Lazy Sunday Afternoon...

Another lazy January Sunday afternoon. Brian here, the head of the household (OK that would be REALLY scary if it were actually true ;), and this is the first week without my World of Warcraft account. I cancelled it on Wednesday, and I've done better without the Warcrack than I thought I would! I just didn't have enough time in the day to do WOW and get other things done. For example, I got post-production finished for the last of the photos that Cynthia and I took in 2007 and 2008, something that's been on my plate for weeks now. If I still had WOW, there's no telling whether I'd have played WOW or gotten those photos done. This way, I know that I'll behave. To an extent at least; I did crank up Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and played that for a while! But I got laundry folded, dishes done, and watched Kevin install Windows 7, so I think it's been a good day overall.

I guess that would be the big news for today: a friend of mine got me a beta copy of Windows 7, and when I told Kevin I had it, he immediately was all over it! That's muh boy!! In the time that it would take most people to install it on ONE computer, Kevin effectively installed it on TWO! It was actually two hard drives on the same computer, first one then the other, but it was still mighty impressive I thought. And if anyone has the computer for Windows 7, it's Kevin. He built his own computer over the summer, and basically only an i7 Nehalem-powered computer would be faster than his. Install times for all the programs and games he's put on there are amazing. It's been really cool to see how he's taken to it; he's truly a great kid! He installed Windows Vista 64-bit last month, and he had a similarly good experience with it.

The other thing that he's really taken to is Pandora Radio, which is something that I'd recommend for anyone (www.pandora.com). Kevin made a hard rock station on it and an old-school rap station, and they've both been superb. You just tell it a song or an artist that you like, and Pandora creates a playlist of songs that song like it. It's the web front-end of the Music Genome project, which takes songs and breaks them down into digital "signatures". They compare the signatures of the various songs that they have, and from that they can tell which songs sound the same, and then from THAT they can make playlists for you. Pretty cool stuff for being free!! I'm listening to "Ran Kan Kan Radio", a station I made consisting of mambo and Latin jazz songs that sound like the mambo song Ran Kan Kan. Sounding sharp!

We're gearing up for the premier of the new season of 24 on the telly. It's pretty rare for us to be this stoked for anything TV-related; we only have 4 of 5 shows that we watch with any regularity. But we've always liked 24, and we're happy that it's still on; shows this good usually get cancelled for lack of depth on the part of the general TV audience, as happened with Serenity and FarScape.

Cythia is making us a fabulous dinner, as always. Tonight it's pork potato rolls. Nummy! Her new job is going quite well, and she's enjoying her much shorter commute. She picked up a Simplicity sewing pattern the other day, and got some fabric for it, and she cut out the pattern this morning. She found this really cool purple material (her favorite color) with a nifto pattern in it. the funny thing is, it's total de ja vu for me; I remember my mom doing the sewing thing when I was hella small.

Well, I'd say 24 is probably on now, so off I go!



--Brian