This weekend I accomplished absolutely nothing and it felt wonderful!! I went golfing for my birthday yesterday and spent the entire day enjoying the sun. Today it rained so we just sat on our front porch curled up in our outdoor chairs reading while the kids played on the floor. The day couldn’t have been any more perfect. Some times you just need to put the “to do” list on the back burner and sit down and enjoy being a family. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a birthday weekend!

http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/20080902_tows_moms

I had the house to myself yesterday afternoon and sat down to watch this and I swear 100 different emotions flowed through me. I do not think this woman intentionally left her child in the car BUT I have a really hard time understanding how you can stop and get 8 dozen donuts at a donut shop ( going to the door.. night a drive thru) and leave your child in a car seat. I have always had an issue with that … even knowing friends who have left 7 and 8 year old children in a car to run into a store to get milk ect bothers me. Even in the safe community I live in that is something I have never done. They are our children.. not our pets. You don’t tell them to sit still and crack the window and say I will be back. How could she unload 8 dozen donuts and not notice her child? If you read some of the comments people mentioned that leaving the younger child in the car to take the older child into day care was a common thing and the parents had even been spoken to about it by the day care directors. I do agree we as women do waaaay too much and sadly it takes something likes this to make us all aware of that. Oprah had an ” expert” on who was talking about what we need to do to slow down and he made a comment that I found really interesting. He said there is no such thing as multitasking.. we simply stop doing one thing to do another. If you really think about that it makes sense. He said.. we need to learn to focus on one job and complete it before moving on to another. How many times have we done something so simple as having the pasta water boil over because we were busy reading/typing something on line? My heart did break for this woman , especially for her husband and remaining daughter and I hope she has learned from this and gone on to do something good from the tragedy. I did try to do a search of her name to see if she has started some foundation or is a speaker or advocate of children in cars safety.

For some reason we have started getting about 6-10 magazines a month. If we had actually subscribed to these magazines I would probably not be writing a post about this. We have no idea who ordered them on our behalf or why they chose these particular magazines. For example one magazine features diet pill reviews and another is all about backpacking. Is someone trying to tell us something about our weight or are we just the random recipients of magazines? I would really like to think it is the later of these possibilities. It would be kind of hurtful to think someone is telling us we need to loose weight and that backpacking is the way to go about doing it!

Wii is totally an impulse buy. I bought one because I wasn’t the one paying for it. While standing in line, I couldn’t help but question if this purchase was even worth my time. The people in line for the Wii that I encountered seemed to be in some kind of brainwashed state constantly stating how great the Wii is. They weren’t you typical fanboys either. They were mostly middle aged people.

I have to admit Wii is fun, but Xbox 360 is the still the kind of video game consoles. As for PS3, I would love to have one except for the fact that it doesn’t have any games I want to play.

Having a pop-up camper has long been a wish of mine. We were able to fulfill this wish lately when we purchased an older model camper for a very modest sum. Now that we have a camper I have become keenly aware of all the technology that is available on newer campers. When our camper was built no one had ever dreamed about gps systems or remote controlled comfort systems. As we sat in the campground last weekend surrounded by $100,000 RV’s it was astounding to consider what the possibilities are for outfitting today’s recreational vehicles. Unfortunately to do this in today’s world I would need a much fatter wallet than I currently possess. As green with envy as I secretly might be, it really is nice to be sleeping up off the ground this camping season!

For some reason the driver for my DVD player on the PC disappeared. After some searching I found the following information which helped to restore everything back to normal.

If System Restore did not resolve the issue, manually modify the registry.

From the Windows Vista default Start menu, point to All Programs, Accessories, and then click Run.

In the Run dialog box, type: Regedit. Click OK.

In the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.

In the Registry Editor window, locate and then click to select the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Class/{4­d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

From the File menu, click Export.

In the File name dialog box, type: Savedkey, and then click Save.

Click the REG_MULTI_SZ data type UpperFilters file, and then from the Edit menu, click Delete. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.

Click the REG_MULTI_SZ data type LowerFilters file, and then from the Edit menu, click Delete. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.

In the Registry Editor window, from the File menu, click Exit.

Shut down Windows and restart the computer.

In just about 2 weeks I will celebrate my 39th birthday. It really doesn’t seem like I should be that old because I really feel about 27 years old at the most. My wife starting addressing a few party party invitations and getting supplies for the big day. I wish she would just let the day pass like any other without all the hoopla but she won’t. For some reason the idea of now standing of the edge of 40 years of age just doesn’t set right with me. I would prefer to pretend for just a while longer that I really am still a young guy.

DS Lite will play GBA and DS games, not Gameboy or GB Color games. The new DSi will only play DS games as I understand it. And, for the sake of thoroughness, the original DS is backwards compatible with GB/GBC/GBA games.

This aside, another option that’s available is system emulation. I won’t get into specifics, but generally speaking, the DS is able to emulate games for the NES, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Game Gear, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, and a few other systems. Doing this requires the purchase of a special cartridge and a memory card to store the files.

Many PSPs can do this without additional hardware, as long as you install custom firmware on the device. Once this is done, it’s able to emulate all systems the DS can, plus the Gameboy Advance, Playstation 1, and more. (Note that the newest units — in particular, the PSP-3000 and PSP-2000v3, currently lack this capability. Thus, if this is of interest, you might be better off finding a used unit and/or one that’s already customized. Unlike the DS, the process to install custom firmware can be intimidating.