Getting Out

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On days I work from home I have to sometimes force myself to get outside. I don’t want to be locked up all day. Today was probably a good day to stay in since it was in the 20’s all day, but I ended up going out twice. I had to get something to eat for lunch. I ended up also grabbing some Swordfish at the market by my house and cooked it up for dinner. It was fantastic as usual. I picked up some crab cakes for dinner tomorrow but then realized I wont be home for dinner. Hopefully I will have them Wednesday. I am glad I am cooking more.

I also ran out after work today to get a hair cut. I ended up getting a cut and a shave. I always love the way it feels after a professional shave. Especially in the cold air. The down side is it is not so cheap. I probably wont do that again for a while but I am not unhappy that I got one today!

Now I am off to attempt to get to bed early since I have an early day tomorrow. Here is to actually getting to bed!

Why Do Mondays So Hard To Get Through?

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Today was one of those days that I didn’t get to half of what I had planned on working on. I wish it was due to procrastinating, but there is so much going on I need an other day to work on stuff that happens during the day I lived through! 🙁 I wish tomorrow will be better but I have almost a completely booked schedule tomorrow, and then a long night after work. Wednesday is totally booked up from 8:30AM onward. The plus side is if I let myself disconnect I do have a 4 day weekend. I just need to not log into email for the 4 days so I can rest. The question I pose is how do you stay disconnected when you know coming back to work there will be all the work you missed during your time off that you will have to catch up on?

My Short Week

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I am excited for this week to get underway. I have a packed schedule at work Monday through Wednesday, but then I am taking two days off. I decided to use my vacation days by taking 4 day weekends for the rest of the year. I have to burn off days before 1/1, and I didn’t really plan to go anywhere since I wasn’t expecting to get time off right away when I started my job back in September. I am not complaining at all but I just didn’t think about doing anything cool.

My company holiday party is also this week so I hopefully will get to meet more people I only know from their voices over the phone!

I just hope I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight. I wasn’t tired till almost 1AM last night. Getting to sleep on Sunday nights is always fun.

Online Radio

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Today I have been home trying to fight a cold. Instead of listening to the usual play list I have on iTunes I decided to tune into some streaming radio instead. So far it has actually been pretty good change of pace. I have used AOL Radio before, and it has been pretty good. Today I am using my almost never used XM Radio login. I can really tell the quality degradation on my radio stream vs a downloaded song. I am going to see if I can tweak the quality at all? I have been making a list of some songs that I might actually go and buy since I liked them! In that way AOL Radio is better than the XM Radio via the browser. With AOL you can click on a link and bring up the song in iTunes to buy. Of course I don’t buy from iTunes anymore (I use Amazon) but it is a good idea.

UPDATE: Apparently you can buy music you hear on XM using Napster. Unfortunately I won’t use Napster for two reasons. 1 I have a Mac. Secondly I don’t want to pay for a flat fee for music. I would rather buy the music outright. Oh well.

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Drinks & Dinner Was a Bad Idea

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Last night I meet up with Danny & Anthony for some drinks and food. I knew I shouldn’t go out since I have felt like I have been coming down with something all week, but I didn’t listen to myself. I had a good time, but I probably should have stayed in. My throat now is not feeling good at all. I also had a horrible night sleep. I am staying in today to try and rest up. I am not horrible yet but not so happy either. I have already taken more Zinc, and some Tylenol. Hopefully I can kill this before it gets worse.

My New Monitor

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After searching far and wide for a good deal on a monitor I ended up ordering a Dell 23″ LCD. I got a nice discount and it was the right size for me. It also offered DVI & VGA inputs. I got it yesterday and it looks great on my new computer table add on. I am finally using Outlook the way it was intended (full screen with a nice big 3 pane setup so I can see everything).

Now all I need for the perfect computer setup is a better mouse and keyboard for my Thinkpad. I just got a Microsoft Wireless Laser mouse for my Macbook and it is really nice. Moves really smooth. I might get another one for the Thinkpad, but I can’t figure out what kind of keyboard to get. I love the Apple Wireless Keyboard I use on my Macbook, but I don’t think it will work with a Windows machine.

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Twitter

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About a month or two ago I signed up for Twitter. I thought it was a cool idea, but as usual most of my friends aren’t using the system so I didn’t do anything with it. About two weeks ago I had second thoughts about the system and started Tweeting anyway. I plugged in Twitter to Facebook so now whenever I Tweet my Facebook status is updated. I thought that was a cool idea. Last week I added a Twitter plugin to Typepad so my latest Tweets are now in one of the colums on my blog.

I find it cool that I can blast out a quick Twitter message from my iPhone when I am bored somewhere!

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Supercharging My TivoHD

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When I moved into my new apartment last August I got digital cable but I opted to not get a cable box. Instead I got a TivoHD and two CableCARD’s. The TivoHD and CableCARD combo has been fantastic. I got two CableCARD’s to use in the Tivo. I figured it could handle two, and two cards was still cheaper than renting one cable box. The issue was when the cable guy came to setup the cards I didn’t have the Tivo so he configured on in my TV and it worked great, but after the initial test the second one didn’t seem to work. I tried several tests with one and two configurations of the cards in my Tivo and always got no luck with one of the cards (always the same card). I wasn’t in a rush to call in the issue since I would have to either pay to have a service visit or go into their office to swap the card.

I finally broke down and wanted to fix the issue with the second card so I can record two shows at once with the Tivo. After over a year of procrastinating I finally called to figure out what was wrong with the second CableCARD. The rep I spoke to didn’t really have much of a clue so I wasn’t confident she would figure out the issue, but I got lucky. She sent some sort of signal boost to my TV and then after two hours both cards were working normally. I was very happy. Now I can record two shows in HD at once! Mmmm HD. I don’t even know how often I will need this function but it was a problem that I finally wanted to have resolved!

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Black Friday

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Yesterday I was really stupid and did what everyone else did the day after Thanksgiving. I went shopping. I know, I always say I avoid all stores between Thanksgiving & New Years. Especially on Black Friday, but I wanted a deal on a computer monitor. Since I have been working remotely from home periodically I wanted a nicer monitor for my work laptop. Going from my 23″ Cinema Display on my mac to a 19″ boxy monitor on my Thinkpad just wasn’t cutting it. I went to Best Buy to look at a 22″ or 24″ HP LCD. Turned out I thought the 22″ was too small, and the 24″ was too expensive. After some quick price comparison on my iPhone I realized that I could get a better deal online so I passed on buying anything.

After my failed attempt at shopping I meet up with Danny and we headed over to Stout for a few drinks and dinner. It was cold walking to Stout but it was a nice to get out!

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Went to take part in Black Friday @ Best Buy. Didn’t buy anything. Ended up at Stout for drinks and dinner with Danny, then home for some TV.