Blair's Blog

… or, more precisely, California Adventure. It’s been sunny and warm today and pretty light crowds. We’ve only used the fastpass system once in two days – the longest line for anything yet has been about 20 minutes. The boys and I even got on the California Screamer coaster in less than 10 minutes.

It’s about 4:00 pm and we just had a late lunch and will head back for the evening after a bit of a rest.

By the way, if you are geeky enough you’ll be impressed by the fact that I’m writing these posts on Brenda’s iPhone while connected to the web over the hotel’s wireless network. I think that is pretty cool!

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Well, after much angst we’ve taken the plunge and bought ourselves a MacBook Pro.

The kids computer tanked about 6 weeks ago and we’ve been nursing it along trying to decide whether to buy bits and pieces to fix their computer or to buy ourselves a new computer and hand down our old one.  The never-ending cycle of building and rebuilding and repairing our PCs has become quite wearing.  It always seems to be one of those time and money pits scenarios that is just annoying after a while.

So, while we were looking at the various options we considered buying an Apple of some sort.  However the desktops, with the integrated screen, just seem impractical (or gutless, for the miniMac).  The decent Macs are the notebooks, but they are quite expensive – particularly compared to, say, a Dell notebook with similar specs.  During October or November each year, though you can sometimes find last year’s Macs on clearance for prices approaching that of a Windoze notebook.

In the end we found a good deal on one of last year’s MacBook Pro notebooks and picked it up yesterday.  The kids will get our old Windows PC (and finally be able to run the games they want!).  We are hoping that the great reviews of the MacBook, the more stable operating system and the ability to run Windows in a virtual machine, when required,  will have made this a good choice.  If this machine can be run for 2 or 3 years without me feeling compelled to do a rebuild, it will have been worth the extra few hundred dollars.

… I hope.

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After nearly 6 years, we decided to replace our digital camera. Our old digital was a Sony DSC-P9, which was a very good camera when we bought it in 2002, just before Alyssa was born. However, much has changed in the world of digital photography in these few years and the old camera was having some light metering problems. Many outdoor shots were turning out badly overexposed. Continue Reading »

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Plain English:

Sorry for our absence over the past week, but internet ne’er-do-wells attacked our computers and I had to sort some stuff out before I could put the website back on-line.

The Geek-splanation:

Bad, bad script kiddies and spammers!! Bad! Go to your rooms – no supper for you!

The last 10 days have been exceedingly frustrating as the site has been down due to a rather nasty email based attack on our servers. The attack was actually against our mailserver, but it was difficult to sort out what was really going on, so the webserver has been down while I analyzed mail and system logs to try figure out what was happening.

Continue Reading »

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