Microphone Please ...

I have to admit, vacation can be really enjoyable when you can take a week off and do absolutely nothing. As I stated before, last week I celebrated my birthday on July 14th. I decided to take the whole week off and just vedge and can I see that it was sheer HEAVEN!. It was a week off of nothing but some serious self indulgence. During the week, I had the chance to take in a couple of movies both with my family and by myself. I had the chance to watch my 2 girls finish up swim lessons and hung out at the pool a few times soaking up some rays and catching up on some audio books.

Bartimaeus Trilogy (My daughter got me hooked on this series, thank you Adrianne)
Cryptomnicon
RA Salvatore's Orc King


Hit the bookstore a few times. Southlake Towncenter's B&N is really nice. There is this one hidden soft couch/chair that is in the corner by the window on the second floor just below an A/C vent and its hidden away from the other chairs in the area. I can grab a couple of magazines a few books and fall asleep for a few minutes. Picked up my favorite copies of Hak magazine and 2600.

I also took a few trips over to the local Frys electronics to work on upgrading my main computer in the house.

Now its a ...
Athlon Dual Core X2 5800
4 gigs of Memory
1+T disk
Dual boot WindowsXP Pro/Ubuntu Linux Server 64bit
Gforce Video Dual SLI
42" Vizio monitor/HD

Also worked on updating the router, WRT54GS running new release of Kamikaze.
Updated Snort intrusion detection on it along with Dsniff tools.
loaded msploit on Ipod Touch with jailbreak at 1.1.4.
Did some wardriving to test it out. Ill post more on my findings here later but its amazing what people leave wide open on samba/windows shares.

Picked up off of Ebay a DVR for the Dish for my den as well.
Programmed for Dr. Who, Stargate Atlantis, DollHouse (Fall 08), Top Gear and others.

Ate some great food. There is something to be said for having a nice big fat medium rare steak, just you a fork and a knife.

All of this and a heck of an enjoyable birthday on the day itself. The week itself looking back now seems like it was almost two weeks. It was long and extremely enjoyable. Thanks goes out to my wonderful adoring wife who really let me just enjoy myself. I really needed it. Its back to work tomorrow but I am well rested and ready to go. Its hard for me to imagine someone that just doesn't work doing this all the time. Whats the point really? It wouldn't be nearly enjoyable without work being in place. But then again I enjoy my job and so it doesn't seem to me as if Im working if its something I like doing.

Enough of my ramblings. Back to enjoying my last day of my vacation. I think I'll go take a nap now. This blog post was tiring. (Hyuck Hyuck)