My brother flew in from Boston for the long weekend, and my parents came, too. My mother-in-law was also in attendance. We ate Cornish Hens instead of Turkey – because Malin was our chef du jour and she would rather both cook and eat the wee chicks vs. a large turkey. All of the other fair was fairly standard Turkey-day fare: ham, macaroni & cheese, stuffing, deviled eggs, biscuits, and sweet potato casserole. We had some other less traditional menu items as well: broccoli & craisin salad and brussel sprouts.

My mom brought Wall-E on DVD for Will. He has now watched the movie three times already since Thanksgiving.

On Friday, all the men (including Will) went out to shop for Black Friday deals. We had four places to visit. None of the things on our lists were critical, so we let ourselves sleep in. Due to our late departure, we struck out on all but the last.

• Staples did not have the 24″ widescreen LCD monitor on sale in Peachtree City (it was ~$100 off in Greenville, SC per an ad that my dad brought with him).
• Wolf Camera had long since run out of the free 4GB x 3 memory cards. Yes, that’s right – buy three 4GB memory cards (SD or CompactFlash – and good memory, too: SanDisk Extreme III) for $20 each and get $60 back via mail-in rebate. No wonder they went quickly.
• K-Mart had run out of $179 Sony Blu-Ray players ($120 off) by the time we arrived.

The one deal we were able to take advantage of: $7.99 for a 50-pack of DVD-Rs at Best Buy. Only three packs were left; I bought two of them. I also snagged a copy of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels on DVD as it was on sale for only $3.

While at Best Buy, Will and I introduced my brother Jake to Rock Band. Will and I had first played this at my friend Desmond’s in North Carolina last month. They had the full ensemble set up on their demo Xbox 360 system. We let Jake warm up with a simple tune first: Eye of the Tiger. We then decided to play one last one before heading out: Peace Sells But Who’s Buying. It was an entertaining moment at the PTC Best Buy…

Luckily, online stores were participating in Black Friday sales this year which means I got nearly of the deals I originally was hoping to score – just not from a retail, brick’n'mortar store. Gotta love Frys.com and Amazon.com!

On Saturday, out in the soaking rain, I again attempted to brew a batch of holiday beer (I tried cooking up a batch last weekend but failed miserably). The weather was less than stellar. I will not be brewing beer in the rain again anytime soon. Despite the foul precipitation and several aggravating missteps (including the depressing breakage of my thermometer calibrator), brew day went admittedly more smoothly than last week’s attempt.

Tonight, I’ve finally removed some nasty spyware from my computer. One of the guests here for Thanksgiving was browsing/surfing and apparently inadvertently installed a nasty one onto my machine: go.google redirects, security sites blocked, and Windows Firewall automatically disabling itself. And the whole canniving thing secured itself from removal via a TDSS rootkit. I may have to create a Virtual Machine specifically for guest internet browsing to prevent this sort of “innocent” infestation again…

I’m still compiling some photos from our trip to LA. I know, I know – it’s been nearly two months since we got back, and nary an image or paragraph detailing the trip on this blog. I’m also working on pictures from Halloween (the whole family dressed up to go trick-or-treating!). Stay tuned…

This past weekend we saw crazy storms here in Atlanta. Friday night saw a few funnel clouds that wrecked random parts of town, including (oddly enough) parts of midtown and downtown. The next day saw more bad weather with more tornado warnings and horribly-sized hailstones. Luckily, down here in Fayette county, we avoided all of the bad weather. It was wet on Saturday, but absolutely awesome yesterday. We spent most of the time on the deck under a big umbrella. Malin was apparently not completely under the umbrella since she turned red on her shoulders. Luckily for us, Will and I completely avoided oversunning.

Work has been very busy for me for the past month, and it has been picking up for Malin over the past few weeks. That is the main reason I haven’t posted in over a month. That’s what I tell myself anyway. Other reasons are that there hasn’t been a lot going on lately… Will’s addiction to Lego Star Wars has not abated, so we’ve decided to cut him off from XBox for a while. We’re interested to see exactly what Will will be like after he gets through this painful period of withdrawal.

We had thought about getting a Nintendo Wii. In fact, we still are thinking about it. They are still hard to come by, however. I figured the lack of availability was limited to Christmas season, but here in March they are still hard to get. We ventured out last weekend, determined to purchase one, but the Toys’R'Us had just sold their last one. They directed us to another location in Morrow that still had two more in stock. But, alas, by the time we got to Morrow (about a 15-20 minute drive from Fayetteville), they too were sold out.

We will not be getting the Lego Star Wars game for Wii (despite the fact that it includes the original trilogy and looks really cool…). We’ll try to stick with games that are more interactive from a physical perspective. You know, swinging-the-controller-around-like-a-crazy-person kind of interactive – like sports. These should help him outgrow his addiction to Star Wars (he even dreams about it lately). I’m almost afraid to ever show him the movies – afraid that he’ll become so unhealthily engrossed in it again. We’ll see. He’s about at an age where Malin and I would be comfortable with him watching the first movie (the original from 1977, not Episode I) – were it not for his current obsession anyway.

So lately we’ve been trying to find other things to keep his interest. Luckily, he likes reading (or rather being read to – he’s not reading by himself yet). He also likes Webkinz: simple online games, completely absent of light sabers, Jedis, and Jango Fett (Will’s favorite character). Plus there are interesting ways to interact with the Webkinz pets – like helping the pets brush their teeth, build a vegetable garden, eat food, go to work, and go to school. You can even direct the pets to go to the potty (speaking of which, Will has been doing much better with regard to potty-training lately).

Another thing that Will has gotten interested in is “playing music notes”. Years ago, when I was in college, I wrote a DOS-based MIDI composition program. It is actually what I used to get most of my music into electronic form. Malin doesn’t care for the music: she can’t get past the fake instruments and distinctly video-game-like sound produced from my computer’s MIDI card. But Will likes it, and calls it “music notes”. He doesn’t mind listening to the music, but his favorite part is just changing the colors of the user interface so that everything looks hideous – from electric green to neon pink and everything in between. Then he’ll play a track to see how it looks.

Until recently, I was unable to run my program since I no longer have a sound card that works with DOS drivers (i.e. a Yamaha-OPL2/OPL3-compatible synthesizer with MPU-401-compatible MIDI device, running on default I/O ports). But my friend Scott clued me into DOSBox recently, and it works like a charm. It emulates old DOS hardware to run almost any old DOS application or video game while using your current, state-of-the-art devices and Windows drivers under-the-hood. I had to tweak the settings to get everything to run just right, but now it does.

Since installing DOSBox, I’ve used the program to write a couple of new songs. You’ve been warned – all sounds were generated from the MIDI hardware on my computer, so they’ll have a very video-game kind of sound. It doesn’t help that my expertise does not lie in orchestration. So sometimes I pick MIDI tracks that I think sound good, but they only further the “video game” quality of the music. I’ll let you decide. Here are two songs I wrote over the past week: song1 and song2. Sorry if the downloads are slow – the files are kind of big because these MP3s were encoded at a very high bitrate (nothing but the best for my original music!)

Just for some perspective, here a couple of songs that I wrote ten years ago, while still in college: song3 and song4. I’ve got lots and lots of these laying around, so maybe I’ll post more later. I’ll definitely post links so you can download my MIDI software and the DOSBox configuration for it to run sweetly. I’ll try to do so before another month goes by…

Sorry for the long bout with technical difficulties. This site has been down for quite some time. But now we’re back in business with a solution that should keep us in business for a long, long time to come…

I’ll write more later. The last post, The End of May, has some info on what we’ve been up to while this site has been down.

We were quite upset and discussed our options with them. Shortly after our troubles, we moved Malin’s photography site to TextDrive servers. We were able to do this because a colleague of mine at work has available bandwidth for his account there. I have been in discussions with another colleague of mine regarding SliceHost hosting. So we will likely move our web-site there in the near future. At that time – if not sooner – this blog will be operational again.

In the meantime, no one can read this post except me :(

Despite the fact that no one can access this blog now, I decided to begin writing posts again to make sure our lives are suitably documented.

As far as the news of the past many weeks:

• I’ve been to Ireland. I visited Belfast and Dublin and had a pretty decent time, despite the fact that I was there for business.
• My parents invited Malin, Will, and me to Savannah, GA (Tybee Beach in particular). We joined them for several days there. Will loved the beach, and we all had fun. I got to go shark-fishing with my dad (which, unfortunately, was a little slow due to less-than-stellar guides), Malin and I got to visit some of our old haunts, and Will got to have fun playing in the sand at the beach. Will also has a mark on his head even to this day – he fell and hit/cut his head on the corner of a table. That was a particularly crappy/scary morning. But when we realized that his injury did not require stitches or any other need for a doctor we all made it through the day a-otay.
• Malin got a new camera. All photos posted to her photo-blog since May 25^th have been with a super-swank Nikon D200 with a very nice lens (vs. her D50 for which she has one decent lens and one inexpensive “kit” lens). She swears that the camera was worth it because of the phenomenal pictures it takes. I trust her.
• We had a couple of friends over for Memorial Day. Little Will thinks that my friend Scott’s name is “Rupaul”. He also thinks that playing car racing games on the X-Box (Need for Speed: Carbon) is synonymous with “fast women”. Thanks for that one, Rupaul.

Whenever this site is back up, then you can all read the wonderful things I’ll be writing. Hopefully we’ll get this site up and running on the TextDrive servers soon.

Everything else should be the same as before – except more stable. I don’t expect to be struggling with MySQL every other day anymore… (thank goodness).

If you’re curious what is a “virtual server” then you can learn more here.

My computer (the one that hosts this site) rebooted itself earlier in the week upon downloading critical Windows updates. This made for a toxic situation that resulted in the MySQL database being irrevocably destroyed. This is the same scenario that completely killed our website when it was just a websiteling (about 6 weeks ago). Since that first fatality I’ve created a backup procedure that runs automatically (everyday, at 2am and 2pm).

Luckily, nothing was permanently lost. I restored the database from the backups, and everything is running smoothly again.

I have since reconfigured Windows Update so that it will not automatically install updates – thus preventing a situation that could recreate a terminal illness for the database.

So, anyhow, there is a gallery link at the top. It isn’t by any stretch complete: so far it only has the photos that we had on our old website – which are pictures of Will from his first several months of existence. I’m currently running software called Gallery 2 to manage the pictures, but I think I’ll change it out. Gallery 2 runs too slowly and seems like it will take a lot of work to get it to look good. So you’ll likely soon see it swapped out with photo album pages generated by JAlbum.

Malin has already started using JAlbum for her client galleries over at her photo blog. So we’ll likely start using it over here, too.

Some cool updates regarding our recent database disaster: the tech support guys at Sphere.com have been very helpful! Their site is a search engine for blog entries, and, as it turns out, they indexed Malin’s photo blog before our database crashed. After determining that they had processed her website and actually finding her website in search results, I e-mailed them asking if there was anyway they could send me their cached copy of the blog entries we lost. Today they sent us those entries – so a big nod and “thank you” to those guys. Unfortunately, they did not index this blog – just Malin’s photo blog. But it was cool that we were able to get some of our lost stuff recovered.

So stay tuned, and keep checking the gallery for updates. Eventually, it will have lots of our photos on it: our photographic records of Will’s childhood so far, as well as pics from all sorts of events (gatherings of friends and families, holidays, etc…)

The only real news of the past few weeks is that Will turned two on Thursday (1/11). He got to eat his favorite foods including chocolate cake:

Synopses of the posts that were lost during the database crash follow:

• Between Christmas and New Year’s we got our site, bluegosling.com, up and running: We bought the domain, setup all of the sites herein (which include a couple of blogs and a couple of place-holder web-sites for business), and published the first post. We are hosting the site on our own server here in the house. The down-side is that a real web-hosting service would provide things like back-up and recovery sources (doh!). But the up-side is that we have full control over everything, including the technology we use to build our site (like using WordPress to build the blog sites).
• On New Year’s Eve we celebrated with a meal of roast leg of lamb and toasted with Lindeman’s Péche (a fantastic Belgian ale that we typically prefer over champagne or sparkling wine). On New Year’s Day, I made a batch of beer (a great way to ring in the new year).
• This past Thursday was Will’s second birthday! Coincidentally, it was also my dad’s birthday (yes, Will and his grandfather have the same birthday – cool or what?!) Will got to eat his favorite things on his birthday – Pizza for lunch, Pasta for dinner, and, of course, chocolate cake! (see picture above).
• We decided not to throw a party for Will this year – yet. We’re waiting until the first weekend in February so guests can give me a hard time, too (since I turn 30 on the 31st).

That’s a brief recap of what we had talked about prior to losing our database. From now on, I plan on backing up the database nightly – just in case we have any further troubles.