Hayden's play and our stupid camera

Hayden is almost done with the first grade! Since his disastrous run at Kindergarten, he's made a complete 180 and is doing way better in school. We were really worried about him, but it turned out that we just got stuck with a really, really crappy school for kindergarten. So, here's a pro-tip... if greatschools.com tells you that the school your kid is in is a 4... get your kid out of that school!

Hawthorne Academy has been a godsend for Hayden. He's had to really bust his butt there, but the hard works really paid off. His teacher is the best and she's responsible for how far he's come from when he started the year.

They had an end of year play called 'The History of America'. Since we're in Texas I figured it'd be named 'The History of America: How all the founding fathers were totally Christians and all loved Glenn Beck and how there was never any slavery either... it was a trade triangle'. I guess they opted for the shorter title.

Hayden was a pilgrim for the play. It went really well until I decided to use our crappy camera. I've had a love/hate relationship with this thing for a while. Sometimes it pulls off these awesome shots and works great for a whole event. Other times, like during the play, it sucks. Since it was semi low-light, the camera went full retard and would not work. Every picture was crap and it would randomly lock-up trying to do it's pre-processing on the photos. So, when Hayden and the other pilgrims sang their song about how they were about to screw the Indians out of their land... my camera died. Good times.

The play went really well and Hayden had a blast. We got some really good hot dogs from our favorite place after that so it was all good. The big problem now is that I'm quickly loosing the argument against Joy over getting and D-SLR camera. I think I'll get her one before summer is out... I'm pretty much agreee with her that we need it after this mess.

To play a video game

For some reason, I decided that I needed to be able to play old arcade games on my LCD upstairs. It actually started at work with a conversation with a guy about this Xbox I hacked for him. When I gave it to him, it had a MAME emulator and the Simpsons arcade game on it. He had messed with it and it stopped working. I was explaining how to fix this when I got this idea to set up an arcade game in the game room... it seemed fitting.

We had a media PC hooked up to the game room TV back when it was a 32'' CRT. I kind of forgot about it since we got the big TV downstairs. When we got the 46" in the game room, I replaced the media PC with a netbook. I decided to take today and get MAME running on it.



Getting the emulator to work was pretty easy. The hard part was getting my controller to work with MAME. I started out with this really nice software called Pinnacle. It was reccomended by a few sites I checked. I downloaded the trial and it worked like a champ but they wanted $20 for it! That's way too much money for a gamepad mapper. So, I looked for an opensource alternative. I found JoytoKey. It did the same thing for free so that rocks!

I played through Golden Axe and started up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. I think I'll finally beat The Simpsons after that. The cool thing is that since it's running on the netbook, I can take it with me when I travel. Maybe next time I'm at NSA, I'll throw some Shinobi up on the projector during one of my briefs.

I'm still going to use IE

Check out this really cool advert for Google Chrome.



I'm going to stick with IE for now though. I was a big Firefox supporter because of how it handled tabbed browsing and, at the time it performed better than IE 7 and way better than IE 6! I have to say though, IE 8 works really well with Windows 7. For now, that's where I'm staying.

The problem is that Joy would use IE and I'd stay on Fire Fox. This would keep all our cookies happy. Now, we both fight by logging each other off our respective sites. It's not like we don't have enough PC's. I have my desktop, Joy has hers... there's Hayden's netbook, my netbook... we have the server under the stairs. Hell, we even have browsers on the 2 media centers. Not to mention the PSP and DS browsers... and my phone... and her phone... well you get the idea.

I guess I have to start a campaign about how awesome Firefox is so she'll stay off IE. Man, that's going to feel weird.