At 11:59 AM on 6/29/2006, Jake Ryan arrived in Portland, Oregon. He is 7lbs. 4oz., 20 inches in length.

The actual delivery was a short nine minutes, not to belittle the experience, but it seemed like a piece of cake for mom, and baby. Everyone is doing fine, and Katherine is so excited to finally meet her new baby brother.

Bad bad bad

How can I say it with such certainty?

We're being induced. I'll be taking a week and a half off. I'll be catching up on house chores, sleep when possible, some xbox, and lots of bottles and dirty diapers.

I'll post pictures soon.

Stay tuned.

WHEN YOU PURCHASE APPLE PRODUCTS.

Yeah, that's right. What am I talking about? Well my iPod Nano died, a few months short of the 'one year' warranty. The screen went bad, like tons of other Nano owners. I was relieved to find that I had all the original packaging, and the receipt.

So a trip to the mall was in order. We arrived at the Apple store, to be greeted by a friendly salesperson that informed me I needed an appointment to meet with a 'Genius'. I had called earlier and explained my plight, why didn't they tell me to go online and schedule an appointment!!!!????

Anyways, I was able to get an 'appointment' about 1/2 an hour later, so I sat at the 'Genius" bar, and watched a few sessions of people trying to understand the complexities of their apple hardware (read sarcasm).

There were quite a few people with broken iPods, and not just Nanos either. One guy had his iPod go bad, and they informed him it was under warranty, but he had to pay $29.95 for shipping and handling to replace it. I was confident that I would not have to pay this, after all I had a receipt, and all, this guy had nothing but a broken iPod.

So it was finally my turn, after close to 45 minutes, they took my iPod, and tried all the fruitless steps to revive it as I had done. They finally agreed that it was a hardware problem, and would replace it, for $29.95.

I was furious. But I kept my anger inside, and tried to rationally explain to the guy, that this seemed like extoriton. If you ask me, $30 seems like the amount most people would pay to get a new iPod, any more, and you're risking some really mad people.

Several other people were there, and they all thought this seemed like a shady business practice.

Come on, face it. Apple knows I have no choice in the matter. Am I going to throw my busted Nano away over $30? Hell no. And that's where they know I'll pay the blood money.

I think it's a SHADY business practice, and I'll be looking forward to Microsoft's iPod Killer, whenever it comes out some day. I'll certainly think twice before making another Apple purchase in the future.

Rant over.

So a week ago, my xbox died. After 1/2 hour on the phone w/ xbox support, they determined I had a bad power supply. I argued, even insisted that was not the case, but they held strong.

The new power brick arrived today. I figured I'd plug it in, and nothing would change, I'd have to call xbox support again, and wait.

I was totally wrong.

I'm happy to report it's working again.

So Friday afternoon (evening) I was playing Oblivion, after about 1/2 hour, the screen went blank, the xbox turned off, and my daughter said "There's red blinking lights on the Xbox!"

Oh crap. With over 1500 different internal parts, I was pretty sure my xbox had just died.

So I called Xbox support and went through the usual non-helpful, troubleshooting tips. I had quickly read some stuff while on hold that stated the three blinky lights meant hardware failure.

So the tech support rep, who was very nice, had me do a ton of things and she finally said, "I think it's your power supply, we'll ship you out a new one ASAP." I kind of argued and said, I don't see how it would be that... blah blah blah....

So I guess I'll have to wait to get the 'new' power brick, plug it in, and see that it's still broken.

When I called the rep also told me, "Wow, you're lucky, a week later and you'd be out of warranty...do you want to purchase an extended warranty?" I usually hate doing this, but now that I know how much we (all of my family) use this thing, I opted to purchase a 1 year extended warranty for $29.95.

The good news, is that when I ship this in, I can remove the hard drive, preserving (in theory) my games, demos, and everything I've done thus far on my console.

Let me tell you this, if my oblivion game is lost, (I had just gotten to level 10) it's going to be pretty hard to start over.

Here's what you DON'T want to see: