Brian's Blog

Christmas this year wasn't as much fun as it normally is. Don't get me wrong, it could be much much worse, but my daughter woke up at about 2:30am Christmas morning and left me a nice present of vomit to clean up. She was sick all day Christmas day and much of the next day causing me to stay home and take care of her rather than engaging in holiday festivities. She obviously didn't get sick on purpose and I was much more worried about her getting better than I was about partying but still it wasn't fun for either of us. At the very lease I had some forced one on one time with her which I think I always fall short in doing anyway. So we played some games and talked while keeping warm in front of the fire.

On a positive note though it was a somewhat Geeky Christmas for me having gotten a couple of tech toys worth mentioning. I got the cool binary wrist watch pictured in this post. It looks like I now have reason to get faster in my mental binary to decimal conversions! My wife also got me a new printer which I sorely needed. My HP 722C was a champ and still works but it is really showing its age. Printing out pictures was a laughable exercise. So the new one is a nice Canon PIXMA iP6700D. Which I went through a minor hell getting to work with Linux as it isn't even listed on Linuxprinting.org. I was going to send it back but it would have cost almost as much as another printer once you added the restocking fee, shipping, and the price difference of the HP K550 I was going to replace it with. After much Googling it turns out that a driver for the iP6600D for Linux is available on the Japanese Canon site, and ONLY on the Japanese site. And, as another stroke of luck, it works for the iP6700D also. I'm sure I'm missing some functionality somewhere or another but I haven't seen it. Either way, it's a major step up and a better printer from what I can tell than the HP one was. Given a little bit of time I'm sure it will be supported directly.

The highlight though of the tech fun is the Commodore 64 30 in 1 game stick! Talk about some fun retro gaming! I've already blown more time than I should with my old favorite, Jumpman Jr. Not to mention Karate Champion, Winter Games, and Pitstop 1 and 2.

More important though than all the geek goodness though is that finally everyone is feeling well and we are having a nice day together.