Year: 2009

Mmm… foosball…

(I had my camera at the office today so for fun I took a picture of the table.)

Last week I was kind of bored so I decided to get back into computer gaming. I’m hardly a big-time “gamer” and in fact I probably only get this urge about once every six months. But I figured this might be a good opportunity to involve Alex and perhaps Zack in some fun “guy stuff”.

Age of Empires is really cool, but doesn’t work very well under Linux (and I don’t have any Windows computers). Space Empires IV is a classic but I’ve played it so many times it’s not really even a challenge– and more than likely it would be a little too complicated for the boys. So I poked around for some native Linux games. There are a ton of first-person shooters, but they’re usually pretty violent and we’ve already outlawed Halo in our house because of that.

I discovered Warzone 2100 which is a sweet real-time strategy game. It takes place in the future on a nuclear-ravaged earth, and the objective is to research technologies and build tanks and cyborgs and so forth to take over the world. Everything is done in beautiful 3D, with textures and sweet sound effects and lots of action.

Alex absolutely loves the game, and we’ve played a few missions and skirmishes against the AI. Right now Zack is content to just watch and comment on the battles (“Alex, Dad has ten tanks and he’s blowing up the bad guy base!”). I’m sure he’ll get involved soon, and we’ll have three computers running a networked game.

What a great way to waste some time!

I’ve got my AmaroK music player on “random tracks from collection” which means it picks anything it wants from my 10,000-song collection. It makes for some interesting transitions in music, to be sure.

Loreena McKennitt just popped up: one of her songs from The Mask and Mirror. AmaroK displays the album cover, related tracks, and other interesting tidbits of information about each track it plays, so I saw the album cover for this one:

Whoa. That is most certainly not a very flattering picture of Loreena. Maybe she’s not the most beautiful singer but wow, you’d think they could have done something more with this.

Don’t get me wrong– I thoroughly enjoy her music. But the packaging could use work.

Just got back from dirt biking in the mountains with my friend Rich. It took me a little practice to get used to riding a motorcycle (this was a big bike) and making corners and climbing rocky trails, but after a couple of hours I had the “feel” of the bike and the trails. I wasn’t exactly speedy out there– Rich had to wait for me around every turn it seemed– but now that I’ve done it I’m excited to go again. Good times.

Well, summer vacation is officially over. The kids start school tomorrow. It sure flew past.

On the bright side, it means we’ll have a bit more structure in our days and schedules. On the down side, it means I won’t be able to roll out of bed at 8:00 any more. Got to start setting that darn alarm again.

Random factoid: the population of Colorado has an obesity rate of 18.9% (meaning that percentage of the people can be considered obese).

Related factoid: no other state in the country has an obesity rate lower than 20%.

Another fun season of summer league ultimate has come to a close. We started out a little slowly this season, but picked up momentum and won a long string of games to finish in third place overall.

The tournament was last weekend. We struggled in the beginning of our first game and couldn’t recover, losing a tough battle to find ourselves in the beer bracket. That meant our later games were a lot of fun, because we weren’t playing for glory or fame.

Our team name was “Better off Red”, for obvious reasons:

As always, it was a great group and a thoroughly enjoyable season.

Tonight was the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Unfortunately the moon is gibbous and quite bright, and the city lights– including the streetlamp across from the house– make it difficult to see any. There were some scattered cirrus clouds as well.

Still, I turned off all the lights and went outside for a bit, hoping to catch at least one. I was rewarded after a few minutes as a bright one streaked across the zenith.

My best memory of meteors remains the time Thom and I were laying out in the desert somewhere in southern Utah, the Milky Way spread above us. I don’t remember what shower it was, but we saw a lot of shooting stars that night. There’s something magical about them.

I’m watching the Rifftrax version of The Empire Strikes Back and it’s an absolute riot. The Harry Potter version was pretty funny, but this one might take the cake. With Chad Vader as a special guest commentator and some awesome Yoda imitations, the jokes range from Colt 45 and Jar-Jar (predictable) to Microsoft’s Clippy and Jheri-Curl.

Highly recommended.

We went up to Winter Park yesterday and had a blast. We’d done this a few years ago and decided it was such fun we should make it more of a tradition.

We played two rounds of 18-hole mini golf (I won the first match; Laralee took the second):

Some wall climbing…

Trampoline bungee jumping, complete with flips:

But the clear winner in popularity with the kids was the alpine slide. I think we rode it seven or eight times. Photos fail to capture the fun: they look like we’re kind of sitting in a little trough, when in fact we’re cruising along at a pretty good clip.

Zack took the first few runs pretty slowly (notice Laralee backed up behind him) but got the hang of it and insisted on using the “fast lane”.

Since there are two parallel tracks, I attempted to take some pictures as I raced beside Laralee. Despite no signage about it, apparently cameras are verboten on the track, and Alex (who was immediately behind me in line) said as soon as I left the starting point the woman manning the ride called the guy waiting at the base and reported “There’s a guy in a white shirt and cap with a camera!”. When I hit the bottom I was told not to do it again. Whatever.

Here’s a great action shot as I jam the control stick forward for maximum speed. Mr. Sulu, engage Warp 1!

And a self-portrait (notice La in the background; I had just passed her):

I caught up to Kyra, who had left ahead of me, but due to camera difficulties and the fact that I was screaming around a curve, I didn’t get her on camera and instead ended up with a few pictures like this:

To finish the day, we made a visit here:

La wiped out on the final run, and when you skid down that smooth concrete you leave a lot of skin behind. She managed to scrape patches of skin off both legs, her elbow, and a couple of knuckles. Apparently it was a pretty impressive crash, and it’s fortunate the kid behind her was far enough back that he didn’t cream her with his sled.

Despite the injury and a bit of sunburn, we can chalk it up as a fun day all around.