I was out the door at 8:30 this morning for my drive to Hoboken and then the short PATH train ride over to the Christopher Street station and a walk down Hudson Street for the Windows 7 Launch Event in NYC with Steve Ballmer giving the keynote. The first thing that surprised me on entering the hall was that it was such a small space. I immediately recognized some fellow MVPs and enthusiasts in the small crowd and managed to catch up with most of them during the event. The keynote began as scheduled at about 11 am. Introducing Steve Ballmer was Kylie, famous for her “I’m a PC and I’m 4-1/2” commercial. Steve presented her with a pink notebook PC before giving the first part of the keynote. After a demonstration of some of the Windows and Windows Live capabilities by Brad Brooks, Steve moved to the back of the room to an area that had been concealed by a curtain. The area was set up with lots of hardware to display Windows 7 and show of some of the PCs and devices that work with Windows 7. After the keynote, it was basically mingle time. I headed home at about 2 PM with my swag, which included a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, a T-Shirt and some of the same items that were sent to those hosting a Launch Party. It was an interesting day and I am grateful to have been on of the fairly small group in attendance today.

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I’m on vacation this week.

I was originally planning to take off next week, but switched it first to straddle this coming weekend and then to be this week instead. I made the latter switch because Pennie and I were going to be out late on Sunday. That didn’t happen because the flu nailed her on Saturday, unfortunately. She’s doing much better now, 5 days later, but she had a rough weekend.

The change to straddle the weekend was because I’m going to NYC tomorrow for the Windows 7 launch festivities. I have no idea what to expect, but figure that it will be crowded. I’ll be leaving home about 8:30 or so and heading to Hoboken, where I’ll take the PATH train to Christopher street and then walk about 8 blocks or so south on Hudson street for the big event. Doors open at 10, so I think I’ll be showing up around the time that the doors are opening or shortly thereafter. It should be fun!

It was still hard to get up this morning, but much better than Tuesday. Tomorrow morning I get to sleep in a little longer since I have a doctor’s appointment at 7:45 and I need to fast as they will be drawing blood. So, that means getting up at about 5:45 to have black coffee and get the morning reports done remotely for work before a shower and the appointment.

Waiting for me when I got home yesterday was my 2nd 2009 MVP Award gift. Microsoft changed the beginning of the award cycles year this year. I was awarded last October for the first cycle of 2009. All awardees in October 2009 are once again 2009 MVPs. The January awardees will be the first group of 2010 MVPs in the first cycle of the new award year. The gift is quite nice. It isn’t much different than the one from last year, but I actually like it better. The only problem I have is that I don’t have a good place for the award. Both last year’s and this year’s awards are on my desk, but they are behind the 23 inch monitor, so you can only see them from an angle. With two laptops and the big monitor on the desk, it is already a tad crowded. I’ll figure something out eventually.

This evening Pennie is heading to the movies for a girls’ night out. I’ll be bringing the house plants in from the screen porch and the orchids will move to their winter home in the basement. Frost and freezing temperatures are predicted for tonight in advance of a very rainy and windy couple of days. Fall is most certainly here!

I went to bed a little before 10 last night, as usual, and slept decently, but when that alarm clock went off at 3:45 I was absolutely not ready to get up and moving. I managed to drag myself downstairs for my first coffee of the day and did well right through the drive to work. However, about a half hour after I got to work I was ready to go back to sleep. Fortunately, another cup of coffee at 7:30 was all that I needed to get over that hump and it has been quite a decent day since.

Pennie and I took a road trip yesterday to Sugarloaf for a crafts festival/street fair that was taking place. Sugarloaf is just past Warwick, NY and it was a lovely day for a drive. We took the back way over local roads and timed our arrival quite well, since traffic was just building up in the area. When we left a few hours later, parking was much worse than it was when we arrived. We had a great time, walking along the road stopping in the shops and browsing the vendor tables. Pennie got a really funky hat for herself and we picked up a lovely sweater/jacket for Amaya. On the way back we stopped at a hopping coffee shop in Warwick and picked up something to drink. On a whim, I stopped at a garden center in West Milford to buy some mums for the front steps and a pumpkin. Pennie picked out a neat one that has little “warts” all over it. All in all, it was a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon.

The evening was another story, though. At around 5 PM I thought that our neighbors were blasting music outside my office window. Actually, it was from the parish hall on the other side of the house, up the hill, and several hundred feet away. There was another one of the monthly dances/parties attended by the local Mexican population. The church really needs to get a handle on the groups that use the hall. The volume of the PA system was incredibly loud. When I went to bed at about 9:30, the volume was lower, but I could still hear it through my earplugs because the bass was thumping through the ground and resonating through every fiber of the house. Add to this that the loud family, who live between us and the church, were outside in the evening and the kids were wilder than usual, running around the house and screaming continually for an hour or more. Retirement to a farm in VA or anywhere were the neighbors are very far apart sounds really good about now.

Since last Wednesday I’ve been having issues with the AT&T connection for the laptop. I have a USB device called the Quicksilver that plugs into the laptop and lets me connect to the Internet pretty much anywhere that there’s a cellular connection. At work there is now a decent 3G signal, so it is worthwhile using the AT&T connection for daily use. The connection started having big problems at around 9 in the morning on Wednesday. I was planning on joining a Live Meeting at 11, so I poked at it a bit, until I decided that it wasn’t going to work and figured that it must be a network problem. What happened was that I’d have a connection and usually was able to browse and check email for a minute or so, but then all network activity would stop, despite having a strong signal showing. I used my office LAN to attend the Live Meeting and then called AT&T support after the meeting. The tech had me reinstall the client software, reinstall the drivers and even use the connection manager provided by the device manufacturer, but nothing worked. He decided that it was a hardware problem and a new device was shipped out. I stopped at my parents’ house, as usual, on the way home Wednesday. My sister had provided a link to some photos of her family at Disney World, so I figured I’d try to connect from my parents’ house to show them to my father, since I actually believed that the problem was not hardware, but a network issue. Sure enough, the connection was perfect.

On Thursday I had no issues at all. The replacement device arrived at home, but I figured that I’d be sending it back unused. Fast forward to Friday morning. I was unable to get a connection, it threw a generic error 635 that I had not seen before. I called AT&T again. I worked with a tech for another hour and after some further troubleshooting steps, we were able to get it working again. Unfortunately, what we did was switch devices. I was now using the replacement unit, but we had done a number of other things, too. That was, however, short lived. At about lunchtime, the connection failed again. This time the signal strength dropped to 0 bars first and when I disconnected and tried to reconnect, I was greeted with the 635 error repeatedly. I tried the other laptop and it also threw the same 635 error. Another call to tech support and more troubleshooting. Finally, the tech was able to open a network ticket because we could make a 2G connection, but never a 3G connection with the Quicksilver. I was able to make a 3G connection on my PDA phone, though. When I got home on Friday, I tried connecting and got the same error. I tried again on Saturday and Sunday, with the same results.

So, this morning I’m fully expecting to be tethering to my phone or puttering along at 2G speeds until they fix the network problem. I tried connecting anyway and was met with the 635 error on the first attempt. I switched the card to 2G only and connected. I then disconnected and switched to 3G only and it connected. It dropped a little while later, but I was able to get reconnected immediately. We’ll see how this goes or I’ll be calling AT&T again to check on the status of the network ticket. Isn’t technology fun?

Last week, while we were down South celebrating Amaya’s 1st birthday, my cell phone rang. It was the Saturday caregiver from my parents’ house. I had offered to go grocery shopping for my father Thursday evening before we left or Monday evening when I returned, but my father insisted on going himself on Saturday. Unfortunately, while backing out of the driveway, she sideswiped the parked car belonging to the caregiver. My father had already told her that he’d pay for the damage and she told me that she wouldn’t bother going through insurance for it. I saw the damage on my father’s car on Wednesday. The passenger side was scratched and creased from the back corner to the mirror and the mirror was cracked. The mirror itself was still firmly attached, at least. Well, on Saturday I got to see the other car. As soon as I looked at it, I estimated close to $2,000 in damage. Her SUV had a light crease in the rear door on the driver’s side and a large crease and some scrapes on the rear quarter panel. The bumper and tail light were intact, at least. Sure enough, she had gotten two estimates. The first was for over $2,000 and the second was for slightly less. That was an expensive shopping trip for my father. On Wednesday I asked him if he was going to admit that he was no longer fit to drive or was I going to have to fight him over this, too? Of course, he responded that he was fit to drive and that he would relinquish the keys when he decided he was unfit. I’m not ready to fight that battle with him.

I’m still having trouble with his junk mail obsession. The pile of mail that I have to go through each time I’m there is incredible. The only positive thing is that he doesn’t send as much money as he did. There is the occasional check going out, but a week can often go by with none being sent. I’m hoping that the warning about his Visa and Discover cards has sunk in. If he used them for responding to any of the junk mail in the past month I will be contacting Visa and Discover to cancel both cards. And that’s not something that I look forward to dealing with as I’m sure that it will mean sending a copy of my POA and filling out forms and such. Plus, he’ll be very upset about it, of course.

Mom’s condition hasn’t changed much in recent months. She’s pretty quiet most of the time and is generally healthy besides the Alzheimer’s reverting her to the mental state of an infant. I wish that my father would accept the fact that he needs more help than he is currently getting, but that’s a battle that I’ve been losing for a very long time now. At this point, getting more help would be to help him, not her. I don’t like that he’s alone with her for 20 out of 24 hours each day and 24 hours on Sunday. Until such time that he’s completely incapacitated, though, I will not change his mind.

On Thursday I received word that I’ve been re-awarded as an MVP for Windows Live for the 6th year in a row by Microsoft. It is a nice recognition for the time I spend helping people and Microsoft in the forums and newsgroups. With the release of the final version of Microsoft Security Essentials on Tuesday, the traffic in those forums has been quite high. Fortunately, my fellow moderators do a great job of helping out, too.

It’s Fall now and the leaves are beginning to drop. I mowed the yard at our house today and will probably need to attach the leaf mulcher to the mower next weekend to do our yard and my parents’ yard.  I normally love this time of year, but…. Let’s just say that life could be a bit better all around.

I feel rather helpless and that’s depressing. My lovely wife has been battling depression for some time now. When she’s in that bad place, there’s nothing that I can do to help.