Here is a little online picture book that is great for telling people how to use the internet. Is is full of laughs.

Baby's First Internet

Soon we will be taking my daughter to Indianapolis, Indiana to spend some time with here family there. Dropping her off in Indy is always found with mixed emotions. It sucks not having her around, because I do miss the little wookie while she is gone, but it is also like a summer vacation, where we don’t have to worry with sitters and can do as we please. Now that Maddie is getting older, sitters are becoming a thing of the past. She is now independent and is a growing teenager. She has her own cell phone, can text message like a pro, and is usually fun to have around. She always want to talk, or at least talk about what she is interested in, and is pretty easy going.

In the past our Summer break has been filled with catching up on house chores and maintenance. One year we went to Telluride, Colorado to see the Telluride Bluegrass festival. We drove all the way from North Carolina to Colorado with a bag of camping equipment strapped to the roof of my old Pontiac Grand Am and a dog chilling in the back seat. Last year Amber had a big surgery and was in a lot of pain. We did not do much, but try to get Amber feeling better, and I was trying to adjust to a new job.

Well this year we do not have many plans. One thing we are going to do on our way back home from Indy is we are going to stop and see Moe. in Cincinnati, OH. This is going to be a great show and a kick start to our short Summer Vacation. I can’t wait to jam out to some Moe. and kick it old school. We are also going to catch Jack Johnson play at Walnut Creek in Raleigh NC. We have pit passes and will be chilling front row. I have always wanted to see Jack Johnson, and this will be my first show. Shortly after that, we will have to hit the road again and pick Maddie back up.

I have found it funny that her trips to Indy always make me appreciate having her around the house. I guess it is true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It will be weird when she is off to college and won’t want to hang with the parental units anymore. I guess then me and my wife will have to plan some crazy trips and get into our own adventures.

I guess her being away for about three weeks is not too long, but for some reason it will feel like forever.

I have recently been in search of a good Virtual Machine so I can setup some development servers on my Windows machine. I first tried VirtualBox to run a few different types of Linux distributions. VirtualBox at first seemed to work ok, and since it was recently purchased by Sun I thought that there was a lot of promise here. What ended up happening is that my laptops processor started getter hotter than HELL and crashed all the time on me. This was frustrating.

Next I tried VMware Server . This Virtual Machine worked a lot better than VirtualBox. Screen resolutions and hardware on my laptop were recognized with ease. The processor ran much cooler, which was a bonus. I hate the configuration of the network devices, which I find kinda cumbersome. Other than that, I find VMware a much better product.

I am just wondering if anyone has a better alternative for me. I guess I am just spoiled because I use Parallels at work on my MacBook Pro. Parallels just works great, but maby that is because it is running on a Mac. I find working in Virtual Machines as a development tool great, but have only come to this realization after having a Mac.

I am a music freak. I have over 10,000 songs on my ipod, and love listening to live concerts streamed from Archive.org . One of the things that I like to do with my ipod is do a random song selection, so I can get a kind of radio station listening experience from my music. The only problem with this is that I have so many different styles of music. I also really love to listen to music online, while I am at work. I don’t know why I prefer it to plugging in my ipod, but I do.

Well today I stumbled upon Pandora Radio . This site can only be described as revolutionary. They say that they have created a “Music Genome Project” where they have related all different aspects of music artists, songs, bands, ect into relationships. When you bring up the online player, you can type in a artist that you are interested in. I typed in Phish and a Phish song was displayed to me. The songs after that are selected to what I might like based on my first artists selection. You can also rate if you liked or disliked the selection. This makes your customized radio station even more fine tuned to your listening tastes. The best thing about this too is that I now can expand my listening tastes, because Pandora will select new artists that they think I will like, based on my habits.

I think I might have found a web site that really has made a impact on me.

Yesterday was my daughters 13th birthday, and what a joyous occasion it was. The weekend before her birthday we celebrated with her friends by taking them out bowling and then out to eat. That was a lot of fun, and we gave her one of her birthday presents, a digital camera, so she could take pictures of her friends while they hung out. Well yesterday, on her actual birthday, me and my wife had one more surprise for her, her own cell phone.

We had given her one of our old cell phones to use, and only use on a limited basis. This was to make sure that she would not loose it and would not abuse it. Well she accomplished to adhere to 75% of this. She did not abuse the phone and she did not loose it until this summer, when she was not using it at all. I figured that if we actually let her use the cell phone like all other kids, for texting and a main life line, then she would not lose it at all. So we made the plunge and decided to get her a phone on our plan. Now that she has her own phone, me and my wife both have phones, it is time to retire the Time Warner Cable VoIP phone that we have been using. The TWC VoIP phone cost us about $50 a month. Since everyone in the house has there own phone, I am canceling that bad boy now. I hope that this does not come to bite me in the ass, but only time will tell.