Merry Xmas and Seasons Greetings. Not much going on, but I’d just like to say what a wonderful year it has been. Tracy and Lucas have been great. We are eagerly expecting another baby. We’re spending time with some family now and it’s great to see all the cousins and their kids growing up together. It’s too bad that we live so far apart that we only get to see each other a few times a year and it’s getting harder with all the kids that have to travel. As I get older, I realize how important family is and how lucky I am.

I feel bad not giving back more to the causes that are important to me. My New Years Resolution is to do better at that. The causes that are important to me include: education, global health, and the environment. I usually give a bit back to my alma mater, UM, but I’m looking for some more charities which focus on those areas. It’s hard because there are so many charities and its hard to investigate them all. I feel safest going with a brand name, but they tend to have some administrative overhead. But I’m not positive that administrative overhead is a bad thing, unless it is excessive, like %20.

Facebook applications annoy me. They are all these stupid viral things that are fun, but not actually useful. Because most application just request access to your personal data, my default is to not add any applications.

I don’t consider myself a privacy nut, but if I’m going to give out my private information I better be getting some value out of the application. Or I better be able to trust them. I am sure that most applications are safe, but you can’t really be sure. I am more worried about indirect sales of personal information by the application owners. But especially for widely used applications like SuperWall, it has to be tempting to sell all those names. It’s nearly impossible to trace and once your information is out there you can’t get it back.

I got myself a new Dell monitor a 24″ display(E248FP) and a new 8800GT graphics card for X-mas and as a reward for my promotion. The monitor arrived the other day and it’s beautiful, I should’ve upgraded a long time ago. This replaced a 19″ CRT which was pretty fuzzy already. The new monitor is sharp and bright. The only problem is that my games run terrible because my old graphics card isn’t any good. My new card is scheduled to ship next week and I hope that’ll bring my frames up to a usable level.

On my desk at home I have 3 monitors and 3 pcs. One is headless linux server, one is an older game machine with a 15″ LCD and my primary game machine is a new quad core with the new 24″ monitor and a 15″ LCD.

Tracy has been doing well. The pregnancy is going fine. In a couple of weeks we’ll do the ultrasound to find out the sex. Lucas is learning language and communication and he’s pretty funny. He’s got a thing about the number five. He started by counting 1,2, then 5. Now he’s made progress, it’s 1,2,3, 5. He’s really fun to watch and play with. I’m really happy to be a father. I got a promotion at work.

My new title is now “Lead Systems Engineer”. It’s nice to get some recognition because I’ve worked pretty hard the past year. I’m still not entirely sure if I want to be in systems instead of software engineering for the rest of my career, but I’m happy where I’m at for now.