I have once again had a moment that has changed my life. I finally got a new phone that does more than answer calls. My wife and I upgraded just last week. She got the LG Xenon and I got an LG Vu. I have become more productive and more distracted at the same time.
The only thing similar to what I am experiencing was when we got a DVR. It transformed the way we watch TV. This thing is changing how I do everything.
It is more of a PDA than I have ever had. I have the ability to take photos,video, and all that good stuff. Here’s an interesting tidbit. We don’t have a data plan. My friend is telling me that when that happens it will change me even more. I am excited and afraid. Should I be?

It has been a very busy and productive spring. My work has relocated to a new hangar and we actually had more tech issues than I was prepared to deal with. Now that i am back in the swing of things I wanted to post what has been going on. To my brother, Andy, I am very sorry that I have not been able to do the show or post any thing at FTHTTT. I have been going so fast with Tee Ball, Color Guard, and other kid related activities by the time I get home I have totally forgot about it and it is too late to get online and get it done. To be honest i have not even had the chance to watch any racing, let alone form an opinion.
I have been working on learning about the open source movement and putting as much of it to work as i can get my hands on. I have created an ubuntu laptop now and am really enjoying it. I have a dual boot vista/ubuntu machine at home now and am loving it.

It has been a while since I last wrote and I am having a seriously crappy day. Things are beginning to happen around here and people are starting to realize the things I have been trying to bring to their attention actually need their attention. So I am getting looks like why didn’t you handle this when I give them the answer that Ihave been waiting on you to decide and it is really frustrating. Then I get routers and access points that have minds of their own. And now the computer that I actually do work on is acting crazy so as I wait for AutoCAD to uninstall so I can clean install it again I reach for the laptop and relieve some stress. I think I should watch a movie or something tonight,

Sorry for the gap in posts. Things have been happening quickly around here. We have had family emergencies, new offices in which I (the default IT department) had to setup everything from cat5 connectors to printers to phones. But I guess that is job security, maybe.

If you have read my post in the past you know that I have been diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia. Then after trying a medication that worked well I was told that the insurance would not pay for the prescription. After consulting the doctor who gave me some other solutions that were similar to what I had all ready been doing. I went to the VA and got the prescription filled by just showing the doctor my results and talking with him. Nothing too it.

I have been taking it for 3 days now and I feel better and worse. I was drinking 5 or 6 cups of coffee a day just to stay awake. Well, now I have to cut that back and the headache is starting to bother me. The mention of drinking decaf makes me cringe. I have also noticed that I become irritable in the evening. I don’t know if that is the medicine wearing off or a sign that I need to go to bed. I am fighting through it but I don’t want to bother my family. Over the last 2 days I have managed to more done than I would in a week.

My wife has been working on the flower beds and it really looks nice. She has great ideas on what to do with the little area that we have. I know she likes doing that but she seems very frustrated while doing it and I can’t figure that out.

It is something that happens to all of us. We reach a point in any venture that we take on and then we get to the place that a decision needs to be made, a direction needs to be set, or a plan needs to be developed. The economy is struggling, the country is trying to figure out what it wants to be, and cities and states are trying to figure out whether to take bailout money or not. Families are trying to determine how to move forward and provide for now and try to look at the future.

Whether we want to admit it or not, the future has changed. Just 1 year ago i was thinking about setting up retirement stuff and college funds. Now I am trying to do the same but the fact that my 401k is own 40%. I am basically losing the employer matching each month. The only thing certain about the future is it won’t be what you expect.

I tell you, the way the last week has gone in the life of the bartonomus, I am beginning to feel like the stars have misaligned themselves. Holy Crap! Last Thursday I had one of these machines refuse to boot to windows. Of, course this has critical data to our day to day operation that has not been backed up so after 3-4 hours of carefully trying to restore the thing without losing any data Iwas successful. It is still acting weird on startup but it is running otherwise normally.

Then, my co-worker who is not very tech savy has his home machine catch the crud. It has some data that is important to a project that has been going on for a while so my boss volunteers us (he and I are the resident IT department, by default). He give it a go and by Friday lets me at it. Well, after several different types pf attempts, I get the thing to at least get to the WindowsXP splash screen. From there I know I can make some things happen. Repaired XP but lost alll and I mean all the data. I ran a Linux based utility of of a hand dandy cd and it scans it and I found the virus and got rid off it.

I told him several times that I was trying to do every “non-destructive” repair I could find. I honestly think the data was lost before I even touched it. After telling him that his machine was running but I will have to recover what I can he informs me that he had all of his tax records and about 10k photos on that machine. And he did not back them up. OY! The machine had a 60GB hard drive. After getting working it showed 46GB of free space. I recovered 49 GB of data after lettig it runn over the weekend. So i try to find a storage solution for him and then he says he has a hard drive that we can store it to in his car. Cool, external 250GB I think. Wrong, internal 250GB HD. So I tear his machine apart and install it, initialize and let it format as I go home for dinner. Yesteday I get the tfiles saved and put in the new drive so he can go through and keep what he needs (I sure as hell ain’t gonna go through 49 gigs of someody else’s data). Install AVG so he has some antivirus. FAIL! He is so far behind on updates I have to run Windows Update so AVG caan run. After 67 updates including XP service pack 2. I get it installed. Run the scan overnight and come in this morning.

As well as dealing with all that, I had to fix another of the big machines that needed to have it’s video card replaced. It started acting up and then just quit working. I usedthe Dell online chat and trouble shot it and they got me a new by lunch and he was up and running when he got back from lunch.

My computer has been having issues as well but nothing major, just enough to piss me off while trying to do everything else. Fixing those issues as they come up.

So I got home last night and really felt the need to run anti-virus scas and updates on all our machines just in case. Nothing major there, knock wood. So I came in this morning and check my co-workers machine and it had runs the scan and took care of the minor issues. restarted it to update everything and she is running well. I unhook it from the monitor I used to fix thins and move the other machine back in its place. and then I hear, I bought some more RAM to put in the machine to make it run better, can we put that in today? Here we go…..

BTW, I am a drafter.

Good Morning! A simple greeting that is said out of reflex for most people every single day. I have always tried to say good morning with honesty and sincerity. It is the first impression that you give the people around you every day. I have known many people who just say it out of habit and you really feel like they could care less about giving you a smile and a wish that your morning be good. But I digress.

Ever since being diagnosed with my sleep disorder, I have tried to do things that can keep me from getting sleepy as well as things that wake me up. I have found that waking up is a difficult thing for most everybody. I now understand that the rutt that I find myself in from day to day adds to my feelings of sleepiness. The more routine things become, the more unable to feel awake and alert I become. In order to change things up I try to do something different each day. Today, i am writing this at a way earlier time than I would normally do and I have switched up the order of what I am going to do this morning. Unfortunately, my commute can’t vary all that much.

I also find myself getting frustrated with the routine of the folks around me. It is like clockwork. I get here at about 7am and the guys that get here before me are talking about one thing or the other. They mostly have a negative spin on things and I have to fight to stay positive. Not what i am looking for first thing, but I don’t expect them to motivate me. Here’s the thing, I break things up a little bit everyday and it is working almost as well as the prescription medication I had. Go figure.

Failure is not an option! This is a mantra that many of us have used in the passed. I will not accept anything other than success. It is a motivational thing that kept me and many others on track and for many years i felt that to be true as I worked through school and jobs and marriage and children. On the scale of raising children, being a failure is not acceptable. I will not and cannot fail my kids. On the other hand, the only way to fail as a parent is to not take the time and make the effort. I am not always right and I make wrong decisions but is that failure when I make a decision that doesn’t exactly turn out the way I planned. I am, of course, not considering life and death type decisions. Those decision need to be on a whole other level and thank goodness I have not had to make that many of them.

I have recently come to the realization that our society has taken a motivational saying and changed the entire culture from the top down. Our Education system is being redesigned in order to not allow anyone to fail. The bar is set so low that the system does not have a failure option. The bailouts! How many time have I heard that whatever the industry is to important to fail or to big to fail. That really makes me wonder why the bankruptcy system is even in place.

What I am getting to is that I have changed my mind on the “failure is not an option” mantra. From now on I think I will go by a new mantra and I hope as many people as possible, including businesses and government that make tough decisions every day. Try and remember that those who you are leading are looking to you for guidance and depending on you. In that, I hope we remember –

“Failure is an option, consequences are not.”

At this point I am completely frustrated with everything going on around me. My car is getting a $1700 repair. My wife has sent me to the doghouse. I finally got around to helping my daughter use her iTunes card and of course I have to convert the format into mp3.

But then I remember. Today I am not at work, which in itself gives it all a positive taste. It is also the day we celebrate a great man who led to a more equitable society, I think. All I know is that I got the day off and instead of honoring two of the greatest men in American history, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, as we did when I was in school we get to honor a civil rights activist that gave a really good speech. I am not trying to diminish the accomplishments of the civil rights movement. I am just wondering if this PC Holiday needs to be reconsidered as fairness day or everybody gets to share in everything equally day. Maybe it is because that day has not come yet.

I am a white guy who really wants the African American community to look at itself and fix what is wrong just like the rest of the country did thanks to Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the civil rights activists no matter what race, creed, color, or religion.

I have been hiding of late. I have not posted anything to any blogs recently. Here’s my reasoning. I was tired. I ust didn’t have the energy to spend on writing stuff down that people may or may not care to read so I just kept it to myself.

I was not out of touch though. I have been more active on twitter, plurk,and facebook do to the increase in folks that I know that are on those services. I truly enjoy interacting that way.

Here are some of the things I have been working on. The 2008 review and 2009 preview for FTH3T. I am thinking about video blogging those since It may be a little easier on me to produce and on those who wish to check it out. We will get a great show up and running this season, and maybe even some others. Ok, so I am back in the swing of things and the holidays are over. Talk to you more later.