For a Friday evening, this one has been fairly productive. We were originally going to go down to Denver with some other friends to an organ recital, but they had to cancel. That gave us back a Friday evening!! Tomorrow is our ward’s Preparedness Fair and I’ll be doing some parts of the fair. I’m responsible for providing internet connections, the internal network, and for presenting the Church’s provident living website. It should be a good event — as long as someone shows up. Sometimes these church things are not well supported.

I’m taking down my home network tomorrow for the fair. The firewall appliance I use has eight internal network ports, two WAN ports, and a dial-up failover capability. All we’ll have available is a dial-up connection so this device will provide us with the ability to share this 56k modem connection amongst the two or three computers that need access to the internet. I’ll also have a printer set up and will have that shared out as well. That’ll give folks the ability to print if needed. The setup shouldn’t be too difficult and will be (for me) quite instructive. I might just want to buy a smaller version of this appliance to use when Nina and I are traveling so we can share a connection.

Another thing I’ve wanted to do is set up the ability to have the occasional video log on this journal. The first version of that is now available!! I’ve got a small Logitech camera on top of the monitor and have recorded the first installment. While this may not become a regular feature, it was fun to set it up. You can see the first video log by clicking here. Let me know if you can actually access this video log!

I’ve been working on staining and sealing the deck. Everything is ready — except the weather. We had wonderful weather for a couple of weeks. The deck has to be done every year, so I might as well do it when the weather isn’t terribly hot. I cleaned off the deck and swept it down on the last warm day we’ve had. Since then it’s been downright cold (high today was 50 and it’s currently 33 and raining possibly turning to snow overnight). This weather can’t hold out for too long, but it never fails that when I’m ready to do the deck, the weather begins to work against me!