What a nice week it turned out to be! At first I didn't think much of having a day off on Wednesday, but it provided a nice break in the middle of the week. Work two days, have a day off, work two days, weekend! Not bad! I'll have to keep this in mind for later in the summer if I want to do a special day trip outing with the family.
Michelle's sister, Gina, arrived today. It was a bit weird to pick up just her from the airport. No husband, no kids. Her husband and kids are going to spend a major portion of this week visiting their grandma in Toledo. Gina's plane arrived about 45 minutes late due to a takeoff delay resulting from mechanical problems. We were able to track her flight using thetrip.com's flight tracker and flymanchester.com to further confirm the details. The latter was very useful because USAir had changed the flight number from the one printed on Gina's itinerary two months ago. In the end we arrived at the airport as Gina was coming down the stairs for her luggage.
After dinner I took the boys each out for a walk around the loop to get them out of Michelle's hair for a bit. They seem to have chest congestion from something, a cold, allergies, teething? They had a bit of trouble going down for their usual nap at 4PM today. We had better success about an hour and a half later. By then they were fit to be tied! I just hope they sleep through this night without similar problems.
On the tech news side, after staying up till midnight last night, I finally got the Linux partition of my main PC to use the cable modem. Thank goodness for the Google search engine! As I got various errors and warnings along the way, I would type them into the search engine and see if anyone else has reported similar errors. In the end the root cause of my difficulties was a stupid BIOS setting that Microsoft wants vendors to set by default even though they work without it! Argh! Microsoft can drive me crazy.
ARC (the parent company) stock took a beating this past week. There was an announcement that we were about half a million less than expectations. Many tech stocks are having similar problems. The stock market perceptions make any shortfall take a beating in market valuation. Most of our end customers aren't exactly cancelling their designs, research, or development. They tend just to be pushing things out and stalling a bit. In a way the market downturn has done us some good because customers who might never have paused to take a look at using ARC (as opposed to our competitors) are now examining the ARC story. I think that if we could get the four companies to coordinate a little more, we could do very well. None of our competitors offer processors, peripherals, compilers, and operating systems all under one roof. We need to get this message out there.
After the kids went to bed, Michelle and Gina drove to Denny's for coffee, dessert, and some verbal catchup. I stayed home and ate some Vienna Fingers and milk, read a weekly newspaper I get, and launched an software update download for my PC. Michelle says that Gina also hears that Grandma T. can't believe Michelle is open to having more children. It strikes me as odd because that's usually the attitude we get with the 40 and under crowd. Usually the older generations have great stories about life in large families and seem to reminisce about times when that was much more common.
Nowadays I think we're paralyzed by this "how are you going to pay for their education" bull. People worry more about what college their kids will go to than whether or not their children will eventually be with them in heaven. Really people! Which is more important in the bigger scheme of things?! Which is the bigger gift to your child: an Ivy league education or a sibling? I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to get a bachelors and masters degree. I'm more grateful to have Alyssa, Christopher, and Suzanne as brothers and sisters. I'll admit that I didn't view Christopher that way when I was 13 or Alyssa that way when I was 5, but those things passed. Abby and Claire have their share of contention, but for the most part they get along well with each other. Abby misses Claire when Claire is not around, even for a few hours. Ah well! I'll let this go for now. Time to put the soapbox away and catchup on sleep I missed last night.