I've Been Away for a Week. How are you doing? :)
I had all of last week off from work and spent a lot of time with my family. The time off started with a trip to a local Asian restaurant in Cleveland's China Town district. Awesome food and a nice atmosphere (even though it's "in the hood"). My daughter really enjoyed the Kung Pao at full strength, my wife and I had Bento boxes. Mine came with a braised eel and my wife got additional sushi besides the California roll that all the Bento boxes come with.
We watched a few good holiday films in the "Attic Theater", starting with The Hogfather on Saturday night, followed by The Patrick Stewart version of A Christmas Carol on Sunday/Monday (owing to someone's early bedtime. ;) It was then time for the missus and I to play at being Santa and his elves. Matters were complicated a little this year by our daughter's excitement and admission that she knows Santa isn't real. She was torn between wanting to help us put presents under the tree and "believing". In the end she chose to believe and played it up well.
However, she admitted to sneaking downstairs five times between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. The first time to put the presents she made for us under the tree. The second time to check on the stockings. The third time to make sure that the wrapping paper we wrapped the door to the dining room where the Christmas tree was (she planned to bust through the paper in the morning and there was some concern that the heater vent might loosen the tape and the paper would blow loose). The fourth time to check the stockings again. And the fifth time to check the paper again. A likely story... ;)
Christmas morning was fun what with all the bursting through wrapping papered doors and opening gifts. Not to mention "Santa" managed to get the gifts that were asked for by the girl, and are apparently much appreciated a week on, and some bonus gifts that really are well loved as well.
The remainder of the week we cooked together, played some board games (new and old), watched a few more holiday themed movies and shows, read together, went sledding, did a few odd chores around the house including snow shoveling, built a snow ghost (which melted in a day), and built a snow man (which is still up). [catches breath]
Myself, being the late night person that I am, I also managed to install Windows 3.1 from floppy images of my original disks in DOSBox so I could install the Win 3.1 games I have that won't work in WINE for me. Experimented with installing Windows 95 and 98 in DOSBox (not so hot), then in VirtualBox (also not so hot), then in QEMU (warm, but still unusable). I found a few guides for doing this including links to drivers and such, but I could never get sound or more than 16 color 64x480 graphics in VirtualBox or QEMU. Weird, because in the early days of virtualization, running Windows 9x was no problem. I suspect this has a lot to do with the move to hypervisors as Xen (the project, not the Citrix product) didn't support any Windows versions before Windows 2000.
I also managed to get Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic running in WINE finally as I found a site dedicated to getting it to run in Windows XP/Vista/7 which contained the patch I needed (official patch from the original creators of the game to fix a color depth detection bug). It now runs as reported in the WINE AppDB: Installs and plays the intro scene, then hangs. Which means this might be the one game I will be playing in native Windows 98 on my old laptop.
Santa was nice to me too. I managed to find a refurbed ASUS Transformer Prime TF201 tablet at cowboom.com thanks to woot! $210 as it has a few minor scratches on the back and some odd little "hot" spots in the display. There are eight of them, but they are only really noticeable when you have a white background in something (like a web page). They're not horribly disruptive and I can certainly live with them for over 50% off the list price. As far as I can tell, cowboom.com sells the stuff people return to Best Buy as they are owned by Best Buy. The tablet is REALLY nice. Now I can buy EveryCircuit and actually make use of it for building some stuff. :)
I even had two chances to hang out with a friend and continue playing, MYST: Riven, from 14 year old saved game files (the last time we played Riven and didn't finish) and also playing MYST: Exile. So all in all I had a great week off which makes up for the crappy summer.
Tonight, we will have the New Year's family sleep over which usually consists of watching our DIY "marathon" where each member of the family gets to pick an episode of a show we like and run them back to back until midnight. Usually starts around 8:00 PM. Complete with snacks and drinks and ending with all of us crashing on the futon. We might try a Google+ Hangout with my folks too.
What about you? What did you do over the holidays (work or play)? What are you doing today? How are you?
We watched a few good holiday films in the "Attic Theater", starting with The Hogfather on Saturday night, followed by The Patrick Stewart version of A Christmas Carol on Sunday/Monday (owing to someone's early bedtime. ;) It was then time for the missus and I to play at being Santa and his elves. Matters were complicated a little this year by our daughter's excitement and admission that she knows Santa isn't real. She was torn between wanting to help us put presents under the tree and "believing". In the end she chose to believe and played it up well.
However, she admitted to sneaking downstairs five times between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. The first time to put the presents she made for us under the tree. The second time to check on the stockings. The third time to make sure that the wrapping paper we wrapped the door to the dining room where the Christmas tree was (she planned to bust through the paper in the morning and there was some concern that the heater vent might loosen the tape and the paper would blow loose). The fourth time to check the stockings again. And the fifth time to check the paper again. A likely story... ;)
Christmas morning was fun what with all the bursting through wrapping papered doors and opening gifts. Not to mention "Santa" managed to get the gifts that were asked for by the girl, and are apparently much appreciated a week on, and some bonus gifts that really are well loved as well.
The remainder of the week we cooked together, played some board games (new and old), watched a few more holiday themed movies and shows, read together, went sledding, did a few odd chores around the house including snow shoveling, built a snow ghost (which melted in a day), and built a snow man (which is still up). [catches breath]
Myself, being the late night person that I am, I also managed to install Windows 3.1 from floppy images of my original disks in DOSBox so I could install the Win 3.1 games I have that won't work in WINE for me. Experimented with installing Windows 95 and 98 in DOSBox (not so hot), then in VirtualBox (also not so hot), then in QEMU (warm, but still unusable). I found a few guides for doing this including links to drivers and such, but I could never get sound or more than 16 color 64x480 graphics in VirtualBox or QEMU. Weird, because in the early days of virtualization, running Windows 9x was no problem. I suspect this has a lot to do with the move to hypervisors as Xen (the project, not the Citrix product) didn't support any Windows versions before Windows 2000.
I also managed to get Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic running in WINE finally as I found a site dedicated to getting it to run in Windows XP/Vista/7 which contained the patch I needed (official patch from the original creators of the game to fix a color depth detection bug). It now runs as reported in the WINE AppDB: Installs and plays the intro scene, then hangs. Which means this might be the one game I will be playing in native Windows 98 on my old laptop.
Santa was nice to me too. I managed to find a refurbed ASUS Transformer Prime TF201 tablet at cowboom.com thanks to woot! $210 as it has a few minor scratches on the back and some odd little "hot" spots in the display. There are eight of them, but they are only really noticeable when you have a white background in something (like a web page). They're not horribly disruptive and I can certainly live with them for over 50% off the list price. As far as I can tell, cowboom.com sells the stuff people return to Best Buy as they are owned by Best Buy. The tablet is REALLY nice. Now I can buy EveryCircuit and actually make use of it for building some stuff. :)
I even had two chances to hang out with a friend and continue playing, MYST: Riven, from 14 year old saved game files (the last time we played Riven and didn't finish) and also playing MYST: Exile. So all in all I had a great week off which makes up for the crappy summer.
Tonight, we will have the New Year's family sleep over which usually consists of watching our DIY "marathon" where each member of the family gets to pick an episode of a show we like and run them back to back until midnight. Usually starts around 8:00 PM. Complete with snacks and drinks and ending with all of us crashing on the futon. We might try a Google+ Hangout with my folks too.
What about you? What did you do over the holidays (work or play)? What are you doing today? How are you?