Binary Brew

Things to acomplish in 2009:

• Read 50 books
• Read books/stories to my girls at least once a week.
• Wake up everyday at 6am and do 100 push ups (at a minimum)
• Watch only 4 hours of TV per week
• Ride my bike to work every day. (weather and travel permitting)
• Play more games with the family
• Find at least 5 geocaches a month
• Write a new blog entry every week

We are almost ready to close on our new house. Currently we are set to close at 4pm on 12/31.  I had delayed the delivery of all the appliances until the end of the year and coming down to the wire, it looks like we will close before I have to rent a storage space! We are excited to get started on re-modeling this place and moving in over the next few months.  This weekend (if we close tomorrow) we are going to head to IKEA and buy the new kitchen I designed with Devon. To keep with my New Year’s Resolutions, I will use my remodel of the house as a way to keep the “One Blog Post a Week” goal I set for myself this new year. So, if all goes well and we actually close on the house tomorrow, I will start a new post with some “before” pictures of the house and then post more entires as the re-model progresses!

Happy New Year to everyone…. Good luck in sticking with resolutions!

This sucks.  No Pandora for me on my ride to work today.  No email once I got to the office and no way to post to my blog via my iPhone. I called ATT and they confirmed that the Data networks for EDGE and 3g are down and should be up in the next two hours.  My outage started at 7am. Its now 845am and its still down and they dont plan on getting it back for at least two more hours. For a 300.00 phone and 120.00 a month for the service, I really expect much more reliability.  5 or 10 mins down every now and then is acceptable. Hours of down time during peak usage times?  Not. What can you do.  ATT and iPhone have me hooked.  I cant take the phone to Verizon so I can have a team of hard hat wearing people following me around ensuring that my network is working. So I guess I have to suffer with a very expensive iPod for a few more hours.

Our TV died two days ago, so I headed over to Best Buy to get a new one. I decided on a Sony Bravia 32″ LCD.  Its HD ready and I am impressed with the quality of the “On-Air” HD local channels. The only problem is now I have an HD TV but I have nothing that can take advantage of the quality other than my local channels.  A new HD Tivo is like 300, so I wont be getting that anytime soon and an HD DVD player is like 300 also. I discovered that if I connect the MacBook Pro to the VGA port on the back, I get a really nice picture when watching HD QT videos, but watching a DVD doesn’t really add any clarity. I’m afraid that this TV is the beginning on my eventual home theater. 32″ TV is much bigger than I expected.  I am used to watching on our 26″ CRT.  32″ is a great size for watching movies.  Its a wide screen and our old BOSE system sounds great (thanks dad for the donation) though I am tempted to buy the new BOSE all in one system with the 4way surround speakers. Well, regardless, I am happy with the purchase. Watching Discovery Channel DVDs are far more impressive on this TV than any we have had in the past.  If anyone is looking for a new TV and wants a flat screen LCD, I recommend the Sony Bravia 32″ its only 700 at Best Buy.