Electronic Age

In an effort to save some space and prevent Owen from ripping everything out of our entertainment center cabinets I have decided to pack up all our CD's and rely completely on our computer for our music. Over the past year I have loaded all of our music onto itunes and now that will be it. I feel a little better since I have the external hard drive to back everything up. As of now, I have over 3,000 songs, 12+ gb , and 9+ days of music I could listen to. I have the computer wired into our stereo in the house and out to the patio out back, so with that and our ipods, which we can use in the car, we shouldn't really need them. Most of the music I have bought lately has been electronically anyway.

Pumpkin Farm

Cathy took Liam and Owen to the pumpkin farm with my parents, my cousin Heather, and their cousin Anna. Looks like they had a great time. I got to meet them at the ice cream stand only to find out it was closed for the winter. Fun time for me. Anyway, some good pictures below.

My Garden

When we bought our house there was an enormous, two-tiered garden in the back. It is probably 40 ft by 40 ft or so. This year I decided to grow some things, mainly cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, cabbage, peppers, and peas. I also have a pretty extensive herb garden in pots, but it would spread too much in the garden. Well, since it is so big, I bought a lot of tomatoes: 24 plants. I didn't realize how many tomatoes 24 plants would produce, but it is a lot. The first time I picked, pictures below, I picked two 5 gallon buckets worth of Roma tomatoes. I bet that over the summer we picked 5 or 6 times that much. Next year I will be a little more judicious in what I plant.

Three Mile Island

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Titanic, the Challenger, and the list goes on and on and on of classic and monumental meltdowns and crashes. Now you can add the St. John's server to your list. That's right, our main home server (domain controller) went into critical and utter death yesterday. I think that it was the worst day of my life as everyone looked to me (whose fault it wasn't) when the last 15 years of their files were lost when Solomon (nice name for a server) imploded. It has been pure hell as all home directories, permissions, network accounts, etc... are all gone. And of course this is a WELS operation so we operate our entire 5 server, 55 terminal+ school computer system on $19.99 per year and volunteer manpower, so to fix it isn't exactly easy. To boot, we were in the process of building a back-up domain controller that was days away from being built and backing everything up. I'm one who kind of knew this would happen, so I only lost about a months worth of stuff, others weren't so lucky.

The ironic part is that I was just saying to Cathy the other night that we had a lot of files on our home computer with really no back-up. So I ordered a Maxtor 300 GB external hard drive to back-up my home computer and I was going to take it over to school... well, it arrived today. Anyway, it is working pretty slick, I'd recommend it.