Nad is heading back out to Kansas at the end of the week. She’ll be gone for three weeks. After that, she’s back here for two weeks, then back out on assignment for another two months. Who do you think she misses most when she’s out there? Me? The cats? Neither! The DVR is who she misses most, because its got all of her episodes of Passions, Days of Our Lives, Real World and Road Rules.
To help her feel less homesick, I bought a Slingbox today, a neat little device that broadcasts your TV across the interweb. After setting up the device, which was very simple, I installed the software on Nad’s Media Center PC and her work notebook, both of which were very easy.

As I type this entry, the Sling Player (the program the displays the TV program) is running in the background. Take a look at what it looks like while playing one of those awful PSP commercials:

I should also add that Nad’s work notebook freakin’ rocks. It is an hp nc6000. What impresses me about it is that for the last hour I have been running on battery power while typing this entry, surfing the net, and streaming Comedy Central shows wirelessly without a hiccup in performance. If I ever get around to buying a new notebook, I will buy one of these.

After a particularly bad day at work for Nad yesterday, we ate dinner at Bennigan’s; my brother’s name for the place is where I got the title of this entry. Dinner was quick and tasty, and not too expensive. We rarely have the opportunity to just sit down at a resteraunt and relax, mostly due to the lack of time during the week. Our commute eats up around three hours a day, and both of us regularly clock in nine to ten hours at work. Figure in five to seven hours of sleep a night and a couple of hours to get chores done (cooking, cleaning, preparing the next day’s lunch, etc.) and spending time with the cats, it is easy to see that free time is a precious commodity in the WaN household.

This made planning for our anniversary very difficult. We don’t have any special plans at all. Maybe play a few video games together? Watch a movie?

I’m gonna man up and admit that I cried like a little kid when Harm passed on. It hurt real bad, and it was so helpful to hear and read kind words from my friends. Thank you for posting here on the site and for the phone calls. It made a difficult time much easier to bear. We will be receiving her ashes soon.

I’m going to switch topics to something more light-hearted now.

Our anniversary is coming up soon. Nad got me a great gift for the occassion, a TravelDock Zen Micro, which turns my Zen MicroPhoto into a little boombox. It is sitting on my desk at work now. Nad now has the same one on her wishlist, so it looks like I will pick one up for her too (too bad they don’t come in different colors). I already got Ridge Racer 6 for her. You know, it is pretty awesome that a game is a satisfactory anniversary gift for my wife. I’m so lucky.

I recently changed the site’s stat tracking system from WP-ShortStat to StatTraq. The main reason for the change was that ShortStat just up and decided to stop doing its job. It happened right after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0, so I assume something about the upgrade process broke it. I checked the site and didn’t find any help for correcting that issue, so I just moved over to another stat tracking system. Right now, I am liking StatTraq. It is just too bad I can’t migrate the data from the former system to the latter system.

The stats have taught me that people like the scared kitty.