Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Cheers!

Cheers!

Cheers!

Cheers!

I hope you and your family have a Merry Christmas and a safe and Happy New Year!

Cheers!

I’m amazed that yet another year has come and gone and St. Patrick’s Day is here again. It’s time to put down that first round of fertilizer on the lawn if you have lawn to maintain. I’m really excited about Spring this year… I have quite a few lbs to shed and I’m looking forward to strapping on the inline skates and hitting the trails. The twins will be participating in a 5K fitness run in a few weeks so I need to get into shape fast.

If you’ve never heard Irish music here’s an embedded stream from Live Ireland

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
Credits: Image by Eva

Cheers!

This is the time of year I generally spend a couple of days doing a digital and physical cleaning, going through my disk storage and purging old junk data and then physically going through my office and storage room (unofficial lab), discarding equipment that broke in the past year or older equipment that hasn’t seen the light of day in the past 365 days.

As I mentioned in last year’s post entitled, Holiday Gadgets and Recycling, you can’t just put that old computer or TV in the trash can or by the curb in Pennsylvania these days you need to recycle them at an approved collection center in your county. This year I’ve got a Canon iP4600, Epson 3170 Photo Scanner, Sony 30″ WEGA TV, Dell 19″ CRT and Dell Dimension 8200. A few of the above broke this year and a few of them have been sitting in the storage area for 365+ days which means it’s time for them to go. This is another reason I don’t mind supporting my local Best Buy since they provide a great recycling program.

If your going to be disposing or recycling an older laptop or desktop make sure you wipe the entire hard disk to protect your privacy. I wrote a post entitled, Safely disposing of your old computer, which describes how you can safely dispose of your personal computer so there’s little to no chance that anyone could extract any useful data.

The big technical issue in the household this past year has been the explosion in storage space requirements. The oldest daughter is now working with videos, yet another YouTube star in the making, that combined with all the pictures, movies, audio streams, etc has created a huge demand for additional storage space here in the household. A side effect of that explosion has been the challenge of backing up all that data in a manner that is somewhat automated trying to avoid the human element (me) that occasionally fails. So I added a Seagate Barracuda 3TB SATA hard drive to use in my external eSATA hard drive dock, replacing the existing 2TB hard drive. This was a relatively cheap option and will allow me to continue doing business as usual until I can come up with some other options. I did look briefly at the Synology Diskstation 415+ but I decided to table that potential purchase until later in the year.

I know quite a few folks are using Synology, Drobo and even FreeNAS. I briefly played with FreeNAS but the older hardware I was using just didn’t have the performance I was looking for. I’ll probably seriously look at purchasing a Synology later in the year, we need to see what the budget can afford.

Cheers!

Image Credit: jaylopez

Cheers!

It’s been more than 15 years since I was back to Ireland to see my family and friends. I spent a lot of time in Ireland when I was younger working on my Uncle’s dairy farm outside Listowel. I can still remember the day trips to Dublin and the weekend outings to Ballybunion.  And who could forget the Rose of Tralee, was always and exciting festival and event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wmIZEl1nSo

Cheers!

I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a safe and Happy New Year!

Cheers!

References;

Ceol na nGael – WFUV
LiveIreland

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a safe and Happy New Year.

References;
Ceol na nGael – WFUV

Cheers!

It’s the start of Memorial Day weekend here in the United States. The official start of summer and a time to honor our active and retired armed service members and those that have made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom and liberties that we enjoy today.

Happy Memorial Day

References;
Ceol na nGael – WFUV

Cheers!

Please remember to thank the veterans and current day military men and women this weekend. While we all certainly don’t agree on the politics of world diplomacy it’s the men and women of the armed forces that provide the umbrella of freedom and democracy that we enjoy every day.

Cheers!

Cheers!

July 4th is often referred to as the birthday of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th (for the historians out there I know that it wasn’t actually signed on July 4th so please don’t flame me) and led to the American Revolutionary War as the colonies sought independence from Great Britain.

Please remember to thank the veterans and current day military men and women this weekend. While we all certainly don’t agree on the politics of world diplomacy it’s the men and women of the armed forces that  provide the umbrella of freedom and democracy that we enjoy every day.

Cheers!