My birthday was last week.  We (Parents, Sister + Michael, Neil, Jonathan, April, and Tony + girlfriend who's name I can't remember, although I do remember that it was an uncommon name that happened to be the same as a Star Trek character) went to Takeya, as has become tradition.

I got gift cards for Lowes and Home Depot, and used them to get a Ridgid oscillating spindle/belt sander, Porter Cable random orbit sander, and a Kreg pocket screw jig, which made me very happy.  I keep watching Craigslist in the hopes that I'll find a deal on a drill press and dovetail jig, but I've just about resigned myself to the fact that I may just have to bite the bullet and buy them new.  Once I have those, I think I'll be pretty well equipped as far as core power tools go.

Over the weekend, we had Joe, Shirley, Mike + girlfriend and Neil and Karen over for drinks on Saturday night, which was fun.  On Sunday, we went to a condo on the beach where Joe's family has a timeshare.  I had forgotten how much fun the ocean was, if for nothing else, the fact that it remains suitably cool even in July when most pools feel like bathwater.

Other than that, not too much is new.  Contract for new Cisco phone system at work looks like it might finally get signed this month.  Also working on some disaster recovery options that may have a chance of actually getting approved this year, thanks to our new CFO that actually understands the concept of no servers=no business.  The current idea is a single beefy box, probably 12 or 24 cores with 96 GB of RAM running ESXi and a pair of HP Lefthand VSA virtual SAN appliances set up to do block level replication of the data on our EVA.  This is looking to be in the 30-40k range, and I'm not sure we can shave much off of that and still have a working solution.  Oh well, I guess time will tell.