Geeking Out

I'm having a geek-out-of-body-experience and I have to tell you why.  Our home has finally gone Windowless!  That's right, we are completely a Linux-shop now with Inna running Xubuntu and Ubuntu running on my box.  Her poor little laptop was suffering under the "load" of WinMe that it came with it.  How can WinMe be a load?  I don't know, but the thing was as sluggish little critter.  Given the choice of trying to fix the problem (by probably reinstalling Me) or doing away with the problem completely, I opted for the latter.  Xubuntu amazed me in that it all just worked.  I expected some issues with the wireless card (seeing that a lot of people have issues on this particular point) but lucky me, it worked off the bat.  I have to admit that I do have a Windows 2000 VM session that I have to use on occasion, so maybe we aren't 100% Windowless?

First Words?

After all the effort we've put in to try and get Danny to utter the words "Mama" or "Papa" we've finally hit pay dirt. So, what is the word he's saying? No, not "Mama". No, not "Papa" either. It's "Dai" (Russian for "give me" - apparently he's got his priorities just right). He's very cute though as he turns his hands flat and curls his fingers in and out mimicking the gesture we taught him when we would say "Dai" to him. I really find it amusing how he'll crawl around the floor jabbering in baby-speak then stop, sit-up and start saying "Dai" with the hand gesture out of the blue. Then there is also the gesture of "all gone" that we can't help but enjoy. In conjunction with his baby-speak it's as if he's really saying stuff like, "Hey, I threw my ball over here but it's gone, have you seen it?"

Birthday Bashing

The weather cooperated very nicely for our big birthday bash this past Saturday to honor the Inna and Daniel who's birthdays were last week. In fact, if anything, it was a little too cooperative! The few drops of rain in the evening were a welcome relief, but since Daniel, and his lone party guest Marcus got to splash around in the baby pool, we won't complain. Inna worked tirelessly to ensure enough food was put on the table and boy did she do a good job. I promised not to take any credit since all I was responsible for was making sure the meat was cooked on the "Barbie". No complaints, well except for there not being enough Bruschetta, but what can you do? Unfortunately I didn't get too many photos of the event (just a couple of boys in the pool) so you'll just have to take my word for it that the event went off well.

Ft. Lauderdale

I was given the good fortune of being asked to attend the Trader's Expo which took place in Fort Lauderdale last week. A big deal for me since this was to be my very first business trip. So now I'm on the board, but I've got a long way to go before catching up with the likes of Charlie and William. While the show itself had us standing up for six hours talking about RealTick to traders and wanna-be-traders, the best part was definitely the after-show chillout on the beach. Fantastic warm weather and water and expensed meals. And people complain that business travel is hard? Innochka who was stressed by the fact she was going to have to deal with everything at home by herself realized that it was no more difficult than when I'm home. While trying to imply that I'm a lazy SOB, I chose instead to interpret that comment as permission to go on more trips :)