New year, same cheer

Nothing new. Nothing exciting except for more snow. I guess you have to expect that kind of thing in Canada in the winter. This is what I would rather be seeing instead.

The North Shore of Lake Superior

Saskatchewan. When your wife leaves you, you can watch her going for three straight days.

British Columbia in the summer. The only snow is too high up to worry about.

But instead, we get this.

Happy New year everybody

I'm Baaack.... again!

Well if it isn't one thing it's another. Last time a power failure knocked out my monitor. This time Windows knocked out my internet.

It was called something like Microsoft Family One Internet Security or something similar. I'm now afraid to go near it and am treating it like the diseased creature it is. If anyone gets the urge to download this internet security program, configure it right away. A better idea would be to leave it on the update sight and far away from your computer. It should be listed as malicious software.

I downloaded the thing a while back figuring it would be a good idea for the ex-girlfriends new computer. She has two teenage daughters who I know have visted some questionable sites in the past. Since I'm theonly user on this computer, however, setting it up right away was not a necessity. Bullshit.

After a few days of ignoring and not reading the little watchboxes that kept coming up, it decided it would no longer be ignored. To get my attention it shut off my internet. I still don't know what it did. The XBox 360 could still go online, but the computer was completely isolated from the modem and no connection wizard would change that.

I'm doing a bit of an end run on it to get around the thing, using a partitioned Windows the girfriend had created by accident when she owned this computer. (That's how I know what the kids had been downloading.) So my original is still isolated, but at least I'm online again.

Anyway, a belated Merry Christmas to all and an early Happy New Year

My absolute favorite game for the PC is The Sims. There seems to be this whole cottage industry taking images from the game and stringing them into movies and videos. Out of the whole bunch, this one is my favorite. Think of it as my Christmas present to all of you since I am too cheap to even buy a card.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeZIIgbPzzI

I didn't want a Wii

I guess most people are pretty happy with things the way they are now. Thanks jcotter and doorgunner for your input

I've never been much of a one to long for things to stay the same. On the other hand, I believe in the old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The old system with the larger pages worked just fine for me. I liked the way you could customize it and all. So far as I can tell only two things good have come out of this mess. Like jcotter said, the party features are a bonus. Leaving the group's game and venturing off to make changes somewhere else always meant losing contact with the group. No more. That and I like the idea of placing your more frequently played games directly onto the hard drive. Such a feature would have prevented wearing out the turntables on three of my old PS2s back in the day.

As for those avatars, well lets just say if I wanted a damned Wii I would have wasted the money on one. Maybe they will grow on me. I don't know. But I am already sick of looking at them. I just hope as time goes by they get more useful and not so useless.

Now to digress.

Christmas is coming far too quickly for my liking. Maybe a couple pics of the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train will help me get into the Christmas spirit

Naw. Didn't work for me either.

NXE Disgestion Time

   Okay. Its been a few days since XBox360 owners sat down and struggled with their new avatars. We've had time to look at them and maybe even time to play with them. So I figure now is the time to ask if they have improved life on the XBox for you or not. Also, there were a host of other changes that came along with them. Do the new scrolling pages work for ya? Anybody out there missing the old dashboard yet?

  As for me, I'm gonna withold all comments until I've heard from others. Don't want to slant the answers with my own biased opinions, now, do I?

I'm back

Powerbars. BAH! The package said surge protector. The freakin package lied.

It seems we had a little bit of a wind storm up here a few weeks ago. A branch somewhere made a little too much contact sending a bunch of electricity subscribers scrambling for their flashlights. Well some credit is due to the fine folks at Hydro One because it wasn't out very long. Everything came back on, however, but my monitor.

You don't really need that, do you?

Well I finally got a new one hooked up. You can look forward to something deep and insightful here in the near future. In the meantime I got some catching up to do. :-)