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November Update
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After an exhausting trip to London, November was a whirlwind of work, work, and some more work. I was hoping that after the London trip, the end of the year at work would settle down a bit and give me and my team some time to catch up on a few things. Unfortunately, it actually kept a steady pace and in the past week, has been incredibly busy. I took a nice vacation during the week of Thanksgiving though which was much needed.
Much of my Thanksgiving vacation was spent working on the home theater. Rebecca and I decided to move the home theater into another room which required us to demolish an existing wall and rebuild it. The existing wall was ugly to say the least. It has weird indoor windows and a small door made from 2x4's. We removed the workbench that was in the room and stripped the wall down to mere studs only to discover that we needed to add 4 more. Luckily, Kelly popped over and helped me frame the wall and pickup drywall at home depot. Framing the wall required re-wiring the electrical romex through the new studs, but it wasn't too hard. The next day Jeff helped me get the drywall up and later in the afternoon, Andy relieved Jeff to help me finish the job. After some corner bead and mud, the wall was looking pretty good.
 Rebecca and I then spent the next day sanding, priming, and painting the room. We went with "Red Red Wine" for the walls and black for the ceiling and accents. It came out awesome! We then moved the carpet to be flush with the rear wall, leaving bare floor in the front of the room where the TV and equipment are. Eventually we will replace the carpet to fill the room, but for now, we needed to work within the budget. I bought new brown outlets and faceplates and spray painted them all flat black. This worked out well. We were able to paint, do the carpet, and move all of the theater equipment into the room in one long day. The end result is awesome and we are very pleased with our quick DIY makeover. It's not perfect and not 100% completed, but it's a million times better than it was.
For Thanksgiving dinner, we went to Steve and Kelly's and had a wonderful dinner and a great visit with the extended family. It's always a pleasure to visit the Patterson's, but this was a particularly warm event.
Rebecca and I decided to give each other computers for Christmas. I've always built my own computer, but I finally decided to order a Dell. I'm just too lazy to bother with the research necessary to choose the right parts, order them, and put it all together. Needless to say, I was a bit apprehensive about how the computers would perform. The computers came in this week and setup was pretty painless.
 I got a Dell XPS 400. It has an Intel Pentium 830D processor (3.0Ghz dual-core) with 2GB of RAM. It also has two DVD drives (one read, and one RW). The media card reader is particularly handy as I can take the SD card from the camera and plug it straight into the front of my PC. The computer is absolutely whisper quiet which is a stark change from the 747 jet engine I'm used to. I did move my Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS from my old computer to this new one though as it's a fairly up-to-date device. Rebecca got a Dell E310 with a 3.0Ghz P4 HT and 1GB of RAM. She also got a new flat panel monitor and seems to be impressed with the performance so far. I was able to get both computers up and running in record time. In fact, it took longer to backup the data on Rebecca's computer than it did to get everything restored onto the new one. Sheesh! Of course, she upgraded from a 733Mhz with 256MB of RAM. Night and day there.
 By far, the highlight of this computer is my new video card: the Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB. This is the fasted video processor on the market currectly and runs my favorite game (World of Warcraft) at 1280x1024 with all detail turned up at 4x AA at over 100 frames per second. Wow! My monitor doesn't support higher resolutions, but I would love to see how it performs at even higher resolutions. I also checked out the Half-Life: Lost Coast demo and it ran smooth as butter with detail turned up as well. I'm happy. :)
Lastly, we took some pictures of the kids recently that came out great. I'm not posting them as the outfits they're wearing will likely be in our Christmas cards when I take some pictures this weekend. Just know that cute pictures are coming. :)
Oh yeah, Happy 53rd Birthday to my dear ol' mum! :)
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said...
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I was surprised to find that I am thought to be a year older than I actually am, dearest son of mine! Truly you must post a correction - your "dear old mum" just turned 52 (not 53)! :-) Mom
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Jim said...
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I was confused because of the 1953 birth date... yeah, that's it. :)
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