Happy Thanksgiving! I can’t believe the holiday season is already upon us. Where did the year go? I will be taking Dad out to dinner today as usual and just relaxing the rest of the weekend. I get Friday off from work, so super nice to have a four day weekend!

I have a lot to be thankful for this year. Most importantly I am thankful for my Dad and friends. They all make my life complete. I am also thankful for having a great career and being happy at what I do. Another new thing this year is I am thankful for getting quite a bit of my health back. Walking everyday and eating better definitely helps you feel better!

In honor of T-Day, I took a picture of the awesome holiday display on top of our entertainment system. It consists of twin paper turkeys (all Dad’s doing) and a harvest of pumpkins and other Fall items (all my doing).

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

Twin Turkeys!

Today, I went for my 2nd visit to the eye specialist to look at my lazy eye surround vision situation. They gave me all kinds of eyedrops that left me is a far out groovy vision funk. Things were blurry and colors seemed to be off. After the long two hour visit and plenty of tests, three things were determined. The good news is my eyes are actually healthy overall (except for the lazy eye muscle, the eye itself is in fine shape).

The second and odd news is my eye glass subscription is quite a bit off, so they wrote me a new one. This kind of pisses me off as I have just invested tons into new glasses and sunglasses, grrrrr.

The third and not so good news is it is recommended I have surgery to correct my lazy eye. The doctor said it is very likely it will fix the eye and center it. The problem is that my left eye is getting more lazy and as it drifts more to the left, it is causing me to have that vision way over there that is interfering in my normal vision view. I think it will be a good idea, but am going to wait until the Holidays are all over and will schedule in January or so. It sure would be nice to have both eyes look straight, especially in photos!

I took a photo of my very enlarged pupils below…fun, eh?

Big Ole Pupils

So in the past month or so I have had this interesting thing happening with my eyes. I have a lazy left eye that has always been “turned off” and as a result has very poor vision since it never was used and did not develop. Last month for some reason, my brain decided to start processing imagery from this lazy eye. The result is I see in front of me as I always have and now I also see to the far left as well…it is a whole new experience. The sucky part is the images on the far left are a bit blurry as my eyes are totally different. My glasses do correct my left eye to the best possible, but it is still pretty sucky vision.

So today I went to see a specialist in this lazy eye thing and he did a lot of “hmmms” and “uh huhs” and then asked me to come back Monday afternoon to see a colleage of his. Did not seem to be alarmsing as anything life threatening, was just interested. I hope I don’t become a science experiment and hopefully will get some answer after the second visit!

I do find the surround vision intersting, but would prefer to be back to normal. Perhaps I will need to wear a pirate patch, agggrrrrhhh!

Been away at the Windows Connections conference that I go to every year. It is put on by Dev Connections and has various tracks on Exchange, Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint, Office, etc. For me, it is a week long of training on various topics and is really the only formal training I get all year. Helps me mentally prepare for what is coming in the future and for things I could and should be doing now in my current setup. The conference started on Monday, 11/10 and ended Friday 11/14. Time is from 8 - 6 daily, so it is a pretty long day of constant information flow.

John’s Posse (sounds strange, I know) was in full effect as usual. We all hang out after the conference and catch up on everything from tech to life. I also got the surprise of Steve from Acuity-VCT being in Vegas at the same time as he was on vacation. Had dinner with him and his wife on Wednesday evening. Tried to go to Steve’s favorite Chinese restaurant, but everything was closed. Odd that we could not find ANY chinese restaurants to eat at on the strip! MacGyver was in full action as normal (he even fixed the plane he was on).

I also missed the big fire in Santa Barbara on Thursday. Sounded pretty intense from what I heard. Glad none of my friends lost their homes and I am sorry to hear about those that did.

Back to work tomorrow. Viva el Micro$oft!

Dev Connections 2008, Click to View More

Ha, I been meaning to post this for a long time now. When I went on my trip to Chicago and Ohio, I was amazed by the toilets at the Chicago O’Hare airport. They have this system that after a flush, you wave your hand in front of this sensor and it put a new toilet seat protector on. Fascinating. It also counts down how many protector are left in the system. I wonder if it pages the janitorial staff when almost out? Most of them had about 40 or so left…wonder if they start at 100? Deep questions deserving some deep understanding. Anyways, here is the video I took below (I know, werid…but like I said, I was totally engaged in this whole process).

The title says it all. What could be better than learning the history of whiskey and tasting various whiskey? I volunteered at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural history today for the Natural History of Food series event as a whiskey pourer. Never done that before, it was fun. The hard part was measuring out just the tasting amount. The food was excellent as well and there were even some games of throwing heavy objects around. Whiskey was good, but I am definitely still a tequila fan.

Me and my bottle. Thanks Meridith for the photo.

I have been JibJab’d by the nice folks in Ohio. I believe Ken is responsible for this.