No matter how rosy and happy they make it sound, there’s just something about having an airplane circle your head (3 times!) while spraying pesticide, when you’re walking in to work, that tells you: today is going to be a wonderful day.

Not been posting lately – it’s been pretty hectic at work.

My wife has a mix cd in on rotation in her car’s cd player and my daughter has become completely addicted to one of random songs on it – Butterfly by the techno/dance pop group Smile.dk. I suppose toddlers do this kind of thing – and I’m really starting to appreciate the complexity of the song. I just gets in to you, you know?

I heard the song The Audience by Matthew Herbert recently, and like the beat. Link goes to a live version.

I’ve about had it with all of the music on my iPod – it’s time to start listening to my Pandora stations again.

Adobe’s John Nack has a great post with links to a few physics based drawing programs. I’d love to be able to play with one of these. I hope that Sophie get’s to – this would make a wonderful edutainment product for kids (and parents!).

Also check out the game Crayon Physics. Casey and I spent over an hour playing the free version of this. It’s a great idea for a game.

It’s been one week and I’m still not over this damned cold! At least my fever isn’t 104F like Saturday. I’m getting tired of being tired.

Made my first political donation to Barack Obama on Thursday morning. I really hope he wins this.

I moved my Dell laptop back to Vista. I updated all of the drivers and picked a more stable nVidia driver. Now all my issues are gone! I had one outstanding issue with Flash CS3 running slow, but after switching it to run in “XP SP2 Compatibility mode,” it runs fine.

I also probably helps that I added 2gb more ram – for 4gb total. This thing is fast now!

I’m out of complaints for Vista. It took a year – but better late than never.

The experiences that I’ve had with Vista on my Dell Latitude have really turned me away from Windows. After all of the issues with poor driver performance (boo nVidia!), sleep issues (crashes when I close the lid 1 out of 5 times), and general weird things – I’ve decided to move to the Apple side of the fence.
We bought my brother’s G4 Powerbook for Casey to use as her main PC – aging but still does everything that she needs – mail, surfing, digital photos, etc. And we splurged and bought a new midrange iMac (with Leopard) for the “family” computer. I’ll have to keep the Latitude d820 until I can afford a MacBook, but I’m going to try to work on the iMac as often as I can – I work better on a desktop than a laptop anyway.

I setup BootCamp with XP on it. Installed all of my apps – works perfectly. When I was still at Hewitt, Citrix worked flawlessly on both the OS X side and the XP side.  The Adobe apps that I use work fine in Leopard. iTunes works better. The whole experience has just been wonderfully easy. Simple. Quiet.

I did have to find a utility to format my external harddrive (200gb) to FAT32 so that I could use it in OS X and Windows. OS X should really have the ability to write to a NTFS drive out of the box. That’s been the biggest pain in the whole “switch.”

I think that I’m going to like it over here.

Did another endo a few weeks ago on the Beech Springs trail. I was going a little too fast at the end of the longer the Gravity Cavity section and landed wrong on the little jump. Landed on my face, again, and slid what had to be a few feet on my chin. A wonderful evening at the ER and a few days in the bed later, I’m mostly back to normal. My chin is as hard as a rock (scar tissue I assume) and I can’t whistle.
The hospital charged my insurance over $10K for it all. What a scam! Sophie’s birth plus three days in the hospital for Casey was the same price.

Haven’t updated in a long time!

On October 5th I left the whole Hewitt/Wachovia mess and then started a new job at Bank of America on October 9th.  The full fancy title is “Enterprise Learning Senior Lead Technologist.” Short title is “Instructional Tech Designer.” I like the longer one better!

I’m doing pretty much the same work that I was doing at Hewitt – creating WBT templates, fixing the mistakes of vendors, troubleshooting WBT/LMS issues, working with offshore, etc.  But the environment is so much nicer! Less stress, more help from other internal teams – and  possible future. Hewitt was just a dead-end. I really hope that they do something about it for the  people that are still there!

Since I’m doing much less Flash programming at work, I’m really going to have to start practicing at home.

aM laboratory

I havn’t done anythine like a lab in a long time. Maybe I need to stop working on project all of the time and start playing around again?