Well it’s Christmas Eve. I’m not sure what happened to the rest of December. But it is in fact, Christmas Eve. Let me think of all the Christmas things I forgot to do before Christmas came.
So I guess that’s not too bad, but still. December went fast.
In case I don’t get on here tomorrow, everyone have a very Merry Christmas!!
Today was my two little sisters’ birthday, they turned 5, and a week ago was my mom’s birthday. For my sisters’, we went to Chuck E Cheese’s. Bill and I played some racing games, and I had to play some variation of Dance Dance Revolution with Katie. I actually got pretty good at that. It was the kind where the arrows are angled, which I’m not a huge fan of, but I was able to at least get good enough so we could keep on getting free games. Anna and I rode in one of those car things that you put the token* in and it moves. I thought I was going to be a little big for it, being a larger boy, but it was one of the monster truck models so we fit in there pretty well.
*Actually, they switched to a credit card type system. You pay however much, and then they fill up little cards with however many “tokens.”
Time to play a little PSP and watch “The Santa Clause” with the gang.
5 DAYS ‘TILL CHRISTMAS!!!
We saw the movie Eragon today. It was good. I have never read the book, but I’m sure there is plenty of stuff left out in the movie, which is annoying since it’s only a little over an hour and a half long, it’s not like they were trying to squeeze into a bearable length of time. The other thing I didn’t like, is since it’s only rated PG, all of the battles were watered down… a lot.
But as a whole the movie is very enjoyable, I’d see it again, and I look forward to the next two parts of the trilogy.
I run. Just for running. I’m no track star, but I believe that every man should be as strong as he can be, and in at least decent aerobic shape.
Anyway, for the past few weeks, since it’s been getting dark early and I’m fairly busy during the day, I have been running at night. It’s very nice. Just running through the cool dark. I usually listen to an audio book on an MP3 player (Moby Dick right now). Even without that, it’s a lot of fun – the Christmas lights, dogs, police cars mysteriously prowling around, it’s great.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra is holding a contest where you can download one of their songs (Wizards In Winter) without a particular instrument, along with the written music for whatever your instrument is. So I downloaded the song without the drums in it, and then recorded myself playing along with it.
You can see my video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b69aBVCnLn8 and the rest of the contest videos here http://www.youtube.com/group/tsocontest
If you’d like to vote for me that’d be great. You just have to Sign Up and then click the stars under the video.
The drum part wasn’t too hard, but it was very fun.
My sister is savagely beating my brother with blankets and pillows. She actually just kicked him now too.
It’s very funny. My mom came in and was trying to talk to my other sister, and in the background the other two were going at it. Lots of grunts and squeeks were being made. The whole thing would have made a great home video – my mom struggling to talk, arms and blankets flailing around behind her. It was all in fun I think, but it looks like Katie hurt her elbow in the festivities. I’ll get the pork chop to help the swelling.
At my dad’s work, St. Luke’s hospital, they have this dumb internet filtering system that doesn’t allow you to do pretty much anything online. I can see why they do that. They don’t want slacking employees farting around on MySpace and other such frivolous websites: wasting time, and exposing the system to hacks, spyware, etc. My dad doesn’t do that kind of thing, but he would like to view some sites that they have blocked (Gmail). So, what I think I am going to do, and have been wanting to do for some time, is setup some sort of tunnel, to make the HTTP (web) traffic go through the network port for SSH (a protocol for remotely accessing a computer). That way St. Luke’s little firewall won’t know what’s going on. Now, don’t think this is my idea, this method is very common, but I think once I do it, I will write a little tutorial for it, in… non-computer minded people’s words.
You might think that what I’m doing is unethical, but I don’t think it is. For a couple reasons.
1. My dad told me to do it and he is a big dawg at his work.
2. He’s not going to use the new ability to do the sorts of things the hospital doesn’t want you to do. Kind the spirit of the rule, not the text of the rule idea.
So that’ll be pretty cool when it’s working.
We just saw Happy Feet tonight. It was okay. It wasn’t as funny as I though it was going to be. But it was still good. My mom and sisters said that it was “cute.” Whatever that means. I’d watch it again, and I’m sure it will make it into the nightly movie rotation at our house, but it wasn’t as good as Ice Age (1 or 2), Shark Tale, or Shrek, as far as animated movies go.
On the way home from the movie we were having a conversation with Anna and Emma regarding the pronunciation of “Wisconsin.” Emma seemed sure that it is “Muh-scon-sin,” but I think she was playing us.
