Moving The Old TV

Ginger's parent's headed home today. But not before Ginger, the kids and them went out to lunch at Coastal Flats. Since they were also going to be going shopping I decided to skip this outing. And I will add that while Ginger and I went to my company's holiday party last night, Ginger's parents took the kids out to eat. And people think I'm making it up when I say Ginger's Mom likes to eat out when she's up here.

The other big event of the day was moving the 60 inch rear projection television from upstairs to the basement. To assist in this Herculean effort I enlisted the aid of Ben, who was coming over to drop off the Mac computer of his we're buying. Our first idea was that we were going to take the TV outside, around the house and into the basement. And I even spent about an hour outside before Ben came over taking apart the sliding door to the basement. Then once Ben was here we revisited the idea of taking the TV down the stairs. Mind you, it was just the two of us. Somehow that was the course of action we decided on and since it was my TV I felt like I should be on the bottom since if it fell and crushed whoever was on the bottom it didn't seem fair that it would be Ben since it wasn't his TV. Believe it or not the idea of taking pictures of this event was mentioned, but I didn't like the idea since the pictures could have simply been a reminder to me of how I made such a foolish decision and had paralyzed or killed myself. Somehow (and I'm still not exactly sure how to be honest) we managed to get the television down the stairs and no one was injured (although there were a couple of times I was sure I was about to slip from the weight and thought the whole thing was going to come crashing down on me). Now that the television is in the basement, I've decided if we ever sell the house that TV will be conveying to the new owners. I don't want to deal with moving that thing again. And now that I've said that, you just watch and see if it doesn't up and die on me just to spite me and I'll be force to move it again.

Once the TV was all situated Ginger set it up and hooked up all the cables. While she was doing that I headed outside and reconnected all the pieces of the sliding door I had taken apart. After that we felt we had to test the television out and hooked up the Wii to play some. At this point Quinn hadn't tried any new foods and was going to be missing out. What all the adults found amusing was as Catherine, Ben and I started playing Quinn started yelling to Ginger "Mom, I need something new to try right now!" Ginger headed upstairs and fixed him a jelly sandwich. Now I know you're thinking how could that possibly be something new, but the child has steadfastly refused to eat a anything with jelly on it in the past. But lo and behold when tempted with the sweet sweet desire of getting in some Wii play action he ate a full fourth of a jelly sandwich, with no gagging or making faces I'm told (I didn't witness this for myself as I was downstairs at the time getting the snot beat out of by Ben on the free fall game in Mario Sonic Olympics). I plan on offering it to him as something he can eat a couple more times and having it qualify for some Wii play and I'm hoping we'll have added something new to the child's diet. I have to admit, getting him to try new foods this way is so much easier than before where it was a huge battle for everyone. I wonder if I could sell our story to Nintendo for advertising purposes in exchange for some free games.

Holiday Party 2007

In addition to all the stuff we did on Saturday that night was also my company's holiday party. Everybody looked really nice and I proved that I have zero tolerance for alcohol anymore by having my feet feel overly warm after just two drinks. They had a Hollywood theme to the party with celebrity impersonators and people dressed as academy awards statues, more than a bit gratuitous I freely admit. And the food / seating situation didn't seem to be too well planned out as since when the dinner started there were still about a third of the people standing that had no where to sit. Luckily we had snagged a table with a bunch of our friends though. They also closed down the open bar at 11 which was half an hour earlier than had been publicized. What I found interesting was how upset this made some people, but I had finished my two drinks by just after 9, so it didn't bother me.

The people in attendance were much like last year. At least I look better in the photo with Ginger and myself this year (and check it out, I'm wearing possibly the exact same outfit). If nothing else an evening of just hanging out with adults with no kids around made for a fun evening. Not saying that I don't love my kids, but it's nice for Ginger and myself to be able to get out and have normal (ok, what passes for normal) conversations.


Barry and Karen managed to get out of the house for a bit without the three kids or the dog.


Pyromaniac Robert spent a lot of time using a candle to try and toast a marshmallow.


Ken and Karen also managed to sneak out of the house without Amanda.


Hey, it's KennyG and the Doberwoman. I heard Roxie was left home alone. Hope she doesn't get into as much trouble as Macaulay Culkin when he was left alone. And what's Kenny doing out at a party. Shouldn't he be at home working on that book deal for his great American novel.


Check it out, this year I managed to convince Pete to pose for a photo. Pete was a big hit later in the night as we were checking out his iPhone.

House Of Joy

Yea, I know. I said I was going to try and put up the pictures from Friday today. Gonna have to push that back some as too much stuff is happening today.


Ginger's parents are up visiting. They're here to baby sit the kids tonight while Ginger and I attend my company's party. Today though we decided to head inside the beltway to the church we used to attend when we lived in Arlington. Before we could do that though we had to have lunch, which we ate out because Ginger's Mom is up and that's just what you do. Although to fair, they were here last night and they ate dinner at the house.


Back to the church though. The pastor of the church loved trains. I mean really loved them. So every year around the holidays they would have a couple of rooms they referred to as the "House of Joy" that were filled with train decorations and they open it up to the public. Back when we lived in Arlington the Quinn would insist on going over every day sometimes. Well it's been a while since we were there because Quinn had almost completely forgotten about it (I couldn't tell if he remembered it once he was inside and saw it or not, but I think he did at least vaguely). But even though he didn't remember it that didn't stop both of them from being crazy with excitement once we got there.


Quinn was in train heaven as he was allowed to control some of the trains. Besides blowing their whistles (which he would do multiple times) he could also control their speed.




Both kids really loved the figure eight track with the ridable Thomas the train. They did a really good job sharing access to this as they would load it with presents and drive the presents around the track and deliver them.


For some reason this building model was Ginger's favorite. Don't ask me why.

After the train exhibit we stopped by Ginger's cousin Susan's place. She recently attempted to uninstall McAfee and had somehow gotten the computer so that it could no longer connect to the internet. Since I work with computers everyone thought apparently I would be able to fix the problem. Survey says ... [X]. First McAfee wasn't really uninstalled. The registry was riddled with references to it. And second I don't know what was going on, but it looked like McAfee might have replaced a library for socket communications or something and now that McAfee was in a semi removed state that library was no longer working. The network card was working, and could tell when it was connected to the router, but it couldn't communicate with the router at all. Pings didn't work, it wouldn't connect and get an IP address, nothing network related was working. So I wasn't able to fix it. Anyone out there have any ideas? I will add that I think the lookup or something might have been hosed because when I would try and ping the router I was expecting to see something like "Pinging 192.168.1.1 ..." where it would echo the IP address I entered after the ping, but instead it would print "Pinging [non asc char] ..." So that definitely seems like some lookup library call wasn't working correctly.

The New Hard Drive Looks FAT

Ok, it's now Saturday morning. Most of everything has copied except for a couple of files. Each time I try and copy one the files that didn't work it says the destination drive is full and needs to have files deleted before the copy can occur. The new drive still has over 200 Gig free, so I'm not seeing how that's actually the problem. After looking into why that's the case I discovered all the files that didn't copy over were over 4 Gig. After looking into it some more, it turns out the new hard drive (which I will now add came preformatted) is formatted with FAT32. Gah! Now I have to decide whether I want to wipe the 220 Gig of stuff it took 5 hours to copy onto it and reformat it or just live with it being FAT32 (laziness is having me lean towards not reformatting it).

The new hard drive has a blue LED on the front to show when the drive is in use. But instead of the normal on / off it's a wide light and it goes back and forth as you access it. While I was copying data last night it looked like an old school cyclon (or a refurbished KITT). The cool looking factor is at this point being overshadowed by the FAT32 aspect though.

New Hard Drive

It twas foggy this morning. It made for interesting sights. As I was driving Quinn to school the sun finally started being visible through the clouds. It was odd seeing the outline of the sun and having it be no brighter than what you would expect the moon to normally be. It made everything seem very surreal. Catherine wasn't with us. That's because she was at home with Ginger preparing to go to the doctor. Her finger had swollen up and we think it got infected, so Ginger was taking Catherine to the doctor this morning to have it checked out. And sure enough it was indeed infected and Catherine is now on some antibiotics.

When I got home tonight I was pleasantly surprised to see that my new 500 Gig external hard drive had arrived. I ordered a new drive since both the drives in my old computer only had a couple of Gig left on them and the laptop which has a 40 Gig drive also only has about 2 Gig left. And given I need somewhere to put new pictures that I take I need more space. And at the rate I take pictures those couple of Gigs wouldn't last long at all. And that's why I bought the new drive. So I pulled it out and plugged it in and then plugged in an external casing with an old drive in it and did a bulk copy from the old drive to the new one. A full hour and a half later and I'm still waiting for the copy to complete. My guess is copying about 250 Gig of data over USB connections isn't the fastest way to do it. The little copy window sat there at "Preparing to copy files" for a full fifteen minutes before it even started copying any data. And normally the copy window has a time remaining on it, but that's not even there so who know how long this is going to end up taking in the end. After an hour and a half the progress bar is about 1/10 of the way through so I'm thinking I have a while left to go.

Time goes by....

I can't pull the pictures I took today until the copy completes (out of USB ports). So at this point it's been three and a half hours since I started the copy and I'm about 1/4 through the progress bar. After examining one of the files it's copying I see it's copying about 170 MB every 12 seconds or so. Quick back of the envelope calculations tell me at that speed it will take about five hours to copy 250 Gig. And I'm guessing for smaller files the throughput is much less. So from the looks of things there's still another three hours to go on the copy at least. So I'm just going bail on trying to get pictures up tonight and post something tomorrow morning.

This Time I'm Really Done

I know before I said I had beaten Super Mario Galaxy, but now I'm really done with it. I actually finished it over the past weekend. You can "beat" the game (i.e. rescue Princess Peach) after getting *only* 60 stars. But there are 120 stars you can get (as Mario). Once you've gotten all 120 stars, if you rescue Peach again it will open up the ability to play as Luigi. So you get to play the whole game again as Luigi. A couple of the boards (the cosmic races basically) are different in the Luigi version, but other than that it's mostly the same game. The difference is the controls. Luigi is actually faster than Mario and can jump higher. The down side is he has no traction. Whereas Mario can stop on a dime when you try and stop as Luigi he'll slide for a bit in the direction he was going. For the most part it isn't a problem since he can make 90 degree turns with no sliding problems and it's only completely stopping or reversing direction that you run into issues (it is tedious on boards that have very small above ground paths since you tend to fall off those more often). So once you play through as Luigi and get the 120 stars again and rescue Peach twice more you open up the final stage (which isn't difficult and more of a "Here's one more level for all the hard work you put into the game"). The final stage is on the planet with the trial stars (trust me that this is useful information to have and if you get to the point where you need that info you'll know what it means). So now that I've gotten all 242 stars I think I can finally put that game to bed. For me anyway, Quinn and Catherine still like to play it, but Quinn gets pretty frustrated when he can't beat the end level bosses. Need to figure out what the next game I want to play is now. I'm open to suggestions if anyone has them.


And I might as well throw in another image of the star from the kid's tree. It was taken the same time as the one I posted a couple days ago (I like the other image better though).

You Are No KITT

With a writer's strike in full swing there's very little new programming coming down the pike. And sadly what is coming down the pike is just wrong on so many levels. KITT is suppose to be a Pontiac Trans Am. I'm torn. On the one hand we get a new Knight Rider show (childhood nostalgia goes a long way). On the negative side the new KITT isn't a Trans Am anymore and is a Ford Mustang. I didn't have as much of an issue when they switched to Fords for Team Knight Rider (which was really an hour long Ford commercial). Mainly because I didn't watch that show and since none of the cars were really KITT it didn't bother me that they had switched to Fords. Having a new KITT not be a Trans Am though just seems wrong. At least the Hoff is going to be making an appearance in the new version (hopefully he won't be drunk eating hamburgers before shooting).

Would You Like That Gift Wrapped?

If you were at Barnes and Noble tonight you might have been asked if you wanted your book gift wrapped. That would be have been Quinn who was there for the school as they did a fund raiser by wrapping presents for free and accepting donations. I didn't get there till late and didn't have my camera, so I don't have any pictures of the event. I'm not convinced they raised that much money other than from the parents of the kids there volunteering. I ended up buying Ginger a cookbook for Christmas (that she picked out) and getting it wrapped and donating another $10 to the school. Turned out to be a really expensive cook book when all was said and done, I really hope she appreciates all the hard work I went through to get it after she picked it out and handed it to me in the store.

The picture up above isn't related to the book store event, it's just a random photograph from when we put up the kid's Christmas tree a while back.

Pan's Labyrinth

Been a while since I've mentioned movies I've watched, and I've let a lot build up since then. One that I watched a while ago and never really mentioned was Pan's Labyrinth. It's a fairy tale written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. It's a foreign film, so you're going to want to watch with subtitles on. The movie is really good. It's easily one of the better films I've seen in the past couple of years. It's a fairy tale in the original sense. Meaning it's not a Disney film, but rather has some of the more gruesome aspects that the original Grimm tales would have and as such I wouldn't suggest this one for kids.

The story takes place in Spain in 1944. And here's where knowing more about Spain's history might have made the story more meaningful. Spain evidently had a civil war five years before, and while it appears to be over, there are still patches of rebel soldiers in the wilderness. Clearly through the movie we're suppose to sympathize with the rebels. This is made clear by the actions of the officers designated to crush the rebellion.

All this is backdrop to the main story. The movie feels like it's a coming of age story for the Ofelia, a 10 year old girl whose mother has married Captain Vidal of the officers designated to bring in the rebels. Ofelia's mother is pregnant with Vidal's child, but the pregnancy is not going well. When we first see Vidal we instantly know how we're suppose to feel about him. As he looks at his watch and announces the entourage is arriving 15 minutes late we immediately get a sense for his character. It's shown through the course of the movie that the mother doesn't necessarily love the Captain, but rather saw the marriage as a way of escaping what had become of her life after Ofelia's father died leaving them alone. Ofelia refuses to accept Vidal as her father, which of course increases the tension between them.

The fairy tale aspect comes in with the premise that long ago the daughter of the king of the underworld escaped into the real world and forgot her true identity. This is where the story picks up with Ofelia encountering mystical creatures who lead her to Pan, a Satyr played by Doug Jones (who actually gets to speak in this role as opposed to his roles as Abe in Hellboy and Silver Surfer in the latest Fantastic Four movie) who inform her that she is this lost daughter, and that to reclaim her place she must perform three tasks.

Is everything about the movie perfect? Not really. The characters are very one dimensional. You know who the good guys are and it's very obvious who the bad guys are (at least in the real world, in the mystical world it isn't as easy to tell who is good and who isn't). Clearly we're suppose to be supporting the rebels, but without knowing Spain's history I wasn't sure why that was the case (it's possible this was some subtle political commentary or something that I simply didn't catch). There were also some night scenes that were shot in a blue filter that I wasn't particularly fond of, but other than that the cinematography was excellent. In the end I might have preferred a bit more ambiguity as to whether the fantasy elements of the film were real or imagined, but the movie heavy handedly tells you the fantasy elements are real. Which is fine I suppose since it is by definition a fairy tale and I suppose the ending would play much differently if the fantasy elements were all imagined. All in all this was an excellent and very enjoyable film.

Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel...

Attended Quinn's last choir performance this morning. After that we took a brief run by a toy store and then headed home for some rest and relaxation. Today we basically took it easy and everyone took a long nap. Sadly we blew any sleep the kids regained by having them go to bed over an hour later than they usually do.


Yesterday when Barry and his family were over Karen gave our kids dreidels and instructions on how to play with them. They actually helped at meal time because we let them play, but they had to eat a bit between spins. The only bad thing was as the kids would lose their chips they started getting really upset. Other than that they seemed to enjoy the game a lot (they both enjoyed it more when they were winning though).


And here's a mini video of people playing the Mario Sonic Olympic game on Saturday. The camera ran out of room and stopped recording before we found out who won, but the winner in this particular event was Catherine. This was the 100 meter run, which lasts for about 10 seconds. Now imagine doing the "Dream Race" in which you run constantly for about a minute and a half and you can see why my arms were sore the day after we did this a week or so ago.

The Santa Dilemma

I'm not sure today could have been any busier if we had tried. My work throws a holiday party for kids and today was the day of the party. So we headed out to the hotel where the party was being hosted. There were less games this year than last year (which had less than the year before). The kids still seemed to have a good time, and it was an opportunity to sit on Santa's lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas.


I had to go back later and ask Santa what Quinn had asked for after he refused to tell us. It was a race car, but that's all I know and I suspect Quinn asked for a specific type of race car, but Santa didn't give me any more details than that. Santa is supposedly hundreds of years old, so maybe his memory is going (which would explain why he still brings me presents since it's obviously not because I've been good).

Speaking of Santa, we're looking for input on when does one break the truth about that particular idea to youngsters. I remember several years ago answering a question from Quinn about Santa being real with a "If you believe he's real, then who's to say he isn't?" The reality question hasn't come up again since then. And Quinn has since indoctrinated Catherine with the lore. So the question then becomes how long do you let this go on? Should I have just come clean several years ago? Or do we continue letting them believe the fiction?


Back to the kid's party. One of the attractions they had this year was a juggler. Who was "giving lessons" to the kids. Which for the most part meant he had a lot of extra balls the kids could play with (which sounds really bad out of context). Quinn gave it a shot with somewhat predictable results.


There was also a room with a giant inflatable twister moon bounce. The problem here was after Quinn exerted himself on the moon bounce his cough went nuts until he had rested for a while.




There was also a guy making elaborate balloon creations. This was one of the more popular activities. The bad news here was the creations were so elaborate it was taking forever just to do one item, so the line for this guy was about half an hour or more. Catherine ended up standing in line and getting an angel wing / halo (which Quinn tried on briefly when Catherine was getting her face painted). The balloon angel wings lasted all of about 20 minutes, then as we were leaving Catherine set it on the ground and it got stepped on and popped. Which is the really bad thing about these elaborate balloon things, the kids get so attached to them and they're incredibly delicate and when they do pop that's the end of it. Add to this both kids are somewhat on edge since they've gotten less sleep over the past couple of days than they normally do and the balloon popping resulted in a mini meltdown (which stopped almost as suddenly as it started thankfully, which was odd but I wasn't about to question why it stopped).


And I couldn't leave without getting some face time in with the big jolly guy myself. I mean I need to do something to offset that whole being good thing.


After the party we came home and Barry and his kids came over for a playdate. This eventually resulted in everyone playing the Wii. Barry tried out the Wii Sports fitness test and his Wii age was 69 (which might be about the highest score I've ever seen, I think my Mom even managed 59 her first time trying it). We eventually started playing the Mario / Sonic Olympic game since four people can play that one and some of the games are fairly simplistic. Predictably this usually resulted in Quinn or Catherine beating everyone.


And then after dinner and after Barry and everyone left we had to take Quinn to church for the second night of the choir program. And the girl with the bow from last night was in a different position, so I had a much better view of Quinn. And the woman in front of me with Marge Simpson hair wasn't moving, so I could go around her without having her move in front of my shot. All of which meant I would have gotten some great shots had I actually remembered to put the memory card back into the camera before we left (I had pulled pictures off earlier and evidently forgot to put the card back in the camera). Tonight there were more people than last night. So of course Quinn picked to tonight to go to the nose. Although it's possible he was just scratching it really hard. And even though Ginger got him a different pair of pants for tonight he was still scratching his legs at various times during the program for some reason. So once again Quinn is getting to bed really late as is Catherine (she decided to go to tonight's performance also). We may need to force the kids to take naps tomorrow to try and reclaim some of this lost sleep.

Opening Night

Tonight was Quinn's big choral opening night debut. He did pretty good all things considered. He sang, did the hand motions, he didn't fall down, or knock anyone else over. And as an added bonus he didn't pick his nose while on stage (yes, I was worried that was going to happen). He did keep bending down to scratch his leg or something at various times throughout the performance. He was wearing new pants so maybe they were scratchy or something. All in all a fine performance and he and the other kids did great. The only bad thing was the overall performance was pretty long and Catherine was wiped before the end (Ginger ended up leaving with her and Catherine feel asleep in Ginger's arms downstairs).


I would like to say a special thanks to the girl in front of Quinn for wearing the big bow in her hair so that I only got a couple of decent shots. And a big thanks to the woman the aisles in front of me that kept moving her head back and forth so that I had to had constantly about her jumping into my shot (you can see the shadow of her head in the shots I did get). Good times there.

Snow Job

The snow did indeed result in school being delayed. The county was delayed by two hours, but the kid's school only had an hour delay.

Quinn will occasionally focus so much on whatever he's doing that he's not really paying attention to what you say to him. This is most noticeable when you ask him something. Like this morning:

Ginger: Quinn, it's cold out, do you want to wear your scarf today?

Quinn: Yes...
Quinn: No...
Quinn: Wait, I think...
Quinn: Actually, I don't know.




Sadly I neglected taking into account the time it was going to take to scrape all the snow and ice off my car this morning before we left. The kids played out in the snow some while I was busy scraping. I did grab a couple pics of them as they were shoveling the snow in the front yard. They desperately wanted to build snow forts, but the snow that hadn't frozen into ice was nothing but powder, so it's not a packable snow.






And tonight was the dress rehearsal for the church's Christmas concert. Tonight Catherine decided she wanted to go want the practice, so we all ended up going. I also took the D70 tonight since last time I only had the handheld Nikon. I got pictures that turned out a lot better than I would have expected. This was without a flash and shooting from the back of the auditorium. I did crank the ISO setting up t0 640, but it didn't introduce as much grain or noise into the shots as I was expecting. Tomorrow night is the first concert. The only problem with this is the practice and the concert will be keeping him up really late. And he's still getting up at his normal time, so over the next couple of days he'll probably be on edge as he gets less sleep than he normally does. It would be nice to force him to take a nap on Saturday, but with all the plans we have for that day, it doesn't look like that's going to be happening.

First Snow

It's always nice to get that first snow of the season out the way. It started late enough that school's weren't late or closed. That didn't stop traffic from being a complete nightmare this morning. It started really coming down around midday and continued on and off throughout the day until finally tapering off in the night (as of midnight it had seemed to stop completely).

Right now there aren't even any late opening for school tomorrow, which surprises me a bit since I would think there's going to be some ice on the roads in the morning. But maybe since it's more or less stopped snowing now they'll be able to clear all the roads before morning. Or maybe they just like waiting until the last minute to make those kinds of decisions. Who knows.


Looks like the kids played outside some this afternoon, but I wasn't around when they were out enjoying the snow. Luckily Ginger snapped a couple of pictures, but apparently Catherine was the only one that was willing to stand still long enough for her to get a photo. It's always a pleasant surprise to come home and check the camera and see new pictures of the kids on there.




I really liked the effect of the snow covered lights, but I don't think either picture truly captures the effect.

Warp Tree, Engage!

We had snow this morning. Just some very light flurries with absolutely no accumulation, but still. According to the weather we may get some more tomorrow with actual accumulation. Not sure I'm looking forward to that.


So I've been experimenting with taking some photos of the Christmas tree. I like how a couple of them have turned out. Sadly these are the best of the bunch. And I took a bunch.


I'm not particularly thrilled with the blurred image one. But I like a couple of the other exploding ones. I'm still on the fence about the imploding one. You can tell I have a hard time not shaking the lens since most of the times the light lines aren't completely straight (one of them turned out pretty good though).


And I got my hair cut tonight. It was an interesting experience. The lady cutting my hair was obviously overbooked since she had someone waiting in the wings already when she was cutting my hair. Then while she's cutting my hair one of the other stylists comes over and tells her that she's not feeling well and leaving early and can she pick up her walk in also. My stylist agrees and suddenly I've got the Tazmanian Devil cutting my hair complete with opaque swirling cloud and brief flashes of scissors as pieces of my hair go flying everywhere.

And Boy Are My Arms Tired

I ache. I can barely raise my arms today they're so sore. Why are they like that? The Wii. That new Olympic game where you have to run makes you use the remote and nunchuk like a drum stick. And after doing about 10 races that are three minutes each evidently I must have exercised muscles I didn't even know I had.


Tonight Quinn had practice for the Christmas concert he's in at church this coming weekend. The practice was at 7 PM. Neither of us wanted to be the one to take him, so Ginger asked if we should try and convince him not to be in the program. Rather than do that, I decided to cowboy up and go ahead and take him. When I got home I thought I had cut a break because Quinn said Ginger was going to be taking him, but apparently that was just wishful thinking on his part.

Quinn did pretty good at practice. In fact he actually sang. He's been in several concert things before and he's never sang in any of them (he would just stand there and sometimes do the motions). But this time he's actually singing. Too bad he has that same cough that Ginger had and now I have. He's just picked that up within the past week or so. He has dress rehearsal on Thursday night, then the concert is Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Spent Sunday Recovering

Spent a lot of Sunday trying to get info off my old computer. Who knew that XP has semi decent security. Since most of my stuff is under My Documents, that's all inaccessible if you take the disk to another computer. At first when I took the drive to another computer using an external case I browsed to the area and it told me the directory contained 0 bytes. I'll admit I kind of paniced a bit when I saw that (it should say something like folder inaccessible instead of saying it's 0 bytes). I did make note of the fact that the free space available was only 2.5 Gig, which is what it had free before. So even if the data had become lost, it probably still would have been recoverable. But luckily I know one of our work sys admin's (Matt) home number and I gave him a call and he walked me through figuring it out (actually he ended up connecting to my computer and doing it himself). So I've got the pictures off and stored on Ginger's machine, and I can get to the rest of the data so at least I feel better about that. Plus knowing that the last couple of months of pictures are now on two separate hard drives alleviates some of my concerns since single points of failure are bad in my opinion. Both hard drives are in the same house though, at some point I need to push all this data to a drive and get that copy out of the house.

We rearranged the downstairs a bit today. And every time I would walk past my office I would feel the urge to sit down at the computer, but that won't be happening any time soon. It feels a bit like a phantom limb. Like I *know* the computer is dead, but when I walk by I still want to sit down and check stuff.

The Rest Of Saturday

My computer dying was only part of Saturday. One of the things we've discovered is that the kids really like the Mario / Sonic Olympic game. The problem is that it is the first four player game we've gotten where the nunchuks are also used. We have four remotes, but only two nunchuks. So this morning I decided I would get another set of nunchuks.

Me: "Okay, I'm going to the store. Do we need anything? Does anyone want to go with me?"

Quinn: "Where are you going?"

Me: "Toys 'R Us"

Quinn: "Are you going to where they sell the video games?"

Me: "Yes."

Quinn: "I'll go."

Me: "I'm shocked."

Catherine: "Daddy?"

Me: "Yes Catherine?"

Catherine: "What are you going to get at the store."

Me: "I'm going to get two more nunchuks for the Wii so we can all play the Mario / Sonic Olympic game at the same time."

Catherine: "Mommy! Daddy's going to the store to buy dump trucks."

Me: "No Catherine. They're called 'nunchuks.' Can you say 'nun'?"

Catherine: "Nun"

Me: "Chuk"

Catherine: "Truck"

Me: "Nevermind. Quinn are you ready?"

I used the free $25 gift card I got when I bought Super Mario Galaxy, so I only had to pay $15 for the two the extra nunchuks. Figured this way it would insure that I actually used that gift card rather than forgetting about it and having it expire.




But today wasn't all about playing the Wii (it was most of the day, but not all of it). We also put up the kid's Christmas tree. The kids had been asking to do this most of the day. Quinn helped put on the lights. That was fun. I've never seen the lights so tangled in the back as they were when he was finished. Catherine insisted on putting on streamers while Quinn was putting on the lights, so the streamers briefly got intermingled with the lights.


Once that task was all done the kids played on the Wii some, then Ben (self proclaimed gentleman of leisure) came over and braved the house of sick people to have dinner and play the Wii. Quinn proceeded to beat up on all of us in the running games. Quinn's getting better about not getting as upset about losing. He's just decided he would rather not play the games where he knows he won't win. Catherine also has been doing better. Although during one of the racing games she started crying really hard. I thought it was because she was losing since she was still moving the controls up and down, but it turned out that Quinn had hit her in the face with the Wii remote at the start of the race (you move the remote up start running). To her credit she never stopped playing the game and just cried while she was playing (she has her priorities I guess).

R.I.P Desktop

Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. My home computer has officially died. Last night the heat sink / fan started making a funny noise. This morning I decided I would buy a new fan. But before I could, when I came back to the computer it had turned itself off and the fan had completely died. I hoped that the CPU hadn't fried itself when the fan went off, but had no way of knowing. I tried replacing the fan with another one I had from the computer graveyard, but that fan also didn't work. I even went out and bought another heat sink / fan. No luck. I tried replacing the CPU with an older one and still nothing. It won't show anything at all on the screen anymore when you turn on the computer. I think I may have damaged the motherboard at some point when I was trying to replace the heat sink / fan (those things are a complete pain to put on and take off).

Not sure what the next step is. I tried taking it completely apart and seeing if maybe I had introduced a short in it at some point, but even after I tried that it's just dead. And it's not like I can buy any replacement parts either, since everything is over three years old most places don't even carry tech this old anymore. Technically I could probably buy another processor off the internet, but that seems unwise since I really don't even know if a new processor will fix the problem. For all I know maybe the processor is fine and I just broke the motherboard when I was trying to replace the heat sink (or I could have damaged the processor replacing the heat sink now that I think about it). Not to mention if I bought another one of those processors I would be paying a premium for it since it's so old.

So it looks like I may be in the market for a new desktop. The question now is do I try and roll my own like I have in the past, or buy one already put together (Dude, you're getting a Dell, whatever happened to that marketing campaign?). Really don't want Vista, so anything I bought I wouldn't want to pay for Vista (or any operating system really since I already have XP Pro). My other alternative is that Ginger really wants a Mac, and her computer is identical to what mine was (the only exception being the processor). So I suppose we could get her a Mac and then I could take her's (although her's is as old as mine was, so that would probably only be a short term solution (plus her's had that problem where it was shorting out and always rebooting). Man this really isn't something I wanted to deal with right now. This also means I've temporarily lost access to a bunch of my pictures and stuff. And any processing I do now would be with the laptop, which really blows for post processing since the LCD doesn't do that good a job of displaying colors and stuff correctly.