MichaelandChrissy.com

We took the boys to the George Carden Circus at the Hammond Civic Center on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It was a pretty good show for such a small venue (it was literally the size of a high school basketball gymnasium).  Aiden had never been to a circus before, and he was captivated.  I forgot how much circuses smell like, um, animals.  There were lots of animals there.

Aiden and I got to ride an elephant before the show started.  There was a number of good circus acts.  We saw a lion tamer, and he had a white tiger in his pride.  The clown was pretty good.  The highlight for me was the motorcycles speeding in the steel sphere.  I’ve never seen that up close before.  Then again, I’m used to circuses of the Soleil variety.

The boys were very well behaved: Aiden switched often between my lap, Chrissy’s lap, and the bleachers; Gavin cried a bit, but we couldn’t hear him over the various acts, he mostly just took the bottle and looked around.  We had a pretty good time, but it leads me to wonder how much better the (much more expensive) Ringling Brothers Circus would be.

“Bring Down The Sky“, the expansion content for Mass Effect, was good for a few hours of new gameplay.  It starts as soon as you get aboard the Normandy and head out into space from the “Citadel”.  Once you investigate a new asteroid on the “Stellar Map”, you are treated to a nice cutscene (one of many in the new content) of the rock hurtling towards Terra Nova, and its millions of human citizens, powered by three huge thrusters.  The antagonists, Batarians, are evil slavers that kill people for fun and profit.  It might have been wiser to hold off on this mission until I had built up some experience and better gear, but I dove straight in anyway.

It turns out that there are human survivors from the science team on the asteroid.  One of them talks me through the mission by radio, until the Batarians find her hiding spot.  There is plenty to do on the asteroid, but I got saving people to do!  The bulk of the new content is driving the Mako to each of the three thrusters and disabling them.  The installations are the same throughout the galaxy, so nothing new there.  At the last thruster, I am confronted by the Batarian lieutenant.  I used the “Charm” skill on him to negotiate rather than killing him outright because I’m playing a good guy.  It was surprisingly easy to convince to give up his superior to save his own butt.

The problem with playing as a “Paragon” is that sometimes you would rather knock off the bad guy.  He’s really really evil; he deserves it!  Batarians suck, and they sick Varren monster-dogs on you!  But because my character is “Lawful Good”, I let the lieutenant and his two sidekicks go, with his blessing to kill his boss.  Once I catch up to the Boss, after killing countless Batarians in his base, he wants to talk.  Of course. It seems that he has planted bombs all over the place, right near his human hostages.  Mass Effect is all about moral crossroads: I can kill him (let the scientists die) or let him go (run to defuse the bombs).  Good guys defuse bombs.

I’d like to know what happens when you decide to chase after the Batarian leader instead.  But in this case, since they all lived to talk about the event, one of the hostages gives me a choice of rewards: light/medium/heavy human armor, Quarian armor, or a tech tool.  I’m playing a tech/soldier, so I chose the tech tool, and it’s easily the best one in the game (and I got it right in the beginning!).  Overall, “Bring Down The Sky” is pretty nice for a freebie.  Although a goodly chunk of it is “more of the same”, Bioware managed to introduce a new race, provide more rich background story, and provide a good couple of hours of new gameplay.

A few years ago, there was a photo-captioning contest at a Transformers web site that I frequent, TFW2005.com.  The idea was to add a funny comment to a number of Transformers pictures that they had selected, mostly screen shots from Transformers The Movie (1986).  I’ve been known to do some neat stuff in Photoshop, so I decided to give it a try.

I didn’t win the contest, but it was fun to look at all of the other entries.  I do remember that the winners weren’t as funny as my own submissions, although there were some really hilarious ones submitted.  Judging came down to a popularity contest, I reckoned, and lurkers like me aren’t all that popular.

But I don’t just want these to be forgotten in my “images” directory, so here they are for your humorous enjoyment.  The Constructicon entry is funny on a couple of different levels, and the Unicron entry is just inspired.  And yes, I understand that only old-school Transformers fans will relate to any of this.

Chrissy recently found some time to take some Halloween photos of Aiden and Gavin.  Yes, Halloween was two weeks ago, but it’s hard to find time for these things when you’ve got two kids!  She could have easily blown it off, but Halloween photos are an important family tradition in our house.  We’ve got fabric backdrops and props and everything!

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

An unintended part of this tradition has been the choice of clothing.  Gavin gets all of Aiden’s baby clothes, which have been in storage for two years, including the Halloween-themed clothes.  So what we end up with is a photo of Gavin in the same clothes and almost the same pose as the one that was taken of Aiden two Halloweens ago.

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

This brings us an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast our two boys.  When they were only a few months old, they looked pretty much the same.  Gavin has more hair, and Aiden was almost a month younger at his first Halloween, but they still look remarkably alike.  Unfortunately, Gavin didn’t get as many outfits or backdrops as Aiden did, but remember, Chrissy has two kids to manage now!

Aiden (2006)

Aiden (2008)

But then there are also the differences between then and now!  Although Aiden still has the ceramic pumpkin that sports his name across the front, that is where the similarities end!  He’s gotten to be such a big boy over the last two years.  We’ll have to see what memories next Halloween brings us!

My Dell XPS Gen5 computer was high-end stuff when I bought it in 2005.  I updated the video card and memory last year at about this time, thinking that these would be the last upgrades that I would be able to make before buying a new computer.  I was wrong though, since it turns out that my Intel 955X chipset motherboard was capable of handling a multi-core Intel processor, as long as it has the latest bios (A04).  I wasn’t sure if the XPS Gen5 could handle a processor greater than a Pentium 4 until just recently, but I was happy for the chance to prolong the life of my computer.

I didn’t see the need to upgrade to another Pentium 4 chip, since that would only increase the speed to 3.6 Ghz at the most.  However, the Intel 955X chipset in the XPS Gen5 can handle any of the Pentium D 900 series processors as well.  The Pentium D is essentially like two Pentium 4 chips strapped together.  I settled on the Pentium D 940, since it is as fast as my old processor (3.2 Ghz).  Also, the 940 is cheaper and easier to find than the 950 (3.4 Ghz) or the 960 (3.6 Ghz).  There is an 800 series for the Pentium D line as well, but the front side bus isn’t split amongst the two processor cores on these earlier releases.

The downside is that my machine won’t necessarily be any faster, since the processor still runs at 3.2 Ghz.  The difference is that there are now two processors running at 3.2 Ghz, and they run at the same time.  So multiple programs running under Windows will run equally fast, without having to share processor time.  The new processor also has twice the front side cache (2×2 MB) as the old one.  Single programs, like my very needy video games, will run at relatively the same speed, unless they are optimized to run on multi-core processors (I’m thinking Crysis right now!).

I got very lucky and found a brand-new boxed Pentium D 940 on eBay for $80.  Other boxed 940s were going for at least twice that amount online.  I had seen some OEM processors (just the chip, no fan or heat sink) going for only $75 before shipping, so I got a pretty good deal.  When I opened up the XPS Gen5 though, I found that the fan and heat sink that came with the processor would not fit on my motherboard.  I would have to use the old heat sink, a monster cooling tower with two fans encased in a shroud around it (arguably better than the one that Intel sent).

The problem was that I didn’t have any thermal gel compound.  The new heat sink had some on the bottom though, all ready to smash up against the processor.  I took out my pocket knife and scraped off the compound from the heat sink, then spread it the best that I could on the business end of the old heat sink.  It looked like hell, but I’m hoping that it evens out a bit once the processor heats up.  I’ll have to keep an eye on the temperature for the next few days (especially once I start playing games on it) to make sure that it doesn’t overheat.  With luck, this computer should last me another couple of years!

Last night, Chrissy decided that Gavin should try something a little more solid than formula.  So, she mixed up some baby cereal for him to try.  It wasn’t much more than a thin gruel.  He didn’t take to it very well, and pushed most of it out of his mouth with his tongue.  Maybe he’ll be more receptive next time?

I remember when Chrissy first gave Aiden solid food.  He didn’t seem to like it at all then, and he didn’t like it this time, either.  Chrissy gave him a bite of the baby cereal, since he was asking for some.  His expression was funny, at first, until he started dry heaving.  No wonder Gavin didn’t want any!

Aiden is a smart little boy.  He shows good problem solving ability and is able to follow multi-step directions.  He has an easy-going nature and is very loving to his baby brother.  But Chrissy and I are worried because Aiden has a speaking problem.  He used to babble a lot as a baby, but he never quite grew out of that; the sounds never formed into coherent words.  We’ve come up with some ways to cope, but his language skills are barely past single syllables.

Children are supposed to learn a dozen words by eighteen months, and should be able to string two or more words together to make simple sentences by the age of two.  Aiden started off with a couple of sounds by eighteen months, but words never followed.  It’s hard when you take him someplace to play with other kids his own age, and he’s the only one in the room that isn’t speaking.  We still strive to put him into social settings, but we tell people that he’s “shy”.

Chrissy started to be concerned when Aiden was only a year old.  She picked up a book on the subject, “The Late Talker: What to Do If Your Child Isn’t Talking Yet“.  The book deals mostly with Apraxia, a particular speech disorder, and what to do if you child has it.  We don’t think that Aiden is Apraxic, but we did find out how to get help for him.  At the very least, we took away from the book the need to have your child tested early to rule out bigger health problems.

We contacted “First Steps“, a child health group, and they came to do an evaluation on Aiden when he was seventeen months old.  They claimed that Aiden had excelled on all counts except for speech, but he wasn’t far enough behind to warrant therapy.  Aiden’s pediatrician then recommended that we test his hearing at the local hospital, and he passed those tests as well (we knew his hearing was fine, but did it just in case).

Aiden’s vocabulary didn’t progress farther than “mom”, “dad”, “eat”, “uh-oh”, “ball” and “bye”.  First Steps came out again for a re-evaluation when he was twenty-three months old, and this time he qualified for speech therapy at home.  He currently gets one hour of “play therapy” with a therapist per week.  We think that this is helping, but the results are slow in coming.  He now makes car noises and some animal sounds, which is good since mimicry is an important step towards speech.

Aiden has augmented his communication skills with sign language.  He loves the “Baby Einstein” sign language videos, and he recently got “Baby Signing Time“.  He has gotten pretty good at it, and can sign “car”, “ball”, “mom”, “dad”, “eat”, “cereal”, “cracker”, “cookie”, “candy”, “drink”, “milk”, “juice”, “water”, “baby”, “bath”, “bedtime”, “I love you”, “kiss”, “more”, “open”, “book”, “cat”, “dog”, “please”, and “thank you”.  He has even started using multiple signs to put together ideas (”eat cracker”, “drink milk”, “more please”).

Although the sign language is a big help, we would prefer that he talk out loud.  Chrissy has enrolled Aiden in speech therapy at St. Xavier University, where they teach speech therapists.  This is a little pricey, but we’re serious about helping him speak properly.  We’re hoping that Aiden will get better with more therapy and eventually catch up to other kids his age.

When I first turned eighteen, I was excited to vote in the 1992 presidential election.  As a poor college kid, I disliked Bush, and I couldn’t wait to vote for Bill Clinton.  When I finally got my chance to vote for the first time, I discovered that there were other choices there besides “President”.  Which Senator should I pick?  What’s a “County Assessor”?  Should this judge be retained?  Lucky for me, there was a handy-dandy “click here to choose all Democrat selections” button there.  This made things easy.

I voted for Clinton again in 1996, because all was right with the world and why change a good thing?  That, and I still really liked Bill Clinton.  I voted for Al Gore in 2000 because I was so used to voting Democrat.  I also thought (and still do) that George Bush should not be rewarded for his father’s failure in office.  Bush stole the election with his brother’s help in Florida, however, much to my chagrin.  By then I had started to pay attention to the county and state elections as well.  I was voting for more than just a President.

My choice for President in 2004 was easy: Anyone But Bush.  Bush was following in his father’s footsteps (catastrophically low approval rates, a failing war in Iraq, painful international gaffes), so it was time for him to go after his first term (just like his Daddy).  Locally, I also routinely voted for Democrats for county and state elections.  I liked their stances on education, jobs and crime as they pertained to Northwest Indiana.  It also felt good to be more informed about local politics.

As I grew older, however, I came to believe in some of the tenants of the Republican party: a strong military, smaller government, and fiscal responsibility.  I supported the “War on Terror”, even if it was becoming unpopular.  I saw the Democrats squander their majority in Congress, a huge opportunity to do some good.  I still didn’t like Bush, but that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t vote Republican for the next guy.  Once John McCain got his party’s nomination, I was all set to vote Republican for the first time in 2008.

Then McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.  At first, I thought it was some sort of trick, leaking out disinformation in order to illustrate how sad Barack Obama’s lack of experience was.  Politically, it was a terrific choice: a running mate that shared Obama’s lack of experience, so there was no way for the Democrats to criticize her, and a woman, who would soak up votes from disenfranchised Hillary supporters.  In practice, however, it didn’t make any sense to me.

I couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for a Vice President that was so fantastically under-qualified as Palin.  Not while McCain was seventy-two years old and in questionable health.  He’s a spry old guy, and I dig him, but he could drop any day, leaving a stereotypical soccer hockey mom as President.  I could see a soccer mom as Governor, or State Representative, but not as President.  Joe Biden predicted a catastrophe to test Obama within six months if he took office, so imagine what would happen if Palin were in charge!

So now I’m in a pickle because I can’t vote for either candidate.  I don’t like Barack Obama.  I think that Obama will raise taxes, increase the size of government (bureaucracy, inefficiency and spending), ruin our military, negate any gains we’ve made for Democracy in the Middle East, and go on to liberalize the Supreme Court (killing moral legal decisions at the national level for generations).  Yes, I would like to see Health Care and Social Security reformed, I support that, but at what cost?  What to do…

I’m at a stalemate on the national level, and I can’t seem to get off the fence.  So, I turned back to the local elections.  I researched the candidates at the county and state level in the local newspapers (all of our television comes from Chicago, so I know far more about candidates from Illinois than Indiana), and once again found myself leaning towards the Democrats.  I guess I could split up my vote between the two parties, but I just can’t stay away from the “click here for one party” button.

I reluctantly voted straight Democrat this year.  I’m still on the fence with Obama, but I’ll remain cautiously optimistic as long as he doesn’t invite Reverend Wright, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into any high-level government positions.  I was also well informed on some town issues that I was glad to put my vote in for.  I feel like a part of my local community, and it’s nice to be able to make a change for the better at the local level.  I just hope that I helped make a change for the better at the national level too.

I love to vote.  I do it whenever I can.  I usually don’t have to wait in a long line to vote, but this morning was an exception.  I normally vote on my way to work: just drive up, walk in, vote, and bounce on out.  Even in the tight 2000 race, the voting line wasn’t too bad.  I already knew that there would be long queues at voting polls this morning though, so I decided to show up early.

I woke up at 6 AM, as I normally do, but immediately slipped on yesterday’s clothes (they were still on top of the laundry hamper) and ran out the door.  It was a nice walk down to the elementary school where my local precinct votes.  The sun was just coming up, the leaves on the trees were all red and gold, the air was warming up.  Then I got to the poll and found a line!  It was 6:10 in the morning!

There was about a dozen people in front of me, and that was just to get inside.  Once inside, another two dozen (those that had been waiting outside in the dark before 6 AM) were already signing in to vote.  I finally got inside the doors to sign in after about half an hour.  They required a driver’s license, and you had to be on the books already.  Another half hour later, and I had voted.

I guess an hour wait is about the average across the country.  Once I got home, I ate some breakfast with the boy and watched the news about the voter turnout in other areas.  I thought that I had it bad, but there were some ridiculous lines in other states.  On the bright side, I got a free “tall” coffee from Starbucks for voting, and I don’t even like coffee.  How’s that for Democracy?

Gavin slept through the night for the first time last night.  It was a shock because Aiden began to sleep through the night at fifteen weeks old, so Chrissy and I were crossing our fingers that Gavin would do the same.  At fourteen weeks, Gavin was still waking up at 2 AM and 5 AM every night, so we weren’t holding out much hope for a big change in a single week.  But we got lucky!

Or so we thought…  When daylight savings time kicked in on Saturday night, all of our clocks automatically fell back one hour.  So Gavin woke up at four?  Well, no.  Our bedroom clock went completely wonky and reset itself four hours ahead.  Chrissy woke me up for work at 2 AM, thinking that it was in fact 6 AM.  We were so happy to see that both kids were still asleep!

Chrissy didn’t realize the error until we turned on the TV for the weather forecast, and it said that it was 3 AM!  I was just about to drive to work, assuming that it was still dark outside because of the time change, but instead went back to bed.  When we crawled out of bed for the real 6 AM, Gavin was just waking up (and hungry!).  We’ll have to see if this was just a fluke!