The weekend was busy. Erin volunteered at a La Leche League fundraiser dinner, which took up most of her weekend, so William and I spent most of the weekend hanging out at home. We went to the dinner though, and had a brief visit with Jason and Amy. I was feeling a little distracted though, so I don’t think I was much of a conversationalist. I think everyone had a good time, and they raised a bunch of money.

Sunday, Erin went back to help with the cleanup, and again William and I hung out. I made him scrambled eggs for lunch — he requested them — and he wanted me to put food colouring in them to make them “Red eggs and ham.” We didn’t have any red food colouring though, so he had to settle for yellow eggs with no ham. (Yes, I did put in yellow food colouring, and it made them pretty yellow.) His request went like this: “Daddy, can you make me red eggs and ham, because you’re nice, and mommy’s too lazy.” I’m not sure where he got lazy from, because there was a jumble of comments about how she put in too many drops of food colouring and things were too green. It was such an odd sentence though.

Erin mentioned the fact that William and I watched Star Wars, and he literally asked more questions than there was dialogue in the entire film. Everything from “why are they vacuuming up that robot” to “Why does Darth Vader carry his laser bee on his belt?” (I think a laser bee is his word for light sabre, but I can’t be sure because he asked a lot of questions about laser bees, and why they weren’t using them at various points of the movie.) He sure was curious about the movie though - he hasn’t asked me that many questions over such a short span in a very long time.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Mmm, hey! With my Info Cram 6000, you can absorb books instantly by attaching this electrode to the brain pan…[does so] and this ons to the [in pain] loooooiins! [electricity starts flowing through him] Gloyven, Tolstoj, searing, brains, glayven!” - Professor Frink

Admittedly, I’m not going out of my way searching for commentary on the Canadian Men’s Hockey team, and their loss in Torino, but all the commentary that I’ve read has been decidedly low key. There’s a lot of “you can’t win ‘em all” and “what can you do?” type of comments out there. Some criticisms of how the team played, but overall, the expected outpouring of angst has failed to materialize. I think it might be tempered by all the success the rest of our (female) Olympians are having - with 19 medals and counting, it’s an impressive performance by Canada at these Olympics. Then there’s the fact that in reality any one of the top 7 (8) countries in men’s hockey are legitimate medal contenders, which means that more than half are going to be on the outside looking in at the medal ceremonies.

It could also be because Canada is getting tired of hockey.

Nah.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “If this gets out, the next words you say will be muffled by your own butt.” - Moe

I’ve come to know and love Firefox as a browser, but that’s obviously helped by the customization afforded by extensions. One extension in particular that I’ve been using is “Spellbound” but unfortunately it doesn’t work with the latest version of Firefox. But wait… Not only does a development version work, it adds some cool features, like inline spell checking.

I had some fun installing a dictionary on the laptop last night, but otherwise it looks great.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Immigrants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!” - Moe

The week off was pretty low-key. We stayed home, and relaxed. I got the laptop up and running - after fighting with Gentoo, trying to get WPA working for the wireless connection, I decided to try Ubuntu (as recommended by Jason) The install went smooth, but WPA was still elusive. I decided to cut my losses and switch back to WEP until I can get some time to get WPA working properly. The result of running Linux for nearly a week now is that I realize that there is life after windows. There are still a handful of apps that we can’t run, but not so many that it’s going to make me go back to Microsoft.

What does this mean for the new computer that I’ve been shopping for? Well, not much, except I’ve decided to go Mac. When the Mac Mini x86’s are announced, I’ll be getting one of those. It’ll be an interesting switchover, but something that I think is long overdue. This is where Erin’s mom wonders why she bought a Dell ;) Primarily, the Mac Mini is the machine that’s making me switch - it’s powerful enough for me, and relatively inexpensive. I could build a PC clone for about the same money, but then what have I gained? This way I get the OS X goodness that I’ve been wanting to try ever since they announced it’s Unix roots, and a much more common platform to work with.

So, other than that earth-shaking decision, nothing much was accomplished during my week off. William is a year older, Julia can stand on her own, and I have a new-found respect for the work that Erin does every day to keep us all sane. (Not that I didn’t respect Erin’s hard work before, but now I respect it even more.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Whoa, it’s Santa all right. And he is kicking ass!” ~ Bart

I’ve taken next week off of work, so I likely won’t be posting here a whole lot (if at all.) We don’t have any big plans for the week, but hopefully we’ll be able to get some stuff done around the house that’s been needing done lately.

Check back for updates, or don’t - it’s totally optional :P

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I’m gonna make you an omelette!” - Barney

I’m currently investigating the Pandora from AOpen - it’s a Mac Mini sized PC that runs on a Pentium M chip. I’d love to get a Mac Mini, but I can’t cut the x86 strings at this point, and I don’t want to wait an indefinite amount of time for Apple to come out with an x86 mini. It’s really too bad, because they’re really good machines for a really good price (the Pandora could easily wind up costing me as much as the high end Mac Mini if I’m not careful)

I’d love to be able to tri-boot OS X, windows and linux on the same machine, just to see which one I wound up using regularly. That’s a long ways off though.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I am evil Homer…I am evil Homer…” - Evil Homer

I spent some time with the laptop last night, trying to get the Gentoo GUI installer to work - I finally gave up after about the millionth time and started doing the install the old fashioned way. Not a big deal. I came upstairs after setting it going on a big compile, and saw William sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of ketchup. We ran out of ketchup last week, so we bought some over the weekend, and so William had a 1.5L ketchup bottle in his hands that was very nearly full. Anyway, he was doing something with it that he didn’t think he should have been, so when I came into the kitchen, he panicked. He dropped the ketchup bottle on the floor, and the bottle snapped open at the bottom, leaking ketchup all over the place. It bounced a bit too, and the end result was ketchup on the wall, ketchup on the floor, ketchup on the chair, and a little ketchup on William. We cleaned it up together, with Erin’s help, and none of us were the worse for the wear. William’s comment upon seeing the ketchup on the floor was “I closed the lid so the ketchup couldn’t get out. That’s impossible.” Then he repeated “That’s impossible” several times. It was hard to keep a straight face.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Nacho, nacho man…I want to be a nacho man…” - Homer