Ronnie Sherard

Well, it’s hard to believe that in just under three months I’ll be down in Florida. I’m heading down early to get things set up for the family to move. In a couple of weeks, I’ll head down there to look at houses and see if I can find somewhere for us to live. It’s another chapter in my career, but it will be hard to leave.

Reflecting back on our time in Omaha, there is very little I would have done different. I was able to complete my Bachelor’s degree and start on my Master’s. I was active in Scouts, although this last year has been fairly tied up with working two jobs. Speaking of two jobs, I’ve met some great people through Domino’s. I’m hoping I can stay in touch with a few of them, somehow. It’s been a great ride, but it’s time to move on. Five years in one place is, well, too long when you’re looking at advancing in your career.

Well, roads weren’t really an issue when we came back to Omaha. We had sunshine until we were just outside of York. It was amazing to watch the mounds of snow along the roads and in the fields increasing the further north and east we went. The last few shots are of our parking lot. I’d say we got a little snow while we were gone!

The drive home wasn’t too bad. We left late Tuesday night, stayed in Topeka, and made it to Hays late morning Wednesday. Along the way, we saw a mixed bag of weather. We drive in drizzle and fog most of the way from Omaha to Topeka. The drizzle tapered off around Sabetha and gave way to some thick fog. The roads this morning weren’t too bad, except the last eight miles of the trip. Then we ran into some slush and saw the results of an accident on the side of the road. But, we made it for Christmas!!!

We stopped at Wal-Mart when we got into town this morning. I just couldn’t help snapping a picture of the parking situation. Apparently, someone didn’t get the memo on how to park…

We had our family pictures taken, oh, about a month ago. I’m glad we did it. I wish we could have afforded some more. Maybe after the holidays, we’ll get out and have a bunch more taken. I love the shot of my girls! I think it’s an excellent picture. Of course, I love the one with both of the kids too!

I’ve seen a lot of posts about this on forums all across the Web. Well, I’m not sure if anyone else was having the same exact problem as I was, but I figured it out. I would hook my BlackBerry up to my laptop and get a good connection, then it would drop, then I would get the dreaded error. So, I would unplug it, plug it back in, and the process would begin again. I noticed that if I moved my BlackBerry, it would drop almost immediately. Upon inspection of the USB port on my phone, I noticed one pin was out of place. It was bent up slightly. So, I took a mini screwdriver and pushed it back down. I now have NO problems with the connection!

If any Military Star card carriers shop the online mall provided through the AAFES website, I have a note of caution about one company in particular. I ordered a hard drive from PatriotPC (http://www.patriotpc.us) on November 1st. I emailed them two weeks ago and was told there was a delay in the warehouse, but it would be shipped early this last week. Here it is another week and still no shipped status. I’m getting close to disputing the charge on my Star card and just finding one somewhere else.

This mission is a BLAST!

For years, we (computer users) have been happy with Windows XP. After all, it was a grand improvement on the flop of Windows Me. Those of us who upgraded to Me from Windows 98 kicked ourselves for wasting money on such a bug-ridden release of Windows. We had a flashback to those days when we tried to stomach Windows Vista. Windows Vista was released with pomp and circumstance in 2006. I was eager to get a copy to see what all of the hype was about. Of course, I made the mistake of trying to run Vista on a laptop with a 1.3 Ghz processor and a mere 768 MB of RAM. It immediately took me back to the 386 days, as Vista’s resource hog choked the life out of my laptop. Unsatisfied, I bought yet another copy to install on my desktop, consisting of a 2.2 Ghz quad core processor and 2 GB of RAM. While it ran fairly well and there were some great improvements in areas such as networking and usability, Vista was NOT a gamer friendly platform.

I haven’t had much of a chance yet to game in Windows 7 yet. However, I did load Left 4 Dead onto my laptop and, surprisingly, it ran quite well. When I loaded it in Vista, it was so slow and choppy that I couldn’t even attempt to play it. I did have quite a bit of lag on the movement with the mouse, but I believe that is because it is a wireless mouse. I haven’t decided if I’ll hook up a USB mouse or not, as I don’t intend to do heavy gaming on my laptop. It is just reassuring to see a game like that actually running smoothly on my laptop platform.

Windows 7 has a lot of great features I like. First of all, I really like the library feature in Documents, Music, and Videos. This allows you to maintain several folders under one link. If you have your documents, music, and movies in other places, you can simply include the folder and they will show up in the library. Another nice feature is on the Start menu. Programs such as Google Chrome, Word, Excel, Firefox, and many others will show recent sites or documents you have opened. So, instead of needing to launch the program and then navigate to the site or document you are looking for, you can simply click on the link from the Start menu.

Simply put, I think Windows 7 is one of the best versions to date. I’m sure bugs will be found, which is not uncommon with Windows. However, its ease of use and speed make it far superior to what we were stuck with in Vista.

I used a few pictures from my Blue Angels photos to create a Windows 7 theme. I think it turned out rather well. I’m making it available for free, but feel free to donate if you really like it!

Blue Angels Windows 7 Theme