Hello,

So it's been a hectic week (what else is new) but the end is in sight. Tomorrow's Friday - hooray! Work has been quite busy. It seems like we just have an endless pile of work to do. I complain about it a lot to Liz, but I suppose it is better than the alternative. The busier we stay, the more money we make, so it's a good situation.

We had softball practice on Tuesday. This practice was a little better, but we're really not in any shape to play ball (at least in my opinion, we're not). We've got another practice scheduled this weekend and maybe we'll have one more next week before the games start next Thursday. I sure hope we're ready by the time games start. My guess is that we're going to get killed the first couple weeks. :-(

Last night I had basketball with the guys. It was such a gorgeous day. The high here in Rochester was about 89 degrees. It sure was a nice day to be outside.

So that brings us to today (Thursday). Mardi, Liz's mom, is coming up to visit this weekend so we spent most of the night cleaning up the house in an attempt to make it presentable. I even got out and mowed the lawn for the first time this year. I don't know what we're doing this weekend, but I wouldn't mind spending some time relaxing. Knowing Liz and her mom, however, I imagine there'll be a lot of yard work getting done. Ah, well.

Anyway, I suppose that's about it. I hope everyone is doing well.

Take care,
Corey

Yeah, I know - my blog has been a little neglected for the last few days. Anyway, I'm here to update it now.

Liz made it home Friday night. Her flight was a little late, but she made it home all the same. She certainly was happy to be back.

The weekend proved to be rather uneventful. Liz and I spent most of the weekend at home with not a lot to do. That should be a pretty sharp contrast to our next bunch of weekends. We've got plans for every weekend from now until the end of May.

Liz and I watched some of the NFL draft - the Packers didn't have such a great draft. They did get a cornerback in the first round, which does fill a need, but Detroit picked up another receiver in the first round (to go along with the receiver they picked in the first round last year). The downside to the corner Green Bay picked up is that he's only 5'9". That might not be such a big deal except that the receivers around the rest of the NFC North (Moss, etc.) are all well over 6 feet tall. That could pose a problem.

Detroit certainly came out ahead in the draft this year. Another young receiver and a running back in the first round. So, Detroit now has a quarterback, halfback, and two receivers that are awfully young - Joey Harrington, the QB, is the most experienced with 2 years under his belt. With Mariucci at the helm, that offense could be scary for a long time.

Liz and I also went to visit some more nurseries this weekend. We had been looking for some holly to put in front of our house, but we haven't been able to find any. We finally asked a guy at one of the nurseries about it and he said it won't live through the Winters around here. That's too bad. We had been excited to grow some because Liz's mom grows some and it does very well. Anyway, I guess we've gotta find something else to put in front of our house, now.

I talked to Nate for a while last night. It sounds like he's got his computer issues figured out (at least for the time being). Sunday night, he reformatted the hard drive and started with a fresh install of Windows. He got everything reinstalled and the two of us were goofing around with some games last night. Everything seemed to go pretty well. Hopefully, it stays that way.

Liz and I have softball practice tonight. Our season starts next week already and, due to rain-outs, we've only had one practice so far and it wasn't even a very good one. We're really going to have to get going if we're going to be in any sort of shape to play next week.

Anyway, I suppose that's about it for now.

Cheers, everyone,
Corey

Hi everyone,

Well, I've had a couple busy days. It seems like I just keep getting more and more to do at work and I'm not getting any more time to get any of it done. I was at work until about 6 today trying to finish up some things prior to the weekend before I just gave up. I think I need a beer....or 4.

Of course, that'll have to wait because, in an hour and a half or so, I need to run to the airport to pick up Lizzy. Geez, it sure will be nice to have a wife again. ;-)

So last night was our first softball practice. It was pretty low-key. We didn't have everyone there and, like I said, it was the first practice of the season. There was lots of lollygagging. You know what that makes us? Lollygaggers! :-) Anyway, it wasn't all bad. The only thing is that I played pitcher all last season and I'm getting a little tired of it. Unfortunately, no one else is any good at it and I don't think anyone has the ambition to really learn, either. *Sigh* I actually like being able ro run the game from the pitching mound, but I'd like to actually field some balls once in a while, too.

Anyway, Liz and I don't really have any plans for the weekend. We'll probably just hang out together for a while and relax a bit. May is going to be a very busy month for us - we have plans every weekend in May already. I suppose it might be a good idea to get some R&R in before that starts.

I got a bit of good news when I came home today - I had a message from Nate waiting for me on my computer. He believes he has the crashing problems worked out with his computer. He found that he still had some "residue" from the drivers for his previous video card hanging around in his registry. He downloaded some utility designed to clean that junk out and it sounds like he's now up and running. Hopefully, that's truly the case. :-) If it is, Liz and I might spend a lot of this weekend playing games with Big Daddy. :-)

Well, I suppose I'm going to get going for now. Take care, everybody.

Corey

Hi everyone,

I hope you're all doing well. Last night was fairly uneventful. It was raining all night over here, so I just stayed inside for most of the night.

I chatted with Nate for a while about his computer. He was afraid he had fried the chipset for a while (it wouldn't even boot up), but eventually got it back up and running - of course, his problems were still there, but at least he could boot it again. Anyway, he got a tip from someone online to pick up a bigger power supply (he was only using a 350W supply) so he ran over to Best Buy last night to pick up a 450W supply. It sounds like that has helped, but the problems still persist. Last I heard, he was trying to determine what to change some settings to within his BIOS. Hopefully, it'll all work out for him.

Today, over lunch, I attended a seminar over at Dain Rauscher (they're the brokers that are handling Relion's 401(k) plan). They went over their whole spiel about how they track the market and pick out stocks to buy or sell. Overall, it looks like they've got a pretty good look at the market, but of course I'm certain they only show their successes at such meetings and consequently ignore the times it hasn't worked so well. Anyway, for what it's worth, they said that, right now, the market is at a high so you should be cautious about investing too much money in any aggressive way. They haven't started selling off yet, but they're poised to if the market drops much. One of the guys presenting was talking about the fact that he currently has a lot of money tied up in a "double inverse" fund. I have no idea how it works, but, supposedly, if the market drops 10%, he gains 20% (and vice versa). Anyway, enough about that.

It's rather dreary here today, but I'm still planning on playing some basketball with some of the guys tonight after work. It doesn't sound like we'll have a huge crew, but we should have enough there for a good game, at least. After that, I'll probably just head home and try to clean up the house a bit. We were supposed to have softball practice yesterday, but it was rained out and has been rescheduled for tomorrow.

That's about it for me. I suppose I'll be going now. Take care, everyone.

Corey

Hi everyone,

Yesterday was a pretty blah day, in all. Work was a bit frustrating, but that's only to be expected. After work, I tried heading over to the batting cages, but, as usual, nothing was working. The pitching machines weren't working well and the ball return was jammed. The place is absolutely falling apart. Honestly, if someone would put together a decent batting cage and driving range around here, they could make a mint.

Anyway, that was just about it for me last night. I went home, ate some dinner, and chatted with Liz on Skype. You know, it's such a handy program. Liz and I spoke for a couple hours last night, easily, and it didn't cost us a dime. The quality is usually quite good (it depends on your connection, but you'll certainly need broadband) and, even when it's not that great, it's certainly as good as any cell phone I've ever used. If you want to check it out, go to their website. Or, if you want, give me a call and I'll help you set it up.

Besides that, I just watched some hockey last night. There were a couple game 7's on last night so the games were good. There's one more tonight: Toronto vs. Ottowa, I believe.

Also, tonight is our first night of softball practice (which is also why I wanted to hit the batting cages for a while yesterday). Hopefully, I won't kill myself. ;-)

So, I suppose that's about it for me. Take care, everyone.

Corey

Hi everyone.

Well, after our busy day on Saturday, yesterday turned out to be the exact opposite. Liz and I just lounged around for most of the day - just trying to take it easy. The weather was pretty crummy - rainy and windy (mostly just windy) all day long. I guess it's a good thing we got our landscaping work done when we could.

Liz went dress shopping again - this time, she came home with a couple dresses. (and a sweater, but who's keeping track?) One of them she likes quite a bit - the other one, she's not so sure about. Anyway, she had me take a couple pictures of her with the dresses on so that she could send them to her sister to get her opinion.

Besides that, not a whole lot went on yesterday at our place. Liz got all packed up to head to Austin and I spent most of the day playing video games and chatting on the phone.

I talked to Mom for a bit - she wasn't too happy. Well, this weekend, she was all excited because Gavin, who's currently being very shy, came running over to Grandma to play for a bit. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, Mom tried to pick Gavin up and threw out her back again. So, she's pretty bummed now - she's stuck on the couch for the next couple days. :-(

I spoke with Nate for a while, too - he's having trouble with his computer again. He went out and picked up a new monitor this weekend, as well as a couple more cooling fans for his box. Anyway, when he installed the new monitor, it sounds like his computer started locking up on him every few minutes. I don't really know what the problem is, but the last time I talked with him, he was going to check out his monitor manufacturer's website for some new drivers. I'll have to try to get in touch with him tonight to see what came of it.

And Kara - well, she's planning on making play-do. Seems like a good time to me. :-)

Anyway, that brings us to this morning. Liz and I were up bright and early (well Liz was brighter and earlier than I, but that's nothing new) so that I could drop Liz off at the airport. Right about now, I imagine she's halfway to Chicago. She has a short layover there and then she's off to Austin for the week. :-(

Fortunately, I've got a fairly busy week ahead of me, so maybe I won't have as much time to miss her. I usually get together with some guys to play basketball on Wednesdays, I've got that article to write for the Javaranch newsletter, and I think we're going to start softball practice this week (Liz and I play in an IBM softball league). Hopefully, all of that will help keep me busy.

Well, I suppose that's about all for me. Take it easy, everybody.

Corey

Hi everyone.

What a day! Liz and I have been up and going since early this morning and we're just starting to wind down now - at 9:30. Actually, Liz is well on her way (she's been in bed for about an hour now). Anyway, I felt like getting a blog entry in about the day we've had.

Like I said yesterday, we decided to do some landscaping on the front of our house this weekend. That was today's project. We laid 2,976 pounds of retaining wall block - just shy of 1.5 tons of block (124 blocks at 24 pounds a piece). We started it last night (just barely - we tinkered with it for about an hour or so), but the bulk of it was all done today.

All in all, I think it went up quite well. We had a few issues here and there where we ran into some shallow running roots that we had to try to get around. There was a bit of chiseling done, I can tell you. Regardless, we're both quite pleased with how it turned out.

We even got out to take some pictures of it tonight before dinner and I've put them online (along with a couple pics of the huge flower pots Liz picked up yesterday). You can find thumbnails of the pics here. Just click on any of the images to see a full-sized image.

In those pics, you can see Liz's tulips. They're doing quite well, but we had to move a lot of them to make room for the retaining wall block. If you look closely in some of those pics, you can see the tulips in the back are wilting quite a bit - those are the ones she moved. I sure hope they survive. Fortunately, we've got a nice thunderstorm moving in as I write this, so I'm hoping the extra rain will help them along.

We need to fill in our raised flower-bed with dirt now. For the most part, the dirt level is pretty good, but, especially on the East side of the house (the left side of the pics), where the wall is 4 or 5 blocks high, we need to add a lot of dirt. I'm hoping all the commotion won't kill Liz's tulips. Some of them might even have to be moved again. :-(

Anyway, it was probably around 4:30 or so that we finally got the wall put in and got the front yard cleaned up. Then, we finally got to shower and I had to make a trip downtown - nothing big, really - just needed gas in the truck and I needed to pick up some car soap so I could wash the truck. The two of us lazily wandered through Target and picked up the few things we needed - we were so tired, we even left our case of soda on the bottom of the cart and had to run back when we realized we hadn't put it in the truck. :-/

So, we eventually made it home and we cleaned up the truck. There was plenty of debris inside from all of the blocks and it needed a wash, anyway.

When that was done, I got out the grill and we made bacon cheeseburgers over an open flame - some things are just wonderful. :-)

Anyway, that pretty much put a close on our day. We snapped a few pictures prior to dinner and I just finished getting them online for everyone to look at. I hope you enjoy them.

So, plans for tomorrow? Maybe we'll just sleep all day. ;-)

Take care, everyone.

Corey

Sorry everyone - I know how belated this update is. Needless to say, it's been a pretty hectic week.

Liz and I have been putting in quite a few hours at work with our respective projects. I've been trying to keep up with the project we're currently working on and it's taking all the time I have and then some. Anyway, a few highlights from our week...

Liz has been out on the town every chance she has gotten. Wednesday night, she was out with Brit (Brit is the fiancee of a classmate of Liz's and she is currently doing a coop at IBM) for dinner and then went shopping for candles for Brit's upcoming wedding. Then, Thursday night, Liz went out with her co-worker Marcy for some dress shopping. She was supposed to be looking for a dress for the weddings we have coming up next month - she ended up with no dress, but she had a bunch of clothes from Old Navy. Whatever makes her happy, I guess. :-/

For me, on the other hand, it wasn't quite as exciting. I got together with some friends on Wednesday to play some basketball. I also had a trip yesterday up to the cities. I attended a seminar on a couple new Microsoft products - the key item was InfoPath. It was pretty cool, but I'm not jumping for joy over this one. I won't go into details - if you really want to know about it, give me a call. I'll be expecting the phone to ring off the hook....any minute now....hmmm....any minute... Alright, fine.

Anyway, we've managed to survive to Friday night. The weather has been just gorgeous (today was over 80 degrees) so Liz and I are trying to take advantage of it this weekend. We checked out a couple nurseries tonight and started a big landscaping project. We laid some brick out in front of our house last year and we haven't been especially happy with the way it turned out. The slope of the yard was just too steep so it didn't end up looking very good. So, in order to fix it, we've decided to pull all of the brick out (I think it'll be reappearing in the backyward) and putting in retaining wall. We haven't gotten very far yet - we've only picked up the first load of block (I believe there will be three) and placed a few pieces. Tomorrow will probably be a long day.

Anyway, we're going to try to get a lot of it done this weekend because Liz just found out today that she's going to be headed to Austin again next week. She leaves Monday morning and she'll be out of town until Friday. I guess, with her out of town, I should have plenty of spare time left to finish up whatever we don't get done this weekend.

I suppose I might have one more project to keep me busy next week, as well. I've mentioned my "prefessional" blog a few times. Well, as it turns out, it's actually drawing a bit more attention than I had expected. I had a request a couple days ago to write up an article for a Java newsletter that goes out every month on JavaRanch. JavaRanch is a forum site that I help moderate - it's all about Java and related technologies. I'm not yet sure what I'm going to write about, but I imagine I'll spend some time on it next week while Liz is out of town.

Anyway, I think that's about it for this week. Sorry this update was so late - I'll try to do better in the future. Take care, everybody.

Corey

Happy Easter, Everyone!

Hi there,

Well, I'm writing this blog from Liz's folks' place in Sheboygan. I took off from work around 2:30 yesterday so that we could get on the road and home before it was too late. It's nice to be back in Sheboygan to see Liz's family for Easter.

It was a couple pretty hectic days at the end of this week - I had so much to do at work and we were trying to get some things done at home before the weekend that I don't think I had gotten to bed before about two in the morning for the last couple days. Fortunately, I slept in quite a while today to make up for it.

Unfortunately, because I've been so busy, I haven't been able to share some good news with everyone. Liz just received two patents for some of her work at IBM. She refuses to take much credit for it as the patents were really for someone else's logic, but she did a lot of the testing of that work so her name is on the patent, as well. Regardless, she's pretty excited - and she gets a nice bonus from work for getting them.

Last night, after we arrived in Sheboygan, we were all sitting around looking at photos from Ron and Mardi's trip to Puerto Vallarta. Ron was showing us the computer he built. He put one together for the sole purpose of being a "home theater" system. He installed myHTPC (that stands for "My Home Theatre PC") on it. It's really just a program that appears to cover up Windows, but it offers some neat features for listening to music, watching slideshows of pictures, checking the weather, watching TV, and then some. All in all, it's pretty cool. It was certainly neat seeing their pictures of Puerto Vallarta - it was funny to see all of the places they went that we had seen while we were down there.

Well, that's about it for now - no big plans for the weekend that I know of. I think Ron's folks are coming over tonight for dinner and then I'm sure we'll have Easter church in the morning, but that's about all I know of.

Just in case anyone is interested, the NCAA hockey championship is taking place tonight (Saturday) at 6:00 PM. I believe it will be on ESPN. This year, it's going to be Maine vs. Denver.

Take it easy, everyone,
Corey

Hi there,

It was another late night at work for me, so there wasn't a lot of time to do things around the house. That said, Liz and I got out for a nice walk last night to enjoy the weather and made a trip to Home Depot to pick up some things for planting flowers.

Liz got a couple trays of "seed starters" so we spent some time last night planting daisy and snapdragon seeds. She also picked up some bloodmeal to sprinkle over the tulips out front to keep the rabbits away. Liz had been putting that off for a while but, when she spotted a couple nibble marks last night, I guess it wasn't going to get put off any longer.

Like I said - that was about it for last night. Tonight, I'm planning on playing some basketball with a bunch of friends. Hopefully, I won't kill myself. Then, when that's done, the NHL playoffs are starting tonight. I guess I've got a full night planned. ;-)

I did hear some rather big news in the tech industry - it's almost a week old so I must be out of the loop a bit, but here's the story: http://www.crn.com/sections/news/Top_News.asp?ArticleID=49145. Apparently, Sun Microsystems, who has been in legal battles with Microsoft for years now, has settled with Microsoft - for $1.6 billion, which should help Sun's bottom line - they had already forecast losses of roughly $800 million for the third quarter this year. Sun has been hurting for quite some time monetarily and losing market share to some other "big dogs" such as Microsoft and IBM. Not only has Sun settled their legal feud with Microsoft, the two seem to have become "best buds" overnight. Along with the legal settlement, the two have joined forces for a 10-year technology sharing pact in which they'll try to make their systems more interoperable.

Now, I'm no business genius, but it looks to me like Sun desperately needed a "big buddy" to keep them from falling by the wayside and Microsoft needed some help to fight off IBM's open-source push with Linux. Personally, I don't see open source going away any time soon, but this certanily puts a wrinkle in things. I just wonder if Microsoft is going to make things "interoperable" by simply taking over everything Sun does. :-/ We'll see, I guess.

Anyway, enough about that garbage. I'm out - talk to y'all later!

Corey

Hey all,

I hope everyone is doing well. I had a rather late night at work last night. We had a bunch of stuff going wrong at work so I had the pleasure of hanging around until about 7:30 trying to get most of it cleaned up. It's getting closer, but it's still not entirely fixed.

Anyway, it ended up being a rather short night at home with such a late worknight, but Liz and I did manage to get a few things done. I was going to go out and fertilize the lawn, but Liz said she wanted to do it, so I showed her the way and she ran around the yard for a while. Who am I to complain if she wants to do all the work? ;-)

Mardi called to chat for a little while last night and I got a chance to gab with her for a little bit. She just started her fourth quarter at school so they're finally on the home-stretch, but it sounds like the school year heads well into June. That seems like an awfully long time to me, but I guess, with school starting after Labor Day and a week off for Spring Break, school has to last that long.

Liz and I watched most of the men's championship game last night. It really wasn't very exciting. UConn went on a 10-0 run about 5-10 minute into the first period to give them a nice lead and they never looked back. At one point, they led by 25 or more. Figures - the Final Four games were great and then the championship game was horribly boring. Tonight, the ladies take to the court, UConn vs. Tennessee. Personally, I'm looking forward to the opening of the NHL playoffs tomorrow night.

With the weather getting nicer, a handful of friends up here in Rochester are planning on getting together to play some basketball after work. We're going to try to get started tomorrow, but we'll have to see if the rain stays away or not. The weather report says it should be in the 60's, which would be perfect, but it looks like we might get a rain out. :-( We'll see, I guess.

One good thing this week - it's Dave's last week away from home. If you don't already know, Dave has been away from home since January for work. I think he's in Tennessee but, for the life of me, I can't remember if that's right or not. :-/ He's been down there for some training class that he's going through for his job. Fortunately, this week he'll be all done and can head home to the wife and kids - I'm sure he's looking forward to that.

Anyway, I guess that's about it for now. Catch ya'll later.

Corey

Hi everyone,

Well, I know it's been a while since my last update, but that's because Liz and I were on the road this weekend. We made a trip back to Clintonville to visit family and friends. We had a lot of fun seeing everyone, but, as always, we never have enough time to see everyone as much as we'd like. Of course, daylight savings time didn't help us out at all this weekend, either. :-(

Gavin is certanily getting bigger. He's in a bit of a "shy" stage right now so he certainly didn't want to come by Liz or me this weekend. He's still not very talkative (or at least wasn't while I was around), but his speech is getting much clearer now.

Dean has started his season as the JV Softball coach with a pair of games this weekend. It was a rough way to start the season - it was cold and horribly windy, but the girls can't be that upset, Dean was up all night before the trip making sandwiches and rice krispy bars for the girls - I wish I had coaches like that in high school. ;-) The girls ended up losing both games - it sounds like they've got some work to do on their pitching, but I imagine it'll get better. Maybe if the girls can feel their fingers, they'll play a little better.

We got out to see Nate for a bit and checked out the NUGM (Nate's Ultimate Gaming Machine). I must say, the guy did a heck of a job putting that box together. It looks awfully nice (the glowing blue lights are a nice touch) and it's very powerful - we spent a little time playing games on it this weekend to test it out. The only thing he's missing is a couple more fans in the case because, when he's playing games, it tends to get a little too hot. He's got space for about 3 more fans so it's just a matter of getting some more and getting them installed.

So, after our weekend away, it was still nice to be home (or at least out of the car). Unfortnately, our first night back wasn't so smooth. Liz wasn't feeling so well last night and my back has been hurting lately so neither of us got much sleep last night. I have a feeling it might be a slow start to the week.

Anyway, that's been about it for us. We're planning a trip to Sheboygan this weekend for Easter but, until then, we don't have much planned. If the weather would stay nice, I'm sure we'd be out in the yard, but I think it's supposed to rain from about Wednesday on. We'll see, I guess.

Catch y'all later,
Corey