video tour of the new house

we made a video to tour the house instead of a bunch of still pictures. i only have a quicktime movie (*.mov) version so far, but i'm looking for a utility to convert it to *.avi or *.mpeg.

the link is on the left sidebar - right-click and download for better results!!

edit: the *.avi and *.mpg files have been created and uploaded. enjoy!

House Tour Video (*.mov) 9MB
House Tour Video (*.avi) 42MB
House Tour Video (*.mpg) 57MB
Download before playing!

was v. atl --- smc v. kg

so it's the bottom of the 9th, my washington nationals are up 2-1 on the co-division leading (with the nats) atlanta braves. atl gets a double and a single and all of a sudden lindsay starts hollering from the bedroom that my cell phone is ringing. i holler back "oh i know who it is!"

so i call kg back (bad luck?) and the braves tie it up and we head to extra innings. well, cordero had already blown the save (rare occurence) so during the 10th we had stanton (he of the yankees waiver) give up a single, a sac bunt, an intentional walk and a popout. not terrible, man on 1st and 2nd, 2 outs. ayala comes in and just needs to get one out of any kind. first thing he does is hit giles' baggy shirt to load the bases and bring andruw jones (yeah that guy) up to the plate. ayala looked like he was at his first dance in middle school or something he was so nervous. now was the time you appreciate cordero's icewater veins and nerves of steel. ayala (he of the bum shoulder who needs to go on the dl and get better) walks jones on 4 straight balls to end the game.

two more games kg two more games. i already predicted we'd go 1-2, but we needed this one with livan on the mound. as long as we don't get swept, we're only 1 game out of first when we go to florida this weekend. oh boy i just looked at atlanta's schedule for the next week and they have 7 games against pittsburgh and cinci - chump teams. not good.

i guess i became a man this weekend

because i bought a real deal lawnmower and spent nearly 4 hours mowing "the plantation" as i like to call it now. we have 0.572 acres and the back slopes down a hill to a drainage area with a lot of rock that i have been calling "the pit" thus far. the back half of our lot (on down the hill to the pit) is of course not sod like the front half and this area had really grown up into some thick grass and nasty plants. i started at about 8:00 am and some portions of the grass were still really wet so i would mow other sections and then at the end i came back to those portions.

in the middle while i was having a glass of water on the back deck and about to pass out, my builder happened to be bulldozing an adjacent backyard in preparation for their sod. he hollered to me that he was bringing his big mower out and that he'd take care of the back forest, i mean, tall section for me. what a relief. he still hasn't done it, but he's been really good about things so i trust him.

we added some potting soil to the base of the new trees so the struggling ones will hopefully get going and growing. we're going to take a short video of the interior of the house and the plantation (hopefully the builder will finish the mowing soon) in lieu of a set of still pictures. we hope this will capture the house better. i'll try to make sure it's not in quicktime format for my uspto buddies :-)

a lesson in type a(nal) behavior

i've been meaning to write this up since we got the entertainment center delivered and filled up with goodies tuesday evening. what's a guy to do with about 100 dvd's that were once alphabetically aranged along the shelves of a sweet hidden, swing-out dvd storage area of an entertainment center that he no longer owns (left it in va)?? the mrs. was pretty adamant that she didn't want said dvds to be visible from the shelves or glass front cabinet portion of the entertainment center (and i secretly agreed that it would look nicer if they were not visible. that left me two pretty big shelves on the left side and two pull out single row dvd drawers that each held 20 dvds on the right side. what was i to do with such an incongrous space?? plus i also had to put my (kind of seldom used (besides baseball)) xbox games somewhere too.

step one: stack the xbox games horizontally on the back left of the first of the two left shelves.
step two: identify the least watched dvds and the ones that i'd rather not have people see and laugh at me for having and fill in the remaining space created by the xbox games.
step three: remove all sets and (ahem) set them aside and alphabetize the remaining dvds.
step four: create a new row in front of the steps 1 and 2 cases and create a row on the second of the two left shelves.
step five: pull out my favorite dvds to be placed in the right side pull out dvd shelves. any cases larger than normal size (including those with wraparound boxes) will not fit and must stay on the left. lindsay was granted a few obligatory spots here.
step six: repeat step 5 until all the remaining dvds fit on the left shelves (it took about 35 to fill up the right shelves)
step seven: place the box sets snazzily in front of the dvds on the left shelves.

when you open the door to the right shelves, the front dvd on both shelves is visible/displayed. napoleon dynamite and rounders were awarded with these spots.

updates

we went to lexington lifebridge church this past sunday and enjoyed a good service. the congregation was a bit a smaller than we thought, but we both felt very comfortable with jake in the nursery and with the worship and message styles. we'd probably still like to visit nicholasville first nazarene since it's a whopping 5 minutes from our place (as opposed to 15 for lifebridge), but i hear the demographic is a bit, ahem, older. most of the people at lifebridge are right around our age with kids a little older than jake. the pastor has been great too. we corresponded via e.mail while i was still in va and then he brought us sloppy joe's for the weekend while we were moving in. then on monday he hand-delivered (to my office) a mug with goodies in it to thank us for visiting (he's an asbury guy and happened to be on campus)

work has been good this week and i've mainly been deciphering and better understanding the configurations of our main firewall and packet shaper. pretty interesting stuff.

we got almost all of the rest of our furniture yesterday as the sofa, love seat, and entertainment center were all delivered. there is only the matching living room chair and the last bookshelf for my office yet to be delivered. the living room set is brown leather and looks really nice. the entertainment center is a beast (they said it weight 400-500 pounds, but looks awesome. on the suggestion of a friend in va, i'm going to put up a set of interior pictures once the last pieces of furniture come in.

done

and it was definitly worth staying up until 2am to finish. waaay too many thoughts and questions going through my head, but luckily i have 2-3 years to think about all that now don't i? haha. luckily i've already been able to explode some of the bursting questions on over to chris.

best birthday presents ever

can this combo really be topped (for me at least)? i'm sure jkr timed the book purposefully for me :-)
the book itself is great so far (on about p. 300 of 652) and i'll leave it at that for my hp-friends.

saturday at the zoo

late on friday while trying to figure out what to do with saturday, we decided to venture to cincinnati to one of our favorite restaurants that happens to have a franchise there - toot's. the original is in murfreesboro, tn which neighbors my hometown of smyrna who also has a toot's now. the only other one is in bowling green, ky. we love them for their incredible fried dill pickle chips.
anyways, we didn't want to just drive 2 hours for toot's so we looked for other things to do in cinci and found out that they have an awesome zoo! a wonderful first for jake as you can see above. lindsay has been at home with him since we've gotten here and she's been working on things like animals and body parts (jake can show you his eyes and belly so far) with him. we were looking at some birds in a small glassed-in area and we said that's a bird, it goes 'tweet tweet tweet'! after a few times saying that (of course lindsay had been teaching him that during the week too), jake said "tweet tweet tweet!"! it was one of those special parental moments where you see that teaching him things was paying off.
we saw tons of cool animals and got a bunch of great pics, but were pretty wiped out at the end of the day.

good week at work

ok, so i forgot to post yesterday and i back dated the previous post so i could have a post on my birthday. anyways, the week at work has been good with some solid successes along the way. i successfully figured out how to write a set of scripts on a mac server via the underlying unix foundation to have a particular webserver startup (and backup all of its files) after the machine reboots and before anyone logs in. i was very excited after it worked for the first time. the rest of the week has been filled with continuing to get aquainted with the myriad of servers, routers, firewalls, etc. on our network and to log into them and play around with them while not messing anything up.
i hope all is well with you and if you're a harry potter fan, enjoy the weekend and the book - i'll be getting mine at midnite, but i wish i was doing so with you.

happy birthday to me

26 feels reeally old. i'm like 5 years older than upper-level college students. i got my first driver's license 10 years ago today. the 10 year high school reunion is mercifully still a couple of years away. i can't even believe i've been out of college 3 years let alone high school for 8. i guess i'm just going to have to realize that i've phased into that whole adulthood phase of life even though i've known it for the last few years. most often i enjoy the new experiences i'm going through (marriage, house buying, parenthood), but it's hard to grasp their sum total of "getting older". i'm still into many of the things i was into 5-10 years ago, much to the chagrin of my better half sometimes :-) but come on, no age group has ownership of harry potter, comic book characters, sci-fi movies etc, magic cards, table gaming, and video games. :-)

good weekend

well, mom got hitched without a ... hitch. ahem, everything went great :-)
everything was beautiful and went well and now she and charlie are honeymooning at niagra falls. this weekend they'll return to bristol and load up the rest of his stuff and take it down to smyrna. some will probably go in storage until they find a new and bigger house.

the drive down on friday afternoon in the highlander was nice despite the i75 traffic north of knoxville and the 3-car ferry we had to take across the kentucky river when i tried to take a "shortcut" via what looked like a good highway from our town to i75. we're south of lexington, but needless to say, we'll be heading north to lexington to go south on 75. there's just no quicker way.

we drove back to knoxville after the wedding on saturday and just hung out and watched a movie that evening with the family. we had family photos taken on sunday afternoon and then we hit krystal's in knox for a snack and o'charley's in lex for dinner on the way home. we had family photos taken with my dad last time he was in va so now we just need to have some taken with the newlyweds to complete a nice set :-)

work was really good yesterday. we had devotions as a department in the morning (it's weird not being in secular/government work anymore...) and i was able to get some really good work done on my current projects throughout the rest of the day.

last nite we hung the big mirror, some more pictures, and what was hopefully the last set of blinds all while on and off watching the hr derby. it was kind of lackluster and long after abreu started things off with 24 in the first round. the previous record for a round was 15 and for a derby was 27.

oh and the dsl was working fine when we got home :-)

busy day and still no home internet

whew! yesterday was a fun, but really busy day at work. my supervisor and i spent almost the entire day figuring out why our campus-wide bandwidth was up at 50% overnite and hanging out in the 80-90% range during most of yesterday. long story short, we found some dude downloading movies and now we just need to find him in person (*knuckles cracking*). it was pretty wild to use the packet sniffer and then happen upon a packet with this type of stuff: asfj023ur0jap8v cinderella man asdjj;kj m0243u00 .avi 230-8avas;lkjl;j haha

regarding the home internet, the security system might not be a big deal right now, but we're having a filter for the whole house placed on the outside where the phone comes in from the street. the problem appears to be that many of the alltel routers are down in the area. they apologized for my lackluster welcome to their company :-)

our formal dining room set and 3 of my 4 bookshelves were delivered on wednesday and i set up all my books last nite. interestingly, i got all of them (except the ones i've decided to just leave in a box) in the 3 bookshelves that have already arrived - not sure what the 4th bookshelf will contain.

i'm only working a half day today and then we head out for kingsport, tn where my mom is getting hitched tmrw!! yeah, i guess i forgot to mention that one. but it was a long relationship time and a short engagement time.

have a great weekend!

ps. ride lance ride!! livestrong.

new pda

back to the good old days of working in info. tech. - i was just given a new pda for work! fun fun!!

new desk and work area

not as private as an office, but fun to work with

the things i wanted to post last nite

but couldn't because i got the dsl modem, but couldn't get the internet running. yeah i know haha the guy who just got a job dealing with computers and internet and networks couldn't get his system running. but i've got a good hunch what the problem is. for the dsl internet part to work right, all the phone jacks with something attached to them (phone, tivo, satellite, etc.) have to have a filter (it just looks like a line splitter) attached to them. well, everywhere i had something plugged into a jack, i put a filter. however, the new adt security system we just had installed is connected to the phone line from inside the wall. that looks like it could be a problem.

ok, so scroll down to the beginning of the move story and work your way back up.

oh and you can click on the picture at the top for the full-size version.

sunday and monday and the nats

sunday and monday morning were filled with continued unpacking and with hanging blinds and things needing anchor bolts and the drill. on sunday afternoon, we ventured back to home depot to buy some shelves for the garage and a new grill for the 4th and while we were waiting on them to get the grill, rain started to pour down. after 10-15 minutes it slacked up enough (or so we thought) to get the highlander and load the stuff in the back, but we still got drenched. and wouldn't you know it - 5 minutes down the road the rain cleared up.

monday afternoon, after we had some burgers and dogs that i left on the grill a bit too long, i was able to watch the nats (every day pretty much now) vs. the mets live from rfk. they uncharacteristically faltered in the 9th and didn't mount a comeback, but it was great to get to see them on tv. i don't know how many games i listened to on the radio since basically only the weekend games came on tv in the dc area if you didn't have satellite (which i now do). since i didn't post much the past couple of months while we figured out the job and move situation, i haven't been able to express how infatuated i've become with the washington nationals. i keep up with about 4-5 blogs online and read all the washington post articles related to the team. i had no idea i liked baseball nearly this much and it's been fun to have a team i really really care about and follow. of course i like ut vols college football, but i've never read this much about them - just watched games and kept up with the national college football scene. i've kind of been a fan of uk college basketball since middle school (and i guess we will especially be fans now), but i've never kept up with them or any pro b-ball team since jordan left the bulls (who i did watch a lot of games of while in high school). same goes for pro football too. i got sick of the washington over-coverage of the redskins (the tv and radio seem more apt to talk about what joe gibbs farts smell like than talk about the nats. maybe it's changing now that the nats are 19 games over 0.500, but i dunno the skins and their owner stink). i'll root for the titans and peyton's colts, but i don't have much gusto for either.

long live the nats - if and when they get to the playoffs, i'll be making a return visit to dc :-)

saturday

early saturday morning, me and L had to drive to east lexington to return the budget truck (it's amazing how close everything feels here) and we had a good ol' breakfast at hardee's while we waited for the furniture stores to open. we went to haverty's and found what we wanted at prices we knew would be comparable to any other nice furniture store (since we'd already looked at two other places). we got new living room furniture since our old is now in our playroom and a new formal dining room set since our old (which is pretty new) is in our eat-in breakfast area and new bookshelves for my office (three 4' high and one 3' high) since my old ones didn't come with us. after the furniture store, we went to home depot and got some hoses to water the lawn, some sets of blinds to hang in certain rooms of the house, and a mirror for the powder room.

saturday afternoon, we finally accomplished something we'd been looking forward to for over a year - we bought a toyota highlander! we got a slightly used 2004 (it had been in their rental car program) that is black, limited edition (but with cloth interior oddly enough), v6, 4wd. we love it and it's nice to finally have two cars after nearly three years of marriage. granted, we were in a public transportation area. saturday evening, the whole family (smc, L, jake, and dad) piled in the highlander and went to dinner at a reasonably priced italian place that we had been wanting to try out. it was pretty good, but macaroni grill is still my tops.

friday

on friday, the movers worked hard and fast and got done in about two hours instead of 3-4 hours. me and L went out to an atm to get them a cash tip and we ended up also staying out and opening a new bank account, getting licenses (mine is the best ever - i'll get a pic up soon once i can "smudge" out the important info), and attempting to get a ky license plate. the rest of the day was spent unpacking and going to dinner that evening.

wednesday and thursday

on wednesday, we drove the 8-hour drive from va to ky thru west va, but the truck was sooo slooow that it took 12 hours for the trip. on thursday morning, we closed on the ky house and it was officially ours. we waited at the empty house for a while that afternoon and then called the ky movers 3 hours after they were supposed to be there and they said they were going to have to cancel until the next morning (when i would already be at work).

that afternoon, while lindsay was putting some things away in the kitchen (we emptied our car at least) and while i was unloading the small things from the back of the truck, and while we both thought the other was looking after jake, jake took his inaugural tumble down a few stairs and bruised his noggin reeeally good. it looks better now, but it was a scary moment. after that, we called my dad and begged him to come to the rescue and keep an eye on jake while we took care of all the moving in related stuff. he happily obliged and we met him at applebee's a few hours later. since we didn't have beds to sleep in, we we went back to the little on campus hotel at the seminary and stayed another night.

tuesday

ok, so the move went pretty well with the normal hiccups that provide for stories to remember later. last tuesday, the movers were a good three hours late and lindsay had to take caroline to the airport and pick her dad up (at the same time) that afternoon. once the guys got there, they worked hard and it took the expected 5 hours to load the 24' budget truck. when we were reserving the truck, we were afraid we were going to have to get another truck, but luckily we were able to fit it all in one truck. we had decided to leave the entertainment center (wal-mart, been thru 2 moves already), my bookshelves (kmart, pressboard, don't look the greatest), the patio furniture (target, $100, lindsay hated the chairs), and the grill (decent grill, but took too much space).

important info

i found where i will be picking up harry potter & the half blood prince: potter party

first real day at work blog

6:47 am - got out of bed (got to wake up 1.5 hours later than normal)
7:35 am - left my new driveway
7:47 am - arrived at work (1 hour in travel time saved (that includes not having to go by the daycare))
7:48 am - locked out of the office because i don't have keys yet
8:01 am - met a guy at work (nathan) who hooked me up with a cup of coffee
8:25 am - spilled the coffee coming up the stairs
9:45 am - got to use the internet for the first time in almost a week (director approval). found out the dsl modem is at the ups place because they couldn't find our house. called the usps and let them know they need to start visiting my mailbox.
12:10pm - left for lunch - taco bell - and to stop by the house (i can do that these days) to pick something up to run an errand later.
1:10 pm - got back from lunch, began afternoon project: working through a ccna 3.0 test prep cd.
2:03 pm - just remembered to finally cancel the washington post (sad)
2:30 pm - went to get keys so i won't be locked out tmrw morning
2:50 pm - got back to the office and the key didn't work haha
3:15 pm - got taken on my first "clucker's run". like starbucks at pto - crystal city or jazzman's or concessions at pto - alexandria, it's the local place for an afternoon snack.
3:40 pm - got the correct key for the office.
5:00 pm - worked on CCNA stuff and will continue with the pretest tmrw morning.