Ty’s Weblog

We’re back home now. I’ll catch up on the goings on tomorrow some time.

We made it to Clinton safe and sound. Xander and Mira were both great for the trip. We were very proud of Xander because he was able to tell us he needed to go potty while we were on the road with plenty of time for us to find somewhere to stop and get him inside. He was rightfully proud of himself.

Mom, Dad, Neya, and Brey are here and we’re having a great time.

Xander was a happy boy today!

We went out to eat at Red Robin, but we got there about a half hour early. We decided to head over to Best Buy and look around for a little bit.

We pulled up and there was a giant running man guy sitting in front of the store. Xander, who loves the running man guy, thought that was the best thing he’d ever seen. He’d seen it once before when they had it at work for a few weeks, but it has been a while.

We got a picture of him in front of it and then went inside. Turns out, AOL had some people there talking about AOL 9.0. The best part was that they were also handing out little running man guy stuffed toys. We got one for Xander, and ranks among the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He was running around the store with it smiling and laughing, he was quite a happy boy.

A demo has been released for Deus Ex 2. I’m bittorrenting it right now. I plan on giving it a try when Xander is down for his nap this afternoon.

Blue’s News has a list of other mirrors.

Behold the power of the code word. Every family should have one of these as soon as the child is old enough to remember it! It shouldn’t be anything that anyone could guess. Don’t make it a favorite color or the dog’s name or something like that.

All you need is one word, and as you can read, the pay off is huge.

Slashdot has a link to a story on Wired about people briefly sharing iPods as they encounter each other out in the world.

This is one of the neatest things I’ve heard of in quite a while. It makes me want an iPod even more. Not that you actually have to have an iPod to do this, that just seems to be the community that’s started doing it. Anything that has a headphone jack would work just fine.

Yep, I’ve gotta start saving up for that iPod.

Kate and I are currently addicted to Hexic. It’s a cute little puzzle game where you try to rotate hexagons into groups of three or into larger hexagons. Even Xander keeps wanting to play it.

I finished up Ratchet and Clank last night. It was a great game. A very well done platformer. I’m sure there were flaws with it, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head. I was seldom frustrated with the game. It was hard enough to be fun, but not so hard that I was pulling my hair out over it.

I look forward to getting my hands on the sequal for Christmas.

Square Enix and AOL announced today that music from Final Fantasy VII - XI are avaliable on Radio@AOL and Radio@Netscape from now until April 2004.

So now we know what I’ll be listening to for the next few months. Sorry iTunes. I’ll be back to you later.

Just a quick update to say it appears that Xander’s leg is fine now. He’s not limping anymore and isn’t complaining about it hurting now.

There are rumors going around that Farscape is back in production. Keeping my frelling fingers crossed.

Speaking of Xander’s school on Friday!

I picked him up on Friday. I walked in to the classroom and he didn’t notice me come in. He was on a mat on the floor working with the teacher on cleaning up the work he had been doing, so I got to watch him for a minute wihtout him knowing I was there, whcih I enjoyed quite a bit.

As I stood there, one of the other children runs up to me and says, “Xander just did the number board all by himself with out using the white board!” The number board is a square board. You take a bunch of square numbers and put them on the board in order from 1 to 100. The white board is a little cheat sheet which shows the board with all the numbers in the proper places. Xander had put all the numbers in place without any help from the teacher and without checking the white board.

I was of course very proud. After a minute Xander saw me. He finished cleaning up and came over to me telling me what he had done. He was very proud of himself as well. One of the teachers was standing there talking to me and she said that he was one of the youngest children that they had that could do the board on their own.

Xander did something to his leg on Wednesday. When Kate picked him up from school he was limping. One of the teachers noticed it as he was walking out the door. We took him to the doctor on Thursday. No apparent problems other than the limp. The doctor said to give it another day and if it wasn’t any better, take him to get an x-ray. They hesitate to give an x-ray to a kid his age unless they really have to.

Friday morning it was a lot better. He was walking a lot easier on it. We sent him off to school and he didn’t seem to have any real problems with it.

We’re hoping that it’s all better now, but we’ll just have to wait and see. He still limps a little bit this morning, but it does still seem to be improving.

The patch for ToEE is finally out. I know what I’ll be doing tonight! I’ve been holding off on actually playing this for a while now, because of all the bugs. Hopefully this will get the game into a playable and enjoyable state.

We had a beautiful lunar eclipse last night. Xander thought it was amazing to watch the moon disappear and then turn red. It was little cloudy, so it wasn’t the best viewing, but we had enough open patches that we got to see most of it.