Mia chats with a pretend friend on her plastic phone.

happy Super Bowl Sunday!

while mucking around in my web directories, I found this page that I made seven and a half years back, and promptly forgot about – part one (though I don’t think I ever made a part two) of a chronicle of Yvonne and my adventures in Europe. This was our last big trip before we had Callum (who is now six and a half). Kind of neat to find this… almost like finding an old scrapbook stashed away in the bottom of a dresser drawer somewhere, but of the virtual kind.

plus, I could really go for one of those big ol’ Stiegl beers right about now…

this afternoon I created this page on my personal web site, with links to my various profiles online – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and so on. I made it for two reasons – the first, and most obvious, is so that people who are seeking to contact me can do so in whatever way they care to. But I also realized that I usually can’t remember which handle I’ve used for each social networking site, and in fact I often can’t remember which social networking sites I’ve signed up for at all (for example, I realized just now that I have two Orkut profiles, neither of which I use, and I can’t even remember how to log onto one of them). I assume this list will grow as I remember old profiles I’ve used, or create new ones into the future.

what amazed me the most about this exercise is how many profiles the average Internet user posesses. I wouldn’t even call myself a “power social networker” and yet I have a whole page full of ways to contact me or figure out what I’ve been up to online. Aggregators, created to make sense of and unify the many profiles people maintain online, turn out to be yet another profile that users then need to keep track of.

another thing I find interesting is how different social networks vary in popularity depending on which part of the globe they’re used in. Facebook is the most popular social networking site here in the United States; Orkut in Brasil; while QQ (I don’t even know what that is!) in huge in China.

“let’s go to the Aquarium,” I suggested to the two eldest kids. “Why don’t you guys go pick out some clothes, and we’ll head off!”

and these are the clothes they picked out…

at any rate, we’re off to the Aquarium so Callum and Mia can stun hapless sharks into submission with their stunning array of colorful clothes. Then, this afternoon, a dentist appointment – ’cause that’s how I roll on my vacation days.

yesterday I left work a bit early to head downtown to the Gaillard Auditorium, where the Charleston Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing for this evening’s performance. A friend of mine, and a fellow Sigma Chi, is one of the directors of the symphony and, knowing my interest in violin, invited me to check out a rehearsal. I found myself a seat in the very middle of the auditorium, somewhat in front of the balcony, sat back, and watched the whole thing. For a while I was the only person in the entire audience, watching the full Symphony play their performance, just for me! Well, mostly for David Stahl, the Music Director and Conductor, who was leading them through the rehearsal, but I was there too. At any rate, it was incredible.

one of the pieces played yesterday afternoon was the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with the Charleston Symphony’s Concertmaster, Yuriy Bekker, on lead violin. This guy put on a heck of a performance, with such amazing speed and grace with his violin (a 19th century French instrument by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume) that any sort of sound I could make come from such an instrument would sound like chickens scratching on a tin fence in comparison. Pretty daunting!

at any rate, it was a great experience to be the only guy in the audience to hear such a masterful piece of work, and not something I’ll soon forget.

the kids are well.

(don’t worry, the update is not quite over yet!)

Here is Callum, doing some reading on the couch (probably because he was told to, to be honest! – but hey, reading is reading) in his pajamas in a quilt that Yvonne crocheted. Callum is in second grade, and progressing well. He’s big into math, science and music, which is good. Even more than these things, he’s into LEGO… for Christmas we got him the LEGO Hobby Train, which features 30 different models that you can build from one set, and he’s a big fan of that. The kit comes with one set of instructions for an attractive red and white train, and there are 29 (and possibly more) instructions that can be downloaded online.

Mia is huge into music, horses, Webkinz, horses, superheroes, and horses. She has a massive imagination – one minute she’s Hawk Girl, the next she’s Storm from X-Men, and occasionally she turns into a pegasus unicorn and flies around the house. That’s right… more than just a plain ol’ pegasus or unicorn… we’re talking a horse with a unicorn horn and pegasus wings. She is quite mighty. She’s been doing kindergarten classes; writing, colors, simple math, and the like. She also loves to read. So far, she’s not sure if she would like to grow up to be a doctor, a dentist, or “one of those check-out people at the grocery store”. Lately she’s been leaning toward the latter, but eh, she’s only four, and the grocery store is one of her favorite places – mostly because she gets to eat what she calls “stamples”!

Lachlan has started to speak, albeit a bit behind schedule, which may be because he heard no English during the first six months of his life in Taiwan. Regardless, he’s a good chap, with boundless energy. He can play a never ending game of fetch (although don’t worry, I don’t yell “fetch!” when I throw the ball for him to chase after).

that’s it for now! Callum and I are off to music class.

so if only because I don’t really have anything of interest to say right now, I thought I’d post another short story. This one I wrote back in 2007 for a Machine of Death story competition that I didn’t win, so before the CD-R I have it saved on cracks and I lose it forever, I’m putting it up here! Problems with the story, aside from, you know, problems with the writing itself, include the fact that the plot is too similar to that of the movie Minority Report (which in my defense I’ve never seen, so while writing this story I had no idea) and also the word CRACK!, but I’m not gonna change anything at this point.

so if you care to, you may read it here.

for Christmas and New Years the gang and I are in Johnson City, Tennessee, visiting Yvonne’s brother Robert. When we first got here we got to play in the snow a bit – it was Lachlan’s first time seeing the stuff – but it quickly melted and since then it’s been pretty mild.

as far as life is concerned, things are status quo, and the new year is almost upon us. 2009 has been a pretty good year – the kids are great, Yvonne has been doing well, work is good (we had several successful releases of Blackbaud Direct Marketing this year, plus I got PMP and ScrumMaster certified!) and I’ve been getting back into playing and producing music, which has been a blast and I feel has enriched my life.

and that’s it for the annual recap – at least ’til this time next year!

I find it sort of interesting that when you do a Google image search for Brian Crawford, the first image that comes up related to me in any way, is a comic I drew for work. The second is also a comic I drew for work. The third is a comic I did for Office Offline.

the first image that comes back with an actual image of myself, is this one, image #91 on the list.

I need to get some more pictures of myself, out there.

perhaps the most annoying dialog in the world is the Windows XP (and potentially elsewhere) dialog that pops up once your computer has finished installing automatic updates from Microsoft. It’s a really good idea to get automatic updates from Microsoft, by the way. If they find some insidious bug that needs fixing before someone uses it as an exploit and hacks your machine (and there are quite a few of those), they can fix it and get it up and installed on your machine as quickly as possible.

the dialog reads:

Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?

your options are limited to “Restart Now” and “Restart Later”. If you click “Restart Now”, of course, your computer immediately reboots, which you might not want to do right at that second. If you click “Restart Later”, your machine waits 10 minutes, then pops up the dialog again. Then you have to click “Restart Later” again, wait another 10 minutes, click it again, and so on. If you’re not at your computer at the time (maybe you went to get a drink or something), there’s a timer that counts down, and if you don’t click on “Restart Later” during that time, the machine shuts down and reboots.

I can of course see why Microsoft would do this (see above where I talk about wanting to get problems patched as soon as possible so that you don’t get your machine hacked), but there’s nothing more annoying than having this dialog pop up every 10 minutes while you’re trying to work on something, and you just can’t make the darn thing go away.

for those of you in this situation, here’s what you can do. When you get this dialog, you can go ahead and turn off your Automatic Updates. The dialog will stop showing up, and you can get back to your work (or wasting time, as the case may be). Then, at your leisure, you can go ahead and restart your machine. Here’s how:

1. Click on Start > Run
2. Enter: services.msc (I’m guessing the msc stands for Microsoft Configuration)
3. Find “Automatic Updates” under the Name column
4. Right click on it, and select “Stop”
5. You’re done!

hope this is helpful to whoever might be reading this, as figuring out how to do this, was to me…

edit: As per the conversation below, I should point out that this doesn’t permanently stop the automatic updates. Once you reboot the machine, they turn back on at startup… so as long as you remember to do the reboot once you’re done with whatever you’re working on, the automatic updates will continue.