So I blogged the 23rd that Liz was still pregnant. That night she has her water break. I had stayed up playing video games till 2AM, and at 3AM we were awake and getting set to go to the hospital. Total sleep is estimated at 30 minutes.

We got to the hospital at about 4AM and at 9:30AM Isaac Ivan Alexander Barrett was born. He is freaking cute too! I have some pics I will update this post with tonight when I get home.

The following week has been exciting having the new son and spending time with Liz, Madison and Isaac. I love each of them more than I can express in words.

I will update this post with pictures… promise.

Business

For the mast few weeks I have been making a really big push at Utahcon.com to get setup as a gadget/hardware reviewer with some companies. And it looks like we might have found our way in with HP/Compaq. They set us up with a contact for their PR agency and we are in the discussions of getting product sent out for review. I am really excited about this as it will finally legitimize Utahcon.com has a tech/gadget/hardware/book review site.

Pleasure

The poor wifey is still pregnant. It sucks cause I can tell she is more than ready to be done with the pregnancy so we can share the duties of care giver for little Isaac. I can’t wait as I will finally have my son, and I will be able to start grooming him into a young man, and further down the road a great leader of people and possibly a kick ass gamer. For now, we will spend as much time as we can preparing for what we hope will be a very uneventful c-section on February 2nd.

My mother started a challenge in the family to lose weight. The person who loses the most weight will earn $1/lbs up to $100. Having weighed in at 327lbs I think I have the ability to lose the most, and at the same time gain the most from this endeavor. Due to that challenge I have started working out daily. Nothing too major yet, as it is still winter here, and I am not in the mood to spend money on a gym membership I am not 100% dedicated to. No instead I am using the WiiFit to start. So far I am not loosing weight by any amazing measure, but I am being more active, and that is a start.

Friends

As I have migrated from employer to employer over the years my field of friends has changed with each move. There have been a few exceptions, those whom I consider to be better friends, and maybe even have true relationships with. UTChief is one of those guys. Chris, worked with me at Overstock.com and is actually the person who got me into blogging. Through the years we have crossed paths, wandered away from each other, but always manage to come back to similar interests. He has finally “come back” to EFx2Blogs and I wanted to say “Welcome fool!”

EFx2Blogs

Things here have been really quiet, pretty nice eh? Well it’s time that I change that up. I have some updates that need to be done. So I am working on them in the background, and I will be making more noise in the coming weeks on the main page, as well as on the dev page (I don’ think I have set it up yet). More later.

See ya!

They just swore in our newest President, Barack Obama. What a day! Let’s all hope and pray he lives up to his campaign promises and brings The United States of America to be better, so it is once again the greatest nation in the world.

President Obama has made some great promises including this one, that is important to me:

Open Up Government to its Citizens: Use cutting-edge technologies to create a new level of transparency, accountability, and participation for America’s citizens.

Transparency in government makes it much harder (if not impossible) for shady things to happen behind the curtains and the American people’s backs. To see the President himself is wanting this means there is a good man in office, one who can be trusted.

Our local governments here in Utah have been working to become as transparent as possible, and things in Utah are better than they have ever been. People are becoming more trusting of the government and people who are in our government that we don’t approve of are being let go and replaced with people whom we do trust. Transparency is a huge step forward for America.

I am also really happy about President Obama’s plans for Technology. You can read more about his plans for technology at Whitehouse.gov

This is a great new day and I am proud to be an American. Here’s to the future.

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I’m Gonna be a Father!

So I am under 20 days away from having a new son. I can’t wait! Whenever I sit and think about all the things I will have the chance to teach him as he grows my heart swells and I almost cry. It is exciting to think that I finally get my chance to prep and steer a life in a direction I hope will end in world domination, or at least not prison.

Utahcon.com

I don’t think anyone here follows my writings at Utahcon.com, but if you do, thanks! I started the site originally as a place to share my gaming score and some other stuff about my personal life. Well that has changed yet again. Utahcon.com is now a registered business in the great state of Utah. Utahcon.com is where I will be posting all my product reviews and tech news and general geeky stuff.

I hope to move from just book reviews into hardware and gadget reviews as well as continuing the book and software/site reviews.

The site has been a really neat thing for the last year giving me the chance to try a few things and see what fits. Mainly I like getting the books and the knowledge I am gleaming from all the books I have read.

Conclusion?

Not sure what else there is to write today. So I am off for now.

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Today was my day. The wife was tired of making me spend the weekends watching her clean or whatever. So this weekend we just hung out. It was amazing! We went to my favorite place for breakfast, Ogies. I really need to write Guy Fieri about the place. They have an amazing breakfast burrito.

After that we simply drove around the town doing things like playing at playgrounds and house shopping. We aren’t really looking yet, but we will be soonish.

Finally I am settling down for the evening with my laptop and Food Network. I honestly have come to love the network and I watch it almost exclusively. It reminds me of some humor from Jim Gaffigan

I do love food. I even enjoy watching people make food. But you ever notice that the food network is far more interesting when you’re hungry? When you’re full you’re like, “This is stupid.” But when you’re hungry the Food Network’s like porn. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, whip it up baby. Make it for me.” It is a little embarrassing when someone catches you watching the Food Network.

“What are you watching?”

“Uh, uh, the Food Network.”

“Well why are your pants off?”

“I, I like food?” “A lot?”

Overall probably the best weekend I have had in a long time. Soon I will be enjoying a new kind of weekend, one with my son Isaac, I can’t wait… less than 30 days to go.

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Today was a rough one. Liz woke up with bleeding, a worry of all expecting parents. As such I stayed home to help with Madison and to go with Liz to the doctor’s office.

After a few hours at the doctors office, we were told that all looks ok, and that we just have to take it easy. No heavy lifting, no long shopping trips, no fun for me either. Oh well. I would rather have a safe and healthy baby and wife than that anyways.

Back to work tomorrow, I can’t wait to see how the boss reacts when he learns I didn’t come in today

I’m not really that worried, because I am a good employee…

Well I am going to get back to surfing the net and spending time with the family.

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Well the rain is falling, you can hear the cars zipping around on the wet roads from the kitchen table, where I sit to post.

I am kinda glad it is a rainy day, means I don’t have to do much, I get to code all day. I have a quick freelance project to do, then I will be able to turn my attention to EFx2 and maybe get the homepage back to the fundamentals it should be. 

Well… off I go to code.

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If there is one thing I really can’t stand about Zune it is the DRM that comes with Zune Pass. I am not bitching about not being able to take my music to other devices, that doesn’t matter to me (I have other ways of getting it there). What does bother me is how your Zune pass can only be related to 3 computers and 2 devices at a time. I understand the idea here, to keep you from just sharing your Zune Pass login with all your friends and family, and all Zune owners.

What irks me about this setup is that let’s say you are like me and are constantly changing things up in your network, and reinstalling OSes every couple of weeks (don’t ask I just do). Well each time I install Windows it gets a new unique identifier, which apparently Zune is using to keep track of what machine I am connected with. Well I can remove a (single) computer from my Zune device every 30 days. That is it, 1. Then you can’t remove anymore until another 30 days has passed.

So let’s say for example I have two PCs at home and a PC at work. PC1 has Windows XP, PC2 has Vista, and my PC at work has XP. Well at work they come through and update me to Vista. That means to get Zune working on the work PC again I have to drop a PC from Zune (Work) and then add the new install of Windows. No biggie.

Now I have a melt down at home and my PC running XP dies. I reinstall it with Vista… oh well I am going to have to wait 30 days to remove the PC from my DRM and add the new one. This sucks.

Then there is the other thing that really bothers me. Just because a machine is on your Zune Pass DRM doesn’t mean it can handle your Zune as YOUR ZUNE!

Go ahead. Get two PCs and hook your Zune to the first one and link it to the software. Then unhook it and connect it to PC #2. It will ask if you want to link it (and erase all content) or be a guest. You can download music but you can’t change what is on the Zune itself.

Why can’t all three of the machines on my DRM all act as if the Zune was local to that machine all the time? Add and remove content from the Zune. Manage my Zune in full? Seems to make sense to me that if I have the credentials to login to Zune, and the Zune device is on one of my DRMed machines, then I should be abel to do everything with those machines.

Zune Team, is that possible? How about working on that for Zune 3.5?

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Look, I am not the first person who should be throwing stones at Microsoft, especially given my serious on and off again fanboyism for them. However, I am just shocked at how their website is behaving, with the scheduled outage.

First, if you go to Zune.net it says

Zune services will be down for scheduled maintenance starting Monday, September 29, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific, for up to 48 hours.
During this time, you will not be able to access the Zune Social, Zune.net forums, or Zune Marketplace.

So they know their sites are down, and obviously they have planned on this. But wait!! At the top of the page are all the normal links “products, entertainment, social, support”, yeah the Social link is there!

So I clicked it (I am a glutten for pain)… what did I get? Not a nice error page, not even a page. I got a notification from Firefox that states:

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

It is as if the Zune Team and Microsoft don’t know how to setup temporary pages. A simple re-direct, or a nice valid error page. Instead they are leading people to believe they are morons who can’t support a server.

Very Professional.

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My father dropped me an email today, I liked it, so here is a copy of it.
Life’s Rules
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect
you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Continue Reading »

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