Update #5

The Great News: Everyone is healthy and happy:



The Good News: The holidays are officially here:



You can tell by the Christmas lights.

The Bad News: The end of the semester is looming. I've got a fair amount to get done, and blogging shouldn't be it. Expect this blog to lie dormant through December 2009.

What I've Thought About: Gotta admit, its the linux computer I built last weekend. It had been in the back of my mind for months. Black Friday (the big sale day after Thanksgiving) presented a $99 19" monitor. The next day, I headed over with Alicia to a computer store and purchased everything I needed to make the computer work.

It's running a AMD Phenom X3 2.4Ghz 64bit processor (meaning it has three processor cores running 2.4Ghz each), 4GB ram, and 500GB. Those components together only cost $230. The case, motherboard, DVD drive and others brought the price up a bit more, but I built it just a bit more expensive than a bottom of the line desktop computer available at any major computer retailer. And it has top of the line specifications. I'm relatively proud.

It's running Ubuntu Linux (as opposed to a Windwos operating system). I've mapped it as a hard drive to both Alicia and my computer, so we can treat it like a file server. I've added a streaming music application so that Alicia and I can listen to our music anywhere in the world. I've got a bunch of more ideas for it, but I just don't have the time to play with it.

Alicia has more on her blog here.

What I've Enjoyed: The Wire. Great show that used to air on HBO. Really top notch stuff. Alicia and I have finished season 2.