New Work Computer

Well, something unexpected happend this week. I had a packaged arrive at my desk unannounced. It turns out that my work computer was due for a replacement.

I had recieved a message recently that I was "in the queue" to receive new hardware, and that an email would be coming to advise me when it had been ordered. Then all of a sudden POW. This turns up at my desk.

This is an HP Compaq 6530b, the standard laptop for the drones like me. It seems pretty decent. Core2 duo 2.8ghz processor, and sadly windows Vista. I had kind of hoped that I would be able to hold out for a new PC with Windows 7, but apparently it could be many months or even another year before our company IT is ready to migrate.

We also have the wonderful (and cost saving) do it yourself IT now, so I had to set up the machine by myself. I am a fairly technical guy and was not really worried, but it was in fact absurdly easy. I set up everything in about an hour and it appears to be working perfectly.

So... now lets see how I can adjust to new(old) windows, new(2007) office. New harware is always a pleasure to have in my life. It adds some enthusiasm to work.

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Liam the Dragon Tamer

I am still recovering from the nasty cold I had last week and feeling quite run down. I did not get up to a lot last week other than sleeping and then sleeping some more. I did space it out with a little computer gaming (Dave still needs to tell me his WoW character name.) I have recently discovered the fantastic Team Fortress 2 and been having some fun with that. I also picked up Fable 2 on ebay for a cheapo price and started that up. Fun game.

Here is Liam the Dragon Rider at the fairy tale garden on a summer visit there. He will no doubt be a nerdy sci-fi geek like papa at this rate.

Fall is Fully Here

It is well into fall now and it feels like Winter is not too far away. I have had to scrape ice off the car the past two mornings and Liam slipped and crashed his way down icy front steps first thing this morning.

As much as I love snow, cold and winter, I would not be too sad for a few more days of warm sunny weather. It has been rainy misery here for saome days now.

Here is a nice family pic we took before the trees went yellow...

More Pumpkin Fest

Here are the rest of the pumpkin fest displays.

Bad Posting week

Sorry for t the scarcity of posts this week.

I am home with Liam who is sick with something that looks to be chickenpox.

He is in good spirits and on the mend, but I need to do some entertaining.

not much to say otherwise. I will not be posting photos of spotty Liam. That is cruel.

Happy Birthday Dave

Well, it is Dave's Birthday (as my MS Outlook and Facebook advise me) and I recall that for the past few years I have commemorated this occasion by posting a terrible photo of Dave.

This year I have decided to go another route and just post a photo of Dave in party mode that I took on my last trip to Canada.

Notice he is surrounded by adoring ladies.

Dave, you get this treatment as you are far and away my most vocal website reader.

Rock Band is awesome in a box

The Joneses were staying over a night with us on the way back to Geneva, which provided us with an evening of some fun activities. Normally this would mean it is time to break out some board games, but since it was a work night for Claudia, we decided to do something that was not quite as long a time commitment.

We broke out my recent Ebay purchase. ROCK BAND. This is a game I had been REALLY wanting for ages and ages. It was one of the drivers behind me wanting an Xbox at all. I have to say, it totally lived up to my expectations as far as fun goes.

I just have the first Rock Band game, one guitar, drums and a microphone, so we could not quite get the full band experience going. Maybe one day I'll splash out on a second guitar, but not yet.

I had played a bunch at my sister's place on my last vacation, so I had a bit of a feel for the instruments and how the game worked, and I had played with Claudia once since I bought it. I had to explain the whole thing to Doris and Ryan though. It is not super complicated and they understood the gameplay pretty fast.

What surprised me the most was the willingness to have a go at the singing. I don't enjoy it and did not sing, but all the other little songbirds had a go. I have to say it is a very good thing that the TV volume is higher than the singing volume. As a group... not the most beautiful voices. But i will definately say that Ryan put in the best stage performance as this photo shows.

It is also pretty funny how some people were just instantly better at some of the instruments. Claudia - basically never plays ANY video games of any kind. Picked up the guitar and was scoring 80%+ on the mudium difficulty levels. Drums... disaster. I think she did not get more that 20% through a song on easy

Doris - Also not a gamer, but did quite fine on the drums from the start, getting through songs. Guitar... not so much. She could not seem to master the timing and was pretty bad.

Ryan - Did very well at both Guitar and Drums on easy right away, but for some reason insisted on trying medium drums over and over, which he failed EVERY TIME (Sorry Ryan, but the little animated crowd does not lie.) Despite singing in a way that was making my eyes water, the little computer fans went nuts for him and he scored 95% I would give him huge bonus for his acrobatics as well.

I did make some videos as well, but I think I will save those until I can best figure out how to display them.

Claudia has also summed up the game well. "It is fun, but we really are just a bunch of lame-os sitting on the couch with plastic instruments!" I totally agree.

Pumpkin Fest displays

This year the theme of the pumpkin festival was Fairy Tales. So there were a whole bunch of displays/dioramas crafted from pumpkins showing various famous childrens stories. To be honest, I was not as impressed as last year's outer space theme.

Some of the displays, like Gulliver, were pretty great, but there were all too many that seemed to be just a couple of wooden mannequins standing in a small patch of pumpkins. that is uncool.

Here is the very nice Gulliver one. You can see they did a pretty nice giant Gulliver getting tied down by the Lilliputians.

Up a little closer you can see some of the details. Also you get an idea of how huge this particular display was.Now... Little Red Riding hood. Lame. Two wooden figures standing in some pumpkins. They could have made the characters, or some trees or some other think out of pumpkins surely. It is like they were not even trying.

Very disappointing.