Well, I lied. I made art. I decided to fire up The GIMP and see what script-fu they had. Turns out they had a very nice headline script. Which was under the "Webpage Themes" category. In the "GIMP.org" subcategory. And what are the odds that it made a headline exactly like the one on their web site? That was a long shot.
So since the header graphic came out nearly the right color for my table headers (which was coincidental, I swear: I picked that blue for the tables by guessing and then typing RGB values in by hand until I got close to what I wanted) I decided to put it up there at the top. Better than text anyway.
Oh all right. I went and changed it to match the color of my table heading exactly. Now it's slightly different than what the stock script puts out. Satisfied now?
Seems like I've been sick in the past six months more than the past 6 years. I'm at home again. This time, I caught it from a dealer in Las Vegas. She was sneezing all over the cards and such. It was nasty. So I'm at home.
I redid the site here. Makes it handier to add new stuff. I'm going to be playing with RSS and RDF stuff at work, so I changed this around so I can play with it at home. And if you're thinking that the site now looks like Freshmeat or Slashdot, then you'd be partially right. Those sites are completely dynamic, and they use RDF/RSS extensively. These little boxes are self-contained tables which roughly translate to RSS entries. You get each entry in an RSS file, parse through it, and make the table header, body, etc. The design lends itself to RSS use very well. I'm sure there are a million great designs one could come up with. I'm just lazy. This design involved no art whatsoever -- everything is html (except for the background image, which I stole right from the monkey's belly on the front page).
I guess the "little table with borders for each bit of content" design is a natural extension of the way disparate pieces of information come together programmatically. And I'm lazy.
I was exploring some ideas I had floating around in my head and I came across the ||= operator in a perl man page example. I didn't recall having seen that before, so I looked it up. Turns out that it's a very cool operator and highly useful.
Here's an example. Say you have this script:
#!/bin/perl
$foo = "on";
if ($foo = undef) {
$foo = "off";
}
print "Variable is $foo\n";
Kind of a stupid example here, but you get the point: if there's nothing assigned to $foo, set it to equal the string "off". Which is fine thing to want to do in this sort of style, especially if the assignment and the if loop are acres apart, script-wise. (I'd tend to write that with "unless ($foo) {" since it's essentailly a negative test, but the point is the same and it's easier to see this way.)
Turns out the ||= operator does this. The following is identical to the above script:
#!/bin/perl
$foo = "on";
print "Variable is ", $foo ||= "off", "\n";
You can comment out the '$foo = "on";' line in either and it will print "Variable is off"; Expanded out to be more clear, that is equivalent to this:
#!/bin/perl
$foo = "on";
$foo ||= "off";
print "Variable is $foo\n";
Which looks even sillier than the first script, but remeber that $foo might have come from either STDIN (keyboard) or a config file value (which may not have been there, file may not exist, etc), or whatever. Could be a database handle read. The select returns nothing, so you give it something. With no big for loop to get in the way. Very handy for like setting a bunch of defaults en masse.
Anyway, I thought it was nice enough to share. It's something I wish I would have found out about a long time ago. For those of you not perlish, forgive the propeller headed intrusion... :-)
So there's this new Geek Code-like thing out called an OmniCode. Since I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, I went and made up my code. Here is what I am:
Pretend for a moment that you're a technology geek. You're a die-hard Linux user, and you've been using one Linux distribution for a long time. You like this distribution a lot, and you even buy a copy of every new release even though you can download it for free (say that you've also downloaded it as well). Using this version of Linux feels like home, and is something you make a career out of. Oh yeah, also imagine that you own stock in this Linux company, and have since it was first publicly traded. You literally have a vested interest in the survival of . Just suppose that all this is true for a minute or two.
Now say that you've been "online" in one form or another for like 10 years. You like being online, and you've made good money by doing things online. You've made filthy, dirty, obscene cash because you can do things online. In short: you're into being online, and something of an "online" expert. What would be the antithesis of everything online which is good and wholesome? Yeah, sure, AOL. Of course. Ever since they had their own private network opened to the world, with their buggy newsreader triple posting every "me too" three times to five newsgroups at once, AOLers have been the Fingerhut of the online world. (Although I admit it's great fun to wander among them occasionally, to see their painful existence.) AOL is the online equivalent of the guy who takes his girl to the Big Date at the fanciest of Sizzlers and lets her get the all-you-can-eat salad bar since it's such a special occasion. The Great Unwashed is what I'm trying to say. Plebeian and wired. The people who order stuffed bears and crocheted/needlepoint hearts and painted wood plaques with pithy sayings and wall hangings made of baby blue plaid. Hummels and Beanie Baby collectors. A Trans Am is a sports car. They are as un-technically inclined as the average Linux user is, all other things aside.
Now imagine that these people are going to own "your" Linux company. That's right... the Clampetts are not only your neighbors, they own the whole city.
I think I'm going to be sick.
In the Repo Man box set DVD there's a CD with the soundtrack. Somehow this eluded me until about 45 minutes ago. And I'm listening to it and it's got all my old favorite hits.
So for no reason at all, here are the lyrics to the Circle Jerks' tune "When the Shit Hits the Fan", my favorite song of the whole movie:
in a sluggish economy
inflation, recession
hits the land of the free
standing in unemployment lines
blame the government for hard time
we just get by
however we can
we all gotta duck
when the shit hits the fan
10 kids in a cadillac
stand in lines for welfare checks
let's all leach off the state
gee!the money's really great!
we just get by
however we can
we all gotta duck
when the shit hits the fan
soup lines
free loaves of bread
5lb blocks of cheese
bags of groceries
social security
has run out on you and me
we do whatever we can
gotta duck when the shit hits the fan
we just get by
however we can
we all gotta duck
when the shit hits the fan
soup lines
free loaves of bread
5lb blocks of cheese
bags of groceries
social security
has run out on you and me
we do whatever we can
gotta duck when the shit hits the fan
I found this site which has various movie scripts. Probably my most favorite movie (by at least one measure: I've seen it far and away more than any other movie) is Aliens. I remember walking out of the the Cine Capri theater in Phoenix just completely mind-bended. I've always been into movies, and even dressed up as a few of them on dress-up occasions, but I've never felt a movie like that one. I was scared shitless throughout most of it, for one.
I saw Jaws when I was 8 years old, and that freaked me -- but seeing Aliens when you're 19 (and seeing it in a super monster theater like the Cine Capri) makes you feel it as well as think it I guess. Maybe I got more analytical as I got older. Maybe I was young enough to be dumb enough to join a branch of service when a war wasn't on, but also smart enough to analyze the hell out of everything. Show me a 19 year old who was an honor student, a sci-fi geek, a quasi gun-nut, and a fan of JFA and not able to readily internalize Aliens and I'll show you a politician that thinks he telling the truth. "Yes, we have lots of blankets for your people so you can stay warm in your new homelands up north..."
Anyway, I dug the movie. It was a movie for me and I was there at the right time and place to enjoy it. Some people have "Annie Hall" or "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "High Noon". Or even, god forbid, "Breaking Away". And I have "Aliens". So sue me.
So anyway2, I happened across a site with movie scripts. And they had the script for Aliens. And I read it. And I liked it. And I want to write a script of my own, except I don't think I'd be all that great a screenwriter. I write like I think, which is hardly ever good. But since nobody has to read this except me, then I'm happy if you're happy. There's always sed or `perl -pi -e 's/bad/good/' online_post.txt` if I don't like what I have down...
It's an updateacopia today. Here's some random crap I've been meaning to post for a while. I probably would have droned on for like 10,000 words on each one. So you've been saved...
I've always wondered what that little ridge from the bottom of the nose to the upper lip is called. I found out recently. It's called the philtrum.
If you're looking for windows utilities that can fit on a floppy, look at tinyapps.org. They have tons of little gadgets. I thought it'd be cool to make a bootable CD-R with some of these things. Write up a batch file that makes a RAM disk and installs lots of stuff to it and you'd have a nice utilities CD.
Jabber has its own book now. I thought the MP3 book was silly. I guess it could help if you wanted to re-write a chat system for in-house use or something...
Red Hat has a really nice customization guide for Red Hat 7.2. I'd never seen it before. I could have used one of these like five years ago. It pretty much has everything that you'd need to get a RH7.2 box running. I was looking for a quick guide to NFS. I just wanted to set up one mount right quick and didn't feel like reading through the history of distributed computing. I happened across the site and was up and running fast.
You can use this as your /etc/hosts file and not see some banner ads and whatnot. Seems to work so far.
BestCrypt is really cool.
When I need to set up my new kernel, or I get a new video card, I'll look at the NVIDIA + AGPGART Nano HOWTO.
Anyway... On a lighter note, I wound up staying after the SDRIW meeting mentioned below and talking to a bunch of the guys there (you know, that whole "networking" thing). I happened to make an offhanded coment about CFEngine and Tom Perrine, the sort of leader fellow of SDRIW and the guy that organizes the meetings, overheard me. Then we got into a fairly lengthy disussion about taking care of lots and/or many different kinds of machines. He said that he had lots of different machines to take care of, including some supercomputers. Not surprising since we were on the first floor of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. I figured they'd have one or two supercomputers laying about. This lead to the topic of Crays and I mentioned that one that sold on ebay a while back. I said something about how you'd need a whole house just for the Cray's cooling/power and why it would have been silly for a private individual to buy it. So then Tom said that "they" have a "real computer" for sale.
Well, "they" is the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The "real computer" is a Tera MTA which has recently been retired. Turns out that Tom is like the Director of Security of SDSC. Has asked if we'd like to take a tour of the data center and I predictably said "Yes, Tom, that would be very nice of you... if you have time then I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that a short tour would be lovely and well-recieved." Well, that's not true. What I really said was "Yes." What I was thinking was "Does the Pope shit in the woods?!? Fuckin-a we wanna see the data center!" I freely admit to being a whore for high-end hardware. Ever since War Games and WOPR I've wanted to see a Cray. And I figured they'd have some other funky stuff there to see too. They have all the cool toys.
Turns out the Tera is something of a weird machine, and not just weird looking, either. It apparently is the only one ever made. When Tera was first making it, they used to take the side panels around to all the trade shows. They had this frame that was empty, and they stuck the purple panels on the frame to show everyone what it was going to look like when people bought them and Tera started making them. I guess nobody bought any of them and Tera later bought Cray instead. So they made one unit, and used the panels that went on the roadtrips. It is a weird looking machine, though. I thought of Beetlejuice when I first saw it. Very stylish. It's also weird inside. The Tera had a strange multithreaded architecture, meaning that it did a lot simultaneously (in parallel). I guess it did quite well for what it was. The real trouble in getting rid of it is that it's gallium arsenide-based. Not something you can take to the landfill. And they can't sell it to another country, since it can be used for weapons research and is therefore classified as a munition (of course so is Perl so I'm not sure what really qualifies as a munition). They were still in the process of packing it all up and getting it decommisioned so I didn't find out who was buying it (if anyone). I was going to ask how many RC5 keys it can go through per second but thought it's be too geeky to ask. Must have had a weak moment...
Tom showed us another pretty supercomputer, the Cray T90. It's $25 million worth of pretty. It's got two parts: the main housing and the cooling unit. The main housing has all the CPUs and memory and I/O systems and whatnot. It opens up "like a Corvette", with the top reddish rounded part being hinged on one side. I wanted to see inside pretty badly, but that was impossible. Apparently, the air must be tested for impurities before you can crack the case. And the cooling system uses a perfluorocarbon fluid which is fine at cooler temperatures but gets really nasty when heated. So the EPA makes them sample the air before they open it as well.
The cooling unit was about six feet away and mostly whirred and gurgled a lot. I was leaning against it while Tom talked about everything the T90 did, what they used it for, etc. I remember thinking that I shouldn't be treating it as if it were a mailbox and that we weren't on the streetcorner talking about the Braves. It's pricey stuff, and while Tom didn't say anything about me being cavalier with his high-end stuff, I felt bad and made it a point not to touch anything I didn't have to while I was there. Anyway, the cooling unit had one really noticeable feature: a light-up waterfall on the front. You can kind of see it in this picture. The cooling unit is on the right, and the thing running down the center is the waterfall. I thought it was completely frivolous until it occurred to me that it's not at all useless: as long as you can see water churning around, you have a real good visual indicator that the cooling system is running. On a $25 million machine which would last for at most a minute without cooling, that's important. And it gives you something to show the guy the signed the check. You don't want buyer's remorse when supercomputers are cncerned.
The T90 is used for fluid dynamics calculations and such. It's a very fast computer. How fast? It can do 26.3 billion floating point operations per second (what's known as a 'gigaflop'). My Athlon can do almost one gigaflop, but the software to do so has to be specifically written to maximize my architecture's potential. Being 25 times faster than a $250 PC CPU may make the T90 seem not quite so supercomputer-ish until you realize that it was made in 1994. Back then a Pentium 60 was a big deal. 25 Athlons doesn't seem like a super computer, but 2500 Pentiums do.
But if the T90 isn't fast enough for you, then maybe IBM's Blue Horizon is. It does 1,700 gigaflops. That's 1.7 trillion floating point operations per second. It's also huge. It takes up a lot of space. And it needs some hefty machines just to boot up. I should have asked how many RC5 keys it could work through because during its burn-in it was used to crack some keys. It looks like the most it did was 224,293 blocks. The most I've ever done was 2,500 blocks of keys and that was when I had every machine at home and at the Eudora software lab going full-blast (I'd say like 40-odd Pentiums, a dozen Macs, a few odd Sun boxes, and one Alpha -- probably 60 machines total). So Blue Horizon really is super. At least until 2006 when my home machine will again do 1/25 as many gigaflops as it. Although I don't know what I'll ever do with 576 gigabytes of RAM and 5.1 terabytes of disk space. 640K ought to be enough for anybody, right?
Let's see, what else did they have there that was neato...
They had a Sun Enterprise 15000 (aka Sun Fire) with no serial number (no label either -- nothing). It was a demo model that stayed there. I'd never seen one in person, although Qualcomm had a couple E10000s. The E15K has a cute little LCD display complete with an animated bicycle to let you know that it's pedaling.
They have the world's largest tape library there too. It's a couple big round deals that save data on tapes and whatnot. There's a huge set of "regular" computers that act as its cache. It's pretty amazing. (One of the uses for all the storage is a project from one guy where he decided to put every combination of up to eight ASCII characters on it. Why? Because cracking a standard Unix password only means you have to make a hash of the unknown word and then look up the hash in the database of saved password hashes. Now that's a cool use for lots of storage...)
The last thing we saw was their "Vislab" or what's really called the Advanced Scientific Visualization Laboratory. It's one of those "visualize it in a CAD program and then print out the 3D object" type of deal. They have a smaller resin-based machine (laser shoots liquid resin, changing it to be solid) and a paper-based one (regular printer head etches out shape with special ink). Imagine a small donut shape (which is called a torus in case you really wanted to know) on your PC. Now you want to print it. Instead of printing every angle (kinda boring for a torus, but bear with me), say you could print it out as a full 3D object. Which is much better when you have to visualize something like proteins, cell walls, etc. So to print it, you have software that first prints the bottom-most layer on some medium (gel or paper). Then the table the media is on moves down imperceptibly. The next layer is printed/etched. The cycle repeats a couple thousand times per vertical inch until you have the complete 3D shape. Then a solvent of some sort (or even air) is used to wash away the "negative" bits, leaving only your completed sculpture. It essentially makes either plastic or wood models.
They had lots of demo pieces there in the window (they wouldn't let us inside the room with the machines). They had a map of the sea floor which was about 12"x18" and which I wanted to steal and hang on the wall. They had some baseball-sized asteroids (Eros being the most famous I guess). The coolest one was a 3D Earth, complete with color. I guess some guy figured out how to use regular inkjet ink and make colored objects. The colors wash out a little, but it's much nicer looking than plain grey. They also had some "ball in cage" type things (where a sphere is in a hollowed out cube) and a complete inside-out human skull. I thought of 3D fax machines when I saw it, a concept I'm sure is not novel to anyone who's seen the lab.
Well, that's about it for my field trip to UCSD and SDSC (the one encompasses the other). If anything else about my journey strikes me I'll add it in here.
I recently went to the latest meeting of San Diego Regional Info Watch at UCSD. My old boss is the one that got me interested in it (he's been going for years). It's a bunch of local computer guys (university, government and private companies) that get together once a month and talk about security-related issues. It's good to hear from other IT folks, and it's good to network and meet new people that are in my field. It's a couple hours in a room full of geeks, bascially. (I can guarantee that every attendee saw Lord of the Rings, for example.)
The meeting was very informative. They occasionally (~10/year?) have speakers, and the reason I went Monday was because their speaker was Special Agent Bruce Barron of the FBI. SA Barron gave us an overview of the USA PATRIOT Act. (The reason that both "USA" and "PATRIOT" are capitalized is because both are acronyms. I didn't know this, but USA stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America" and PATRIOT is "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". One was from the House the other from the Senate, and they combine into a nationalist whole quite nicely. Maybe someone thought a jingoistic name might help them ram its Big Brother-esque notions past the civil libertarians. After all, how can anyone not be a patriot in these times of heightened security?) SA Barron approached the Act from a purely law-enforcement point of view. He was essentially trying to let us know how the Act helps them deter "cyber-crime". If I was an admin for a large company or government agency, I would have found it particulary interesting. I've known more than a couple people who've helped the FBI prosecute online ne'er do-wells, and I've even participated in one such investigation (albeit peripherally). So he explained how the Act gives law enforcement better tools to prosecute online crime, because the USAPA really does make easy to nab the bad guys and any sysadmin ought to welcome it. The Act removes jurisdictional barriers, lumps some crimes into one federal bin from which to prosecute, allows for more consistent sentencing, broadens the scope of wiretaps to include online surveilance, etc. Which is all fine, except that it also does little to actually combat terrorism while doing a lot to reduce the online freedoms of Americans.
I went to the meeting as a Libertarian. I read through quite a bit of the USAPA (it's looooooooong and there's lots that didn't pique my interest), and I read through the EFF's analysis of the Act. I was prepared to ask pointed questions, from a personal point of view. I figured it was a good time to ask The Man what he thinks of liberty and freedom and how many terrorists he thinks would have caught (or "lives they would have saved" if you're feeling particularly uhmurcan) had the USAPA been enacted last year. But I couldn't bring myself to be poop in the punchbowl. Why? Well, the forum wasn't approriate. It would be like a PETA member sneaking into the American Butchers Association's annual meeting and then trying to make a statement. Convince a roomfull of butchers that meat is murder and see how far you get. There's no choir to preach to there. You'd only end up pissing people off and you'd make no headway whatsoever. They'd only hate PETA more than they already do. I've never been big on protest for protest's sake. The guys there at the meeting Monday were anxious to hear how they can now call the FBI to get that Canadian script kiddie extradited, not why it's sad that an innocent Altavista search can be monitored by the government just by convincing one person that it might be relevant to any sort of investigation, terrorist or not. SA Barron was there to help those guys, not enter into social debate. I felt that it would be detrimental to everyone else if I derailed the meeting (even inadvertantly). And besides, these are guys I want to get to know better. Maybe a few of them had similar concerns (I did hear some grumbling afterwards that I agreed with), but they weren't willing to get in the way of everyone's education either.
I did ask a few questions, though nothing particulary inciteful (as opposed to "insightful"... get it?). The USAPA allows the FBI to prosecute attackers/misusers of computer systems at the request of, say, an ISP if the malicious user doesn't have a contractual obligation with that ISP. Meaning if someone you don't know or isn't your customer breaks into a server or DoS's other customers you can call the FBI and have them pinched lickety-split. Which sounds nice. But what if I attack another customer of my cable modem provider? If I cause them to have to call tech support and rack up enough "damages" (USAPA says $5000 is enough to bring down the heat) can I be prosecuted? After all, it's my cable company losing money, and I do have a contract with them, right? Another thing along those lines that alarmed me was the immediacy of the USAPA. SA Barron can call a judge and get a newfangled wiretap on my ISP in a New York minute. Like fast. And before you can can say Electronic Privacy Information Center the g-men have a box installed at my cable company which saves and analyzes everything I do online. So what if someone claims that I'm attacking them and I'm not? What if the claimant in the previous question says I'm harming them? Do I get sniffed? What happens to the information that gets saved through the course of a spurious investigation? I didn't see a lot of oversight. The USAPA basically says that if you're doing something online, someone can find out what that is without any real reason. Which, again, sounds nice. But how does it stop or combat terrorism?
Well, I could drone on and on about this forever and it still wouldn't change anything. I mostly wanted to write down my thoughts and impressions before I forgot them. Speaking which, I almost forgot the funniest thing that came out of the talk: it turns out that your TV viewing habits are not subject to the same rules as your online habits. I guess a while back someone Congressional types had their cable and movie rental records subpoenaed as part of an investigation. Apparently, that didn't sit very well since those viewing habits were fairly embarrasing. So it was decided -- in a very real and legally binding sense -- that TV viewing and movie renting are private, and therefore protected, behaviors. So the FBI can, with very little probably cause, at the slightest whim and on after asking only one judge, collect everything you do and say online. But to get your pay-per-view records, they have to do a full-on Title III search which involves multiple panels judges, paperwork, accountability, etc. Terrorists must not rent movies or watch cable TV. Well, I thought it was funny that viewing was specifically excluded from the USAPA. Maybe a Senator will go surf a porn site or something we'll get our privacy and liberties back. Could happen.
Tracy and I were out at the movies last night. At dinner before that we got to see some young ladies for whom the seventies still lives. I love those one-shoulder wrap-around things. Tube tops with rhinestones rule. Anyway, one girl had her vocation right on the front of her t-shirt; apparently she is famous in films or some entertainment industry. So I had an inspiration and made a new shirt (ask Tracy sometime what the phrase "Smooth sailing for Cap'n Willie" might mean and you'll get a feel for the mood at the time).
Probably not very original, but it was quick and easy. So it got done. How about that?
The new iMac is here. It's the thing on the right. It's... odd. My thoughts, in rough order:
|
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Jimmy McNulty's Bonnie Scotland is some of the funniest shite I've ever seen and I laughed wee tears.
That's all I wanted to say. Oh, yeah... my uncle made a tape of Dana Gould for me. I laughed so hard I almost ran off the road. Tracy and I were driving back from PHX and right at that part where you get to all the windmills the best bit on the tape started. I really did almost crash. I couldn't breathe, it was hard to see, my nose was running... oh man. The wind was really blowing us around while this was going on. It was kinda funny, in a weird way. I remember at one point I wondered if one of us survived, could we sue Dana Gould for damages?
Christmas came and went. New Year's came and went. All in all, everything went rather smoothly. Tracy and I wound up driving over 1300 miles and flying roughly 1500 miles. We spent a lot of time talking, and that was fun. I enjoyed hanging out with her.
Christmas in Oregon was a hoot, as usual. We met up with Tracy's family over at her parents' house. Most surprising was her brother Mark showing up at midnight on Christmas Eve. It settled the folks to know that he was safe, although it was a little weird because fairly often Mark talks when nobody is listening. It's a bit disconcerting sometimes.
We did the usual Christmas thing. Tracy and I hauled our booty up to Oregon in a hard shell suitcase, and it didn't get searched, which is good. Everything was passed out and opened like one would expect. Then we ate turkey and ham and whatnot, just like you're supposed to. Like I said, it was an according to Hoyle Christmas. I think everyone enjoyed their gifts. Tracy's dad seemed to love his MP3 player. (He's a gadget kinda guy.) Tracy and I dug our things.
We did Christmas activity I hadn't done in nearly 25 years: we went sledding. We had gone down their ice-covered street before, but that's not the same as tubing down a snowy hill. We started out going down the short but steep hill in the backyard. As is normally the case, we found a particular run through the juniper and down the side yard which got exclusive use. And as is also normally the case, the whole affair turned into something of a mini civil works project complete with course smoothing and improvements, hole filling, shaping, and even a fairly significant ramp (with a drop of a couple feet). We soon migrated to the neighboring vacant yard because of its pristine condition. By that time, however, we had been at it for a few hours and we were all more than a little cold and tired so we only made a couple dozen runs. The kids seemed fine, but us geezers were a bit torn up. Suzi was sore, and Tracy was too. Pete seemed mostly OK except for a bruise on the leg, and I had a knee swollen and bruised (every time I do something which involves me moving faster than a walking speed usually means that my right knee comes away inflammed and bruised). I'd do it over, though. It was great fun.
We left Oregon for Phoenix on Thursday and had another Christmas that night. It consisted mostly of us ripping open things while people watched. It was awkward at best. I don't like being at the center of attention, and I can't imagine that everyone coming over to my folks' house yet again just to see us open stuff was that entertaining. Maybe. But I had the idea that we would pass out our presents first and then quickly open everything while people were occupied. I think that worked well.
Christmas at my parents' house is always fun. It's sort of like a yuletide rodeo. You just have to go with the flow, and I always enjoy it (even when Springer is in the air). It's lots of activity, lots of family, staying up late, playing with toys, good food, and everything else a growing boy needs. There's always something happening and it's good.
As far as actual loot, I got lots of goodies. The biggest was a Matrix. I've been coveting it for a while now. I've got a Spyder (and which I've written far too much about before in this space) already, but comparing the two is like comparing a 2002 Mercedes SL600 to a 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit (diesel). OK, maybe it's not that bad. More like the Benz and my Toyota truck. And I like my truck, but I'd also like a really fast Mercedes. I'll probably write more about paintball and whatnot sometime soon.