Bill’s Blog

For Karen’s birthday this year we planned a Girls Night Out.  She hosted a dinner and dessert at our house with several of her friends.  Jeannie cooked an awesome dinner of Italian food.  We even had enough left overs for us all to have lunch today.

While the girls were partying, Emily and I went out on a date.  She ate french fries and five packets of ketchup.

You can also link here for the pics.

This Valentine’s Day I was greeted with a wonderful surprise.

It’s an 8 GB “Product Red” iPod Nano.� The “Product Red” part means that Apple gave some of the purchase price to charity.� The iPod Nano part means it plays awesome music and makes me very happy.

I had been using my 40 GB 4G iPod, which is also pretty cool.� It is an amazing device, but it’s a big large (believe it or not).� I also love the idea of a 24 hour battery in the Nano.� The Nano is a dream.� I did have to make some hard decisions about my music collection though. With 20% of the capacity of my old one, I had to really think about what went on there.

You can see it here compared to the older one, as well as my 4 GB USB drive.� Thanks Karen!� It was a wonderful gift and a wonderful Valentine’s Day.

Karen uses a Sony laptop.  It’s a piece of crap.  The power connector can’t seem to stay working.  Ok, Emily did step on the power cord when she was learning to walk.  That was the first time it broke.  When the thing caught fire, we sent the thing back to Sony.  They charged us $256 to fix it.  A few months later, the power connector decided to start acting flakey again.  So now to use it, she has to keep the power connector in a specific position or it doesn’t charge.  All this for a laptop that never leaves our house! 

But that’s not why I’m writing this.  Every year or so, I end up formatting the reinstalling everything on that machine.  Over time it slows down and seems to take forever to do simple tasks – like loading web pages.  The one thing that Sony did well with this machine is the recovery process.  I made nien recovery CDs when we bought it.  Now I just pop the first one in and 90 minutes later I have a working system.  Not too bad. 

But that was last night.  Tonight I’ll update all of the drivers and the OS and install all of the apps.  It would be great if there was a simpler process for all this, but when I’m done she’ll have a speedy new laptop.  She’ll still have to hold the power connecter in just the right spot, but at least her web pages will load faster!

Karen sent me an email today.  It made my day.  Below is the conversation she had with Emily (who is 3) this morning.