My wife is not a fan of Valentine’s Day, saint or no saint.  She is, however, a HUGE proponent of showing people that she loves them.  I woke up to the bright pink sock monkey over there, as well as the card.  The kids got sock monkeys, too.  Even though my wife thinks they’re creepy, she practically bathed in the smiles that the stuffed buggars brought to our faces.

And yes, I’m proud of still having enough of a kid in me to be overjoyed by the gift of a stuffed animal.  I mean, seriously.  SOCK MONKEY!  How can you NOT be thrilled?

WARNING: Here there be geek!

She also got me this, which I am enjoying immensely.  While I do dig mice, trackballs need no extra space in which to move around.  It is very comfortable, and my wrist has been thanking me.  I don’t even have to bring up how cool the lack of ridiculous dongle is.

I’ve been talking a lot about Windows Home Server.  It doesn’t dig actual server hardware, which I find odd.  It does run just find on a broken-down old laptop with no battery, connected to a 1TB USB HD.  It takes its time during the initial backup, but does what it’s supposed to do.  It also, after some driver trickery, reliably serves print jobs to an aged color inkjet printer.

Compared with getting a Linux server up and doing the same thing reliably, this has been painless.  Now, if my Windows vs. Linux maxim holds true, I will see problems later on.  In my experience, either operating system presents battles.  With Linux, all of the swearing and hair-pulling comes at the beginning, when you’re trying to get it to do what you want it to do.  With Windows, it comes later, as errors and problems creep into the software.  In any case, Home Server’s mechanism for adding the USB hard drive to its data store took two or three whole clicks.  Just awesome.

It feels good to know that all three PCs in the house are backed up in case of hard drive failure.  Because, you know, that NEVER happens.

END GEEKERY

I feel that there is more to say, but I don’t seem to have the words.