My buddy pointed me to a good VU Basketball Blog which I didn’t know about.  It is pretty good reading.  I have been relying on the VU Message Board which is all right but not great for VU hoops news.  The Rivals.com message forum format leaves a lot to be desired.

Villanova plays this Friday night at West Virginia.  This Friday night Big East game must be something new – Marquette played (and lost) to South Florida last Friday night.  It is on ESPN so I will get to see it.  I only got to see the second have last night as I was at a swim team meeting – yep, it is almost time for swim team to start again.

The one behavior which still drives me crazy is the unwillingness to turn off or go into Stand-By.  I can press the function key or use the Start Menu option but the computer simply remains powered on.  Sometimes it will go into Stand By only to turn itself right back on a minute to two later.  Very annoying when it happens while it is in my computer bag.

I was supposed to play last Friday but the course was closed because it had been so cold all week that they didn’t want to take any chances.  I was bummed because I had rearranged my schedule so I could play.  Yesterday was nice but the wind really picked up after we had played 4-5 holes.  From that point on it was really windy.

I shot 96 which I wasn’t too unhappy with considering I hadn’t played since just before Christmas.  I hit the ball, particularly off the tee, really well.  My chipping really let me down, particularly on the back 9.  I just don’t have much confidence in my ability to execute a short (10-30 yards) wedge shot.  On the part 5 17th I hit a great tee shot followed by a very good 3 wood to leave myself 30 yards from the green for my third shot.  What do I do?  Duff the chip and hit it maybe 10 yards.  I do the same with my 4th shot.  I think get fairly close with my 5th and 2 putt for a double bogie.  30 yards from the green in two but take five more shots to get it in the hole.  I had a number of holes like that yesterday.

Still, it was good to get out and I am going to try and play again tomorrow although I may only be able to play nine holes due to my work schedule.  We’ll see.

I had taken the SIMM card out of my laptop to use in a Sony-Ericsson Z750 UMTS phone that I have and when I put it back in my laptop, I noticed that I didn’t have a BroadBand device listed with the Dell Connection Manager.  Very odd.  I cannot explain why it went away.  After dinking with it off and on for a couple days, I decided to reinstall the Dell Connection Manager software.

After doing so, my BroadBand card was recognized AND both my WiFi and BroadBand connections have been more stable.  I worked for almost two hours Saturday night via BroadBand without any problems.  Last night I used my home WiFi connection for several hours also without any problems.  I had also noticed that there was a newer version of the Dell Connection Manager (A11 vs A10) than I had installed so I have installed it as well and all seems to be well for now.

I will continue to monitor this and I am sure that now I have committed it to a blog post, it probably won’t work worth a crap tonight when I need it!

I need to try the Audio Book Builder and see if that helps – right now I am to the point where the books show up correctly in iTunes, under Audiobooks and each one separate, but on my iPod, all of the tracks are all mixed together under the Audiobooks menu.  Bleh.  Makes it really hard to listen to more than one book when the tracks are all jumbled up.

There has to be a good solution to this dilemma.

• Windows Mobile Standard
• Slide out QWERTY keyboard
• WiFi and GPS
• Numeric Keypad

It’s a phone first, PDA / email device second which is exactly what I want.  I really wish AT&T would pick this device up.  Looks like it will be north of $600 unsubsidized at Best Buy, CDW, etc.  Bleh.  I like this phone better than the Xperia X1 I have had my eyes on for a while.

I have been round and round with our internal IT people as well as Dell on this issue and haven’t found any resolution yet.  A new BIOS update (A05) actually made the problem worse.  With the A03 BIOS when it happened I could still ping other computers and eventually full connectivity would come back.  But not now.

Reportedly Dell has a production stop on the E4300 to resolve a bunch of issues and a BIOS update is supposed to be available on January 19th.  I hope so – I am about to spend a bunch of time on the road for work and having an unreliable network connection is not ok.

If you are considering an E4300 I’d hold off for now and see if reports improve over the next couple weeks.  That is of course assuming that Dell actually delivers a new BIOS update and doesn’t delay it again!

Where to go?  When?  Fly?  Drive?  We thought about the beach, the mountains, skiing, a C&O Canal trip, and many other ideas.  We quickly realized that between school for the kids (some on traditional schedule, some on year round), work for the adults, other obligations, there just weren’t many weekends to choose from so we ended up choosing the period between Christmas and New Years.  With that period falling on a weekend this year, it worked out well.  All the kids were out of school and work is for the most part, pretty quiet.

Once we settled on a weekend, we still needed to decide where to go.  We eliminated a lot of choices by picking a winter time slot.  We had thought a trip to Great Wolf Lodge would be fun and it would be but it is pretty pricey and if you aren’t into water parks, there isn’t a lot else to do unless you leave the resort.  Leaving the resort doesn’t make a lot of sense since that is what you pay for so we ruled that out.  Skiing?  Could be pricey and would divide up the family between skiers – good and fair, and non-skiers which defeated the purpose of getting together.  So we ruled that out too.  My parents live in the DC area and there are ton of things to do there but over the years we have done most of them and we wanted to do something else.  Baltimore is close and the Inner Harbor has lots to do so after checking out a few options, we settled on Baltimore.

We ended up making a game out of the weekend and divided the family up into five teams.  We had a series of contests or Clues as we called them, with a winner for each event.  This made the weekend a lot of fun and mixed the families up into groups they normally wouldn’t be in.  Having a series of activities on the agenda also kept us from looking at each other and trying to decide what to do next.

We had activities which could be done at the hotel and some which were done at various attractions,  We had a scavenger hunt at the National Aquarium and another at the B&O Railroad Museum.  We had another around the Inner Harbor itself which involved going all over the place to track down information.  We had a Family Feud inspired trivia contest and a “snack association” game where some sort of snack food was associated with each family member and teams had to figure out who went with which snack.  My sister from Milwaukee lives near the Jelly Belly factory and brought 18 different types of jellybeans to be identified by color and taste.  After you have a couple, they all start to taste the same, except of course, the jalapeno ones which taste terrible!

We stayed at the Residence Inn on Light Street which is about 5 blocks from the Inner Harbor.  I love Residence Inns – they work really well for my family of six.  Breakfast is nice, the extra room is really nice to have, and having a refrigerator to keep food and drinks help us from having to eat out for every meal.  The Light Street Residence Inn is one of the nicer ones I have stayed at – I highly recommend it.  I have added it to my list of list of Hotels that Don’t Suck.

All in all, we had a great weekend, my parents were thrilled and everything came off without a hitch.  About the only thing that was bad was the drive home.  DC traffic is bad.  Really bad.  I simply cannot fathom commuting up and down the I-95 corridor every day like some people do.  I would be insane.  They really need to figure out how to bring the Metro down into Prince William county.  Probably never happen but it would help a lot.

I ended up having to set up new service and now that is is running, I need to migrate our e-mail addresses from my old account to the new one.  The support person I worked with assured me this should be simple to do, we’ll find out in a day or so when it bubbles on to my to-do list to take care of.

So I finally finished it and it was a bit of a let down because the story doesn’t end!  About 100 pages from the end I figured it couldn’t end because the story would have to wrap up really quickly which would have been a real disservice to the story.  So I would rather it flow into a fourth book than have a rushed ending.

There was a quite a bit of character development for Eragon’s brother which should be interesting as it appears he will be a central figure to the conclusion of the story.  This book is a less tedious read than the second book (Eldest), much of which took place with the elves and thus had lots of odd words which can be tedious to read.

If you have enjoyed the first two books you’ll like this one too but it would have been nice to know ahead of time that the story wouldn’t end in this book.