ace’s blog

Don’t stop exercising, because if you do it long enough, you’ll like how you look/feel.  Then, inevitably you will stop for one reason or another and then you will want to start again.  Now exercising is great and all except for when you first start/restart.

I’m in the restart phase right now.  I’ve been to the gym twice and started running around my [very dark at 5:45 am] neighborhood (which has no streetlights yet, even though the power company has been paid).  The first trip to the gym was uneventful, I did 15 minutes of cardio, followed by some leg stuff.  Amazingly enough, I wasn’t sore from that.  Now normally when I’m in the restart phase (cuz I am often in this phase), I am sore regardless of how easy or hard I am with the weights.  I must’ve gotten too confident in that fact that I wasn’t sore from the first workout because I did chest and back yesterday and now,  I am sore as hell.  Apparently, I pushed myself a little too hard on the first chest/back workout day.

Argh (click that word!), this sucks.  I could barely put on a shirt this morning but every time Aaron sees me, he wants me to pick him up.  Instead of being nice to myself, I just pick him up (and put him down about a minute later).

I’m just ranting now.  I’m done.

I started on this post a few days ago so here goes my attempt to finish it…

We finally closed on our house in Memphis and 3 days (yes…3 days) later, the buyers mortgage company finally cut the check and we got paid so yay for that.

We also closed on our house here in Casselberry (Orlando area). It’s my most favoritest of all the houses we’ve owned (which is three if you’re counting). The kitchen is huge and open (but not as huge as kitchen in the Memphis house) and looks out into the living room. We have two covered porches, one in back and one up front, both of which are pre-wired for fans. Our garage is in the back of the house. We have 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms upstairs and 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom down. There is a formal dining room and a second living room. The dining room will soon have the carpet ripped up and replaced with some sort of wood flooring and then we’re going to put french doors in the entrance (of that room) and turn it into my new office/computer area. The second living room is currently Aaron’s playroom and will stay that way until he doesn’t need a playroom anymore. The bedroom downstairs will become a guestroom that all of our guests that we never have over can stay in and be happy(ier)!

Our homeowners association does all of the lawn maintenance! I don’t have to mow or water (or pay for the water) for as long as we live in this house.

We are going to start trying to have another baby sometime in May! We’re both really hoping to have a little girl but if we have another little even one-billionth as wonderful, smart and happy as Aaron, then we will be very grateful.

I’m kicking around the idea of going back to school for a masters degree again. I’ve been told that my boss would possibly pay for it since she would just love to tell potential clients that the Gradebook developer has all of this wonderiforous education and this and that. I’m going to work that angle sometime soon.

…

I think that’s about as much updating regarding the going-ons of my life that there needs to be updating on.

Back when Vonage had it’s IPO, I was excited about it, thinking it was going to be another Google-type money making IPO. As it turns out, I’m glad I’m not a day-trader.

If you haven’t been following along lately, Vonage has had a bit of trouble. First, they were being sued by Verizon for patent infringement. Next, a judge said that they were guilty of infringing on 3 of Verizon‘s patents and ordered to pay a settlement (of around $58M) and was told to stop infring on the patents. There was some seemingly good news for Vonage – they signed a deal with Voiceone that would help them to stop infringing on 2 of the 3 patents. Then Vonage’s CEO stepped down. A few day after that, Vonage was told that they were not allowed to sign-up any new customers until they found a work-around to the patent-infringement issue. Now, just across my desktop scrolled another Vonage-may-die headline “Vonage: No tech ‘workaround’“. So what’s next? I don’t know, I’m just a former customer who has mixed feelings about their service and has remained interested in the company. I know a lot of people who use Vonage and really like the idea of having a VoIP phone and how the service works.

One thing I am unsure of is how all of this will impact some of the other VoIP companies out there like Packet8, SunRocket or even AT&T’s VoIP offering. Maybe it is just my lack of understanding but if Vonage is saying there isn’t another way for them to connect VoIP calls, then wouldn’t that mean the samething regarding the way that all of the other VoIP companies connect VoIP calls? Why would Verizon go after Vonage and not someone much larger (and with deeper pockets) like AT&T?

Edit: I was perusing Digg.com and found this article pointing to a very good blog post from Engadget.com. For even more information, you could visit Wikipedia‘s Vonage article, which is much more thorough than this post.

I downloaded and installed Kubuntu Linux on my (4 year old HP) laptop. So far I like it except for the fact that I had to install Firefox myself. After some googling, I discovered that Kubuntu does not include Firefox by default.

Being a Windows user my whole life, I am not used to having to do a lot of research on installing an application. Eventually, I found this site which points to this script that an Ubuntu forum member (named aysiu) initially developed and was later modified by nanotube, that will download and install the latest and greatest version of Firefox for you. Review this thread.