Ella is registered for soccer

She is old enough to play in the city league now which is good, because the facilities are right around the corner. She is playing in the under 5 league, they have 10 games in total. I volunteered to coach if they are in need of coaches, I wasn't sure if I had the patience for a group of 5 year olds, but we'll see what happens.

Vista finally installed!

Wow, what a pain in the neck that was. Trying to get to Windows Vista Ultimate on my Home Theater PC that I had to replace the hard drive in. Here is what I had to do:

1) Unplug the network connection.
2) Install Vista Home Premium fresh (my Ultimate licesne is an upgrade from Home Premium).
3) Plug network connection back in.
4) Upgrade Home Premium to Home Premium (because my base Vista license is an upgrade license)
5) The install failed right at the end.
6) Unplug the network connection.
7) Repeat step 4.
8) Plug network connection back in.
9) Download Ultimate license file from Windows.com.
10) Put in the Anytime Upgrade disc and upgrade to Ultimate.
11) The install failed right at the end.
12) Unplug the netowrk connection.
13) Repeat step 9.
14) Repeat step 10.

It works now! You think it would be a pretty simple matter of just knowing that I own x number of licenses, simple as that.

Windows and dinosaurs

A couple of random unrelated items.

First, my media PC in my theater blew up. I have been trying to rebuild it, but am having all sorts of problems installing Vista. I have the upgrade version, and it does not let me install it fresh, I have to install XP first, and then upgrade it to Vista which is a real pain. Then, I got my versions all mixed up because I have 2 different licenses, and could not remember which versions I had. I am installing it for the 3rd time, hoping third times the charm.

Other random item, this guy filmed this video at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History of a really cool dinosaur suit. Its pretty cool, I imagine that the kids would really dig it.


Widows continue to be a problem

After getting our garage cleaned out (we killed almost 20 brown widows), the pest guys have kept it clean since then. We were just cleaning out our back lanai (patio), and we found a few more nests. I grabbed the bug spray and headed out to go to battle. I turned over all of the furniture and checked it out. I found about 10 egg sacks, and killed 8 more widows, 7 of them were pregnant. The bug people are scheduled to come back next Thursday, we'll have to continue this genocide later this week.

Spent an afternoon at Typhoon Lagoon

Since work is a little slow right now, I took Fiday afternoon off. Our water park passes were expiring that day, so we decided to use them on the last day. Unfortunately, it started to rain again right as we go there. There was lightning in the area, so all of the attractions were temporarily closed. We had to hide out in a store for awhile. It eventually stopped raining, but everything was closed for another 30 mintues. When everything finally opened, it started to drizzle which made things a little cold, but the kids loved it. Max rode the kids inner tube slide about 20 times in a row, then we took a ride on the family tube ride, and a trip around the lazy river.

We finished the day in the wave pool. Ella would scream "that was so awesome" as loud as she could after every wave crashed over us. We grabbed some ice cream on our way out, and came home and put the kids to bed.

Some changes at work

While we were up in Michigan, some changes happened at work and I was transferred to a new project. I can't talk about it the why yet, because we have not made any public announcements. Anyhow, I have taken over Madden for PS2 and PSP. I am not really that excited to be working on those hardware platforms, they are small teams and small budgets, but it is a new group, and we will be able to pitch some new small game ideas, and I have one cooking up now. We'll see what happens.

Spent the day at Disney

The kids had Disney World withdrawl which is sort of ridicolous, but whatever. So, we decided to go to Disney World for the day. Turned out to not be such a nice day. We got there around 3pm, watched the parade, and then headed over towards Thunder Mountain to get some fast passes. It started to rain just after that, so we had to hide out in the Hall of Presidents for a little while. Ella and I went back to Thunder Mountain after the rain ended, but the ride had been struck by lighting and was not working. We had some dinner and then went back to Thunder Mountain and it was working again, so Ella and I decided to ride it. Afterwards, the wait for Splash Mountain was pretty short, so Ella and I jumped on that while Max and Sarah played in the little kids playground. Max is too little for these two rides.

We headed for Pirates after Splash Mountain because that is Max's favorite. We lucked out, there was no line whatsoever. But, when we got off it was starting to rain again. We decided to ride it one more time to see if the rain slowed down. It did slow down a bit, so we headed out. We got a little wet, but had taken our ponchos, so we were ok.

Not a bad day overall, but the rain kind of dampened things a bit. The kids certainly enjoyed it.

We're home and all rested

We all got home yesterday afternoon, after an uneventful flight. The kids were very well behaved, we had to split up 2 and 2 as the flight was pretty full.

Thank you to everyone that let us stay in your home, loan us your car, give us rides, or opened your homes to allow us to see a lot of people that we have not seen in quite some time.

Funny story about Max. We bought him some Batman pajamas while we were there, they look like the batman costume complete with a cap that is velcroed to the back. He was so excited about them that he had to put them on Wednesday afternoon, he wore them all night, played in them and then just went to bed in them. We woke up pretty early to get to the airport, and he was just not going to take them off, Sarah and I were in no mood to argue with him at 6am, so we just let him wear them. He wore them to the airport and for the entire flight, all the way home. Everyone in the airport kept calling him Batman, which he thought was pretty cool.