The Great Room Resolution
We've started making New Year's resolutions early this year, because no one seems to stick to their resolutions anyway, so why not make them a little more realistic. My wife and I were sitting with her Mom in the "great room" (no really, that's what it's called on the deed!) staring up at all the holes in the ancient plaster, and we resolved that this winter would be the winter that we rennovate the great room.
The first step is to finish the wiring. I need to split the great room onto it's own breaker, because it shares a breaker with the kitchen, so if you were to plug a space heater in there (which we don't do any more, but I am not comfortable not having the option), and someone is using the Microwave, and the fridge compressor cuts on, you lose all power. This is, honestly, about the only thing that causes charmander.fwaggle.org to ever lose uptime.
We also need to run the ceiling wiring for the second fan. The room is quite long (it's probably pushing 30 feet?) so we decided that one light fixture wouldn't be enough, so we're going to have two ceiling fans with modest lights, and then four sconces on the walls. That's the first priority, because it's a whole lot easier to do wiring when you can smash holes in the plaster willy nilly because it's going to be replaced.
After that, I need to tear out the arch way to the original shape. That won't be much work, and actually sounds like a whole lot of fun provided I can sucker one of the kids into doing the cleaning up when I'm done.
Next up will be doing sheetrock, which is going to be expensive, time consuming, and tiring. Lifting sheets of sheetrock up to "ten foot" (quoted because at that time they were never exactly ten feet) ceilings sounds like hard work, this will likely be where my motivation will be tested.
Then comes taping, mudding, and painting. We still haven't decided on the color, but I'm sure that will prove to be fun. I enjoy arguing. No really.
After that, it's time to move onto lighting. We want two ceiling fans, because in the summer it's quite a warm room, and in the winter the fans will help circulate the warmth from the stove. However, we want the room to be a "period" room, so we're looking for some fans that will match some sconces, and that all look that "old style", sort of like the stuff that maxim lighting makes.
My eventual goal is to get a projector, and then hide all the home theater equipment in an old tube radio cabinet, so that when the system is off it is barely noticeable and everything looks like it's from about 50 or more years ago. I think it's gonna look great.
For pictures of the current progress, look at the photos tagged Great Room on my flickr.
My Christmas Wish List
My darling wife Sabriena is absolutely sick of hearing about the things I "want" for Christmas, but I thought I'd list a few things here anyway, for my family's reference. 
Up to about a week ago, the number one thing I wanted this Christmas was a Playstation 3. I'm a Sony fanboy - though not rabid, I can actually see the flaws in their systems, it just happens that I favor them more than the competitors.. speaking of which my wife, when she gets mad at me, often threatens to buy me an Xbox 360 for Christmas, citing the lower price and "I thought you said you wanted one."
Anyway, that changed recently, when one of the lower items on my list, Left4Dead, was released in demo form, and I learned that my computer won't play it. 
So now I've decided to strip anything above about $20 off my list, people can buy me these things if they wish, and then I'll wait patiently until after christmas and build a new PC. Maybe.
Some of the smaller things I would like?
A Nokia CA-42 data cable, so I can put ringtones on my crappy little cell phone.
A Karambit Knife, something cheap but not too cheap (the Smith + Wesson hindged variety look pretty nice).
I would love a camera tripod. Anything cheap, I don't even care if it's not full height (but that would be nice) as long as it keeps the camera stable.
A 4GB+ Memory Stick Pro Duo, because it would be nice to actually use my PSP as an MP3 player, since I can't really afford games for it... unless...
You want to buy me a PSP game! I don't want much, pretty well anything will keep me occupied for a little while, so something cheap like HotShots Golf, the Madden games, Ape Escape, Death Jr or SOCOM (*squeals*) all of which can be had for around five bucks.
Finally, though I can't seem to find them on eBay... I would greatly appreciate a few extra MSP 430 Target boards, for the MSP430EZ kit. They're cheap too, if you're looking at something that's above about $15 for three of them you're looking at the wrong thing. I don't even know why I mentioned this because probably none of my family members will know where to buy them from.
WHG Blog release
If you've been following my entries here, you'd know that I'm an internet kind of guy. Web hosting and web development is what I do, and even if I couldn't make money doing it I'd still do it as a hobby - I've enjoyed solving problems ever since I was a little kid, hacking away in BASIC on my family's C64.
I read all the latest industry news, trawl forums, spend countless hours conversing with other administrators, all trying to keep ahead of the curve. I'll bookmark the odd site when it contains pertinent information that's updated, particularly when it comes to things like optimizations. WHG have added a blog to their website, which looks as though as time goes by it'll become increasingly relevant.
I've ranted time and time before about people shopping for hosting looking purely at megabytes and gigabytes and ignoring other factors, and how important it is to make an informed decision. If you're new to the industry, a site like WHG can be a godsend to help you compare services from different companies, and their web hosting blog can give you some insight into the industry, and perhaps even teach you a thing or two you didn't know.
As an example, one of their recent entries "Do you really need a .com domain?", basically reiterates what I was explaining to a pro bono client I have. Basically I was saying how people will associate "company name dot com" in their brain, and will more or less forget about other TLDs, so when naming your new venture it's important to take this into consideration. The only way you can learn things like this is through experience, and gaining your own experience is costly - you're much better off to learn through other people's experience.
