[Kylan's Blog] Opening Ceremonies

Last night I watched the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was interesting to see all of the teams carrying flags and representing their countries, and I was amazed to see so many foreign leaders in attendance. My family and I wondered if the hundreds of fireworks were affecting the already bad air quality in the city.

I really like the Olympics, so it will be fun to see all of the sporting events over the next month or so. I'm rooting for the USA, Rwanda, the Czech Republic, and India. In particular, I'd really like to see the decathlon because American Diana Pickler, a former Cougar, is competing in this event.

[Kylan's Blog] August Sprint

During the month of August, my group at SEL is doing a sprint. That means that all of the members of the group set "ambitious goals" for themselves and work extra hard (AKA overtime) to meet them. Doesn't sound very fun, but it helps keep everything on schedule.

[Kylan's Blog] The Kite Runner

I just finished reading The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini. The subject matter was depressing, but the book was very well-written. It gives the reader a good feel for Afghanistan's culture, history, and current situation.

[Kylan's Blog] Junior Miss at the Hospital

On Wednesday night, one of our Junior Misses hurt her wrist at practice. We decided to play it safe and take her to the emergency room for an X-ray. Turns out that it was just a bad sprain, but the doctors outfitted her with a pretty serious looking splint. It's the kind you have to wear in the shower and everything. For the competition, she'll be allowed to do a modified fitness routine so she won't have to put too much weight on that wrist.

[Kylan's Blog] Junior Misses

This week Kristen and I are hosting a couple of high school girls who are taking part in the Washington's Junior Miss competition. They came over tonight and will be staying with us through Saturday. By volunteering to be hosts, we earned two free tickets to the competition on Saturday night. Tonight we took the girls out to Tucci's and then went bowling at Zeppos.

[Kylan's Blog] New Radiator for the Caddy

Today we spent over $500 to have the radiator on the Cadillac replaced. Kristen and I have been meaning to get the car checked out for a while now, but we were forced to take action once I started noticing green fluid leaking onto the ground. I wish I could have just bought the parts and done the work myself, because most of that cost was due to the labor involved. The shop actually wanted to do an additional thousand dollars of work to get the Caddy into tip-top shape, but I think I'd rather try my hand at a couple of these repairs. First up: replacing the windshield wiper fluid pump.

[Kylan's Blog] Experimenting with FreeNAS

For a while now, I've wanted to set up a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) drive for Kristen and myself. It would allow us to consolidate our digital music libraries, store our pictures, back up our computers, share printers, and even serve web pages. After some looking around, I decided to install FreeNAS on my old Dell laptop. If it works out well, I might have to upgrade to an old desktop someday.

At the moment, the laptop is connected to our router via Ethernet. I can FTP and SSH into it, but I'm having a couple of minor issues with CIFS and SMB at the moment. The setup is pretty easy, and the administration GUI is very usable. This is definitely a valuable piece of free software.