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Kristen and I recently went wine tasting with our friends Lupita and Javier from Santa Barbara. I just found the pictures, and thought I’d post a couple of them here. We’re standing in front of a vineyard that has turned a gorgeous shade of orange.

Javier, Lupita, Kristen, and Jeff

Jeff and Kristen

The wine was good, but hanging out with good friends would make any wine great.

Our church is having its annual Christmas Party tonight! There’s always tons of food, Christmas music, and lots of great people milling about, but this year I expect it will be especially nice.

We’ve just recently moved back into the area, so now we know a lot more people that will be attending. Also, the party is at my parents’ house this year. We’ve spent the past few days helping them here and there to get the house ready — quite a chore I must say. It has been great to be around to help out, and I think my folks have really appreciated the extra help.

One of the highlights of the event is the annual Ornament Exchange. Each year we play a game where everyone brings a wrapped ornament to share. The ornaments go into a pile, and everyone takes turns opening an ornament — or, if they feel brave, stealing an ornament from someone who has already opened one. The dynamics of a bunch of church-goers stealing from each other brings out some hilarious stuff. Some are too timid to take something from someone else, and others… well, they could stand to be a little more timid.

It’s all in good fun, and at the end of the evening, just about everyone ends up having a great time.

Except for the one who chooses THE Special Ornament.

The Special Ornament a modified chandelier with multi-colored Christmas lights instead of bulbs —- and is disguised each year in different ways. Someone gets stuck with it and has to bring it back next year for revenge. I’ll try to take a picture and let you see how hideous this thing really is.

In my inbox this morning was a heads up from Lockergnome on a new Linux distribution designed specifically for NAS. The kicker is that they’ve made the distro so small it fits on a floppy disk, so you can use all four IDE ports for fixed disks. AND they’ve somehow figured out how to overcome the BIOS limitations for hard drive sizes via software.

It’s called NASLite, and I’d highly recommend you check it out if you have an old computer sitting around and need a file server.

Cheers!

Doh! I got a call tonight, and it turns out our basketball hook up fell through.

We were going to play at a local gym, but apparently something came up and it won’t be available tomorrow. Sigh.

On the upside, my tennis lesson no longer conflicts with anything, so I’ll be able to make it. I do enjoy tennis, but next to basketball, it just falls short.

I found a nice Notepad replacement for Windows XP called Notepad2. Visit their website or download Notepad2 here.

I’ve been using Notepad2 for about a year now, and I like it. Why? It’s quick. It’s lightweight. It color-codes most of the languages I deal with. And it’s free. How do you beat that?

‘To be a good loser takes practice.’ And I don’t intend to practice.
–Ernest Hemmingway

Gotta love it when you have that competitive spirit. I’m a bit competitive myself, and while I’ve learned to enjoy playing basketball for the fun of it — I still love to win.

In fact, just last week I was shooting hoops at a local park and got in a pick up game. One kid started talking trash to me, said I was out of shape. He was right. But he wasn’t good enough to back it up. So my team routed his team. The first game wasn’t close, 11-7, and the second game we shut them out 6-0 before they scored.

Someday I’ll have to just take that kind of abuse. But not today!