What a busy week it's been! I've been tempted to write a few times these past few days, but have been just too interested in catching up on sleep after staying up late earlier in the week trying to format and restore the Mac's hard disk. Even as I type this, megabytes of my favorite unix tools are being downloaded.
Even work has been busy this week. For a while there I felt a little better. I'm not saying that I was at work twiddling my thumbs, but at least I didn't feel buried with pending issues. These past few days I almost felt guilty in going home because it left customers hanging.
Monday night was open house at Claire's school. I stayed home with the kids while Claire gave Michelle a tour of her world. When they got home, Claire showed me a brain teaser they got recently. If Sue has six pets, including hamsters, parrots, and parakeets, and they have sixteen feet total among them, how many hamsters does Sue have? Man! I only wish my questions at work were that quickly solveable! Nevertheless, it's quite a stumper for a second grader, don't you think?!
I went to the Y on Monday afternoon but the instructor didn't show due to an illness in the family. "No problem," I figured, "I'll just go on Wednesday..." Unfortunately Tuesday I got a call from our west coast offices asking me to be available on Wednesday for a conference call with potential customers. By the time I finally did go on Thursday evening I was feeling like a potato.
I watched the pilot episode of Birds of Prey on the WB network last night. It was pretty decent. I was concerned that it would be a mixture of Batman and Baywatch but luckily they didn't need to resort to skimpy outfits. It did a reasonable job of capturing that "dark knight" atmosphere that the Batman movies tried to achieve.
I also finally got around to seeing the original version of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town this past week. It's definitely up there with It's a Wonderful Life for great Frank Capra movies.
Yesterday was another day in the "I can't believe we spent so much money for something so darn boring" episodes. We had gutters put on the back of the house. Yawn! When we first moved in there was a considerable amount of mold building up on the back deck due to the runoff of rainwater. Michelle easily got it out with some bleach just before she stained the deck. The only way to keep it from coming back and having the deck rot was to get some gutters put up.
Claire had no school today and she has off on Monday as well for the holiday. My friend Russell came by the office today for lunch. Since he needed to go to Milford today to renew his license, I suggested he stop by the house and visit Claire and Abby. It would give Michelle a break from the "mom, can I... mom, I need... mom, would you..." barrage. Claire and Abby had two girl friends from down the street over. To him at the time it must have seemed like an estrogen factory in the house.
It looks like the .mac server is down again, at least temporarily. They wrote me earlier in the week saying that they had a hardware malfunction and were going to replace some of the bad systems. It seems like it's still catching up with them. I plan on moving our email accounts and photo albums there soon. I signed us up for a year of service with them but so far haven't had a chance to do much with it. If the move goes well over the next month or so, I'll be shutting down our dialup ISP service, MV communications. They've served me well but it doesn't make much long term sense to pay $40/month for broadband and $30/month for dialup service. I kept them as a backup service in case Adelphia didn't pan out. Also I trust them more for email and web space than I ever did ATT or Adelphia. But with Apple's .mac services, charged annually, I'm running out of reasons to keep my MV service.
I'm also looking into getting a service called Dynamic DNS. It allows you to bind an internet domain name to a computer whose (numeric) address is constantly getting changed by the service provider. This changing of your address is pretty common with broadband internet unless you are willing to pay extra for what's known as a static IP address. It's not that I want to host a web site from our Macintosh (although I could...). It's just that I'd like to be able to control the machine remotely from work if the need should come up.