1. Elly was posing for Mommy the other day.  Looks like another child of ours isn’t camera shy.  This little girl smiles an incredible amount, and I am thankful to God for a happy baby.

2. Reagan loves to take pictures.  He’s learned how to work the camera very well, and doesn’t need any help to take this pictures or to view them afterward.  He’s also getting pretty good with the photography aspect.  He typically will choose a specific target.

3. Some random pics.  One that I would like to point to is that of Reagan fixing the computer.  Him and I took an old PC apart last night.  We both had a lot of fun and he kept asking “What is that?” questions, which I love to have.  Especially when it’s something I can actually give a good answer on.  I always find the dichotomy of this little boy amazing.  On the one hand you have a little geek in the making and on the other you have a tractor loving little farmer/trucker.

First, my children are growing up so incredibly fast.  Elly is about to turn 6 months and is just about ready to crawl.  When you put her down, she’ll quickly scoot from where you had her.  She doesn’t quite follow any straight line, but she raise up on her arms and knees and whatever else she can get on and move around.  It’s quite cute to see her circular paths of teething drool.  She’s eating more solid foods and is starting to make more distinct sounds.  In particular, I’ve noticed that she has the “da” sound down pretty good.  Lastly, she makes her daddy feel so special whenever I come home, where she will grin and grin at me.  Not to be outdone, Reagan has also been amazing me.  I’ve talked before about my geekness rubbing off, but the other day he asked if he could watch Nick Jr. on the ‘puter’.  I said yes and he took off running.  Dessa followed a moment later to turn it on, but it was already up on the screen.  She asked him how he got it and he excitedly said, “I clicked the green button (the Windows Start button) and then the E (Internet Explorer icon) and then the yellow star (the Favorites) and then Nick Jr.!”(The text link for Nick Jr.)  As a geek and a dad, I was quite proud.  His creative side also flashes out regularly.  Like the routine songs that he makes up to well carried tunes, or the other day when he climbed naked into a Target bag that he had poked two holes into the bottom.  He put his legs through the holes and his arms through the handles like overalls and said, “Look Mommy, I’m a grocery!”

I’ve passed my 1 year anniversary at work.  As of July 3rd, I have worked as an “IT Professional” for 1 year.  It has been a crazy ride, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’ve started a major redesign of our church’s website.  I’m really excited about it because it is the first web design work I’ve done in a while.  I’m working out some rusty skills and learning some new ones in the process.  The result seems to be a very nice look and feel.

Barring anything unforseen, I will be attending college this Fall at Nashville State.  I’m going to get my associates in IT, then go on from there to a yet to be determined bachelors.  While I don’t think I’m going to get much use out of that 2.5 years of a biology major, at least I don’t have to take a science this time around.  Rather, I get to work on Database Programming and Programming in C++.  I can’t wait!  (I really do mean that)

Okay, much more to say, but then that’ll leave me late for work.  So, until the next time my wife makes me blog (just kidding), farewell!

I while back I had a dilemma. Through a year or two of annoying people with constant flashes, I had accumulated around 15 Gigabytes of pictures. These pictures are very important to me, and I really didn’t want to lose them, so I would periodically back up to DVD. However, I was always aware that if my stuff was stolen or if there was a fire, that backing up to DVD didn’t really do me a whole lot of good.

That’s when I went looking for an online solution and found Mozy.com, which I recommend if you run into a similar conundrum. For $4.95 a month, you can back up an unlimited amount of data. I currently have around 20 GB stored online. Then, if you need a file, you can either go to the networked drive that shows up in My Computer, download the files in a zip file, or you can pay extra and have the files burned to DVD and FedExed to you.

If you are worried about security, you have two options. You can use Mozy’s 448-bit encryption key (which is what I use) or you can enter one of your own. What those choices mean is that the data is encrypted either way, but if you use Mozy’s key then they would be able to get into it if you ever needed them to. If you use one of your own, then if you lose the key your dead in the water if you needed to get to your data. The former is less secure, but easier to manage.

I’ve also had good experience with tech support. Granted that is as a business customer at work, where we also use Mozy.

Of course, Mozy hasn’t been without its share of issues. For instance, with the business version at work I’ve found that if you have a single file then you have to have 130% the size of that file in free space so that it can encrypt the file. So if you have a 1MB file, then it will use 1.3MB of disk space to create the temp file during encryption. Once it is uploaded and sent online, the the temp file is erased. Well, that’s fine for a small file, but when you have an 18 Gigabyte Exchange .edb file, then it’s not so good. So, if you have a single file that is very large, you’ll need to have the free disk space to back it up.

Also, I do run into the occasional server error where Mozy’s connection messes up.

For me, though, Mozy has been a great security blanket to have. I don’t worry so much about my data because it’s backed up elsewhere. You should still do your local backups, though, so don’t neglect that. If you want to learn more, check out Mozy.com. They offer a free version that will give you 2 gigabytes of storage.

After you drag the email, another window will be opened up, just as if you had opened a “New” Calendar or Task item, except that the contents of the email will be in the notes section of the new item.

This will make it easy to create Tasks and Calendar Events and keep all of a related email’s contents readily available without having to search for the email.