Today, is my nephew’s birthday.  I had a great time a few weeks ago, visiting with my Brother’s family in Midland.  I got to play with Landon and get to know him a bit.  He’s a hoot.  He’s got a ton of energy, and just goes non-stop.  If you’ve ever seen the movie “Flubber” (preferably the classic), he’s alot like that stuff.

Happy Birthday, Landon!

[A quirk in my blog resulted in this post being posted much earlier this month, so you may have already seen it.  Today is his REAL birthday]

[humorously enough, another quirk caused the originally scheduled post to appear at the correct date (although a bit late in the day)]

Today, the little choncho turns 3! It really is unbelievable to me that she could be this old.  We woke her up this morning, and gave her one of her presents, some butterfly wings.  She really liked them.

I’ll take a rare moment to brag about her publicly, not because I think she’s better than your kid, or because I’m an awesome parent (I’m not), but because I love her and I’m so proud of her.  She is so awesome and sweet and polite (most of the time).  Even when she’s upset, she’ll say “thanks” when you hand her something.  She’s beginning to read, can do some simple math, and loves to draw and paint (the latter can become quite messy).  She builds the greatest things out of blocks and legos.  We went to Red Robin on Sunday, and I asked her to circle the items she wanted from the kids menu.  She circled mac ‘n cheese and oranges.

Happy Birthday, Choncho!

I didn't get up an anniversary post yesterday because I was busy DOING stuff for my anniversary this year.  Unbeknownst to Becky, I arranged to take the day off. I sneakily got a late-morning massage appointment for her, and lined up a babysitter (thanks, Molly) so we could go see a movie in the afternoon.  Everything went off without a hitch.

We went to see the latest Indiana Jones movie, which we enjoyed very much despite the somewhat less than explanatory ending. We hadn't been to the theater to see a movie since Pirates II.  But, we both agreed that we aren't missing much except time alone and seeing the latest movies.

Some of my posts that I get the most recurring email/inquiries on are my variousposts about the STDF (Standard Test Datalog Format) parser that I originally created as an experiment back in 2005.  After some help from a former collegue, I am pleased to announce that this is finally available on CodePlex as LinqToStdf!

It is a managed library for processing STDF files, and gives you a model to explore the data via Linq queries.  This means, you can leverage the wide variety of managed languages (C#, VB, F#, JScript, IronPython, IronRuby, Managed C++, Boo, etc.) to process the data in STDF files.  It also works in Silverlight!  It has built-in support for the V4 spec, but it's highly extensible and should be able to parse any version of the file format as well as custom records.  It can be configured to be highly strict and throw on format errors, or be robust in the face of issues that normal STDF processors would choke on to the point of being able to detect and repair corruption on the fly.

If that interests you, I'd love for you to drop by and take a deeper look at it and get involved in its ongoing development.  I've already got at least one person interested enough to contribute and ensure its success as a community project.  There is currently a "beta" release available, and hopefully we'll whip it into shape enough to call it v1.0 soon.

My hope is that this can be an adoption driver for .NET in the semiconductor industry and that through this project I can be an ambassador for the CLR in that area.

Why not come work on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft?  My team is a team of SDETs (Software Development Engineer in Test) that works in the really low levels of the CLR.  We cover areas like assembly loading/fusion, AppDomains, the shim (mscoree), and interop.

As an SDET, you are in charge of all aspects of quality for the areas you own. This means you get to be involved in the design process and be literally the first person developing code using new features coming out of the team.  I've found my last year and a half here to be extremely satisfying.

This is a pretty exciting time to join the team as we're working on some long-lead items for the next version of the CLR and we're also busy shipping Silverlight 2 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

You'll need strong coding, problem-solving, and communication skills.  Some background on the CLR and managed code is a plus, but not required.  If you think you've got what it takes to join the team, check out the job details and submit your resume.  I'm happy to answer questions about the team and the jobs within reason, so feel free to ping me at marklio at [you-know-where].com.

There are several openings in other areas of the team as well.  Feel free to search the other CLR jobs and find the one that's right for you.

I've been horrible with blogging lately.  But, I would be remiss if I  neglected to mention Peter's birthday today.  Happy Birthday, Peter.

Hopefully the thing that's been clogging my blogging pipes will be gone soon.

Well, my old-school buddy Jason turns 32 today.  Jason and I have been friends since pre-school.  We pretty much attended every year of school together, all the way through our undergraduate years.  Here's a picture of me and him (Jason on the left... I don't know what the heck I'm doing) at one of my brother's birthday parties.  He was the friend I got to invite.

Happy birthday, man.  Go play some slaughterball today for me.

It's Jenna's 2nd birthday!  Wow, I can't believe it's already been 2 years.  Here's one of the pictures we took yesterday for our Christmas cards.

That was really fun.  I don't have a nice flash, so I had to resort to auxiliary lighting.  All things considered, I think they turned out pretty well.

Jenna constantly amazes me with what she knows.  She was playing with some blocks this morning and I asked her how many blocks she had.  She said, "Let's count.  One... Two... Three... Four."  Wow.

She's counted as high as 20, and can say the entire alphabet.  She loves to play with toy animals and make them talk with each other.  She loves to play "knock knock", where she'll close a door, we'll knock and she'll let us in, grab our hand and pull us in for a "visit".  Fun times.

This release was exciting me before I made the move to Microsoft, and getting to be a part of it has made me even more excited about what we're giving our customers in this release.  If you're not familiar with Visual Studio, it is a suite of software development tools for creating just about any application or library you can think of.  I'll be writing more about this release in the coming weeks, but for now, go to www.microsoft.com/vstudio and check it out!

Today is my 1-year anniversary at Microsoft.  I've been having a blast working on all kinds of crazy stuff including but not limited to:

• Silverlight
• VS 2008 (Orcas)
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server)

And, Seattle has turned out to be a really fun place to live.

Today is my buddy Dave's birthday.  Here's a picture of him from a few weeks ago when he visited, which was a blast.  I've really missed Dave since we moved to Washington, so it was awesome that he could visit.

Luckily, Halo 3 is coming out soon, so we'll be hanging out alot more virtually.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

Today is our 8 year anniversary.  Eight years seems like a really long time!  This past year has been a crazy year for us.  We've moved across the country, away from all our friends and family.  And, through it all, Becky's put up with all my crazy shenanigans.

Thanks, Becky.

Today is the MIX07 keynote (watch it live right now).  Scott Guthrie is currently on-stage spilling the beans about what's been going on here.  He just announced that Silverlight (v1.1) includes a cross-platform (Mac/PC at the moment) version of the CLR and the .net framework. I'll be talking about this alot in the coming months.  It's incredibly exciting stuff.

The NetFlix guys are on-stage showing off a demo of their new over-the-web movie viewing experience.  I hadn't seen this demo before. Very cool.

Scott just did his chess demo where the CLR engine plays chess against the IE javascript engine.  Very funny.

Scott just demoed cross-platform debugging (Running a Silverlight program on the Mac and hitting a breakpoint inside VS running on a PC).  Fantastic.

Scott's doing his airline demo.  I love this one because he starts with a cheesy "Hello World" app, and ends up with a fully-functional airline flight schedule viewer with crazy animations of planes flying around.

Scott just announced open source Ruby for .NET (IronRuby).  He's developing a Silverlight app with Ruby on the Mac with standard Mac tools.  Good job, John.  Now he's showing the dynamic language console, that gives you an interactive REPL console with Intellisense that can use any of the dynamic languages, or even mix the languages together on the fly.  All in the browser.  Freaking awesome.  I think alot of people missed the announcement about the DLR (dynamic language runtime) that anyone can use to build a dynamic language on top of .Net.

Wow, I've seen the MLB demo, but I hadn't seen the version running on the mobile phone!

In all the busy-ness of the last week or so, I neglected to announce that my brother-in-law Ben and his wife Nicole had their baby.  Congratulations to them.  We're looking forward to meeting Cormac Anthony Patterson in person this summer.

So, we still don't have power, but things are looking up.  Let me give you the rough timetable so far.

• Thursday, Dec 14th ~8pm: Wind starts picking up. Lights begin to dip occasionally.
• ~10:30: Power goes out.  Ticked because I was in the middle of a Halo match.
• ~11:30: By this time, the wind is really blowing.  The sound of branches breaking off can be heard occasionally throughout the surrounding woods.
• Friday, Dec 15th ~12:30am: The wind is blowing like crazy.  The gusts are bending the trees to an alarming degree.  We decide we should move downstairs in case one decides to fall.  This wakes Jenna up and she decides we are playing some kind of game.  She spends the next several hours honking our noses.
• ~2:00am:  I am VERY concerned about falling trees.  With each gust, the sounds of breaking trees can be heard.
• ~4:00am:  Jenna is finally asleep.  The wind seems to have subsided.  We go back upstairs to be comfortable.
• ~morning: Damage is surveryed.  Nothing major.  Check around the neighborhood.  Nothing terrible.  Patiently wait for power to be restored.
• ~noon: It's getting cold.  I look for some firewood.  All I find is soaked through.
• ~3pm: still no warmth.  We decide to bail.  We call the Flints and head to Bellingham.
• ~7pm: We arrive in Bellingham, warm up, and stay the night.
• Saturday, Dec 16th: Head back to our house to check on the cats.  The daylight reveals the devestation of the infrastructure.  Trees are down everywhere.  Powerlines are a tangled mess.  The power's going to take a while.  We make sure the cats are OK, and head back to Bellingham.
• Sunday, Dec 17th: Attend Jeff's church and locate a generator that meets our criteria.  Big enough to run the furnace, small enough to fit in the trunk.  Head back to the house and fire it up.  Becky took Jenna to a friend's house while the house warmed up.
• 8pm: the house reaches 60 degrees, our criteria for staying the night, so Becky brings Jenna back and we put her to bed.
• 10pm: the house reaches normal temperature.
• Monday, Dec 18th 12:30am: The furnace stops working and the house begins cooling fast (the structure itself has not yet heated up to normal)
• 1:00am: We head to Becky's friends house and spend the rest of the night.
• Daytime: Jenna and Becky hang out at her friends house, and I go into work to see about arranging furnace repairs and do other errands in addition to keeping work from falling too far behind.
• Evening: return to Becky's friends house, and have a nice evening playing with Jenna and xbox. Becky and friend go check on cats, which are freaking out, but otherwise doing fine.
• Tuesday, Dec 19th: Some work.  The furnace guys show up and confirm my diagnosis of a faulty flame sensor.  Furnace working again.
• Evening: Head to another one of Becky's friends for some nice dinner.
• 8:00pm: I get a call from my realtor, who just got power and offers his huge generator.
• ~9:30pm: Big generator hooked up and running.  Now we can run some lights and other stuff. Additionally, it runs all night on a tank of gas, rather than having to fill every 5 hours.  Also discover cable service is out.  No xbox.
• Wednesday, Dec 20th morning: wake up from a very pleasant and successful night. Fill tank on the generator and go out to get more gas.  Then head into work.
• 1pm: Becky and Jenna join me at work for some lunch.

In somewhat unrelated news, I saw what I believe to be a couple of river otters swimming in the creek yesterday evening.  The reason I think they were otters was they looked like otters, and the tracks I found in the snow look like otter tracks. I'll have to keep my eyes open for them and maybe get some pictures.

I've gotten lots of inquiries lately where, for now, the answer is simply, "we're alive".  If you weren't aware, the Seattle area was pounded last Thursday by an incredibly fierce windstorm.  Over two thirds of the houses in the area lost power, which equates to over a million customers (houses/businesses). We live in one of the areas hardest hit by the storm.

Luckily, we, our cats, our home, our cars, and everything else all escaped unharmed.  However, we have been without electricity since Thursday night.  We decided the best course of action with a one-year-old was to get the heck out of there.  We stayed with the Flints Friday and Saturday night.  After a brief period of warmth on Sunday brought by a generator, we are now staying at a friends house in nearby Kirkland who regained power on Sunday.

I'll update more when I have more time.  For now, I'm working on getting the furnace fixed.  Either running it continuously for about 8 hours damaged part of the ignition system, or running it from a generator screwed something up.

Hopefully, everything will be cleared up in time for us to make a Saturday flight to Texas for the holidays, but they're saying it may be Friday or Saturday before our power gets turned back on.

I was watching Jenna this afternoon, and she was crawling around and generally having fun.  She crawled over to a little book (Goodnight Gorilla, to be exact), openned it up, and began making noises.  This was nothing new.  She does this often, and we think she is pretending to read it.  What I was most amazed by was that she began making sounds like E-I-E-I.  This of course is familiar.  So, I grabbed her Old MacDonald book, which was nearby, and began reading it.  Lo and behold, Everytime I read, "Old MacDonald had a farm...", she would respond with E-I-E-I-E-I.  I was completely amazed.

I took me a while to realize that I ought to be videoing it.  By the time I started rolling, she was less interested, but I did get it a few times. If I get a chance this evening, I'll get it encoded and get a clip up here.

Today is the birthday of my good friend Dave Barnes.  Dave and I played trombone together at Baylor.  He and his wife Jen moved here to Austin a few years after we did.  Them being here made our decision to move a difficult one.  I'll certainly miss Dave, but thanks to XBox Live, we can still play.

Here he is leaping over the creek on the frisbee golf course near my house.  He made it...this time.

Well, today I am officially unemployed.  I just made my last commute home from Freescale Semiconductor.  I'll really miss my old team and the fun times we've had.

Now that I'm unemployed, Becky and I are free to follow our dream of moving to Washington state in hopes of finding the elusive sasquatch or "wood ape".  That's right, I'm not going to work for Microsoft after all.

My plan is to drive through the forest roads at high speed, hoping to catch the beast unawares and hit it with my huge, 80's style station wagon.  Thinking it dead, I'll strap it to the roof and drive home, only to have it wake up and scare us.  In my panic, I'll brake abruptly, sending the hairy bigfoot flying through the air.

After some misadventures, my family and I will grow to love the gentle giant, and seek to return him to his home, lest he be poached by his arch-nemesis, Jacques LaFleur.  In doing so, we'll realize that if we lived more like these gentle sasquatches, in harmony with nature, that we'd all be better off.

I'm going through the piles and piles of electronics I've accumulated over the years trying to decide what goes and what stays.  I've got a fair number of items that I don't think deserve to be trashed, but I don't want to cart them halfway across the country (literally). So, I've decided to list a few items of interest in hopes that they will find a good home.

The rules are, items will go to whomever I feel like, mostly a function of convenience for me.  If there is alot of demand for an item, money will grease the wheels for you :). If there are specific items you want from the "bundles", let me know and I'll think about it. Here are the items:

• Playstation 2 "bundle".  Includes:
  • console (w/network adapter)
  • 4 controllers (with a multitap)
  • logitech force-feedback steering wheel
  • Handful of games including Amplitude, Gran Turismo 3, Burnout 3 and Socom II
  • All normal cables plus component and s-video
• GameCube Bundle:
  • Console (platinum) (w/network adapter)
  • 1 controller (2 if I can find the other one)
  • 2 sets of Bongos
  • handful of games including Donkey Konga, Zelda (several versions), and Mario Kart (if I can find it)
• Robosapien
• 2 10-inch subs w/amp all installed in box.
• Several PC cases of various age.  One is a very nice black Antec desktop, which I replaced only a few months ago because I needed a tower for my new desk.
• A couple of old CRT monitors.  They technically work, but are old. One is huge (19" I think) one is more like 17".
• Large RC car.  Electric.  Great fun.  with good charger.  A couple of cycles and the battery should be fine.
• Tivo Series 1 - The hard drive is kaput, but there are numerous hacks available to replace it and do other cool things to it.
• Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 - This is an old iPod-like device. It technically still works, but it pretty much sucks. I'd love to just take it apart and hack on it, but I haven't gotten around to it.  It's got some interesting  features. Digital optical input, surround sound support, etc.
• Lots of really old stuff like modems, video cards, etc and stuff that I'm pretty sure no one wants.

I'll add more as I come across it.

Things have been uber-crazy around here the last month or so. The quality and quantity of my posts had been seriously lacking, and there have been tons of things to post about.  Jenna's crawling everywhere, standing up and walking while holding stuff, and starring in a broadway musical (OK 2 out of 3 isn't bad).

Anyway, I've neglected my readers, and I apologize for that. Hopefully that will change soon. I thought I would come up for air for a moment to announce that I have accepted a position at Microsoft.  Becky, Jenna and I will be relocating to Redmond, WA (near Seattle) sometime in August (wow, that's soon isn't it).

I will really miss my current team, our local friends, and church; but Becky and I are super-excited about this new opportunity.  I'll post some more details when I get a chance (and after I learn for sure what I'm allowed to talk about), but for now I can tell you I'll be working on the Common Language Runtime team.

I've updated my blog's tagline (at least temporarily) to celebrate.  Halo 3 was just officially announced.  Hop over to bungie.net and check out the trailer, or download it from the XBox Live marketplace.

I simply can't wait.  I'm going to pour all my energy into building a time machine so I can travel ahead to 2007.

It's my buddy Peter's birthday today.  He's finally as old as me again.  Here he is holding Jenna for the first time, which I'm glad he got to do.

Happy Birthday, man.

Today is my mom's birthday.  She got the short end of the stick having her birthday so close to Christmas.  This is her first birthday as a grandmother, a role that she has taken with much vigor. She was in town here yesterday watching Jenna while Becky was out, but I didn't get to see her since I was at work.  Hopefully, we can see her this weekend and have some birthday festivities.

As usual, I'm not including a picture for her, for fear of some kind of demented payback since she doesn't like pictures.

Well, it's that time of year again.  My school chum Jason Owens is a year older.  Happy birthday, man.

Here he is from Christmas 2003.  Maybe this year I can get an updated picture.

Now that we're home, I finally got a chance to process and upload my photos from birth on Friday morning to the homecoming today.  Warning, there are a couple of gooey baby shots from the delivery, but nothing to bad (I kept a few private).

Click the photo for my set on Flickr.

In addition, you can check out Jen and Dave's set from their visit Sunday evening to bring some Chipotle to a tired daddy, just like I did for Dave when James was born.

For those itching for pictures, but not patient enough to wait for me to upload mine, they can check out my dad's blog.

We're doing OK.  We're pretty tired.  We plan on taking advantage of the nursery tonight so we can be rested for when we go home and don't have a fully-staffed nursery.

This morning, at 7:37am CST, Jenna Evelyn Miller was born, one day early, by c-section. She had turned since our last ultrasound earlier in the week and was breach (breech? beached?).

Everything is fine and Becky and Jenna are both resting.

Evidently, this is the time of year when all the cool software developers have their babies.

Pictures are coming, I'm blogging from the delivery room

[UPDATE: 11:30am]  I forgot to include the stats.  7 lbs 15 oz, 20 inches.  Will get pictures up this afternoon.  Lots to do!

(some photos are from my Dad's Flickr account. clicking them will take you his and not mine)

No, it's not the day of the week I take a shower...yet.  The date is fast approaching and we had our final baby shower today.  This one was the "old school" shower that we had in Belton, basically for friends of my parents who were unable to make it to Austin for our other shower.  It was a good time to catch up on some of the people that I grew up around, or were parents of my friends and such.  We also got alot of goodies for the baby.

An unexpected surprise was that Courtney showed up.  Unfortunately, I had not communicated that I would be there, so Heath didn't come, which would have been really fun.  But, Becky was telling me how glad she was that she came.

Andrew and Sara were there as usual.  We can always count on them.  Goods friends of the family Kandy Kirkley, Judy Owens, and Kathy Thompson rounded out the rest of the shower organizers (along with good ol Mom and Dad).  Thanks for all for the wonderful gifts and your hard work to help us out.  We really appreciate it.

Oh yeah.  This morning at church, we were greeted to a surprise shower by the youth department.  It was really nice, and they gave us a heap (of the 64-bit size) of diapers, which will of course be extremely useful.  It was really fun, except that they made me eat baby food, which was quite possibly the nastiest thing I have ever put in my mouth.  It was quite difficult to fight the gag reflex.  In fact, just writing about it is making me ill.  Thankfully, a couple of girls from our class of juniors also ate it.  I wouldn't have been able to do it without them.

My dad's got a whole set of pictures on his Flickr site.  I didn't take many.

As an update to a previous entry, Peter Golde has updated the PowerCollections library to be compatible with the final release of Whidbey.  Yeah! I can go back to using the official release!

My brother, Andrew, and his wife, Sara, have started a blog.  He's piggybacking off of my site for now.  Here's his inaugural post.  Let's hope we hear more from him.

This weekend, Becky had her masters recital.  She's been at UT for the last two years getting her masters in French Horn performance.  It was fabulous! She played what was, in my opinion, an incredibly hard program.  One piece was difficult enough that she went through about a dozen accompanists before one could commit to the piece, which was modern and weird, but exceptionally performed. Congratulations Becky!

Her parents and brothers were in town, as were my parents, brother and sister-in law.  It was a great time.  Jen and Dave were there as well.  Since there were 3 Flickr-ers there, I created a Flickr group to share all the photos.  Check it out.  There are some great shots from everyone. Our mothers brought a huge spread for the reception after the recital.  Thanks again for that you guys. After the reception, the gang came back to our place for some fajitas a la Mark and Dave, which seemed to be well received.

The weekend was exhausting overall and left me feeling sick Sunday morning.  But I'm feeling better now.  Bring on the new Halo maps!

It's my friend Peter's birthday today.  I'd tell you how old he is, but I don't even remember how old I am.  Here's a picture from a couple of years back of Peter in the Olive Garden in Waco, Texas.  I believe the haircut is a few revisions behind, but the goofy grin is up to date.  Sometime, we'll make it out to Cali for a visit and stay at their new place.

Happy Birthday, buddy.  I believe I have the distinction of being the first to say it online.

Well, it looks like the Lady Bears are gonna win it all.  That's really exciting.  They really deserve it.  I played in the basketball band at almost every home game while I was at Baylor.  Just heard the 'bones playing Emperial March.  Cool to see the band still doing some of the things that Dave, Jeff, and I started while we were there.

[Update] It's now official

[Update] changed 'game' to 'band'. He he

marklio.com, as well as my dad's site bellcountyblogger.com, is now being served from a real server!  I just made the switch a little earlier today to a hosting company.  I've been really impressed with them so far.  The transition was absolutely seamless, although I am still hammering out some email details that were not available before.  I'm discontinuing the gallery in favor of hosting all my images on Flickr.  That way all those images won't take a bit out of my bandwidth (although I have plenty).  Hopefully that will provide a better experience for everyone, especially once they integrate photo printing.  My redirector will continue redirecting the old dnsalias addresses.  Hopefully those will all get cleaned up before my port 80 gets blocked. Up until now, I've been relying on the business class cable modem service provided by my employer, but they're discontinuing that soon and the standard package blocks port 80.

I've been pretty lucky so far on the comment spam here until yesterday when the floodgates opened.  To combat it, I've enabled the Captcha feature that requires you to type a confirmation number to be able to post a comment.  It is fairly self-explanatory and should work fine.  Let me know if there are any problems with leaving comments.

P.S. This will most likely prevent using third-party tools to leave comments (like RSSBandit, etc).

[UPDATE] Jen and Dave are having a similar war on comment spam with WordPress.  Her blog software of choice.

I never got a chance to wish a happy birthday to B-Dub.  His birthday is pretty close to mine and we usually hook up with he and Jan at some point for some dinner.  Somehow, we've neglected to do that yet, despite the fact that we live in the same city.  Maybe he should get an XBox and Halo 2, then those pesky few miles would become irrelevant.

Happy belated birthday, D-Dub.

Keep an eye on this space for a photo.  I've got the perfect one, but I don't have access to it at the moment.

Well, the cat's out of the bag.  It's my birthday. (Not that I was trying to hide it).  I'm 29 today (0x1D for my fellow nerds).  It's been a pretty interesting year.  Thanks to everyone who's sent me birthday wishes in one form or another.

[UPDATE 5:28pm] I missed Peter's announcement because he upgraded to dasBlog 1.7 and it broke an outdated RSS feed link.  He claims to have been the first, but my dad announced it last Friday, although he also announced his anniversary almost 6 months early as well, so I'm not sure that should count.

Well, I just completed the upgrade to dasBlog 1.7.  (dasBlog is the software that runs my blog) I've been pretty excited about it because it will address several woes I've been having, not the least of those being referral spam.  Omar, Scott, and a host of others deserve a big pat on the back for their contributions.  Thanks, guys. Check out Scott's announcement for more links and details on new features if you're interested...you're probably not.

The upgrade was complex since it attempts to do alot of fixing and cleaning of old data, but everything went fairly smoothly once I figured out I had accidently wiped out my custom theme in the move.  One nice side-effect is that my really old entries from when I was running BlogX are editable again.  Some hadn't even been viewable.  I immediately took the opportunity to clean up my categories which had gotten way out of hand.  I still have too many, but it's actually manageable now.  I'm looking forward to playing with the new features and seeing the performance improvements.  I'll probably be doing alot of upgrading of other blogs I manage tomorrow after I've had a chance to work any and all kinks out of the system.

I recently announced my dad's foray into the world of blogging.  Well, after some issues with MSN spaces, we've decided to abandon it in favor of a more controlled solution.

So, here's his new location, complete with fancy domain name, BellCountyBlogger.com.  I'm hosting his blog now using the same software I use.  We're still working the kinks out as of today, but he's already putting content up.

After months of prodding, I finally got my dad to start a blog.  I think MSN spaces will suit him well since he likes to take pictures and spaces has some nice photo integration.  I think it will end up being an interesting collection of family information, pictures of anything and everything, and hilarity.

Check out his inaugural post.  Hopefully, he'll like the format and continue.

[UDPATE] I've killed the old links above since he's got a new blog and his MSN Space is defunct.  Go to BellCountyBlogger.com instead.

Today is my mom's birthday!  Yeah!  I know I usually post a picture of my birthday subjects, but I know she would be mad at me.

Happy Birthday!  Thanks for the many years of support you've given for me to take apart our appliances, make our electricity bill high with tons of electronics in my room, and risk the wrath of Child Protective Services by letting me sleep on the floor, in the closet, in the attic, in the camper, outside on the ground, in a tree, on the roof, in a hammock, etc.

Today is the birthday of my good friend Jason Owens. Happy Birthday!  This is a picture from last Christmas. I miss the old birthdays where we'd all go spend the night at your house and play slaughterball and watch The Three Amigos.

Happy Birthday!

Well, I sold some old games back to GameStop and got a sweet deal on a new XBox.  I'm holding off on the other XBox-related items on my wishlist in case I receive some for Christmas, so for now, I've got one controller and the game bundle it came with (NCAA 2005 football and TopSpin (tennis)).

I realize it's a bit late in the game for reviews, but, as someone new to the XBox, I thought I'd take a few minutes and relate my first impressions of the hardware (especially in comparison to PS2 and GameCube):

The console itself:

It's enormous and heavy! It's as wide as the PS2 (PS2 in flat position), almost as tall as the GameCube, and much deeper than either of them.  It also weights almost as much as both of them combined.

The front connections are pretty nice, rivaling the GameCube. The lack of memory card connectors helps with cleanness.  The mess that the PS2 becomes in the front is ridiculous with un/plugging multitaps, memory cards, etc.

The back is very clean.  A standard, non-polarized AC power cord connection, a single A/V connection, and an ethernet port is all there is. Both the PS2 and GameCube are pretty messy in the back.  The GameCube attempts to “cheat“ it's size by moving its transformer to the middle of the cable, which is very inconvenient. I suspect it will get more messy when I get the HD connector.

The controller (the “S” controller):

The controller worried me the most.  I had only played with the ridiculous huge controllers that used to ship with the console.  I was pleasantly surprised.  They seem to have taken their cue from GameCube on the size and general shape of the controller, which makes it pretty pleasing to hold (for me).  The joysticks/D-pad/button placement is also the same as GC, which I like much more than the PS-style.

The button layout is similar to the PS, organized in a cross.  My preference there is mixed, depending on the game.  The triggers are strikingly similar to the DreamCast, as well as the expansion slots, although there is no “hole” for an in-controller LCD screen, which I felt never really worked out on the DC.  I like the idea of the headset connecting to the controller rather than the console on the PS, which really sucked.

In addition, the buttons are pressure-sensitive (at least the main ones), which was missing from the GC.  It has some extra buttons like the “black/white” buttons and the “back/start” buttons, that seem to come in pretty handy for adding those extra in-game features without adding alot of confusion for button usage.  I'll have to see how they are utilized in other games.

Another improvement over the GC is that the right joystick is the same as the left one, not a little crippled nub.  They are also both concave on the top, which I like more, especially when attempting to execute the awkward “push the joystick“ movement, (which is missing from the GC).

I also like that cord extension connections are built-in to the cord rather than use the larger console connection.

It's pretty hard to beat the overall comfort of the GC controller, but the things the XBox adds and improves upon seem to make it superior.  It's pretty easy to beat the socks off of the PS controller.

P.S.  XBox live support is great. They very quickly determined that the uPnP support on my router was keeping me from connecting.  Disabling it did the trick.  I'll have to see if that was causing problems for some of my PS2 games.

Jeff reminds us that it's his birthday.  Sorry I don't have a better picture of you on-hand.  Happy birthday, buddy.

I'd like to welcome my good friend Jeff Flint and his wife Bethany to the world of blogging!  I just ran across their url in my referrer logs.

Jeff was a fellow trombone player/fraterny brother/crazy person with me at Baylor.  I got a chance to hang out for a little while with he and Bethany recently and had a great time.

I'm looking forward to staying more in sync with the Flints.

Today is my little brother's birthday!  Happy birthday Andrew!

Well, I'm back.  I'm now running plain ol' XP Pro.  Everything went down hill after I installed Apache.  Then, to make matters worse, I accidently quickformatted my data drive during the XP install, which I don't recommend.  Back from a restore now, I managed not to lose anything.

Today is my dad's birthday!  Happy Birthday, Daddio!