I'm running for the Board of Alderman in my hometown of Smithville, Missouri.  I've set up a campaign site, and I get to meet the public as a candidate for the first time tonight at a candidate forum being hosted by the local newspaper.  Whether I win or lose, I am honored to have the opportunity to get to know the members of my community, and I hope I get to serve as their alderman.  Whether you live in my ward or not, please be sure to vote on April 6!

Watch this.

I'm doing a side project that is part of the Gamer Lounge experience in Best Buy.  It gets unveiled near St. Louis this weekend. 

If you pay attention, you get a hint as to what I've been working on.  Right now, I'm under NDA, so I can't say much about it, but I will say this…  I jumped into this project feet first.  Oorah.

When doing the slides for my optional parameter video, it never even occurred to me that PowerPoint may be able to accommodate aspect ratios other than 4:3.  While watching my video after it posted to YouTube, I started wondering if PowerPoint would support 16:9.  Sure enough, from the Design tab, click “Page Setup,” and the first configurable property, “Slides sized for,” lets you pick from several aspect ratios, including 16:9.

Wish I’d thought to look for that sooner.

So I downloaded the bits from MSDN, and dropped it on my Eee.  The process just couldn’t be easier.

1. Start with a 4 GB USB memory stick.  Partition it with a single primary partition, formatted to FAT32.  Then copy the contents of the Windows 7 disk onto that stick.
2. Reboot your Eee.  Press F2 to go into the BIOS setup, and disable fast boot.  Reboot again.  Press ESC to boot to the USB stick.
3. Perform the Windows 7 setup. 
4. Boot into Windows 7.  It will recognize every piece of hardware except for the ACPI device.
5. Install the latest Intel graphics driver (Windows 7 RC version found here).  This is required for the ACPI driver to function properly.
6. Install the ACPI driver from Asus, found here under “ATK.”
7. Enjoy Windows 7 goodness!

My wife, Michelle, and I have three sons, Connor (4), Cade (2), and Collin (1 month).  While Collin isn’t quite old enough to get into computers, Connor and Cade both love it.  Their favorite educational programs are the Reader Rabbit series, followed closely by several Blue’s Clues games. 

To make life easy on mom and dad, as well as to protect the CDs, we ripped all their games as ISO images using ISO Recorder and keep them stored on my wife’s laptop.  Even using the ISOs, the procedure for playing the games at the kids’ request was still a pain in the neck:

1. Log on to the laptop using either mine or my wife’s account.
2. Navigate to Control Panel and turn down the mouse sensitivity to something more appropriate for a preschooler.
3. Mount the ISO for the game they’ve requested using Virtual Clonedrive.
4. Launch the game.
5. Watch the kids close the laptop lid when they were done, forcing the laptop into standby mode with these full-screen kids’ apps still running and the mouse sensitivity turned way down.  Meaning the first thing we’d have to do when we woke up the laptop was bring up task manager to kill the kids’ app (which would inevitably be pegging the CPU at 100%) and then dig into control panel to readjust the mouse sensitivity.

At some point in there, I realized there had to be a better way.

So the first thing I did was give the kids their own account on that PC.  I created a limited-access account with no password (my wife and I both keep our accounts password protected).  I logged on with that account, set the icon size to large, the mouse pointer scheme to extra large, the folder options to “single-click”,  and set the mouse sensitivity to low.

Then to ensure that the kids didn’t do anything on that system that I didn’t want them to, I ran a tool called Windows SteadyState.  This thing rocks.  It lets you lockdown a PC (and individual accounts on that PC) to a very high degree.  It’s not unlike some of the more draconian GPOs I’ve seen, like in schools and libraries, but it works on a standalone PC. 

It took me some trial and error to get the lockdown to what I thought was an appropriate level.  For example, I left the new-style start menu enabled so that there were no icons placed on the desktop that I didn’t place there myself.  I also re-enabled Fast User Switching, which SteadyState disabled, by setting HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableFastUserSwitching to 0.

So now I had a solution to a lot of my problems, just by hitting Windows-L to drop to the Welcome Screen, and then clicking on the kids’ new profile.  The last step was making it easy for the kids to launch their programs.

Putting big, single click icons on the desktop was a no-brainer, but I obviously couldn’t expect the kids to mount the ISO images before launching their programs.  Luckily, Virtual CloneDrive has a command line mount utility.  Good old-fashioned batch files to the rescue!  Here’s an example of the files I wrote, this one to launch Reader Rabbit Toddler:

@echo off
start /wait "c:\program files\elaborate bytes\virtualclonedrive\vcdmount.exe" "c:\disk images\Reader_Rabbit_Toddler.iso"
timeout 7
cd "\Program Files\The Learning Company\Reader Rabbit Toddler"
rrtw32.exe

The “start /wait” was, I had hoped, so that the CD would be available to the system immediately after that line was done executing.  It wasn’t, so I added the “timeout 7” for 7 more seconds of waiting before trying to launch the program.  The Blue’s Clues games, interestingly, will show a screen asking the user to insert the disk, so the wait isn’t an issue with them.

Finally, I created shortcuts to these batch files on the kids’ desktop, using the icons from the actual executables. 

Now my boys can easily launch the programs they want without any intervention from mom and dad, and mom and dad don’t have to worry about the boys getting into things they shouldn’t.

On Monday, the 5-week anniversary of my surgery, I get my first “fill,” where they will inject saline into my band to provide more restriction.  It’s probably about time, as I still get full pretty easily but it doesn’t last very long.  That said, I’ve lost about 15 pounds since surgery, so I guess it must be working.

We’ve been doing some remodeling around the house.  The room we were using as my office has been made into a bedroom for my boys, as their old bedroom has been remade into a nursery in preparation for our newest addition, who should appear in March.

Since we’d completely finished our basement, we moved my office into the end of the basement hallway, which was really a bit of a dead space before (we just used it to store a few things, including some guinea pigs and turtles).

Here’s the view as  you walk down the hallway to my office.  To the left is the door to my den, and to the right is the door to the garage.

Here’s the view from the door to the garage.

Let’s talk about what we see.  First, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 and a Microsoft Natural Laser Mouse 6000.  I’m big on ergonomics.  That’s part of the reason I still use this desk, even though a different style of desk would allow me to set up multiple monitors.  This desk is a corner design with a desktop that “wraps” around you to a degree, and it provides good support for my arms.  The monitor is a 19” DVI LCD.  All three are connected to a nice DVI KVM which allows me to share them between my personal desktop PC (lower left) and my work laptop (in the docking station on the left).

Here’s a close-up of the left side.

In this view, you can see my Linksys WRT54GL (running Tomato firmware), Vonage gateway, and cable modem on top.  You can also see my two phones, one that has an intercom to the rest of the house,  and one that has a headset.  All of this is running on a UPS so I never have any downtime.  The little black button on the desk next to the silver phone is the switch button for the KVM. 

On the right you can see some books and stuff.  Not a whole lot here.  Just storage and a nifty lighted document stand.

To the right of my desk is my printer stand and a bed for my office assistants.  One of my dogs and one of my cats take turns.  Usually it’s the dog.

Here’s the local office manager, Spartan 117.  He’s a bit of a slave driver.

And that’s pretty much where I spend 9 hours a day.  Generally it’s pretty quiet, and I manage a good amount of productivity.

What’s your home office like?  Would you be comfortable working from it full time?

Well, tomorrow is the first official day of my "mechanical soft" diet, which technically means anything that can be mashed with a fork.  I've been cheating a little on my pureed diet, increasing mashable foods over the past week, because, well, let's face it: Baby food is not meant for adults.  I've been taking it slow, and I've been really very careful to thoroughly chew my food so my stomach doesn't get too much of a workout though.  And I've been sticking with soft foods, nothing too fibrous or tough like beef or celery.

I'm able to take my pills down now without crushing them, the exception being my metformin, which I still split.  My blood sugar is doing really good.  In fact, it's going too low (hypoglycemic) every day now, which leads me to think I need to cut back on my glyburide (a drug that stimulates insulin production).  I'll meet with my  family doctor sometime in the next few weeks to put together a game plan on my meds.

As far as eating goes, I really am feeling full on a relatively small portion of food (less than my wife eats, but more than my kids), and I haven't found any foods yet that give me trouble so long as I chew it thoroughly and take my time.  When I get my first fill and get some more restriction from my band, I should be able to take even smaller portions.

Assuming nothing noteworthy happens, I don't expect to blog about this anymore for a couple weeks when I transition back to a "normal" diet.

I'm not in any pain anymore, nor do I feel bloated.  The swelling in my stomach must be going down, because I'm getting hungry now, and I'm not "filling up" on liquids like I was.  Well, maybe a bit, but it doesn't last nearly as long.

Speaking of liquids, I'm sick of them.  I'm sick of clear liquids, I'm sick of full liquids.  I'm sick of cream soups, popsicles, Cream of Wheat, Malt-o-meal, fruit juice, decaf iced tea, water, and everything else liquid.  I want real, solid food.

To that end, I cheated a little.  I'm not supposed to start pureed foods until after my follow-up appt. Monday.  Well, tonight I ran some of my wife's chili through the blender and ate it with a small piece of cornbread, which I chewed really well.  Michelle's chili never tasted so good, even if it was more like refried beans than chili.