All About Bentley

I've seen a few home videos of the high tsunami waves coming up on shore, but this gives you a much better idea of the devestation. Tsunami - Banda Aceh Shore, Indonesia If you would like to make a donation to assist the victims, you can do so through Amazon.com

Vote for Pedro

I found this great deal on a 40 hour TiVo recently. But there's a small catch. First of all, it's $149 with a $100 rebate. Great, just $49 for a TiVo. I had it in my virtual shopping cart, rolling to the checkout. Oh wait, you have to sign up for the TiVo service before you can get your rebate. What if I dont want the service? What if I just want to use it for instant replays or commercial skip. Ok, so my buddy is telling me the lifetime service is just $200. A little steep, but I'll look into it. Ahhhhh...since he signed up its gone up to $300. So I guess for now a TiVo is still just a dream for me. UPDATE (1/26/2005) - This deal is no longer available.

Dont shoot your wife in the face with a rubberband.

Oh goody, I'm 36.

Well somebody had to say it.

On February 9, 2004 I started the South Beach Diet. Just another fad diet I figured. I assumed I would get off it in a few days and stay fat forever. Well I didn't. I lost about 35 pounds. The first few weeks sucked but after that it wasn't so bad. But over Thanksgiving and Christmas I put on about 8 pounds. Started South Beach all over again, it's been only 10 days and that weight is off. Now it will be interesting to see if I keep falling fast past where I was before I gained again. I hope so because I hit a ceiling and would like to get past it. My birthday is Sunday though so it's going to be tricky...cake, eating out etc. No, I dont have to partake in a Birthday cake, and could eat sensibly when I ate out, but I dont want to, it's my birthday.

This is the first picture I ever took with my first digital camera , on January 9, 2001. It was a birthday gift to myself. I used it until I got a new one this past Christmas. And it still works great.

Well here's my new site, at least for now. My old web hosting service is in the process of going out of business so I just moved on. My good friend Mark was kind enough to lend me some DNS and a redirect so I could send folks here with my old site name, www.allaboutbentley.com. I've always liked blogger anyway, it's what I used when I first started blogging. Would be nice if I could figure out if and how I can get my entries from my old site into this blog. But for now, this is what I have.

Ok, maybe Zane and a Fudgsicle were a bad combination

Holy cow, what happened to all my old entries?

Well, I stayed home today like I said I would. I have to be very careful not to sit around watching TV or around 4:00 I'll get stir crazy and start getting really irritated. The weather didn't end up being quite as bad as forecasted but bad enough. There is ice everywhere but the roads never really iced up that bad. Every tree is sparkling white with ice and sagging way down. We opened up our back door today and it was really quiet except for the wind blowing and the weight of the ice making the trees creak. There are quite a few people around town who dont have power. In Edmond there are 809 electric "customers" without power, 95,160 in Oklahoma City and a total of 191,244 for the whole state of Oklahoma. Thats a lot of people without power. Ours has flickered a few times, and even went out for about 30 seconds last night, but thats it. One of our friends was without a babysitter today because of the power problems so in addition to our three we are watching her 1 ye...

The weather is really bad today. There is ice everywhere. There are tree limbs breaking all over the place knocking down powerlines. I'm going to exercise my last two "personal days" at work and use them tomorrow and Friday. "Personal Days" is a funny name to me. Not that I can think of a better one. But it sounds like a show you would see on "Lifetime: Television for Women". "Tomorrow I'm going to stay home and have some 'me' time". Also my car is acting up so I need to get it to the shop.

What does a person have to do to get good internet service these days? Another day with no service. From 2:30pm to 10:00pm my service was out again. I was on hold from 7:45pm to 9:30pm, and then some from 9:30 to 10:00 while they worked on my problem. This is ridiculous. There have been Cox vans all over the neighborhood over the last few days. Something big must be going on. I'm just glad I'm not on call. I use my cable modem to connect to our VPN at work. Also in addition to everything else, it seems that the cable service just reset my entire account. Deborahs email account was wiped out. I had to recreate it. Once everything came back up and I was able to check email, neither one of us had any. Not even any spam. So I'm guessing both our accounts were wiped out and any waiting mail was too. Oh well, life could be worse.

I can rest easy now, my insurance problems are behind me. Because I'm on the company 80/20 plan, and not an HMO, the company is allowed to say what I can and can't do. And they said I can add Zane late and it doesn't matter. So he should now start being covered without a problem. But I'm still going to be a bit uneasy until the insurance actually pays one of his bills. Only then will I know everything is the way it should be. So, nevermind sending me any emails to the previously mentioned address. I'll never check it anyway. Work sure is fun today. We are scrambling around trying to make sure some 40+ servers are up-to-date on their security patches and upgrades for an audit. Most of them are. But it sure is fun when someone runs up and says "Hey we need to find out all this information from you and we need it by this afternoon". Oh well, keeps me busy and makes the day go by quickly.

I probably should not post this here for fear of revealing what an idiot I can sometimes be, but I'm going to anyway. And if you continue reading you must first vow that you will not discuss the following with me for fear of me dying of embarrassment for being such a moron. I've had 2 kids already, you think I would know the ropes. But apparently its been a while. Zane was born on December 15, 2001. That’s 44 days ago. For some reason it completely slipped my mind to go have him added to my insurance plan at work. Well guess what, the company I work for apparently has some policy about adding your kids within 31 days. So there is a possibility that Zane might not be eligible to be on our insurance plan until open enrollment. That does not start until July. Granted I can get him insured on an outside insurance plan, but I don't know what that means for the bills he has outstanding right now. There was the circumcision and pediatrician visits in the hospital. Will that be cov...

I actually got up out of bed this morning and went jogging. About 4 months ago I started jogging in the mornings. I would get up at 5:30am and go for a 2 mile run. It was tough at first. I did as much walking as I did running. Eventually I got to where I could run the whole 2 miles without having to stop and catch my breath. And when I started running I started doing the slimfast thing and I cut out all soft drinks. I lost around 6lbs pretty quick. But I couldn't stay off the soft drinks for long, I was too weak. But all in all I have lost a total of about 10lbs. Since the holidays though I put 2 back on. Anyway, I'm going to try to get back into the routine again. There is a new water park currently under construction in Edmond. I would like to take my kids there some day without being embarrassed. I'm sick of having to swim with a T-Shirt on. Granted I need one anyway because I get sunburned so easy, but I would like to have the option.

I was looking at my web server log files this morning. I think my friend Chad looked at my page at 11:30pm on Saturday night. By the way, anyone that doesn't know, every page, every image etc that you look at on my web site is logged to a file. Along with what you looked at, it stores the internet address you came from to look at it. So, If you use AOL or MSN or a local internet company, I can figure that out, and based on that I can often guess who it was that was looking at my site. So, occasionally I like to snoop around a little and try and guess who has been looking at my page. By the way, Chad shows up as wks-166-154-231.kscable.com

I don’t know why I look forward to the weekends. I just spent 4 hours shopping. Deborah needed to get stuff for school. Tanner needed new shoes. We had to buy gifts for 2 birthday parties. And Tanner and I needed sleeping bags for our sleepover at the Omniplex next weekend. We stopped in there somewhere for lunch but that only took about 45 minutes. The longest segment of the whole adventure was when we found some shoes Tanner wanted, and then had to run to another store across town because they had the same brand on sale. Didn't have his size. So then we went all the way back across town to the previous store. By the time we got home I was exhausted. Then I got to sit and watch Shelbie’s new Mary-Kate and Ashley video. Nothing on the schedule from here on out thought except picking Tanner up from his birthday party. I think I'll take a nap. I sure have learned to appreciate naps.