Had quite an active past few days. Work was busy as usual. I had to go in on Saturday morning to deploy the latest price updates to our marking stations. I have to do that on the weekend so we don't have to incur downtime. Not a big deal because I had a lot of the work done ahead of time.

After giving a lot of praise to The Great Outdoors about our kayak purchases, I am starting to get a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth from them. I went in last week to see when they would be in. Our fishing rod holders that we were getting installed by them were the wrong ones, so they had to get other ones that would be compatible with our boats. They said they would be ready by last Thursday at the latest. So Jaime went in on Thursday to go pick them up with Tony, since they had his truck. When she went in, the dude was like, "Uhh....we keep forgetting to get them." This was after he claimed he didn't even know what we were talking about and wanted to see our receipt. So obviously that dude was an ass-clown (not the guy we had been working with before). He told Jaime that she could just take the kayaks and we could install them ourselves. Luckily she was smart enough not to do that. Why would I risk screwing it up and wrecking my kayaks, if they can do it? I checked again yesterday and one rod holder is in and the other one is on order. So hopefully they will come in this week. The ice is pretty much gone.

We have had really nice weather this week, so it has been wonderful working outside. Jaime went down to see her cousin Amanda in New Hampshire on Wednesday. Amanda is about ready to pop with her baby. I had a doctor's appointment Wednesday afternoon for a physical. Or so I thought. I went in and checked in with the receptionist and had a seat. I got there 15 minutes early. After about 45 minutes or so, I was beginning to wonder why they hadn't called me in yet. Finally, the receptionist called me up and informed me that I was a week early, that is why she couldn't find my sheet. I knew it had said the 16th on the note on our fridge for my appointment so I was a little miffed, but whatever. It was really nice outside and I wanted to go home and get some work done rather than going back to work that afternoon. I checked the note on the fridge, and sure enough, April 16th at 2:00 was right there. Well, come to find out that that note was not for my doctor appointment, it was for Jaime's facial she was getting down in New Hampshire. My appointment was on another note beneath that one sure enough, for the next week. So Jaime and I have to work out a better system for this stuff. First off, the note wasn't even labeled for what it was for, just a date and time. So that led to my confusion. Jaime wonders how I ever managed to survive on my own.

I got my entire shed completely cleaned out in preparation for the kayaks going in there. Dad let me store my snowblower up at his house to give me a little more room. Since it was so nice out this week, I also went on a couple of walks rather than going to the gym. I actually think it is a better workout, and I can't quit halfway through if I get lazy! We went up to dinner at mom and dad's on Tuesday night. We also went there yesterday since Jenn was up with Raechel and Jakob. Jakob is getting big now. Although he does tend to puke a lot. I guess I was the same way when I was that age. We went up again today for lunch. Mom had a ham and Grandpa and Grandma came over too. We played canasta last night with mom and Jenn.

I upgraded my Ubuntu linux distribution this weekend to the next release, Hardy Heron. The upgrade went smoothly (although it had to download almost 1 gig of files). The only hiccup was getting my wireless working again. That is one thing that doesn't seem to work out-of-the-box. It is because the drivers for the wireless cards are proprietary, so Ubuntu, being free, can't distribute them. So even though it was working before, I had to go through the procedure to re-enable them again. It was a bit of a pain to have to boot back to my windows partition to get on the internet from there, download what I needed, then boot back into Ubuntu to install the files manually. So switching back and forth took a little while, but I got it done. The upgrade uninstalled a few programs I use a lot, but I was able to reinstall them shortly thereafter. I suspect most of the changes in this upgrade are under the hood, because I don't see much difference, other than that everything seems a little quicker and smoother. It comes with Firefox 3.0, which seems a lot faster than the old version. Ubuntu is great. I dread having to boot into windows now. The only time I do at home now is when I want to play a game on windows. I have no choice at work, but that is fine anyway because the IT guys take care of all the updates and everything so things tend to be more stable than my home version that wants to download patches constantly and reboot me to install them all the time. It is really remarkable that you can get Ubuntu (or other linux distrubtions) for free, and have everything you would ever need, and it works better than Windows. And you don't really have to worry about viruses or spyware or any of that crap. I am very satisfied with my linux machines.