This Christmas, we're at my wife's sister's house for the holiday week. We've been deeply involved with the theme of sharing.

So far, it's been fun sharing gifts, time together, good cooking, and just being together with family.

Unfortunately, it's also been about sharing sinus infections, stomach viruses, and nasty hacking coughs. We weren't the healthiest bunch traveling out. I'm not sure if we will leave healthier or sicker. Will have to post an update.... The unfortunate part is also that due to illness, we weren't able to visit my wife's parents which was the original intent of the trip....

At least we're not flying through Denver....

Had kind of a bad day (and evening) at work today. Frustrating probably more like it.

The situation reminded me of a character in a movie - Howard Beale in the 1976 movie "Network".

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork2.html

If only I could get away with that. But then, Howard Beale was shot at the end for bad ratings, so maybe I shouldn't....

I have to rent this movie so I can enjoy it again....funny that I remember this movie so well - I should never have been watching it when it came out (I was too young)....

One of my wife's patients brought her husband along for her appointment at my wife's office yesterday. As often happens, my wife received a remark from the husband along the lines of "You don't look old enough to be a doctor." Except the remark came out something like (and I am probably paraphrasing what my wife said), "So how long have you been surgecking?"

So my wife and I learned a new word yesterday. "Surgecking". I guess the definition means "Being a surgeon" in Southern Maryland speak....(and the answer from my wife was "Since 1997 - ask my husband."

I've been sick the last few days, so unfortunately, dinner tonight was frozen pizza. I flipped the box over to check the oven temperature settings and saw the following as the first instruction:

Do Not Eat Pizza Without Cooking

Um.....Sad because you know someone tried this in order for someone to have printed this on the box.

WalMart often touts its ability to offer low prices because of its ability to purchase in volume and the efficiencies that drives. How they handle merchandise, how they stock stores, etc.

So, standing in line at WalMart today (yes, I do shop there) I wonder why they can't seem to improve the efficiency of their checkouts at WalMart and Sams Club stores. The lines always seem long. Movement slow. Frustration high. Even in the 12 items or less line. Sams Club compared to Costco is always a huge difference - same type of store and while the lines at Costco can be long and slow, it doesn't seem to be nearly as consistently long and slow as Sams Club.

Yes, I know that low-paid possibly-less-than-motivated cashiers will play a role. But for all of WalMart's abilities to be more efficient, you'd think they could apply some of that at the checkout....

This is a rant because this started as an issue that has been going on for a long time....

Ever since moving to our new house, I've been plagued with fairly frequent outages from my cable modem. Since I work from home, no cable modem means not being able to work. And mind you, I am paying extra for Business level support for my cable modem.

Finally, last week after calling in about my latest cable modem issues, Comcast discovered, among other things, that I've been getting residential level service and not commercial/business level service ever since I moved. This in addition to yet another line problem that caused my service to basically be on the blink for over a week. We are still discussing how many months of service they are going to start crediting me for (they want to credit me for 2 - I am holding out for 4 after this latest discovery). But that's a different story....

I decided that since these outages seem to happen at least every other month for prolonged periods, it's time to give the local Mega-Telco a chance. I ordered up some residential DSL service on Wednesday. I'm impressed that Verizon had everything I needed to my door and provisioned by Friday evening. This evening, I took everything out of the box and hooked it up and had it running in no time. The only annoyance was having to install line filters on all the phones utilizing the second line in the house...

I'm actually fairly impressed with things. The hookup was completely easy, and a brief bit of Googling got me the information I needed to tie in my Linksys WRT54G wireless router into the DSL network. Home networking now consists of the fast-but-fragile Comcast 12Mbps/768kbps on the main network line and one wireless network, and Verizon 3Mbps/768kbps on the second wireless network.

I'll have to investigate some of the SOHO devices that allow for dual WAN connections to see if I can get true redundant networking, but hey, this is a start. Go ahead Comcast - I'm ready for your next line oopsie...and you'd better watch out because I hear FIOS is just 4 months away in my neighborhood...