I will try to catch up a little for those who are not inclined to use farcebook…

Some catchup below the fold:

I had a lovely Thanksgiving and then went through a brief period of feeling out of touch with the world because my two jobs are resetting my natural clock and daily rhythm to a schedule that few of my friends share. I have learned that some people don’t mind a late night text and phone call, and for that I am grateful as I can talk to people on my drive home from the 2nd job. With both of us working two jobs, Erci and I are seeing less of each other so we’ve made an effort to have a date night now and then. We got to see the recent Muppet movie, and were delighted by the show, the dance numbers, and the appearance of both Jim Parsons and Neil Patrick Harris.

I once again (and pretty much every quarter) am very grateful to Mike Bombich for Carbon Copy Cloner which makes full backups of your Macs easy and you can boot from them. Highly recommended.

I took advantage of some employee discounts and replaced our original Time Capsule with a new one and our D-Link with an Airport Extreme for much faster wireless throughout the house. I am also replacing the Linux with Xen virtual Open Filer machine iSCSI disk share to an old Mac Mini as home media server with Linux NFS shared directly to newer Mac Mini as Media controller and AppleTV units as Media viewers. This is the sort of thing I find fun!

A lot of my personal project time got stolen when I discovered my 120 gallon marine reef aquarium spring a leak! Jeff Lofgren was my hero and helped me move the fish, shrimp, corals, and other living things to a variety of smaller tanks and coolers the day the leak was discovered, and most everything survived (though I did have one of the smaller tanks crash). I am trying to get the leak repaired so I can put the big tank back together again, but have not had time to really progress on it much.

Discovered that Domaine Raspail-Ay 2008 Gigondas is a spectacular wine while having a lovely dinner out with a special friend, highly recommended. I also found out that Fireworx pizza in Leesburg is delicious for those who can do gluten, thanks to co-workers for dragging me there.

ThinkGeek has some pretty spectacular iPad cases with integrated Bluetooth keyboards.

Cassandra and Jeff recommended and lent us “Across the Universe” and we finally watched it Christmas Day and it is both spectacular and moving. I went out and bought my own copies of both the movie and the soundtrack the very next day and have been listening to it ever since… beautiful dance numbers, some very compelling re-arrangements of Beatles music.

I am trying to get several appliances and home repairs done, and we keep running into no one wanting to pick up work, so I guess the economy must be recovering. I am learning that I despise the incompetence that is Sears Appliance Repair, and the fact that they seem to have bought out all the competition. Our Dacor oven has an F1 code alert, which indicates problem with the control panel. Our Viking under-counter fridge has been out for ages with a failed thermostat. We have a small roof leak over our kitchen. All will get fixed eventually, but it’s like pulling teeth to get people to come take our money and fix things.

I successfully replaced a 5th generation iPod classic hard drive and then sold it to a niece for the cost of the replacement parts, very happy that was so easy. Steve and Ashley helped me bring the 120 gallon tank outside and hose it out, and then my hero Jeff Lofgren and Alexandrea Lynch helped bring it back in on New Year’s Eve… Odd mystery, it did not leak when outside, nervous about filling it without having done a repair…

Jill and Eddie hosted the Molecular Mixology blow-out bash to bring in the New Year at their place and Kate, Erci, and I joined many friends there and had a fantastic time being irresponsible… I discovered that coughing after sipping Pyrat rum over a bonfire can be a mini-fireworks show!

Now I am recovering from a fairly nasty ear/throat virus and then infection… Life is always full of surprises.

I am in shock and disbelief that we survived that long without power so well. I hope everyone else does too.

I have to say huge thanks to the power restoration crews and road clearing crews. In the face of natural calamity (salt washing rain followed by sleet and then several inches of heavy wet sticky snow all in only a few hours), and with that compounded by massive plow-blocking traffic jams of epic proportions; they have done a remarkable job of getting the roads passable quickly, then clearing roads so power repair crews could get to down lines, then working on subdivisions (which continues).

Something should be done about not super-saturating the roads all at once with so much traffic, but frankly that could not have been foreseen, at least not on the scale we encountered. The heavy snow taking down overhead lines is something that can only be fixed by re-running those lines underground, which is expensive; but we really need to do it because warmer winters with more wet/sticky snow and ice will be more frequent going forward.

The Prius was a champ, I was able to slowly drive past trucks, cars, and even large snow plows that had no traction at all in the worst of the storm. I did bottom out on Mountain Road where the snow was deep enough that I could not clear the piles, but was able to back up for a mile using the backup camera (following my own tire tracks back out) to try an alternate route. I got stuck 150′ from the driveway and used the snow blower to clear a path to the driveway, getting my car off the street just in time for the plow to come through!

I took a few photos, and they are up on the experimental .mac site, wow that was easy. I may have to subscribe to .mac regularly. Trivial to publish photos!

Full Gallery

The new sump was my old hospital tank, so I had to migrate all the corals, fish, and shrimp from the old hospital tank to the 30 gallon breeder. Feels good to be done with this phase.

I am using a 30 gallon breeder with CPR backback overflow skimming to filter sand and water before it goes into the new system. For a while it will be a lot of work, but once set up it should be easier to maintain than all the little tanks. Now I am impatient to start plumbing tests and thrilled the old backpack works so well at skimming the surface water (I should have use it much earlier, great device).

We just learned about a new (well, relatively new) big public aquarium in Valencia, Spain.
L´Oceanogràfic is allegedly the largest public aquarium in Europe today (that position probably will not remain for long, they build bigger ones all the time). The architecture and detail of planning the marine eco-systems for all the animals at L´Oceanogràfic appear to be models for the latest in marine biology and education and science. This aquarium is now on our list of must go see places. Any one up for a trip to Spain?

We are going with a group of Erci‘s Dad’s friends in April and May of 2007. Not sure if we can fit this aquarium into the trip or not, but we will try.