The highlight of my summer was definitely the 6-day road trip Dave and I took with my parents to attend my cousin’s wedding.  Not only was I honored to be in the wedding, I was so excited to see my family for a solid 4 days.  We drove across the never-ending state of Pennsylvania, through Ohio, and into Michigan.  I don’t think it dawned on me until we hit Ohio that I had been on I-80, on this same journey, many years ago.

I started to remember the road trips to Cedar Point in Grandma and Grandpa Rossi’s motor home.  I remembered all the times Grandma and I had driven to see various family members in Michigan and Ohio when I was little.  Then I saw the Michigan border and everything became familiar.  I remembered the trips from the airport to Grandpa J’s house to deliver his favorite cheesecakes from a restaurant we loved in Rhode Island.  I started to realize how much I missed this place and my family who today is only with us in spirit.  Not only did I miss them, but I missed their homes and their neighborhoods and all the things that filled my family memories.

So, I asked Mom and Dad if we could stop by their old neighborhoods.  I hoped it wouldn’t be too painful to go back to the houses their parents lived in for 40 years, and just say “hello.”  They smiled and agreed and, I shed a few tears just thinking about it.  We all agreed to stop at both houses on the way home from the wedding.  The morning of our return trip, we were up at 6am and on the road for Allen Park, Michigan.

Rossi home, once upon a time

The Rossi house looked as I remembered it, with a new fence and some nice new landscaping.  The Jablonowski house also looked great.  As we sat in the street, staring at the house, the owner walked out toward her car and I couldn’t help but feel compelled to explain our gawking.  I told mom that we needed to say hello before she called the police.

Mom rolled down her window and explained that her dad built the house and passed away in it 40 years later.  The woman was so wonderfully understanding and told us that her parents had purchased the home from my Grandpa and she had assumed it from them.  She said it was a great house and they had even made an addition on the back.  Mom got choked up and I was grateful knowing that my family’s homes, where I had so many memories, were so well taken care of.  I felt like it was okay to continue the journey home knowing that our little piece of Michigan was in good hands.

Jablonowski home, once upon a time

Share on Facebook

I’ve been asked where the small posts about our day-to-day updates are?  Well, the answer is very simple.

This blog is 100% public.  Anybody and everybody can read it and thus we try to keep it’s content very censored and controlled.  If you’d like to tap into the more personal occurrences in our lives please join our friends networks on Facebook.  With the “Privacy Controls” on Facebook we feel more comfortable posting our weekend plans, what awesome things we’re doing, how stressful our days are and even some awesome pictures of me eating huge sandwiches

Share on Facebook

Kate and I decided that it would be in my best interest to no longer work from home.  My cabin fever as of late has been pretty depressing and with me not leaving the house the only person I can interact with on a daily basis is Kate.  I reached out to my boss who was very much on board with me no longer working from home as she thought me being in a field office would be a much better working environment.

It has now been over a month in the making but the paperwork is signed, the budget is in and as of today the required equipment has been shipped from corporate.  I am scheduled to begin working from the local field office, which funnily enough is the office I used to work from prior to switching roles, on Monday.  I am very excited to be back in an office, having a professional environment, people to bounce ideas off of and most importantly to not be in the home all day.

Now I just need to go pick up all the pants I had altered from the tailor otherwise I have nothing to wear to work!

Share on Facebook

I’ve always loved Firefox however in recent months I’ve cast this cute little animal into the refuge pile in /Applications and given its space in the warmth of my dock to Apple’s Safari 4 browser.  Firefox had developed a very naughty habit of eating all of my poor laptops free memory and CPU so when Apple came out with Safari 4 I decided to give it shot.

Safari is remarkably faster than the prior versions of Firefox and had a much lower memory and CPU footprint on my laptop.  The browser offered many other nifty features that I loved the glitz of when switching but over the past few months have all but forgotten as I never use them.  Such toys as “Top Sites” and “Graphical History” while being very interesting features don’t serve one well when they never use the “Top Sites” and barely ever check their browser history.

Today a friend mentioned how much he was enjoying Firefox 3.5 and I decided it was worth a shot to install on my work issued Windows laptop.  I replaced Firefox 3.0 with 3.5 and found it remarkably faster, sharper looking and much better with sharing the small amount of memory my work laptop has.  Since I was so impressed with it on the work computer I decided to give it a shot on my personal computer.

I installed the browser and after just about twenty minutes of usage noticed how much faster it was than prior versions.  It was as fast or faster than Safari 4.  The rendering is quicker than it used to be and Firefox’s use of large fonts has always been the most superior out there.  The results are in

Firefox has found it's rightful home

So now I am back on Firefox and quite happy with the performance thus far.

PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
983 firefox-bi  12.1% 13:59.60  24   249   1148  120M    52M   169M   577M

So now a question for all of you out there who actually read enough of this post to make it here.  Do you have any must have extensions I should look into?

Share on Facebook

Wow, what a crazy few weeks it has been.  Kate and I have been very seriously considering moving onto the next steps of our lives for quite some time.  We both know the things we want to do and the goals we have for ourselves require us to be in a house and no longer in our condo.  While this place has been very good for us and we’ve turned it into an amazingly charming home we want a backyard that is our own, a kitchen that more suits are love for food, and more space for guests and our belongings.

Kate spent a lot of time doing some amazing research to determine the better towns for us to live in.  We wanted to stay within a good commute to the local area we are now as this is where most of the industry and jobs are should either Kate or I in the future be on the job market.  We further were interested in a town with a good community, lower crime rate, and a good school system.  We began viewing homes and figuring out what we liked, what we wanted, and what we absolutely had to have in our future home.

While doing this we also needed to prepare our condo for sale.  This required a lot of staging removing photos, personal items that others may not appreciate and removing all the clutter.  We had to rent a storage unit to put a lot of things that were taking up space and made our condo look smaller than it is.  Our place is now fully staged, we’ve had an open house and a couple appointments for people to walk through.  Still no offers but we have gotten positive feedback about the overall presentation

Buying a house is proving to be very stressful and time consuming.  We found a great home that we really wanted and put in an offer.  We then received a counter-offer to which we gave our own counter-offer.  We were then told that there were 3 total bidders being considered and we should give our last and final offer, which we did and won.  However only a few days later the sellers received another bid and again requested last and final offer.  This time we didn’t win and have lost the house.

It was heartbreaking and very depressing to both of us and we’re still angry every time we think about it; but we’re determined to find the right hosue for us.  We’ve since losing that house been through a few more houses with four more to see this week and hopefully one of them will become our home.

Keep your fingers crossed and send us good thoughts and wishes as we could really use the luck.

Share on Facebook

This is an overdue post …

Kate’s 30th birthday gift to me was a vacation.  While I knew we were going away from March 19th through the 23rd I had no idea where we were going.  The only thing I knew well ahead of time was that I should pack for warm weather and that was all I needed.  I am not usually the kind of person who likes surprises however this was one I could sink my teeth into as I knew it wouldn’t end up with me wearing a funny hat in a public place … then again, I did end up doing that …

Kate and John F. managed to pull of a miracle.  Both myself and Rachel (John’s wife) turned 30 within six weeks of each other.  Kate and John worked together and got us both on a “surprise” vacation together.  Rachel and I knew the other one was going on a surprise vacation but we didn’t know we’d be going on vacation together.

Kate and I got our luggage and made our way towards the airport shuttle bus.  Kate told me we had to make our way to another terminal to connect with our transportation.  As I was walking off the bus there Rachel and John were standing at the terminal stop.  Rachel and I were completely surprised and absolutely goofy to each see the other couple standing there.

So here we are, giddy as a bunch of school girls and hugging each other making a huge teary eyed scene at the Fort Lauderdale airport still with no idea where we’re going or what we’re doing.  We’re then informed that we’re going on a cruise together to Cozumel Mexico.  As there is no place in the world I’d rather be then on a cruise ship I was so overly stoked that I became as hyper active as a 5 year old on 18 snickers bars.

We had a phenomenal time on the cruise together.  Every day and every night was another adventure.  It was so very enjoyable and stress relieving.  I was very sad that we couldn’t stay in that world of happiness for longer but knew we had to get back to reality.

Share on Facebook

Kate and I rarely have time to watch television in the evenings.  We both work full time jobs and after work between the gym, Kate’s MBA classes, my poker nights and us still having to find time to do household chores we get about an hour a night to watch TV.

Optimizing our time is important and ever since we purchased our first DVR in 2003 we’ve enjoyed being able to save time by fast forwarding commercials.  However now that we’ve gone to HD television we’ve run into a problem.  The DVR provided by Comcast just doesn’t have enough space!  We’re constantly at over 90% filled and cheer when we make it into the low 70s.  However it will never stay in that range long.

We’ve lost numerous episodes of television shows because the DVR fills and has to either delete something or not record something.  It’s really getting tiresome and I’ve started to seek alternatives to recording everything on my DVR.

First I decided to try the 100% legitimate way of watching TV and I decided to make use of the Hulu (http://www.hulu.com) website.  Hulu offers a wonderful service offering television shows by participating networks in your web browser.  It offers a SD resolution of 360p and some programs you can rock out on HD at 480p.  The 480p seems pretty good to me within the window however I notice that in a full screen display they’ll tend to be sluggish.  This could be a result of my over three year old laptop but I have no other way to test it as Kate and I have exactly matching laptops.

Thanks to Hulu I no longer need to record my animated shows like “Family Guy” and “King of the Hill” and the crappy TV series I enjoy because I truly am my sons father such as “Knight Rider”.  However when I went to add other shows to my subscription list I ran into an issue.  Shows such as “Scrubs” and “How I Met Your Mother” are not directly hosted on the Hulu site and instead it links you back to the networks own site with their own modified flash video player.  The problem with that being for some reason I am not getting the content.  Nor am I sure that my Hulu subscription will properly notify me when these sites update their content.

As of this moment no matter what I try I can not get the episodes directly linked form the Hulu site to play on my machine.  Yes, I know that most people are too nearsighted to realize that not everybody runs Windows and Internet Explorer so us poor Mac users suffer.  I just don’t think that should be a valid excuse for not being able to play video from a NATIONAL network broadcasting service.  Poor showing.

Hopefully I can figure this out and Hulu can work for my needs letting me only record the things we both watch on the DVR which currently has four things scheduled for the next two days with 14% free.  Those four items are NOT going to fit thus forcing us to loose episodes we can’t possibly watch as Kate wont even be home until tomorrow evening.

Share on Facebook

So today I was diving into my /Applications folder (For you Windows users that’s c:\Program Files\) looking for programs installed I no longer need, use, or particularly want.  Quite a few found their way to the trash can as I’ve really been trying to trim down my program usage to the bare minimum and consolidating a lot into single applications as much as possible.  

I’ve come to the conclusion that my “Must Haves” list has gotten very small.  I am down to the following as required for me:

• iTerm
• Safari (switched from Firefox recently)
• NetNewsWire
• iPhoto
• iTunes
• Twhirl

I can get everything I need to get done with just those applications.  I hold onto Microsoft Office for the rare times I need to open an office document on my personal computer; however for the most part Google Documents allows me access to those files as well.  

I was able to remove tons of “Helper” applications in favor of small plugins to the above programs that accomplish the same goal.  For example, I don’t need a Flickr upload application when I can just use their site and or a plugin to iPhoto.  I don’t need Thunderbird, gmail works just fine.  I don’t need VNC as I use LogMeIn for all my remote connections now.  

What are your “must have” applications?  This is more aimed at the Mac users as my Windows computer I do not have any control over the programs on it.

Share on Facebook

I’ve been wanting to participate in an athletic event that would challenge me and get me back into running.  I’ve struggled the last few months to have the energy and positive attitude to work out and keep up with the regimen I used to find so easy.  I’ve decided to take the plunge and just registered for my first Sprint Triathlon.

I am really excited to train and struggle and push myself.  I’ll be racing with my friend and colleague Katy from work and her sister.  It’s going to be a lot of hard work and a lot of fun. 

Share on Facebook

For all of you who remembered I do have a birthday, I truly thank you and am grateful to have such good friends.  For those of you who didn’t know my birthday was coming up please don’t sweat it.  I can never remember birthdays and if it wasn’t for multiple entries on my calendar, mostly done by Kate, I’d probably miss all of my family and friends birthdays.

In under one week I turn 30.  A milestone some tell me but I feel no excitement about hitting “the big” 30.  It’s just another year older but this time with so much social stigma put on it by others.  People seem to think that 30 means I should act and feel a certain way, yet I don’t feel any different than I did two years ago.  I guess being on my third decade is something to celebrate; especially as reckless as I was with the first one and a half.

Some kind folks have asked me what I’d like for my 30th birthday and I’ve found myself without any answers.  It’s not that I am trying to be difficult but I honestly want very little lately.  I am becoming realistic and realizing just how much waste there is in the craving for many things and I no longer want things I’ll rarely use.  In contrast to years past just having the latest gadget no longer makes me happy.

I am also so happy for the changes in my life over the past two years with driving and my health that I feel full and satisfied.  I am still living on what I can only classify as some kind of emotional high that has left me no longer craving small material items.  That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate a gift, it just means that I can’t spout off a list of things I want like a child can the weeks before Christmas when writing a letter to Santa.

Share on Facebook