Some of the new features included in Brian-9.0:
Advanced intelligence
Ability to make more complex decisions
Increased energy
Ability to take on more responsibility(This feature has not been fully tested)

As one of the lead developers, I cannot begin to express my pride in this newest release. But we are not resting on our laurels. We are still on track for our most recent product, Will, to reach version 7.0 in August. And in September, be sure to look out for Victoria-19.0. We hope to make it our most stable release ever!

[tags]brian, birthday, victoria, Will, cousins, jen-and-terry[/tags]

So Sunday, I decided to go ahead and take William to see the boys and I could visit with the sis for a while. Poor Brian was completely distraught that he couldn’t go, but there was no way that I could risk him getting anyone else sick. I’m pretty sure that he understood… but I’m definitely sure he didn’t like it.

Well, Will and his cousins got along splendidly. They had a great time playing together and no arguments to boot! I think that could be a first with my kids!. Anyway, like I said, I got a chance to visit with my sister, and somehow felt a little better as I didn’t feel like I got enough time to talk with her(or any of the rest of my relatives) over the X-mas holidays.

In other news, I have officially reached PRO status in baseball, tennis, golf, and bowling on Wii Sports. All I have left is Boxing – and I have a looong way to go before I accomplish Pro. You may ask how such a lazy fatass …erm someone with such limited physical activity as myself might be able to score so well on Wii sports in such little time. Well, in a nutshell, it’s practice, practice practice. When we first got the Wii, I told myself that this thing was going to help get me in better shape – nothing amazing or anything, but at least I’ll be up and moving. I promised myself that I would play every other day for at least 45 minutes – and I have done just that… except it’s more like 1-2 hours(at least!). So you figure 1-2 hours every other day for almost a month… that’s a lot of play time!

But it has worked! I’m nowhere near as winded as I was the first time I played a 2 hour marathon of Wii Sports. And my scales told me this weekend that I had been consistently UNDER 200 lbs. for 4 days in a row! Of course, I probably ruined it by eating over at my Mom’s last night! Eating large portions of Filipino cooking just doesn’t go well with trying to lose weight.

Anyway, I figure if I can keep this routine up, and then purchase the Wii Fit game when it is released later this year, I will be well on my way to being a healthier, happier me.
[tags]wii, fitness, health, Brian, Will, cousins, sister, family, sick, wii sports, wii fit[/tags]

Getting Things Done: If you have followed this blog, you know that recently, I have been trying to get more organized and be more productive. This has been a slow process, but lately, I discovered a method called Getting Things Done. I just bought the book this weekend after going from store to store and finding it sold out. Thank the Lord for Barnes and Noble! I had come extremely close to resigning the fact that it was nowhere local and I’d have to order it from Amazon.com and wait for it to arrive.

Anyways, while researching GTD, I ran into a great little article from geektronica.com that introduced me to this great little webapp called Remember the Milk. By following the geektronica article, I have begun my voyage into GTD by integrating RtM with my Google Calendar, and also set it up to remind me of upcoming tasks via email. While I haven’t finished the book, this has been a great first step, and I am already seeing some positive results. I’m actually very excited about delving deeper into GTD and getting past this chaos and moving towards less stress.

Invasion of the Sharpie Snatchers: My Brother-in-law has put up a great little story that starts here and continues on with this post and finishes off with a funny slideshow of the aftermath. This is truly great stuff!

The Palomares Bunch: Lastly, I had promised a dedicated post on the “big” goings-on here at the Palomares homefront. Instead, I thought it would be better if I skip the gory details and just say that we now have two new children in our household. No – Amy and I aren’t THAT fast! Due to some rather unfortunate series of events, my niece and nephew, Keri and Zackary, will be staying with us for at least about a month or so… with the “or so” being the operative words. Needless to say, this past week has been an adjustment period for all of us. We have all worked hard to adjust with 7-8(and sometimes more) people always in the house and it is finally paying off. The new children are starting to get used to their new routines, and we are getting used to having two new young’uns here. Heh…Terry – if you think 2 boys are a handful, try three… ages 5, 7, and 9! Now imagine them all in the same room and trying to get them all to go to sleep!

I have also had to take a quick refresher course on the substitution method when solving linear equations.

Man I hadn’t touched that stuff in a looong time!

As I mentioned, after March 15th we should know a little more as to what the kids’ future living status will be. Either way, we are very happy to be helping these kids in their time of need and will gladly do so for as long as it takes. I have spoken many times before on the importance of family, and this is just a small example of what I mean.
[tags]GTD, rememberthemilk, cousins, terry, planet3rry[/tags]

Our Thankgiving was nice. We went over to Ruby and LD’s for Thanksgiving Day lunch and, of course, we all ate too much. Larry, Suzanne, and their kids, Megan, Courtney, and Bethany were there as well as Elaine, Scott and their boys, Robert and Andrew. After eating, some of the kids went outside to play for a while. I never realized, but Victoria can really shoot the rock! Her basketball skillz are quite impressive. Brian had brought his brand new Yu-Gi-Oh! cards with him and Will was busy playing with his new Darth Tater. Later the whole lot of them went to Broadway at the Beach to watch Yours, Mine and Ours. I stayed home and did some laundry and the dishes… I wasn’t feeling too well after all the food.
Anyway, Today I had to go back to work while the rest of the family stayed home. Work was slow for once, and I wished I had taken the day off as it REALLY crept along.

While trawling the news at work, I learned that Pat Morita passed away yesterday. I was really saddened to read the news. From characters like Arnold of “Happy Days” to Mr. Miyagi to the Emporer in Mulan, Pat was one of those permanent fixtures growing up. Kinda like Johnny Carson, or maybe Dick Clark. In his honor, I assumed the role of a Japanese-American for the rest of the day. (Inside work-related joke…)

I’m hoping to take Brian to see the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, but I’m not sure what is really in the cards. I wish I could take both boys, but I really don’t think Will can handle a movie of that length. Amy said he went to the bathroom five times during the movie last night. He didn’t quite understand why you couldn’t put the movie on pause while he went to the restroom.

HOME
Will got sick last week. 2 ear infections and tonsilitis. Needless to say, we had our hands full. Amy is still running herself ragged trying to get caught up with her new class. Now she’s coming down with a cold. Brian took a trip this weekend with his lolo and lola to Tennesee to visit his Aunt Jen, Uncle Terry, and his cousins, Eric and Ryan. Victoria has been the ultimate daughter taking up the slack whenever Amy and/or I can’t be around. She’s been a real trooper. I have barely been home the past week or two due to work. Usually when I get home, everyone is asleep…

WORK
We made the big move this past weekend by migrating all of our customer’s email boxes from a 3-node tru64 cluster to a 3-node linux cluster. The migration process lasted about 14 hours if you include the monitoring of email flow after the transition took place and also babysitting the new cluster while the influx of emails come barreling in after building up in a queue for such a long period of time. Everything looked fine all day Sunday… And then Monday came.
One of my fears about this project came true. You see, a decsion was made somewhere beyond my team’s control to hook this blazingly fast linux cluster to an extremely slow disk subsystem. So, while the servers can process tons of email, the disks cannot keep up with the write load and you end up with an extremely tight i/o bottleneck. The only way to alleviate the problem was to throw more disks at it and spread the load out Unfortunately, these disks are not made to take the amount of constant pounding that they are getting, so unless we can find a solution fairly quickly, one or more of these things are likely to fail.
Then today, the mailserver we use for outgoing smtp went on the fritz. Our anti-virus scanner kept bombing out which would basically stop the server from accepting email. Thus, tons of angry customers calling about not being able to send out. So I spent all day building a linux server on better hardware so it could handle the load (The old server was Solaris9 on some very underpowered hardware). So the story still continues….

FUN
My friend, David, dropped by this past Friday night to visit. I hadn’t seen him in quite a few months so it was nice to catch up. He brought his PC with him, so we hooked it up and he, Grady, and I played Ghost Recon until around 5AM. I had forgotten how much I loved that game!!!

If you haven’t seen Batman Begins, I recommend it. It was done quite well, and, in my opinion, is much better than any of the previous Batman movies.

I picked up Tiger Woods 06 last week… Excellent golf game! I like it better than last year’s version. EA did change the way attributes are done. Now you must earn them by way of experience points instead of purchasing them with dollars. It seems to me that the TrueSwing technology has been tweaked a little as well. Swinging the club just feels more natural in this year’s version. There are a few more new features, but I’ll save that for a later post. This one is getting pretty lengthy.

I also picked up NHL06. Nice to have hockey back! A decent game. Definitely better than ‘05, but the computer AI still needs more work. It is tons more competitive playing against a human than against the AI.

Football- My Steelers played well against the new and improved Bengals. Nice to see Big Ben starting at QB. Except for the Indy game on Nov 28th, they may not lose another game.

Hockey- My Pens are still winless at 0-4-0-5. Hopefully they can on get back on track soon before my old hometown loses interest. Sidney Crosby has all the makings of becoming a superstar, but unless we can learn to play a little D, it’s going to be a looooong season.