Fantastically Normal

So the worst week of my career, weekend with the boy and a GREAT clip

So this past week was pretty horrible. I am not meaning to complain (no one really means it when they say that), but it was just crazy. Now, most of the following information is IT related so if you aren't interested in the ramblings of IT-project manager, just move along to the fantastic review of Star Wars by a 3 year old below. So the hard part about this week has been that the project / deliverable that I oversaw the past 3 or 4 months is in production and is experiencing issues that we did not see in the test environment at all. We pushed hard and even tried rolling a couple proposed fixes to production to see if they would work. Of course, we couldn't test these fixes before putting them in because in the test environment, everything works peachy. So at the end of the week (8 o'clock last night), we called it a week and decided to hit it around the clock first thing Monday morning. It appears to be a database issue of some kind, but once again, production and test environments are totally the same (or so they seem to be). So all the sweating and pain of the week were basically for nothing, and we are not that much closer to finding the smoking gun. I honestly can say that I have never come up against this kind of thing.

Anyways, I am having a blast this weekend taking care of the boy as the wife is out of town at her dad's house. We went and threw rocks into a creek, went to the Smyrna City muesem (complete with old guys just chatting on a Saturday morning...love that), stood on railroad tracks (no train came by unfortunately) and went to the fire station to look at fire trucks. Pretty great morning all in all. This afternoon we are hitting up Petsmart and Best Buy. Sounds like a boys' weekend all right.

So here is the cool clip where a little 3 year old girl reviews Star Wars. Awesome.

One of the more fantastic little articles out there on the net

So I have no clue where I saw this from, but this article really mashes up a lot of my favorite culture and yet it all seems to make sense.

Talk about a new perspective on the movie Fight Club. Freaking awesome.

HD news and go check out one of the other new blogs on the block

So I am not really under the suspiscion that anyone reads the blog any more, but if a blogger blogs and no one is around to hear it, does it make a difference? Anyways, terrible hacking of saying aside, there were a lot of layoffs at Home Depot today. The first actual home office layoffs. All in total it was about 500 associates which was really tough. Not any close friends, but it was much tougher than I thought it was going to be. In the end, I was blessed / lucky to be on a team that is highly utilized. Moving forward / upward kind of thing. Let me know if you have other questions and I'll talk to you individually.

On a different point, a buddy of mine has started a blog to talk about church issues and whatnot. It is some pretty good stuff so you should go check it out over here.

Posting for the fun of it....lots of crabb news....movies I saw lately

Well I know that I rarely post to the ole blog any more, but I am re-building the computer and I figured I would use my blogging app before possibly not being able to use it. Wow that sentence made no sense.

In Crabby news, we are pregnant with our second child. Just as a testament to how little I am blogging these days, we have been so for over 6 months and we are having a little girl. We are really excited and the boy is pretty excited about having a little sister. In fact, the room is painted up and almost ready to go. Oh boy to get on that roller coaster again.

The boy is recently potty trained as well which is pretty amazing to think about. It has taken a fair amount of time and he is still pretty hesistant about going poo-poo in the potty, but overall he is completely out of diapers and making it through the night without wetting which is incredibly awesome. Lets all just hope that he can keep it up after the girl makes her grand entrance.

On the movie front, I have seen a ton of good movies lately. It has been a combo of movies seen over the holidays and some great Netflixers. So here are my thoughts in two sentences each. Juno was a fantastic indie-esque flick with great dialog (though a bit too we-are-too-cool-to-explain-the-expressions-we-are-using in some parts) and a real heart in it. It really struck close to home on the pregnancy side and other aspects of our life recently (8.5 out of 10). No Country for Old Men was fantastic as well with really good acting, great characters and dialog that is GREAT as in most Coen brother movies. Was my favorite movie of 2007 till I saw the next movie (8.5 out of 10). The Kingdom is a really interesting movie as it really gives a glimpse of the intersection of politics, oil and fundamentalism in Saudia Arabia. The last 30 minutes are perhas the most intense of any recent movie, and yet the director, Peter Berg, manages not to lose the individuals in the story (9 out of 10). Nativity Story was a flick that we wanted to catch over Christmas, but didn't manage to. It has GREAT production values, GREAT acting and really drove home how much Christ loves his own in coming as he did. It really put more humanity arounnd Mary, Joseph and everyone involved, and was a buyer of a movie even with Netflix.

Alright...well, maybe I'll get back into this when the new PC is up. That and blogging for another friend on general church / "modern" Christianity issues. That and update links and whatnot on the blog (been over a year a half since the wife kicked my addiction to World of Warcraft).