It has been a while since I have wrote... the Holidays are always a rough time. You would think I'd have more time but really since I'm going all over the place to visit with people I end up having less. I spent all of Christmas with my parents which was nice and relaxing. Dad and I saw Valkyrie on Christmas day - we both enjoyed it. Apart from that the best part was watching my nephew open the Christmas presents we brought him. He is 2 coming up on 3 soon, so he gets really excited about it and can't seem to figure out which toy to play with. I'll post some photos I took later on when I'm home after I find my camera. I seem to have misplaced it somewhere between my parents and my apartment.

For New Years JoAnn and I went to her cousin Sarah's place. We played Battle of the Sexes, drank beer and got to know one another It was rather interesting since it was 3 white guys and 3 asian women. It was the first time I met Sarah; I can tell why JoAnn looks up to her like a sister. We had a lot of fun talking about Hmong culture, social issues, etc.

The holidays were great this year... and I am totally not ready to start the daily grind up again.  I am also goign to take a class or two this semester.  That's all for now.

Over at Stephen Walther's ASP.NET blog he shares 11 useful tips/tricks that you can use in Visual Studio.  Several seem to be strictly VS2008, but I did manage to get some of them to work in VS2005... my favorite being automatically generating a property by typing "prop" and hitting "tab" twice.  Wow!  What a time saver!

Check it out...

Okay... so I may end up having to buy one of these because it is just so awesome! If it works as intended.. you can wear the Fitbit 24 hours a day and track everything from how many calories you burned to how restul of a sleep you had the night before (it tracks the tremors generated on your wrist as you enter/exit REM sleep).  VERY cool... if it works as it is meant to I can see this being pretty valuable to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.  For $99 bucks (as of this writing) you buy the hardware... everything else is free.