Just got back last night from a weekend of hockey and shopping.  Steph, myself and JLo all went to Pittsburgh for the weekend.  Shopping at the Grove City outlets on Saturday and a Pittsburgh Penguins game on Sunday afternoon.  Great trip, bought some good stuff, had some cheap Yuengling on tap and saw a great hockey game.  What more can a guy ask for you wonder?  Well I got some other stuff as well, like my trip to the sketchiest 'beer store' ever. To be fair, the sketchy 'woman' at Walmart made it sound really sketchy and yet I went anyway, and it didn't disappoint (JLo refused to leave the car).  I apologize for not taking pictures of this 'beer store' and next time I'm near Mercer PA, I will stop and take pictures of it.  Also with the win Pittsburgh moved up into 1st place in the Eastern Conference with only a few games left in the season, so it was a big win.

My pics are here and you can also check out John's pics over here.  He brought his nice camera and has some nice game pics.

Finally got back from Las Vegas.  Mix was great and I had a blast.  I won't post too much about it here (going to post some WPF stuff later). 

Steph arrived in Vegas very late Friday night (Saturday morning) and then we started doing the touristy stuff.  Gambled, ate, saw the sights.  Saturday night we went and saw Love which was fantastic.  Sunday we went to the Grand Canyon.  If you are in Vegas and have a day to spare go see the Grand Canyon.  I did some research on it before we left and basically it was a 5 hour bus ride (one way) at 120 dollars a piece.  I decided we would be better off doing it ourselves, so we rented a Ford Fusion and took off.  The final total for the trip was 530 miles of travel and $159 (food, rental, gas, and park admission).  It was an amazing little trip and the Canyon was probably the greatest thing I've ever seen, it blew my mind.  Stopped at the Hoover Dam (the kids call it The Dam, or just The Big D) which was also cool.

Pictures of the Vegas trip, and pictures of the Grand Canyon Adventure

My old Thinkpad Z60m was starting to do some strange things like randomly shutting down.  So I decided it was time for an upgrade.

I finally settled on the Dell M1530
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7500 (2.2GHz/800Mhz FSB, 4MB Cache)
3gig of ram
NVidia 256mb GeForce 8600M GT
200GB 7200RPM Sata
Wireless N card Some other bells and whistles like a built in webcam.

I love the look of the laptop and was fairly happy with the build quality.  The Z60m had the best build quality in a laptop that I have ever seen so it's not surprising that the new Dell couldn't live up to that.  The first problem I had was that there was a dent around trackpad, but Dell gladly replaced the whole laptop.  However another problem I had with both of the laptops was that they wouldn't sleep 95% of the time. They would just crash and reboot.  After hours of research I found some info on the Internet that diagnosed the problem as PC-Cillin anti-virus that comes pre-installed.  How exactly Dell ships software in this condition baffles me.  I uninstalled (or at least tried) PC-Cillin and presto, no problems at all anymore.

Couple of things I like / are different:

I've always loved my WHS.  I've been using it since the first beta, but I don't mind admitting I'm not the most committed beta tester.  There was no way I was going to try restoring a backup to a machine that had nothing wrong with it using a beta product.  If one of my machines failed during the beta, sure no problem, but I don't go looking for trouble.  So in all the months I've been using the WHS I've never had to do a restore, until this weekend.

Steph's laptop randomly rebooted and then came up with a little message explaining the registry was corrupt.  No problem, I'll restore it!  Well the first restore didn't go as planned, in fact it bombed out with no message at all.  However I figured it was a hard drive consistency problem, so I tried to do a chkdsk which told me there were errors that couldn't be fixed.  So I bought a new hard drive, popped it in and tried the restore again (Note, I had to create a primary partition first which I could have done using Disk Management right in the restore process).  This time the restore took an hour and at the end of that hour the laptop was up and running like nothing had ever happened!   

I love it, I would have spent a couple days trying to fix the problem without blowing away the OS and then I would have given up on that, and then I would have spent some time trying to get all the files off the machine, then I would have to reinstall windows, then I would have to put all the files back on. The whole time Steph would be 'asking' when her computer was going to be fixed.

So why don't you have your own home server yet?!?  Don't know what a home server is?  Have more than 2 machines at home?  Ask me about it sometime and I'll talk your ear off.

We've been busy getting ready for our first Christmas, left is our first Christmas tree.  I won't lie, Steph did all the decorating, but I think I did an excellent job of supervising.

Been really busy at my new contract but with the time off over Christmas I'm hoping to work on a new WHS add-in that has long sat on the shelf.  I'll have even more time to work on it since my Xbox 360 decided to do a terrible impression of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer (ie. The Red Ring of Death), which is more than a little upsetting.