As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a First Christmas impression…
The above picture was taken last week on Thanksgiving night when went out for a very small amount of Black Friday shopping – little did Christopher know that during our time at Toys ‘R Us / Babies ‘R Us, roughly 90% of the contents of our cart was destined for him come Christmas morning!
I’ve only been doing this for a few months and already I can see why parents spoil their children absolutely rotten – frankly, it’s just plain fun! Picking out new toys for him to play with and new stuffed animals for him to mostly chew on, not to mention how dazzled he is by lights and music – I can only imagine what this little guy is going to be like on Christmas morning when we plop him down in front of the tree for the first time.
I really hope he doesn’t try to knock the thing over – we just barely have the dog trained to not do that anymore! 😐
It’s certainly a little extra added incentive to go above and beyond because I want to make sure that Christopher’s holidays are as joyous and magical as I remember my own being, from all of the decorations around the house to the sparkling Christmas lights on the tree and outside to the baking and the smells and the red and green candy as far as the eye can see, and of course … the presents.
My god, we’re going to have so much more wrapping to do this year… 😛
I can’t believe that this year has flown by so fast! It seems like only yesterday I was giving birth to a premature, little alien boy (well, sort of!) and now here we are eight months later and it’s time for our inaugural Spoiling of the First Child Like We’ve Never Done Before!
I have a feeling that the rest of the year, like these recent months, is going to fly by just as quickly, but I’ll do what I can to advent this year’s holiday season as I’ve done in years past in a best effort to document all that is jolly and bright as I take my first stab at introducing the very best holiday of all to the next generation of Sevener…
I’m not normally one to try and get celebrities’ attention online or anything, but apparently yesterday I got an @reply from Marc Summers on Twitter for Thanksgiving! Neat!!!
Despite scoring a brand new TV and a Wii U, consumer electronics haven’t exactly been on my good side this week.
The first came in the form of updates for the Wii U, which I frankly found kind ofridiculous that I had to sit through two hours of system updates the moment I plugged the console in before we were able to play a single game.
The second came just earlier today when we tried to watch a movie on said brand new TV and were promptly told by our blu-ray player that’s only a few years old, “I can’t play this disc.” because apparently Samsung doesn’t want to update the firmware anymore to support new changes to blu-ray DRM when they’ve got plenty of newer players on the market that can handle the newer encryption just great!
And don’t get me wrong, I’m a tech guy through and through so I kind of get some of these arguments – not all, but some – but at the same time as a consumer I also find it kind of infuriating that I can go out and drop $299 on a game system and not even be able to play it when I get home because first it needs to go online and download the rest of the system that wasn’t included when the thing shipped! I was digging around online while they were downloading and read horror stories of kids doing the same thing on Christmas morning and not being able to play at all because of course, the servers were overloaded due to capacity issues that one could only expect with a holiday morning rush.
As for the DRM, well, I’ve always been kind of up in the air on DRM but I think this simple incident finally turned the tides for me because if I buy a box meant to play movies and suddenly it just doesn’t want to anymore, that’s bullshit. The worst thing is, I picked up a new one this evening while we were out Black Friday shopping and I still ended up going with a Samsung anyways because my TV and sound bar are Samsung and I want everything to play together all nice, whereas any sane person would’ve said fuck Samsung and chosen their direct competitor as a result.
Funny how the super old, circa 1999 Panasonic DVD player that I’ve carried with me across the country still plays DVDs just fine, but this newer, more sophisticated box that I bought four years ago is suddenly obsolete because the studios are so paranoid about piracy that they’re ruining their discs for their actual customers. I didn’t steal Maleficent, or Frozen, or A Million Ways to Die in the West. I bought them all legitimately at a retail store – the same place I bought your player – but now the two don’t want to work together anymore because … thieves.
When I buy something at the store, I expect it to just work. No contingencies, no software updates that don’t add new functionality beyond what I just paid for, no hoops. Game + System or DVD + Player should equal what I paid for … nothing more, nothing less.
Love the sentiment – one that resonates quite true for me at this particular stage of my life. I’m always striving for something a little better, but what I’d love more than anything else is just more time.
Anyone who insists that racism no longer exists in America need only look out their window today, whether you see predominantly white people in your sheltered, non-diverse community or the smoldering ruins of a people who feel so desperately helpless that they can only resort to violence and destruction as an outlet for the injustices that they feel within their own community.
Of course nobody condones looting and rioting, but it’s crucially important that we don’t look at these acts and merely write them off as those of violent criminals, but instead what needs to be taken from the imagery we’re seeing out of Ferguson is an example of a situation escalating to the point where words are no longer valid in the discussion, which is a very dangerous place to descend into and not out of fear of mere death or dismemberment.
They tried words, and nobody listened. Now things are getting worse.
And really, what’s expected isn’t an unusually reasonable demand – justice for a young, unarmed man who was shot and killed by a police officer, yet it turned out that the deck was so stacked against him that the prosecutor didn’t even deem it worthy of a trial in a court of law. Instead, a grand jury decided that there was nothing to charge the officer with and that he acted within his rights as a law enforcement official, and there in lies the rub because for an organization tasked with the duties to serve and to protect a community at large to not even question the death of an unarmed man as excessive use of force drafts a pretty clear dialog as to why the black community feels that it’s them against the police, not being protected by the police.
People protest to make their voices heard; they turn to rioting and violence when they go unheard to the point where collectively they feel as if they don’t even matter. What we’re seeing in these pictures aren’t just people who are “really mad” about the verdict – instead it’s a picture of desperation in a society so hopelessly stacked against them that one of their own being killed by the people who are supposed to protect them doesn’t even warrant a trial.
The images we’re seeing out of Ferguson are both terrifying and sad, but in a society where many want to insist that racism no longer exists in America, how else are those on the other side of the coin supposed to get anybody’s attention?
It’s easy to label someone who torches a convenience store as a lawless thug.
It’s more difficult to consider the question of what actually leads someone to do that sort of thing in the first place.
It’s no surprise that nobody who isn’t or hasn’t been a victim of racism wants to talk about it these days. It’s one of those things that we read about in the history books and like to shrug off as a horrible atrocity that our ancestors were very much on the wrong side of, but we’re better than that so there’s no way that racism would still be alive and thriving in America today. But it really wasn’t all that long ago when you consider that the USA is a little over 200 years old and for more than half of that, slavery was a real thing that happened within our borders.
Comedian Louis CK has a good joke that puts it into context:
“Every year, white people add another hundred years to how long ago slavery happened – I was talking to a highly educated guy who said that slavery was 400 years ago, and it very wasn’t! It was 140 years ago – that’s two seventy year-old ladies living and dying back to back … that’s how recently you could own a guy.”
So today in 2014, slavery has existed in our history longer than it hasn’t, and that’s why I think that it’s really ingenuous for us to just think that racism couldn’t possibly still be a real thing around us today when we have elderly black people right now who can remember a time when they weren’t allowed to do things that white people could do. And additionally, I frankly think that we’re going to keep seeing the root of that bubbling out in modern society because it serves as a spark to highlight the inequalities that exist today for their culture.
Sure, maybe slavery itself has come and gone, but things like racial profiling and what roles black people take in our society still have a profound impact on perception of a single class of people. And you would think that people like President Obama as the first black president and Oprah as the richest woman on the planet would serve to inspire, but really, when you’re in the trenches watching kids get shot by their protectors having to fend for yourself, it doesn’t really matter who the shining faces above the clouds are.
Violence is a terrible thing, but it gets people’s attention – maybe it’s time that we started talking about racism like it’s still a real thing and not some fictional excuse that black people dig up from the past to justify wanting to act like thugs. Because dare I say, people don’t protest because they want to … they don’t riot and throw rocks and burn down buildings because they want to … they do these things because they feel like they have to.
Let’s figure out why they feel this way so that we can change it.
So Santa Claus decided to visit our house a little early this year!
I had mentioned a while back that I was strongly leaning towards picking up a Wii U – Mario Kart 8 pretty much sealed the deal on that one. And then old faithful started acting up, first randomly turning off after you turned it on until it had a chance to warm up and finally culminating with a debilitating POP that led us to unplugging it from the wall out of fear of burning our entire house down… 😛
Well, all of this culminated in a bit of a shopping spree at Best Buy tonight where, in addition to ordering a replacement TV to be delivered just before Thanksgiving, we also pretty much cleared out the aisles of damn near every Wii U game and accessory that they had! We actually did the same thing years ago when we got our original Wii – it had come out a couple of years prior, so we finally ended up getting one with some of our wedding money, nearly filling a shopping cart with games and controllers to catch up on what we’d been missing for the past couple of years!
Anyways, tonight we’ve been playing around with it on the TV in our bedroom because as much as a part of me actually considered waiting three days to see it all for the first time on our brand new TV, the sane part of me said, “What are you, nuts?! Nobody buys a new game console and then lets it sit in the box for three days!!!”
Initial reactions:
Mario Kart 8 looks beautiful – the graphics are simply amazing and even from what little I’ve played so far, I love what they’ve done to add new dimension to the tracks. The tracks going up into the air are pretty wild!
Super Mario 3D World is decent … except for the damn cats, which seem to plague just about every level. I’ve always liked the Mario Galaxy perspective and allowing two players that can’t interfere with each other as they play is nice. But those damn cats…
Hyrule Warriors is unexpectedly my favorite so far – it’s an interesting twist on a Zelda game that’s already managed to suck me in, and it makes me want to find the time to revisit the rest of the series, too.
Wii U Sports Club is, well, troubling. Several of the games are basically Wii Sports +1, so it seems silly to buy it again. The worst, however, is golf because the whole put the Wii U Gamepad on the floor – while it’s a neat effect – is also a ridiculous notion for anyone who has anything other than adults in the house! Seriously, the dog nearly stepped on the thing like a dozen different times in the twenty minutes we were playing.
New Super Mario Bros U … the verdict is still out on this one.
Good grief – it’s already 3AM and I have absolutely no desire to go to bed at this point! 😛
Home Entertainment Shopping Spree! Commencing in only a few hours, it looks like we’re actually going to do the bulk of our Black Friday shopping today because Best Buy actually has the new TV that we’re buying on sale all week, and because we’re financing everything, it seems as good a time as any to to a bit of other splurging at the same time as well! So we’re basically buying all of the new games that we’ll get for the next year … now!
Christmas Light Overhaul Extravaganza Also on the renovation list this year is our Christmas light display because despite how much I love decorating, we didn’t even put anything up last year and a big part of it was because the lights we have are a total mess. In fact, after going dark last season I kind of committed to doing it right again this year, knowing that it was going to involve scrapping the bulk of what we already have and starting over with a new design for the entire house.
Which is fine, albeit expensive! Still, I never really decorated our last rental because I didn’t have a ladder tall enough, so our old lights were really focused around a house that we haven’t lived in for several years now … it’s time for a change!
Backin’ Up, Backin’ Up, Backin’ Up, Backin’ Up… So an interim step to this post from the other day that I actually was able to complete was throwing at least a partial backup of files onto CrashPlan, which makes me feel a little safer that at least my photos from all across the years are now a little safer in the event I lose a hard drive like I’ve already had happen several times before! It cost me about $75 for an annual subscription and the files took about a day and a half to upload … for now it was mostly just writing and photos, but where I am in life now makes $75 to protect that kind of stuff a no-brainer.
Kind of looking forward to my next steps because I still have plenty of organization to handle, plus I’m curious to see just how Unlimited they really are if I opt to try uploading my DVD collection to them eventually as well, but I guess for now it’s just comforting knowing that I finally got around to backing up the tens of thousands of photos that I’ve been saying I really need to backup for years now… 😉
Memory Lane Photo Posts I had a lot of fun with this little series. I was feeling particularly nostalgic that night and I can see myself doing some more of them in the future as I come across worthwhile photos. 😀
It’s kind of been a long time since I’ve played with computers like I used to back in the day.
The other day between writing this post and thinking about upgrading some random stuffs, I started tinkering with the old hardware that I’ve had stacked in the spare bedroom since we moved here two years ago. On the downside, it didn’t take long to remember the issues I was having previously because one of the two still won’t output any video at all, but on the upside, I also just so happened to have a junk laptop that my sister-in-law had asked me to fix before she just gave up and bought a new one instead, so I ended up reformatting that one and was able to get a copy of linux (CentOS) running on it to play around with in fairly short order.
The goal with this one is to take another stab at building a media server because I’m not really happy with what I can do with Apple TV and I’ve currently got three boxes of DVDs also sitting in the room next door that aren’t really doing anybody any good! Nobody wants to sift through boxes of movies just to find something to watch and we simply don’t have the room to have shelves upon shelves of DVDs anymore, so right now I’ve been playing around with Plex to see if I can get the thing to work even just a little on that old laptop there before moving to something bigger…
In a way it’s kind of been therapeutic to dive back into circuit boards and jumpers and ribbon cables, even though it’s incredibly frustrating and I’m quickly making a pile of stuff that can definitely get recycled for good this time! Sometimes I need to just step back and take a break from pretty much everything in life and despite all of the other work that I’m not getting done as a result, it’s been fun to poke around inside of these things and hopefully by the time all is said and done, maybe I’ll even have a swell, new way to watch all of my old movies by the time this fantastic, new TV of ours arrives in the next couple of weeks! 😉
The Cleanliness: Taken roughly six months after the last photo was taken, I think this is probably the cleanest that you would’ve ever seen my apartment. Circa spring 2005, I’m pretty sure I was getting ready to go on a trip or something – no idea how it got this clean, but I assure you it didn’t last.
Snoopy Blanket on the Couch: My god, I’ve had that thing forever and I love it so much. It hardly has any warming properties left to it – my Mom had stitched it up and stuffed some filling in it before sending it down to me, but it’s a bundle of childhood and probably my favorite blanket ever. Sadly, in 2014 it remains folded on a shelf in the closet because Cleo would just tear it to shreds…
Sprint Phone on the Counter: LOL – that was my first phone when data kind of started being an option with phones, although it still totally sucked. I think I could post MoBlog photos and e-mail posts to LiveJournal, and that was about it!
Patio Furniture: I got that FOR FREE up in Michigan – the warehouse where I worked rented some space out to a furniture store and they would constantly leave people’s old furniture that they had picked up by our dumpster, so when I saw this almost brand new table & chair set, I threw it in one of the work vans and drove it home after hours! It’s kind of sad because it started out as really nice furniture, but I kept it outside and the weather just ruined it over time. Sara even helped me cover it in plastic at my next apartment to give the table another year or two, but the chairs were pretty gross by the time I finally got rid of them.
Neon Dolphin???: No clue where I got that thing – maybe Walmart or something? I was kind of in a dolphin kick at the time, so they went into a lot of my decorating … you can also see a great white shark statuette on the other side of the door frame where the stairs were.
TINY OFFICE!!!: If my office in my Mom’s basement was big enough for me to fit a couch in comfortably, this thing was basically the size of a closet! There was almost no room on the floor around my chair and I had bookcases and crap piled everywhere, but for my first two years in Florida, that tiny room was where I spent an exceeding amount of my time in front of the computer!
Our Loser Friends, The Poster: I had those printed up after we finished the series and all three of us signed them so we each had one. Unfortunately, I didn’t take care of mine nearly as well as I did the signed money poster and it’s about ready to get thrown out because the ink is bleeding, but it was still a neat memory to carry around for a while. The two photos below the poster are ones I took in Michigan during the few months before I left – one is a waterfall in the Upper Peninsula, the other is a sand painting at the bottom of the campfire bowl done by the camping group I was a part of in scouts.
New Networking Stuffs: Apparently I had just bought a new router from Best Buy, too? I don’t know – I can’t remember everything… 😛
Also noteworthy:
I really loved that couch! The couch that you see there in the photo was totally my bachelor couch – I paid maybe $300 for it when I first got my apartment and within two years time the cushions were already starting to get a little gross after becoming coated with my hair gel over time, but I can’t tell you how many nights playing video games in that place I spent kicked back on that couch with no place better to be and no girlfriend to be there with anyways! Just like the TV, it lasted quite a long time until it got demoted to being an outdoor couch at our last house and from there, the weather and a hungry puppy got the best of it after many, many comfortable (to me) years.
I remember being particularly proud of the pillows that I found to match with that couch, too! 😀
