Kate started walking last week.

For the past month or two she’d been cruising along furniture and walking when one of us held her hand. But in the days before Christmas she discovered that she didn’t really need us anymore, and now she just gets up and takes off whenever the mood strikes her.

It’s fun to watch her walk, but it presents a new set of challenges. Taking her out to eat is getting a little harder…she gets a little restless in her high chair after about 10 minutes and just wants to walk all over the place.

We took her to Disneyland Saturday night and she didn’t last very long at the table. Tammy and I had to take turns leaving the Blue Bayou to take her outside to let her walk.

She was so cute in her big white parka. She’d loiter around the Club 33 entrance walking in circles before deciding to plunge into the crowd, with me and my pointer finger in tow… She’d smile and yell “BAH!” to people walking by every few seconds. Her squeakers drew attention, and people would stop and smile at her. “BAH!” she would say with a smile. “BAH! BAH!”

She even gets a little restless in her stroller now, and the look of joy that washes over her face when we set her loose is priceless.

Cameraphone shots of a baby-in-motion:

Broken into ten 4-minute …’webisodes’… “The Face Of The Enemy” is a bonus Battlestar Galactica episode that’s just gone up on SciFi.com. A new chunk will be available every Friday at 9am all the way up until the series resumes in January.

We learn something new about Felix Gaeta just two minutes in!

You can now turn any external USB hard drive into a NAS for just $55!

This is the Addonics NAS Adapter:

I’m glad that someone finally bothered to make this…even if it is about five years too late. Hard drives are so big nowadays and can hold so much that I’d be too scared to trust my data to a single drive.

RAIDed stuff is the way to go. Buffalo’s LinkStations are perfect…unfortunately they’re pretty expensive. Or I’m just too cheap.

It’s a good thing I don’t smoke because man oh man do I love menthol. Good ol’ C10H20O.

I love mints, cough drops, gum, mouthwash…I’ll even tolerate the gross sensation of Chapstick on my lips for the 15 minutes that the menthol takes to do its thing. (I usually wipe it off immediately after though.)

When I woke up with the worst sore throat I’ve had in years on Sunday I wasn’t sad – I was happy! Happy because it meant I could go pick out an exciting new flavor of cough drops at the grocery store so that I could experience more menthol sensations in my mouth and throat!

It also gave me an excuse to eat more of my favorite ice cream – mint chip!

Yes sir, menthol is tops.

Grey’s Anatomy has been doing some weird stuff this season.

* Callie and Dr. Hahn had just started their whole gay relationship thing when all of a sudden Dr. Hahn just vanished into thin air, with no real explanation, never to be seen again. The Internet claims network interference may have been to blame.

* Denny’s back…as a ghost…and Izzy’s been sleeping with him. I still can’t believe this insanity was allowed to permeate more than one episode. She’d better have a brain tumor and not just be ‘crazy’. Denny must have the easiest job in Hollywood right now. “Follow Izzy around, say one or two lines, pick up paycheck, repeat.”

* Interns got caught operating on themselves in a storage room with stolen supplies, someone almost died, and nobody lost their job. Nobody at all!

The good news is that President Roslin of Battlestar Galactica has guest-starred on the last two episodes of Grey’s as a surgeon with Asberger Syndrome. I hope they make her a regular character, because she makes me smile.

Speaking of Battlestar… The last half of Season 4 starts January 16th, and a 13-minute recap video of everything so far is here. (They did a similar video between seasons 3 and 4).

I’ll be in Pasadena on the 16th attending the Battlestar Auction. I’m still figuring out a way to scrounge up the $60,000 that I’d need to start bidding on a Raptor, though. Other neat items include Baltar’s cigarette case ($300-500), Roslin’s Chamalla pills ($400-600), Roslin’s signature glasses ($400-600), Romo’s sunglasses ($600-800), Doc Cottle’s medical bag ($750-1000), the motherfrakin’ Arrow of Apollo ($2000-3000), Saul Tigh’s liquor bottle ($1000-2000), DRADIS displays ($2000-3000), a Cylon resurrection tub ($2500-3500) … pretty much anything you saw on the show is up for auction. The catalog is huge.

At these prices I don’t plan on placing any bids, but it’ll be neat to see everything up close…and maybe get some photos of Kate sitting in a Viper cockpit.

Christmas is coming and you-know-who is ten months old.

I got my 360 back from repair on Monday. Once again the repair center forgot to transfer over my licenses, and the 12-month limit on the transfer tool prevented me from fixing it myself this time. I guess writing a note in big letters that says “Please don’t forget to transfer my licenses. You guys forgot last time ” rubbed somebody the wrong way and they ignored it out of spite for my insolence.

After explaining the problem on the phone for an hour and a half to no less than four different people in India I finally got through to someone who had any idea of what I was talking about. I was promised a fix and a phone call within 72 hours and while I never got that phone call, it looks like my content has been already re-licensed to my new console as of this morning, less than 24 hours later.

I like the new dashboard! It looks a lot better and man is it fast. I just have to re-learn where to find things. Avatars are neat.

That is me.

Echostar’s TR-50 just got a new name, price, and release date.

The TR-50 is now the “DTVPal DVR“, and it could be the one device that frees you from paying monthly fees to a cable or satellite provider forever!

To my knowledge it’s the only standalone ATSC tuner-equipped HD DVR on the market…basically just an HD DVR for people who get their TV from an antenna.

The price is $250 and there are no monthly fees whatsoever. And, oh yeah, there no ads thrust upon you anywhere in the software. It runs the same DVR software that Dish Network uses on their 622 and 722 receivers – even the remote is the same.

Check your local coverage to see what kind of programming you can expect to receive with an antenna. In most cases (at least in Southern California) a small, easily concealable indoor antenna is all you need to watch HD.

The DTVPal DVR is available to pre-order now, and orders start shipping December 17th.