Jun 27 2008
Came across this article today while surfing around the interwebs. Its titled “Fathering in America: What’s a Dad Supposed to Do?” Thought it had some useful advice and would be nice to share with other dads (and dad’s to be!) who may read this blog. Its brief but to the point.
Jun 24 2008
Sean has officially found his feet. He’s been playing with them for a couple days and loves his new “built in” toys. 🙂 Got some pictures of him playing with them on the changing table. Hope to get them up tonight.
Jun 23 2008
I recently added some new toys to my geeky collection. Back in October, Dmoney hooked me up with a new phone – the HTC 6700 for SprintPCS. I LOVED this phone, I actually used the mobile Word/Excel frequently, it was excellent for text messaging, was convenient to have a decent camera around, etc. Last week, the keyboard started to go out – requiring pretty excessive pressing to get things like the space bar and lower qwerty keys to work. It was also starting to lock up once in a while and when a reminder popped up, it immediately went away so I couldn’t disable, snooze, etc.
Anyway, our SprintPCs contract expired almost a year ago, so we decided to shop around to see what was available. After visiting a bunch of websites and spending some time in the CinciBell store, we determined our current plan with Sprint simply rocks and couldn’t find anyone to even match it. Long story short, Emily and I both got new phones yesterday. She got a new Katana and I got the HTC Mogul (the 6800). The Mogul is faster and runs Windows Mobile 6. Love the phone. Couple pics I stole from the net:
Next, I built a new computer. My previous PC was a Gateway we bought at Best Buy almost three years ago – AMD dual core 3800+ with (upgraded) 3GB RAM and one XFX 8800 GT 512mb video card.
Instead of store bought, I decided to go back to my old hobby and build one. I went to my old favorite, Newegg.com to do the shopping. I went with:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz, 12MB Cache
Motherboard: XFX MB-N780-ISH9 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI
CPU Cooler: ASUS V-60 92mm Vapo Bearing
RAM: mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
Video: XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT Extreme 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 – Added this to run in SLi
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos 1000
Power Supply: ZALMAN ZM750-HP Continuous 750W Modular LED Heatpipe-Cooled SLI Power Supply
This is by far the highest class machine I have ever built. I ran the FutureMark 3dMark06 on both my old computer and new computer and was pretty amazed. The old PC was running Vista Ultimate 32 bit and the new PC is running Windows XP Pro 64bit (to utilize all 4GB ram). 3Dmark on the old PC hit 3906 marks. The new PC was around 14,567 marks!! I may go to Vista 64Bit, but wasn’t really impressed with Vista enough for the 1.5 years or so I ran it. The changes to the control panel and Windows Explorer were enough to put me off. I never ran into stability or driver issues when using Vista, even with my printers.
Jun 16 2008
We started out on Saturday by attending a musical that Emily’s cousin Wes was in. It was a small theatre group introducing a new Christian musical. We enjoyed it. Sean enjoyed his afternoon with his Auntie Gamma (Emily’s Aunt Laurie).
Emily made us a reservation at John Philip’s in Crestview Hills. Its one of my new favorite restaraunts. The menu is small (wine list huge), but the selection of appetizers and entree’s is not missing anything. I went with the Filet (with a side of mushroom bourdalaise sauce) and Emily got the prime rib. Having a restaraunt of this nature makes me feel we don’t need to drive down to the waterfront anymore! The service is great as well. Our waiter was never overbearing and even remembered the last time we came in (and he wasn’t even our waiter that time!).
Ashley kept an ear out for Sean while we were out to eat – Thanks again Ash! Another advantage of the colony! Emily and I finished up the night watching the movie Jumper – although she didn’t make it through and had to finish it on Sunday. I don’t know why that movie got such a bad review when it was in theatre’s, as we both enjoyed it. Def. a renter and not a buyer though.
On Sunday, Emily, Sean, and I went to the Newport Aquarium. We got the idea a few weeks back when we visited a Petsmart store. He just stared with great awe into the little aquariums there.
Jun 12 2008
Sean did something amazing tonight…you just have to see it to believe it!!
May 31 2008
Paul and I have started making videos of Sean so everyone can see him in all his glory! Click the link below to get to our youtube site, or like always, click the “our videos” link on our sidebar.
Keep checking our videos site…we’ll hopefully be adding videos at least once a week!
May 22 2008
This is one of the funniest ads/videos I have ever seen. More info HERE
May 19 2008
Due to an old version of wordpress, our website was hacked this morning by Q8 and Killer Hack. Looks like I need to bite the bullet and upgrade the wordpress install on here. Doing so may make us lose some features that I’ve added to the theme over time – heck it will likely break the website altogether! Whatever the case, I will need to take the website offline to fix it. I will leave the gallery up, but the blog will be down. If anyone is curious, the hacker used this IP – 80.54.200.2 – to access the site. They used some kind of exploit on my wordpress version to change my 404.php page to be this:
This basically gave them a file editor and complete control (as if they had ftp access) to the website. With it, they browsed folders and upload/overwrote the main index file on this, and other websites I have hosted on this account. It was replaced with this:
I believe this is the same way/reason our site is providing popup spam. I haven’t located that yet, but I’ve looked a good deal. Because of all this, PaulandEmily.com will be briefly going offline for an overhaul. Probably really needed to anyway. May get a new theme while I’m at it.
