July 05, 2005

Back on your heads

Posted by Scott at 06:02 AM

Holiday weekend - Have you ever heard that classic joke? It's the one where you get to choose how you will spend your time in hell. Well, my four day weekend is over. “Coffee break's over… everyone back on your heads!” It's time to go back to work. The extended weekend was nice, like a mini-vacation, but I'm sure my Inbox will be overflowing, especially with overseas requests where they'll wonder why I haven't answered in days. Things will get marked "Urgent" and there'll be statements about how imminent netlist freeze is. That's when a customer's design gets committed for fabrication.

Michelle, the kids, and I had a pretty relaxing time. Friday's weather was a bit gloomy but the rest of the weekend was gorgeous. You couldn't ask for better weather conditions. It was sunny, dry, and warm without being too hot. The girls spent a good deal of time playing with neighborhood friends, either at our house or theirs. The Milford pool is open again for the summer, but we also spent some time just in our little kiddie pool on the back deck.

Claire - Claire finished the last of her three "Anne of Green Gables" DVDs. I watched most of them with her. In a way it was like trying to watch all of the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. That is, the movies are well done but man! It was 9-10 hours long! Anne starts out roughly Claire's age and by the end she's in her thirties, married, and has adopted a child.

Being home also gave me time to practice some new piano songs with Claire. She won't get much time with her teacher this summer because of the teacher's vacations and Claire's. I'm trying to fill in the gap and keep her practicing and learning new things. I'll try to send the files to TJ so that he can see if they play on his keyboard.

Shopping - I did a bit of Amazon shopping yesterday. One thing I wanted to get was this USB widget which will provide a lot of audio capabilities to my laptop. Notably, it'll allow me to capture the line outputs from our piano so that I can make MP3 music files of the synthesized music. It's fine for me to put up a MIDI format file for listening but it won't sound the same since most computers have the cheesiest MIDI synthesizers.

I also broke down and bought a widget for playing my iPod in the car. I've owned it since last November. I don't use my iPod as much as some owners because whether I'm at work or home, I'm often too busy. The car is my main free time. If I were an audio purist I'd go for something that wires right into the back off my stereo for the cleanest signal. I decided to take a chance with the FM modulator approach because then I could play the iPod in either vehicle. Some of the early ones had rather bad reviews but some of the later models which are combination charger/transmitters did better because they didn't have to be powered from the iPod itself. I chose the Monster Cable iCarPlay. We'll see how it does.

The last thing I picked up was two old Frogger games for the Gameboy: "Frogger's Journey: The Forgotten Relic" and "Frogger's Adventure 2: The Lost Wand". It was at the request of Michelle. Of all the games we have on the Gameboy, the only one she likes is "Frogger's Adventure: Temple of the Frog" and she was hoping to play some similar ones. She's not into any of the Mario and Luigi based games. I think Frogger reminds her of the early video games. She also likes our remakes of DonkeyKong and PacMan. Michelle, the retro gamer! Who knew?!

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