Happy Easter

So its Easter and while I understand that it has absolutely nothing to do with a Bunny Rabbit and Easter Eggs its still fun to celebrate with the family until we find a suitable church we like. Regardless of that, here are some pictures of Easter today, and we hope you all have a great day / Easter.

Easter eggs being prepared



Kids going crazy :-)



Easter Egg Hunt Addison



Easter Egg Hunt Brayden



Happy Easter!

Brayden and Soccer / Addison turning 3!

So my son is doing some soccer activities, skills, practice right now and he seems to enjoy it. He keeps talking about baseball so I need to get him signed up for T ball really soon. He seems to be enjoying anything that makes him run around for about 30 mins and lets him hit / kick something in the process without getting in trouble.






Addison will be turning 3 soon and we are going to host the party at our house. Somehow Kara got someone from her work to dress up as Tinkerbell and do fun activities with them. Not sure how this came up in conversation but I'm sure it was interesting.

I really dislike hosting kids parties at my house because we have limited areas for everyone to go / run around, and the second story with little kids.. is just not fun. I just need to figure a way out to sell my house and get another single story house with a bigger backyard / RV gate that I can store a Toy Hauler in and move. Its just really nice to live so close to work though / the market is all out of whack. Id rather move to a house that gives me what I need for my family rather than the nice commute. But that's another story.

Cool Password Checker

So if you have a password and you are unaware if the password really is a good one, let a website take a look and tabulate a score for you. The website is - http://www.passwordmeter.com/ .

Found this information from Chris Pirillo's website (from a while ago) and seems like a useful enough tool to take a password you may or may not think is "good" and actually test it against some great baselines for security measures.

It will show you the tabulations underneath the password and that will give you an indication if you can or should change something. Side note - being the paranoid person I am I didn't actually type in my exact password, but something very similar. This way I can find out if the method I am using is scored well or not. Who knows, this site could be a huge data mining / new cracker dictionary site... hmm? For example your real password is puppies!08 I would have typed in paddies!20 which does the same thing for characters and repetition, but isn't your actual password... Hopefully you follow my logic..?

On the note of passwords there is a great program called Password Corral by Cygnus to store your passwords, Password Generator by Atory and they are great tools for the many passwords we have to keep tabs on today.

What I like about Password Corral is that I can put the encrypted password file on my USB drive and use it on any computer I use because I have the program installed. I might have to do a special overview of this program alone as it works great, is free, and has 256 Bit Blowfish for encryption :-) YAY.

Password Generator by Atory is great for when I need to come up with passwords for vendors or service accounts on a regular basis. Most people have no idea what I am trying to do with 1337 sp3@k so I just gave up on them and use this random password generator, which is free at the moment :-).

New Desk :-)

I have been wanting a new desk setup for a while, and yesterday the stars aligned and I found a pretty nice desk for sale for a really decent price. Its not 100% brand new but the guy I bought it from took very good care of it. Either rate here is my before picture / After Picture.


Office Before-





Office After -



I still have a few things to move around / re-arrange but this desk setup is pretty sweet. I can open my sliding door / open my window if I wanted to. I can see into the living room and outside to keep tabs on the kids if needed and this could even become a guest room with a simple futon add.

Either rate I think its cool, just gotta figure out where to hang my flags.

Online Backup Carbonite selected as my method

So I have been looking into a few different online backups for use and I have settled on one. Carbonite is an online backup system where you can select as much as you want from your computer and it will back it up online for you. I figured I would give them 100 bucks for 3 years to test the service out, found a cupon code here for it to be cheaper, and even though I copy it to 3 different systems / 2 external Hard drives I would rather be safe than sorry. I also dont want my manual backup process to screw something up for me if I do need something restored and it does automatic backups after I select what I want backed up.

Pro's / Cool features of Carbonite -

• Seems to be an unlimited amount of stuff you can back up
• You can override their default settings to backup videos / mp3 players (I make home videos and have mp3's)
• Has remote Restore File access feature to get files you have backed up online. Didnt work for me but I didnt troubleshoot the issue.
• Fairly Cheep - you can use an online cupon code after you try it to get it for about 100 bucks for 3 years.\
• Live support for anyone testing / with the service is a major plus to help you along the way if you have questions.
  

Cons of Carbonite-

• May be difficult to use if you are not familiar with where you have files you want to back up outside of normal places of My Documents. Its not bad, but could be harder for some. If you have multiple hard drive partitions it doesn't automatically seek out items on those partitions for backing up.
• No Business /Small business versions for multi PC environment. You have to buy a subscription for each PC individually. This could be a good method for backing up customers servers / pc's for small business's but it would be somewhat costly depending on the office size. I have read this is being worked on, no ETA on the product coming out.