After four and a half years, I finally got around to changing the keys to our house. So all you who have a key to our house and figured you could copy it and sell it on eBay for lots of money, you lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I probably should have done this within the first week of moving in, but having never owned a house before, it never occurred to me. Fortunately, nobody has broken in and stolen anything, so it was a free lesson.

As I was reading my daily quota of SlashDot a few days ago, I stumbled across a very intriguing sci-fi story called Engineers's Dreams by George Dyson. The fact that he could not get it published in any science journals because it is fiction and that he could not get it published in any fiction venues because it was too technical just makes me laugh. In fact that is half the reason I was intrigued enough to read it. That and it is a story about Google.

While our family was in Pacific City, OR, for three days last week, I decided not to take a vacation from my running. I figured that if I took Saturday off because I was at the beach, then I would probably take another day off for this or that reason and it would snowball and I would be back on the couch in no time. It has taken me seven weeks (six of running and one with two days off to rest the weary trotters) to get me this far and I didn't want to toss it out the window. I have run my first 5k without getting shin splints in the process. I am so happy.

I am currently at week three of nine in the Podrunner Intervals Couch to 5k program. This week has me running for up to three minute intervals. Last week I was starting to get worried about shin splints until I started to wear shoes during the day. Normally, I am a bare-footed kind of guy; my feet love the open air. But especially on the day after a run, I really need to wear something that has good arch support or my legs and feet feel very fatigued.

February 6th, 2006 started a short, yet blissful relationship with Verizon. That was the day FiOS internet service arrived at my house. At the low introductory rate of $29.95/mo I was in fat city. I knew this was a limited-time offer so I was not surprised to see my monthly bill increase by $5/mo after my initial year was up. So for the past year and a half, my rate has been a low $34.95/mo and I was still thinking I was doing well. Until this afternoon when I received an email saying that my latest statement had been posted. I noticed it was about $10 more than usual. That's odd. I get on the phone and demand an explanation. You see, I never received an email, letter, phone call, or anything indicating a price hike. And so far, I have never met ANY utility bill that is actually self explanatory. I am not a rocket scientist, but I do have a post-graduate degree. My problem is that I see a higher bill than usual and it takes Verizon 1 1/2 hours, seven phone transfers, four departments, one disconnect and one returned call to finally figure out that they don't know what is going on.

Running has got to be my favorite form of exercise. But I was not born to run. All through high school, I had nasty posterior shin splints all through cross country season and right on into track season. I think I understand now more the causes of shin splints and how to deal with them. They are a repetitive stress injury, where stopping the painful activity will make them go away. Also, there some things that can be done to help treat and prevent them. With all that in mind, I have decided to start running again. Slowly this time.

Our oven is slowly dying. When we bought the house, the inside glass panel on the oven door had one crack that extended from the top to the bottom of the pane. After I started baking bread, I wanted to get some steam action from the oven. One day, I accidentally dripped a single drop of water onto the open door. Sizzle, sizzle, POP! another crack was added to the pane which now has a triangular shard ready to pop right out if you pressed on it.

For the past three years, Sith has been the trusty server that this website and many of my other services have resided on. Over the past year, he has been showing signs of age. It has certainly been nice to have a server that I could administrate and do just about anything with. While having absolute power over the box was very nice, it was getting to the point that it was not worth the trouble of needing to fix all the problems. Let's face it, I always get lost when I go downtown and this is one less reason to get lost.

I noticed that one of my friends had a link that said hosted by Site5. So I went to check it out. I have been looking at virtual server plans for quite some time. Most plans were at the price where I would end up sharing the virtual host three ways just like I had been sharing my real server for the same price. Disk space was really at a premium for almost all of these plans. With Sith I had 8 GB of space all to myself. If I shared three ways, that would be at least 24 GB (unless we wanted more space) at which point almost all the virtual server plans were out of my price range. I had completely discounted hosting plans because I didn't think they could do what I wanted them to do. Well, it turns out that most really don't, but Site5 does. As I looked through the features they had listed, I was very impressed. So I made a list of things I use Sith for.

I spent too much time today playing with IPv6 stuff that I didn't have any time to work on my latest time sink, Pyrobox. I will have to write about that some other time.

For now, I wanted to get this out there. I was curious about how easy it was to confirm that a string is a valid IPv6 address. It turns out that it is not so simple, thanks to the "space saving" techniques of zero folding that is used. Here are some examples of IPv6 addresses that are valid:

::                           unspecified address
::1                          localhost
fe80::219:7eff:fe46:6c42     link local address
::00:192.168.10.184          embedded IPv4 address

Yes, those are just some of the variety that was introduced that makes the protocol easier to use from a high level, but harder to implement and use from a low level.

About a week before my birthday, Nicole and Nathan both came down with nasty head colds. I didn't need a crystal ball to figure out that this meant Lauren and I would likely be sick on my birthday. What we didn't count on was that Nicole and Nathan would still be sick as well. It turns out that by my birthday, my symptoms only included a sore throat in the morning, but Lauren was really not feeling so well.