be back up to the rated 32 mpg.

What about you? Have the high gas prices affected the way you drive or use your car?

Finally got AVG upgraded

Besides managing projects at work, I also take care of alot of other stuff like most of the I.T. problems and solutions. About a year ago I switched the company over from having half the computers managed by Symantic antivirus on the server and half the computers running individual licenses of Norton antivirus to AVG network edition running on our Windows 2003 domain server. It worked great. I could push out standardized settings, updates, etc. In May, AVG released version 8 so when I had time I upgraded to that. It was not a smooth upgrade like it was supposed to be. I first installed it and I couldn’t push installs to some of the computers, none of the stations would keep the settings I spec’d on the server which was a pain, it caused problems with people logging onto the domain for some reason and the link scanner feature they added caused internet browsers to randomly quit. What a headache. So last week I got tired of that and totally wiped AVG from the servers hard drive, downloaded a patched version they released on June 13th and used the network installer to uninstall and reinstall the latest version of AVG on all of the client computers. Works fine now. I actually like it better than 7.5, but they should have spent more time in beta fixing some of the problems before releasing a buggy version.

want to know?

If you like to keep up with what is going on with Apple and surrounding technologies, you might like this site:

macnn.com

I have it set as an rss feed on my browser and I learn something new everyday from it.