Leinninger.com

Last year I launched a site to catalog my childhood memories: Brat-Patrol.com. A few articles were lost when the drives failed on my server, but most of the content is still there and intact. If anyone from the old neighborhood is out there, get in contact with me! I’d love to put your memories on the site too.

Semi-related to that, I found a community supported site called Retro Junk. Visitors are encouraged to write articles with plenty of pictures about every topic we can remember from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. There’s plenty of good stuff on there, but you’ll have to wade through some articles written by the products of a 90’s public school education. Be sure to check out the video archives. Some of the best hard-to-find commercials and Saturday morning bumpers are hidden in there…

- Duane

Sebastian (one of our cats) came back from the vet about a week ago and is doing very well. He still may need to go in for a preventative procedure ($$$), but we’re holding off until he has completely recovered from his last trip. All in all, we’re glad he’s back to his regular self again.

- Duane

Sebastian had a re-occurance of the blockage just 2 weeks after his last visit to the vet. He may have to have further preventative surgery. (Each trip to the vet is very expensive because of the need for anesthetic.) He’s lucky we like him… I’ll say that much!

A few months ago, I managed to get my van and trailer stuck in the back yard. The trailer was never stuck, but the van’s 2-wheel drive and touring tires are no match for the mud. So, Glenn came over last weekend with his 4WD F250 (if Darth Vader had a truck, it would be this one) and freed the trailer in a few minutes. It’s now safely parked on the concrete in front of our shop. Afterwards, we played tennis on a Wii to celebrate. (No, we aren’t lucky enough to have one, but my team at work shares one and we get to take turns with it on the weekend. Yes, my team is that cool.)

- Duane

As a MSDN licensee, I get to experiment with a bunch of Microsoft apps and languages. For the most part, I use the license to better understand the languages some of the other teams use which my team interacts with daily. However, I also get access to operating systems, office applications, etc. When I built my most recent PC, I partitioned 1/2 of the hard drive for use with Microsoft’s new operating system: Vista. I finally got around to installing it… well I kind of had to in order to debug an issue with IE 7. (I don’t want to replace IE 6 on my XP partition, since the majority of IE users still use it.) It’s pretty… but in a Pamela Anderson kind of way. You can tell there’s a lot of makeup to cover up years of hard living and abuse. It’s annoying: prompting me for every single task. It’s inconvenient: the apps I use most often don’t quite work with it and the drivers for my gaming keyboard are not compatible. This isn’t a big deal, because the only game I play underperforms on Vista.

At first, I was tempted to draw comparisons between the launch of Vista and Mac OS X. The new Mac OS wasn’t quite ready for prime-time at launch either. However, OS X was a complete re-architecture. Things were simplified, not just hidden. The user interface was modernized, not just glitzed up. Maybe Vista needs some time to set-in? As for me, I’m glad I kept my XP partition as-is, and I’m extra glad that my Power Mac G5 is there for me. I still do all of my real work on the Mac. I test that work and play games on the PC… and it looks like it will stay that way for a long time to come.

- Duane

Gina (wife), Glenn (father-in-law), and I went to the Sno*Drift Road Rally in Atlanta Michigan again this year. We haven’t been there in 2 years, but the sport is really catching on. On one of the more popular Saturday stages there were about 1,000 spectators standing out in the 12 degree Northern Michigan weather. It was the first weekend with substantial snow of the winter. As a result, the snomobilers were out in force. In fact, one stage was made into a transit because snomobilers were spotted on the road by the lead driver, Travis Pastrana. All in all, it was one of the best events we’ve attended. It was cold, but not too windy, so standing around wasn’t too bad. We got a n official Sno*Drift cowbell as well as Travis Pastrana’s autograph. Check out this video if you would like to know what it’s like without braving the cold.

- Duane