Category: Life

Update 02-20-05: I cancelled this order with Cingular. I’ll be staying with Alltel and my cell number will remain the same.

I just ordered (yet another) new cell phone and I haven’t even told my wife yet. The good thing is that it was only $29.95 and no shipping or sales tax. It’s not the worlds greatest phone but it should work for my purposes and I’ve heard that Cingular has decent coverage in North Raleigh. We’ll see. It has an optional camera phone that goes with it for $44.00 if I feel like I need it later.

Look for pics of my new truck tomorrow. It’s sad but I haven’t been feeling well enough lately to even go to the driveway to take the photos. I’m also going to hook up the Nikon Coolscan that finally arrived a few days ago so I can start scanning slides. I know stomach flu wreaks havoc on most people but try it with Crohn’s. It will probably take until this time next month before I completely recover. I feel pretty slack about my entries. Obviously I’ve had a lot to blog about lately, I just haven’t made the time to do it.

I apologize for my lack of updates lately. I’ve been slammed at work and at home. More work, more birthdays (my dads this time) and then more work again. Today Amy loaded AOL Instant Messenger on my primary PC at home so that she could chat with Katie. Innocent enough. But then to my shock, horror and embarrassment I found Weatherbug on my Start Menu tonight. I’m not sure what saved me from the stroke. Devinne intervention?

Ad-Aware to the rescue – save me now. Sure ‘nuf, 13 data miners were found, quarantined and deleted. Whoa. I still feel violated. The machine seems healthy. Amy didn’t know any better. And like most people she doesn’t understand my concern. So for those who can’t see the “big deal” – Weatherbug is spyware. It loads cookies (files) on your PC to track where you go o the Internet. And AOL is happy to load it for you with Instant Messenger unless you specifically say no. To explain how robust and efficient it is I’ll let the fact that it made 76 connections to 13 sites for traffic reporting in the 9 hours it was on my PC stand as testament. And now I’ve done my “end user support” duties for the evening.

In my world AOL stands for All Outta Luck. Stay away from it at all costs. If you must use IM software, please use Yahoo Messenger. Your PC will thank you. Just for the record, I let Amy keep AOL IM installed. I cleaned off the rest of the garbage it came with.

Connor was urging me to open the front door this morning so he could look outside. What do ya know? It’s snowing. And just three days ago it was 70 degrees here. Amy was dressed first so she got Connor together and took him outside for his first walk in the snowflakes. She couldn’t find our digital camera so she got his pic with the camera on her phone. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the images we can download off the Audiovox 8910‘s.

Camera phones are a must have with kids. It makes it so easy to collect pics that our parents missed (or never got developed). Later this afternoon I’m going to burn our entire photo directory to CD and back up the mySQL database running this blog to an excel file or something I can import later if necessary.