Daddy Shower

On Saturday, Jeremy came down to Beverly to throw me what I’ll call a “Daddy Shower”. It was just me and Jeremy, but we had a good time. We went out for breakfast at Michelle’s Place, a restaurant a few blocks away from our apartment. I’d never been there before, but it’s a place that I’ve heard about from Art and James, who live fairly close to the restaurant. The breakfast was pretty good… not as good as Parker’s Maple Barn or the Red Cottage, but still very good. (Incidentally, James happened to be there when we arrived. :-))

In addition to breakfast, Jeremy gave me a gift bag with some stuff for the baby from him and Angela, but geared towards Daddy, in the spirit of the Geeky Onesies. There was a bib hand-stitched by Angela with “Live Long and Feed Me” in the classic Star Trek font, a bunch of diapers custom labeled with funny sayings, a book of fun games to play with the baby, and a “Baby Geek” picture frame. Fun stuff.

He Was A Good Dog

Kirsten and Beaux

Beaux, 1992-2006

Beaux wasn’t doing so well on Wednesday night. He had starting having some severe seizures around supper time, so my dad took him to the vet. They gave him some valium to control the seizures, and kept him overnight for observation. The vet said that the seizures were probably brought on by a metabolic problem or a tumor, both possibilities for a 14-year-old dog. If the valium therapy worked, they would have recommended a treatment plan. Unfortunately, after he came off of the valium, his seizures started up again. So today at 1 p.m., dad took him to be euthanized.

It’s a sad day for everyone in our family. Beaux has been with us for so long, and he has kept my parents company at home since Kirsten and I have moved away. I would have been about 13 years old when Kirsten got him as a project for 4-H… we couldn’t have known what an impression he would make on all of us. Kirsten trained him and took him to shows at the fair as part of 4-H, and though he was never the most well-heeled dog, he did pretty well and we were proud of him and of Kirsten’s work with him. Beaux was very loyal and friendly, and very protective of his family. Being a corgi-terrier mix, he had an incredible herding instinct, and he would always follow us upstairs to keep watch when we went to sleep. We loved him even during his mischevious moments, like one evening when dad and I were down in the basement, and Beaux just ran right down and peed on the floor right in front of us. We actually had a pretty good laugh about it at the time. After I left for college, I didn’t have as much chance to see him, but every time I’ve come home to visit since then, he’d be there wagging his tail, full of energy, and happy to see me.

In his later years, he’s had his share of problems… from ear infections to arthritis to other disorders, mom and dad have taken care of him the best they can, but it’s been tough. I think he has probably been suffering for a while, but God bless him for hanging on as long as he did and staying with mom and dad.

I never thought I could get this choked up about losing a pet, but I am. We’re all going to miss you, Beaux. You were a good dog.

For more photos of Beaux, see my photo tribute. If anyone has more photos of him, I would be happy to put them up.

If you were friends or family of Beaux, please leave us a comment to share your thoughts and memories of his life.

mini Computer, Max capability

To follow up on a comment Angela had left on my original post about the mini, here’s a run-down on the capabilities of the Mac mini, in no particular order:

• Yup, that’s our “tower”.
• The mini itself is six inches wide, six inches deep, and two inches tall. The whole machine can sit on one of my outstretched hands. In the picture above, it is sitting on top of a matching drive enclosure called the miniStack. the miniStack has the same width and depth as the mini, but is just one and a half inches tall.
• You can read Apple’s official spiel on the mini here.
• It contains a slot-loading “SuperDrive”, which is an optical drive that can read, write, and rewrite both CDs and DVDs. It can even write and rewrite dual-layer DVDs at up to 8x speed. Just stick your disc into the front, and it pulls it right in!
• It has two RAM slots. Each one can take up to a 1 GB DDR2 PC2-5300 SDRAM. It came installed with two 256 MB RAM chips for a total of 512 MB, but I upgraded it to two 1 GB RAM chips for a total of 2 GB of RAM. The machine was very fast with just 512 MB, but it did take an extra second or two to switch between applications when running a lot of applications. With 2 GB you can switch apps instantaneously. If you don’t feel comfortable working inside of a computer and possibly voiding your warranty, have Apple do the upgrade for you. If, like me, you are comfortable working in computers, it might be worth it. Yes, even though I goofed up the first time, I wouldn’t hesitate to make the same decision again (this time with the benefit of a lesson learned).
• It has a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo processor (also known as a dual core processor). To put it simply, dual core means that the computer can perform two separate tasks at the same time, each one running at 1.66 GHz. It’s actually more complicated than that, but I can give you the more complicated answer another time. Compare that to our old Mac, which had only a single core 450 MHz processor. Just one of the two cores in the mini is almost four times faster than that.
• It came with an 80 GB internal hard drive, but that was barely big enough to hold our existing collection of movies, music, and photos. Rather than order it with a larger hard drive (the internal hard drives spin at 5400 RPM and thus are a bit slow), we ordered an external drive enclosure called a miniStack. This sits neatly under the mini and lets you add an additional hard drive. We ordered it with a 320 GB hard drive, so we’ll have plenty of room for baby photos and videos.
• The mini comes with Apple’s excellent iLife ‘06 software package. I won’t take up your time by telling you everything it does, but suffice to say, it lets you do some very cool stuff with photos, video, music, and more. Be on the lookout for more cool creations from the Wood Family thanks to iLife ‘06. Don’t take my word for it… head over and take the tour.

So that’s a little blurb on what’s cool about the mini. I’m really enjoying it, and I’m excited about the creative possibilities it holds. It’s so much easier to put together movies and edit photos when you have a blazingly fast computer to work with.

Drama King

Just to clarify a bit from my last post, I’d say that my interpretation of the situation was rather over-dramatized. In the grand scheme of things, it really was no big deal. The computer was completely usable with the IR receiver broken, we didn’t lose any data, and though I lost a bit of pride, I’ve mostly gained it back since successfully completing the repair. There was no household crisis, Becky didn’t yell at me for breaking the computer, it was pretty much 100% me being very hard on myself.

Thank you all for your concern.

Oh, and Mr. Anonymous, I would be more inclined to approve your mean-spirited comment if you would leave a valid email address. Then again, maybe not.

A Humbling Learning Experience

I recently blogged about the new Mac mini Core Duo that we purchased on Saturday, March 18. Well, up until now, I haven’t really given you the whole truth. I wanted to wait until the story had ended in a way that I found satisfactory before I told the whole thing. Kind of selfish of me, I know, but hey… it’s our blog and we’ll write how we want to. Anyway, it’s pretty embarassing and humbling, but I need to get it out there for everyone to hear:

I broke our brand new Mac. Continue reading…

Almost an April Fool!

Happy birthday to my one and only sister, Kirsten!

Kirsten and Mark, Christmas, 2005

Congratulations on being a quarter of a century old!