Hey kids! RIM has released version 4.5 OS for your BlackBerry! You can get it here.

I just powered up my laptop not only 10 minutes ago and my Twitter and Feedreader are swamped with blogs and micro-blogs about the new year, resolutions, year in reviews, etc. Why should I be the outcast? This is my big, fat new year’s eve blog!

Best movie: The Dark Knight & Iron Man
Worst movie: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Best new phone: iPhone 3G & Blackberry Bold
Worst new phone: Any iPhone imitation

Best new video game: Wrath of the Lich King expansion
Worst new video game: I don’t really have one. Most of my time was spent playing WoW

Best BlackBerry Application Launch: MySpace Mobile. We’ve all been waiting for it.
Worst BlackBerry Application Launch: Yahoo! Go.

New Year’s Resolutions. Past years I haven’t even cared to have any. Most people do them and never achieve them. Well, I think I’ll use the year as an experiment to see if I can stick to my resolutions at all.

1. Lose all my pregnancy weight. A whole year later and still not back to normal, but it’s pretty much my fault anyways, so my goal is to get my ass into gear and hop to it.

2. Buy a new house. This one could be pretty easy, hopefully. We’re already set up to see a really, really nice house on New Year’s Day and if we like the inside as much as we like the outside, we’re going to see about buying out our lease and buying this new home.

3. Go on a vacation. It’s been far too long since I’ve gone on a vacation.

4. Save more money. We tend to blow our money from time to time on things we really don’t even need. LoL. I need to lower my addiction for designer bags, sunglasses, etc.

5. Have more of a social life. Sad, I know, but between family, work and home, I just haven’t the time anymore to go out with friends as much as I used to or would like to. I also find that the things some of my friends do don’t really appeal to me anymore. I don’t really want to go out drinking or clubbing or anything. Being a wife and mother has turned me into an old woman… and I like it. LoL. Not to mention, my friends do live quite far from me.

6. Get even more organized. I have this [healthy] addiction to being organized but I never feel like everything is as organized as it should or could be. Since we will be buying/building a new home, my goal is to get the entire house organized in the best way possible. Organization makes life soooo much easier!

In 2008 I really got my site up and running. It has grown quite a bit since I began blogging on it in June. Below is a chart from my cPanel showing how my site has increased with visitors from the time I began using it to now.

I’ve finally got all the Christmas shopping done and not a moment too soon. Anything else that I buy between now and Christmas is just extra. Yesterday, Saturday, I gathered Sean and we went out to a few stores to get daddy and Ryan’s Christmas presents which were the last ones on the list to buy for.

There was so much pandemonium at the stores. Sales reps were ignoring people, customers were hogging 2 to 3 sales reps for long periods of time which was unneccessary and the crowds of people were rude and slow enough to make you want to punch a puppy.

There were other stores I’d like to have gone to, but just being in the two I went to for hours on end just to buy maybe 10 things or so which should have only taken an hour was frustrating enough to make me want to go home, wrap presents and lie on the couch and take a nap, which is exactly what I did. Not to mention I had a 1 year old that was overdue on his nap time as well.

Now that the gift shopping is finished, I do need to go back to the grocery store at some point and get the items I need to make my new Christmas tradition; a breakfast casserole for Christmas morning. Yum! It has potatoes, suasage, cheese, etc. I will be preparing it the night before, which looks like it might take a while based on the recipe, and then popping it in the oven Christmas morning. Depending on how it turns out, this will be something I do every Christmas for breakfast.

In case you haven’t been able to tell yet, I am a very tradition oriented person. I didn’t have too many traditions growing my in my family, but I want to make sure my son has those experiences and has something that he knows he can look forward to every year.

All in all, I plan for this Christmas to be great, obviously! Family, parties, dinner, gifts, fun, etc.

Oh and speaking of parties, my company held their Christmas party Friday night at the Beckett Ridge Country Club and it was a damn good time. Once I get pictures I’ll post a better blog for it and explain more.

As if the crazy Internet Explorer vulnerabilities weren’t enough, I had gotten lots of malware on my computer because of it and went into a frenzy trying to back up all my important files on my SimpleTech 320gb external hard drive (as seen above), including but not limited to: photos of my son from birth to present, videos of his first laughs, first steps, my wedding photos, family photos, a backup of my website, etc.

Upon trying to do so, I was unable to. After spending money on an external power adapter, driving myself nuts and thinking it was something unrelated to my drive, I found out after sitting on hold for SimpleTech’s technical support for 25 minutes only to have a rude tech answer the phone, tell me I broke the drive, which took all of 2 minutes.

Well, I didn’t break the drive. The drive is a piece of crap. It worked just fine on my old Dell laptop, then I got my new Alienware laptop and it didn’t work. I then used my BlackBerry cord instead thinking that it could be a problem with the cord itself, but it still didn’t work. I then borrowed a co-worker’s digital camera cord and VOILA! it worked! Not sure of the difference but I was happy.

I then tried again to use the drive and nothing. I was using the ‘y’ USB cord that came with it since it may need extra power to the drive. The red light came on but the blue ‘backup’ light never did. I then thought that maybe it still isn’t getting enough power, so I go to Radio Shack and buy an AC adapter with 12v and 1.5amps and still it won’t work.

I tried my drive on my old laptop which is now my husband’s that it formerly worked on and nothing! Used different cables, etc. Out of curiosity, I decided to Google the drive and found nothing but bad things to say about it and how it stops working almost immediately. I wish I had known this when I bought it, but I didn’t!

This is where I decide to go to SimpleTech’s website and do a little research on the warranty. Thankfully it has a 3 year warranty! I then create and submit a RMA and then call their tech support in which the rude douche bag answers, tells me I broke it and then tells me to do a RMA, which I already did. So, pretty much, I sat on hold for 25 minutes for absolutely no reason, but hey, I should be receiving a new hard drive… and you know what? I am going to sell the brand new one and use the money to put towards a GOOD hard drive.

Moral of the story, DO NOT BUY A SIMPLETECH EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE!

I’d like to introduce all my readers to one of my new affiliates. BlabWeb!

Be sure to visit his site for all your blogging needs and wants.

If you would like to become an affiliate, contact me via comment or email vanillamilkshake.com[at]gmail[dot]com

If you’re as easily amused as I am and love a good Chuck Norris joke, you will thoroghly enjoy my first installment of ‘Random Fun’.

1. Go go www.Google.com

2. Make sure that you’re on the classic view of Google.

3. Type in: find “Chuck Norris”

4. Click, ‘I’m feeling lucky’

5. Sit back, relax and enjoy.