Saturday

It's Saturday morning, I have a full cup of coffee (thank you Dunn Brothers Tanzania roast), and I'm feeling blog-ish.

Week 2 of my cast being off - almost all the wrist pain is gone now, but I am still working on range of motion. From what the doctor said it would take at least a month, maybe more before I am back to full strength.

Erin and I have been playing a lot of DDR (actually "StepMania", the PC version that lets you line up all the games into one) for exercise recently. DDR is really a neat game - I do a half hour of exercise before I even realize it's been a half hour. And even though you get a score on every song, it doesn't really matter in terms of exercise because a wrong step expends the same amount of energy as a right one. I love insanely happy Japanese techno (my friend and Japan aficionado Lisa informed me they call that "Hardcore Happy" because the songs are like happy on steroids and crack).

In home IT news, I just upgraded my server to Ubuntu Linux 10.04 (code named "Lucid Lynx"). So far pretty nice. I also finally go through the 13 days of drive checking on my two new 1.5 TB backup drives and am in the process of backing up the entire server. So for those keeping score, the server has two 2TB RAID-5 arrays which means I can lose two drives before losing any data, and if I had a catastrophic failure on that machine, the 3TB offline backup on the secondary server now has everything. Still working on that offsite backup...I also purchased a new Logitech MX Performance mouse to replace one of my 3 remaining (7-year-old, ailing) IBM mice that are no longer made. I may get another one for work, these are cordless, high battery life, micro-USB rechargeable, and overall just nice.

In work news, the product I work on, after a successful GA (General Availability) in March seems to be well-received, and we have more work than we really know what to do with now. I've also had the opportunity to do a little side project using the ARM-based processor architecture - ARM processors are used in many smart phones because they are so low-power. I am really fortunate to have a job that gives me the opportunity to do and learn so many new and interesting things. This is another interesting article on ARM processors in servers.

In other news - well there isn't a ton of other news, but I am back to playing saxophone now after my 6-week hiatus, and will try playing small handbells next Monday. The year is winding down for most groups with summer approaching. We (mostly Erin) have been getting the seedlings planted in the garden - with the early spring, we may get a really good crop, some things are already taking off. Got to test out my new Troy-Bilt lawn mower Monday - having the self-propel drive on the back wheels (vs. the front wheels on my old mower) is going to take some getting used to, but the mower works well and truly is a one-pull start as advertised.

Finally, one of my new year's resolutions for the year was to see the show "Wicked" and in August we're going to do just that - we got early release tickets (thank you IBM club) to the show at the Orpheum in Minneapolis. Erin and I are both very excited!

I'll again put in my plug for what I think are this year's two best new TV shows - "Glee" and "Modern Family" - if you missed out on these, I'm sure the DVDs will be out soon :) Also very disappointed with the "V" remake - Hollywood, please at least try to have a creative idea or two. Please?