We didn’t actually bring the girls around this year. I think they’ll be better suited for it next year. They did dress up though. I’m not exactly sure what they were supposed to be, but they had fancy looking dresses on. My best guess would be witches, as they did have nice pointy hats, but they didn’t really wear them much. (I’m sure that once Milenka reads this she’ll be disgusted with me as she undoubtedly knows exactly what they were… ) Before that though, they tried on their costumes from last year (monkey and panda) and surprisingly, they still fit, sort of. Their arms and legs are too long, but they could squeeze into them at any rate. They ended up just sitting out on the deck and handing out candy to everyone. Pagan was reluctant to part with it at first as she had eaten enough before anyone ever came around that she thought it was all hers, but after a while she got into the swing of things and had a good time giving it away.

Fox was a pumpkin, which I Know for sure, and he pretty much acted the part and just sat on his grandma’s lap through all of the action.

Another odd thing that I noticed was that it was light out. It was getting fairly dark by 7:00, but before last year time would have moved back already and it would have been dark by 6:00. Although somewhat convenient, it just doesn’t seem right to trick-or-treat while it’s light out.

And it only took me like six weeks to get around to making the change. How sad. I’ll post something of substance long before another six weeks pass.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I haven’t posted in a year and a half or so. Milenka keeps on bugging me to do it and I always mean to….. so now I’m getting around to it. Sort of. I figured I’d update everything before I got too much into it.

Things will look prettier shortly.

Oh, and if you happen to actually read this in the next week or so, please leave a comment to let me know you’re around. I have no idea if anyone even checks here anymore, and I’m rather curious.

This think literally spans the entire width of the case. Mounted to the front side of it, which you can’t see, is a 80mm case fan that blows out into a cavity in the front of the case. The case front is flat, but there are cutouts on each side of the cavity that are about 3″x4″.

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with newer computers, and I’m sure that heatsinks have only gotten larger, but still, this seems a bit crazy.. (It could be worse and be water cooled I guess… ) In case you were curious, the CPU is a core2duo 6400.

I must admit that the babies are a bigger time drain than I had originally thought. Milenka had mentioned people she knew (or knew of) who blogged and then more or less never had time to post a thing after having a kid. I always thought that was rather dumb in a way…. not that blogging should be top priority or anything, but I just can’t believe that a baby takes up quite all of one’s time. I still feel that way really, but I do see how it’s easy to get caught up spending time with them soothing or playing or otherwise caring for them. It can make it hard to get much of anything done really. Then again, I’m sure that one would be easier as well. We’ll have a singleton someday and it’ll seem simple (I hope ).

But to add to the baby thing, I’m back in school now too. I’m just taking two classes this semester, which I’ve fortunately been able to schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays leaving the other three days of the week free. But that means that those two days of the week are pretty much devoted to just that. Plus any time I spend on things outside of class may tend to eat into those other three (or five) anyways.

We have a badly needed new computer on it’s way just now as well. Our current one is over 5 years old now, and it wasn’t “top of the line” when I built it. This will actually be the first computer that I’ve ever bought new. My first 486 was kind of new, I guess, but not really exactly. Everything since then has been an upgrade. I started looking though and there’s just too much to upgrade this time around to make it worth my while. I’m just as well off buying something new. Plus, I don’t exactly have the time to find the exact hardware that I would want and then put it all together and everything anyways. The box we’re getting is a core2duo system (this is also my first Intel system since my 486) with 2 gigs of memory. It should do us well for years to come.

Also, I got a new job. It’s with the same company I work for and it’s actually mostly a subset of something that I used to do, so it’s kind of an old job really. It’s a “better” job at any rate. The only really different thing is that it’s on 3rd shift. It shouldn’t be too bad really though. Before the girls started sleeping through the night I was generally staying up with them until 6 or 7 in the morning and then sleeping before I went to work without too much trouble. I start that in a few weeks.

I got a Samsung camcorder for christmas and it had the slight problem in which it couldn’t actually read discs at all. To Samsung’s credit, this particular camcorder had been a display model (only one in the store..) so it’s entire likely that the camcorder had been damaged in some way by customers playing with it. I figured the camcorder was pretty much dead because the disc wouldn’t even spin. At any rate, I thought I’d look around and see if there was a quick fix before returning it to the store.

I looked around online a little and didn’t see anything that would be at all helpful. At that point, I decided to call up Samsung’s tech support and see if they could give me any useful advice. Ha.

To start with, the guy wanted a bunch of information to set up an “account” with them. I actually do understand their wanting to do this because then they can easily track the situation and if you call back later you can just pick up where you left off. I didn’t really care for that though as I just wanted some quick answers. I told him I wouldn’t give him any info and, although he did seem confused for a moment, he went on without bugging me about it. I told the guy about the problem I was having with the camcorder and he only really had one solution. He said I should go to Samsung’s website, download the newest firmware for the camcorder, and then burn it to a disc.

I immediately saw a slight problem in this approach, so I went ahead and asked him if I could just update the firmware via USB instead. Unfortunately, he was rather adamant about burning a disc. I then had to break the bad news that it would be rather hard to do since the camcorder couldn’t read discs… The only other thing he could do was to transfer me to a “level 2″ tech, and of course he would need to grab that info from me that I earlier refused. I just said no thanks, I’ll just bring it back.

That’s some great advice though. If you have a Samsung camcorder that can’t read discs, just burn the latest firmware to a disc and stick it in the camcorder and that should take care of the problem. Duh.

The Target credit card offer is nicely ripped half off so that you can see the child safety warning that it was covering up. Target has placed the value of an advertisement for their credit card over the value of a child safety warning… (Ok, so the warning is a stupid one that’s just common sense and is only there to avoid lawsuits, but still…)

Though perhaps the best part is what appears to be the word “care” scrawled across the bottom. I’m assuming that it says something like “because we care”….. what irony