Christmas was cancelled... but was it?

This Sunday was the Peck Family Christmas in Hastings.. however just as I was getting out the bowl to mix up some yummy Cheesy Potatoes and Artichoke Dip...... the phone rings and I find out that Christmas has been cancelled due to all the snow....

Well... we couldn't just cancel Christmas - it seemed wrong so Bill & I braved the elements, (finished up Christmas shopping while we were out) and bought a ham and some other fixin's so we could throw together a last minute Peck Christmas with Lyz & Rilley & Lilly & Angela & Kevin - Unfortunatly Jarrod had to plow snow - but we sent him home some treats for when he gets home...

The food was great Rilley LOVED the ham... he wanted to eat all of Aunt Angela's in fact I am not sure she even got any food... hmm.....

Trinity and Rilley are now best friends for life. We finished up a great night by watching the new movie Superbad and laughing at Rilley playing with Trinity and falling down every few minutes (that kid falls all the time)....

Riley & Trinity looking for presents under the tree

Trinity's Westie Cut

Before Picture

For those of you who did not know - Bill & I got another dog about 1 year ago. Her name is Trinity and she is a West Highland White Terrier. Well, last night we decided to get her a "Westie" Hair Cut. Here are the results...

The picture really doesn't do it justice because she wouldn't hold still for us to take her picture... but she is really cute and looks like a totally different dog....

Professor Peck's Security Blog - Part 1

I can't remember if I told everyone - but I was recently hired by Davenport University to teach Information Security classes. I know I know you are all saying - but you are not a teacher. Correct! However, it turns out that at the college level you can teach classes if you have a Masters Degree in that field. Therefore, I can only teach Information Assurance classes.

My first class starts in January and it is called Information Warfare. Yes you did read that correctly.... I know a little bit daunting - but I am excited. So my plan is to start a security blog. I am going to make it on a different page than the regular blog one of these days, but for now.... here is my security blog.... part 1.

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I HATE the fact that Internet Explorer and Firefox ask you if you want to save your password... because by default everyone is going to say YES... the problem is you really don't know what you are saying yes to. The prompt should say - hey dummy do you want to save your password in a file that anyone can access and read? The problem is - it doesn't say that... it says hey I can help you out and make things easier for you if you just click this button which is selected by default and if you accidently click enter or ok then that works too.

Ok enough of the rant.... here are the straight facts.

Internet Explorer prompts you to save passwords when you go to a website that requires credentials. The problem is those passwords are easily discovered …. A better option is to use a program called KeePass (or similar) to keep your passwords safe. It has an auto complete option and it stores the passwords in an encrypted file that cannot be broken into without knowledge of the password you use to protect it. I have been using keepass for over a year now and it works great – give it a try I think you will like it….

If you are interested, you can read more about the IE & Firefox password issue here….

http://www.labnol.org/software/browsers/view-stored-password-firefox-internet-explorer/1906/

Oh – and 1 more tip – if you are really paranoid – make your password longer than 15 characters… this makes it extremely difficult to crack no matter what the complexity.

Scrapbook Festival

Quite a few month's ago - Kim & I decided it would be a great idea to make our wedding scrapbooks. I had put this project off for quite some time as I was not too excited of scrapbooking pictures with Lisa in them :-) but anyway - we got started and it went well... then Kim started school, I was busy with work and other fun stuff and we negelected to work on them.... so - we resolved to have a Scrapbookapalloza and finish them in 1 weekend......

The results looked something like this...

Just one table of our tools....

We also talked our friend Jess into coming over to make a scrapbook of her niece as a Christmas present for her sister. She hadn't done much scrapbooking in the past and was highly amused at all of our tools and misc items - as well as our serious scrappin attitudes....

I think that Jess is hiding from the picture - obviously that didn't work out - but here is a sample of all of our junk. It looks pretty organized at this point... unfortunatly it didn't stay that way.

We stayed up until around 4:30 a.m. on Friday night when we decided we couldn't cut or scrap another page!

The next day we got up bright and early and went to Kim's favorite store - Walmart to pick up some pictures and some more scrapbooking materials.... then we started in for another day of fun.... we stayed up till around 12:30 a.m. when we finally claimed victory and finished our scrapbooking projects. Kim & I still need to do a little journaling - but Jess totally finished hers and we were able to throw away about 3 garbage bags full of leftover wedding stuff that I was keeping for the sole purpose of adding them to the scrapbook.....

Wheewww it was a long weekned but very productive and my dining room now is back to normal.

The Great Chili Cookoff

So @ work this year we had the 2nd annual chili cook off. Last year it was over at the Medical Division and Bill & I made a chicken chili at the last minute the night before - and we won the golden ladle award for the best chili.

So of course our competitive spirit forced us to give it a try again this year.... we made another chicken chili - but it had way too much chicken in it - it was still good though and it won the Chili's Close Cousin award.

The chili cook off was great fun - I think we had at least 30 chili's and of course tons of side dishes.... trying to taste all of the chili's to vote was the hard part. Luckily Instruments retained the Golden Crock pot award - we are the champions for 2 years so we better look out next year because Medical is already talking up their chances for taking our crock pot :-)

I also brought in a bear chili - kind of as a joke and surprisingly lots of people tried it and many people really liked it. I heard a few comments like (I don't know who brought in that bear chili but it is the best one!) So I guess Bill will have to go shoot another Bear next year so we can try to retain our crown...

Thanksgiving 2 & Lyz B-Day

Lilly & Rilley in their Christmas Clothes

So - on December 1st we celebrated Thanksgiving and Lyz' B-Day with Lyz & Jarrod & Rilley & Lilly & Kevin & Angela. We had a blast and once again ate until we could not move. The 2 different pies and cheesecake were a little over the top.... so was the artichoke dip and yummy bread that we filled up on before we actually ate :-)

If you have never grilled your turkey, I reccomend trying it. That is the way we do it - because we don't have room in the oven for everything. Wrap it in aluminum foil and grill it for about 6 -8 hours. IT is delicious... lucky for us we had lots of leftovers because we also made a Bear Roast that was a hit....

Thanksgiving

Hey all,

Hope you are enjoying the holiday season, I know it has been a busy one at the Peck house. I am just getting around to posting about Thanksgiving :-) On Thxgiving Day we visited my parents house and ate until we were too full to move, then Bill & I took Cole hunting in the Chicken Coop Shack.

For those of you who don't know, the Chicken Coop Shack is a actual chicken coop that Cindi and I built for Trevor's Chickens, however- the chickens refused to live in it and therefore died. And thus the chicken coop was renovated into a great hunting shack - complete with some very fancy swiveling office chairs (I will post some pics next time I go there so you can all be envious)

So - No Deer on Thxgiving - but Cole had fun imagining that there were 30 point bucks everywhere he looked.