Recently, I learned that a friend of mine from high school took his own life. I hadn’t spoke to him in nearly a decade, but it was still a shock and very saddening.

There’s a memorial for him this weekend in Northern Virginia, but there’s no way I can make time to go back east for it. There will be a large number of old friends there, many of whom I haven’t seen or spoken to much since high school. It further adds to my sadness that it took the death of a friend for me to both realize the need and have the opportunity to reconnect with so many old friends.

NORAD has been tracking Santa on Christmas Eve for 50 years. My mother-in-law remembers listening to it on the radio. Now, they have a website. Apparently, Santa and I visited a few of the same places this year. Here’s Santa at Sky City in Auckland, New Zealand. Here he is at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. And here he is at the Great Wall of China. According to NORAD, Santa hasn’t hit Seattle yet – last report was at 10pm pacific time and Santa was in Colorado. But I’m sure he’s on his way.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Update: about 15 minues after I posted this originally, Santa was spotted in Seattle. I thought I heard something downstairs.

I’m not sure how this happened, but I overwrote the following post from July 27th. Found the original in Google’s cache, but not before I deleted the original. So here it is again:

Brad Smith (via Chris) wants to know what kind of cars ‘softies drive. I drive a green 2002 Chevy Blazer. This picture is from Patrick’s trip home from the hospital. In the picture, you can see my old car – a purple ’97 GMC Sonoma pickup truck. That got traded in earlier this year for a Nissan Quest minivan. Those two cars take a fair bit of gas, so we’re thinking of getting a hybrid – Ford has a hybrid Escape SUV coming this year. My mom has a hybrid Honda and loves it. In the meantime, I try to carpool or bus (or hit John up for a ride) to work as often as possible.

Almost exactly year ago, my life was changed forever by the arrival of my son Patrick. I tried to approach my imending fatherhood with an open mind, realizing that my life was going to change but not really sure exactly how. So far, I think I’m doing pretty well. Today, Patrick is walking (in spurts), talking (in gibberish mostly), eating solid foods and otherwise making everyone around him smile. I don’t write as much code, play as much XBOX or read for fun as much as I used to, but I do seem to smile a lot more.

I am truly blessed to have such an amazing wife, son and job.

It may not be original anymore, but I set up a weblog for my wife Julianne. She’s always sending email out to all our friends with updates about our son, her job and other general goings-on, so I thought writing a weblog would be a good way for her to keep everyone up to date. She picked the name TechieWife in order to inspire the wives of techno-geeks everywhere. 😄

I noticed she got the address of my weblog wrong in her inaugural entry. What’s funny is that my friend Chris Church (no weblog yet) is so lazy that he bought devhawk.com and set it to redirect to devhawk.net. Now he can use IE’s ctrl-enter shortcut key to get to my weblog.