John M. Brown

...you've got a dollar waiting on a dime?

...you're so close to success you can taste it?

...you can't see the trees for the forest?

...you've got so much to do you don't know where to start?

...the harder you work the less you get done?

I think that about sums up my life for the last couple of weeks.  I've got a lot of irons in the fire right now and it seems like I just can't get the door to close on a few projects.  Patience is probably the hardest thing I have ever had to learn...and I'm still terrible at it.

It would seem as though my obsessive-compulsive side is warring with reason and logic and it has been winning so far. 

Yesterday a deer ran out in front of Melissa as she was on her way to the gym.  The impending accident was unavoidable.  The deer looked like it was killed instantly, but the car wasn't badly damaged.  It cracked the bumper and the grill, and punctured the radiator.

We had it towed to a body shop using our AAA membership and Geico provided us a free rental for up to thirty days.  I was pretty impressed with the service.

We praise God that Melissa was not injured and that no one else was involved.  Hopefully we'll get our car back in the next couple of weeks. :-)

This past week my father, older brother, and I all went to Oriental, NC to a Basic Keelboat Sailing class offered by the Oriental School of Sailing.  We had an absolute blast. 

The course was four days long (Monday through Thursday) with the test being on Thursday morning.  It was well worth the $500 charge as we spent about 8 hours in class and the rest of the time on the water.  This past week the weather was absolutely perfect.  Monday it was light wind and sunny, Tuesday was heavy wind and sunny, and Wednesday was heavy wind and raining... all the basics for weather to expect and what to do in each situation.  On Thursday after we took our test we were able to take the boat out BY OURSELVES (no instructor)... if that doesn't show how much confidence you have after the class then I don't know what would.

We're all excited about our latest venture and are working on getting a boat for us to play with and/or plan a trip back to Oriental, NC to charter one of the school's boats. 

Pictures can be found HERE. 

I'm sure you've been waiting to hear so let me go ahead and spill the beans.

I recently starting using OSX Leopard as my primary Mac version (previously I was using Tiger) and must say that the most recent version of OSX is worth the upgrade.  I suppose I avoided all the hassles that people complained about upfront by waiting about 6 months since the initial release.

In my upgrade I had only one issue.  When it completed the network didn't initialize properly on the first boot.  I had to reboot it ONCE to get everything going and have had no problems since.  Also note that I UPGRADED and did NOT do a re-install.  All my programs continue to work without issue.  It was much easier than any Windows upgrade I've done in the past.

The improvements in Finder and FrontRow are well worth it.  FrontRow in Tiger was horriblely slow.  So far the upgraded FrontRow is proving to be a good move.  It's not as "fancy" but it at least works.  Also, the ability to browse and mount remote file shares is great in Finder but still has a few bugs.  Even so, it is a dramatic improvement over the previous version.

I'm still wanting to set up TimeMachine with a Time Capsule, but haven't thrown down the scratch yet.  I did set it up for an external disk and it seems to work, but happily I haven't had to really test it yet (no hardware failures, knock on wood).