Pictures from our Thanksgiving dinner and from Thanksgiving observed with monstersocks' family (mostly dogs).

• Thanksgiving 2009- Lefserittos
• Thanksgiving 2009- Observed

Getting ready for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Finished much of my Christmas shopping online tonight. We're doing Thanksgiving proper on Saturday with monstersocks' family so tomorrow is just the two of us.

I've got one more Google Voice invite if anyone is interested.

I haven't figured out anything to do with Google Wave yet, but I've got several invites for it.

Amazon- Simpsons & Futurama DVD Sale

Get $7.50 - $12.00 off Simpsons and Futurama DVD sets at Amazon. (Buy two, get $15 off, buy three, get $25 off, up to ten at $120 off.)

We got everything ready on Halloween, strung up some lights in the windows of the Beauty Shop and put out some spooky decorations including the bubble fog machine. We had a total of eight trick-or-treaters show up, plus one small child dressed as a chicken who came back twice because of how much she liked the fog filled bubbles.

Once we closed up shop, monstersocks got her costume together (Abby Sciuto from NCIS) and we headed out to Eric & Nichole's Halloween party. monstersocks' costume was gotten by a few folks. I've got pictures from Eric & Nichole's Halloween Party online.

I either picked something up at one of the parties last weekend or my nasal flu shot did it to me.

I've had a sore throat for a couple of days and slept from about 11pm last night until 5pm today (woke up a couple of times to e-mail work and monstersocks and when monstersocks called). Hopefully I'll be better soon.

Good weekend. Went out to Jarrin's annual Halloween party and had a good time as always. The pneumatic airlock was very nice, although a little tricky if you weren't fast enough. I'm disappointed that I somehow didn't take any pictures or movies of the airlock door or flame tower.

I'm pleased with how my costume turned out:
( Killinger Costume Details )

Went out to Roller Derby tonight. Carolina was ahead at half time, but Minnesota outplayed them in the second half and won fairly decisively.

I bought Critter Crunch for the PS3 this weekend. monstersocks enjoyed playing it for a while, although I hadn't thought to set her up with her own profile on the PS3 so her trophies got credited to my account. Oops.

Pretty fun little puzzle game with cute graphics.

I had a good birthday weekend. Went out Friday night to the Danger Board show, then drove home in the early morning snow. On Saturday we went out for breakfast then saw Surrogates and Zombieland. Had a multi-birthday celebration with monstersocks' family on Sunday.

I'm not verbose.

There was a light dusting of snow this weekend on my birthday, then we got a whole lot more this morning for Columbus day.

You'd think this would surprise me less after spending about half of my life in Minnesota.

My brother made a quick stop in town over the weekend on his way out to California for work. We had fun showing him the house and he got to be the first guest in our guest room. Now we just need to figure out how to have someone come and stay in our computer room so that we have motivation to get that room organized.

We went out to moto-i for dinner on Saturday. (We'd been meaning to check it out for quite a while but didn't get around to it until we had someone visiting from out of town.) The food was very good (especially the chicken hearts on special, even better than the ones I've had at brazilian steakhouses). We'll have to go back sometime when monstersocks is driving so that I can try more of the sake.

This morning we went down to Lock and Dam No. 1 then played some disc golf at the nearby course followed by lunch at Sea Salt. After lunch we came back home and played some Wii disc golf (although we couldn't play at Hazeltine as you apparently have to unlock it first) and then some other games.

I've been working on my pictures from this year's trip up LeConte. I've narrowed it down from about 982 pictures to 292, although that's still too many. I did manage to get my panoramic pictures from LeConte 2009 online, and I updated my LeConte Group History set, with pictures from 1974, 1975, and 2002-2009.

Trying to cram as much relaxation as I can into the end of my vacation.

Had a really good trip. Hiked up and down a mountain, got some good time with family (including my two nieces), had trouble free air travel, all of my recent technology purchases worked out well, saw some bears and was fairly unplugged for over a week.

The annual hike up Mount LeConte went very well. My elder niece (4 years old) managed to hike up and down the mountain under her own power (5.5 miles, 2,560 foot elevation gain) and my younger niece (1 year old) had a good attitude while being carried up the mountain (despite not sleeping as much as her sister did three years ago). We had very nice clear weather on the way up. Sunrise the next day and the hike down were a bit soggy.

On a hike out to Laurel Falls the next day before picking up monstersocks at the airport we got to see a mother bear and two cubs scampering through the forest.

My new digital camera worked well for the trip as a replacement for both my small camera (although the new one is a little bit bigger) and my larger camera (higher resolution and similar zoom capabilities). About all I lose is the intervalometer feature and a slightly larger maximum aperture while saving quite a bit of space. The high def movie mode is also quite handy.

I had some trouble in initial testing, but during the trip my new GPS Data Logger worked well. I was able to track my hike up the mountain and the hike we took to Laurel Falls very easily. (I didn't track the hike down the mountain due to the weather and my expectation that I wouldn't take many pictures in the rain.) The waypoint feature is a little interesting, but a little limited since you don't specifically know which waypoint was which later on.

My old portable GPS has always been a little flaky so I picked up a new portable gps a while back. This trip was my first actual use of it. It worked well and has an impressive number of text-to-speech voices in various languages.

I almost brought my netbook (the first computer I've ever purchased with Windows on it) but figured it would be overkill to bring that and my laptop. It turns out I should have brought the netbook so that monstersocks could have had a computer to use while we were in Tennessee.

Now to sort through the gigabytes of pictures I took on vacation...

I'm not entirely sure what this is, but I'm pretty sure someone reading this would be interested in Movits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8fIVTH0TiM

After setting up a new website for my father this weekend I decided to make some changes to my website. I replaced Movable Type with Word Press (easier to install and update with my host, and I've got several Word Press sites set up for other people with my host so it'll help me get more familiar with configuratio, etc.). The content hasn't changed, it just looks a little newer and it's easier to make changes. Everything seems to be working properly so far. I also finally got around to killing my Visi page. Eventually I'll get rid of the Visi dial-up account that goes with it.

After CONvergence I decided to get myself a new camera with a better movie mode. I was originally planning on something a bit simpler (as usual) but was impressed with the zoom lens given this camera's size. The lens is wider than I'm used to on my other cameras so it's taken a little getting used to, but I think I'll like it in the long run.

I've been playing a bit with Google Voice lately. It seems like it would be handy if you have several numbers of your own that you want to unify, but it doesn't work as well if you share a phone number with someone else. If someone calls my Google Voice number and my cellphone and home phone ring, monstersocks could answer our home phone, preventing me from answering on my cellphone. Transcribed voicemails and the options for listening while someone leaves voicemail (like one of those old timey answering machines) seem useful though.

Some recent pictures:

• Como Zoo March 2009
• the Danger Board July 2009
• MN Zoo April 2009
• MN Zoo July 2009

( And a couple of videos )

House of the Dead: Overkill is $20 at amazon today:



Zero Punctuation review of Overkill

Overkill was the most fun I've had with a lightgun zombie game in a long time. Dead Alive + Planet Terror + House of the Dead.

After a stressful week I had exactly the evening I needed. Dinner from Brasa with monstersocks and typhoid followed by the Director's Cut of Watchmen at the Carmike 15 in Apple Valley (this weekend only).

I liked Watchmen when I saw the original theatrical cut (normal and Imax) but this was definitely better. A lot of the changes were very minor but they just made the whole thing flow better. typhoid hadn't seen it before and also really enjoyed it.

Pictures from CONvergence 2009 are online (and on Facebook but there are fewer there). CONvergence was good this year, but it felt like it was spread a little thin. Four days worked for the big anniversary year but I think three days works better in general. Random events of CON included Connie's Space Lounge for the black light fashion show & cabaret, tasty treats at the Deadly Delights party room, the cast of Cinematic Titanic (former MST3K crew, minus the guys who are now doing RiffTrax), watching Spooky Spooky Scary Scary, THAC0 and Fright Night at Cinema Rex (minus the chatty anime kids who hate Leprechaun and Teen Wolf), getting a chance to hang out with various folks including eriker and typhoid, etc.

monstersocks and kalmn threw a baby shower for lexiphanic at the house today. I was exiled to Inver Grove Heights where I watched Transformers. Once again, not enough robots and way too much LeBouf. It was good that they used Soundwave, but Sideswipe is a Lamborghini dammit, not a random Chevy something.

I installed the 3.0 update on my iPhone today. No problems so far and I really like the fact that the Calendar app is suddenly useful to me with the update (you can now sync with CalDav calendars like the Google calendar that monstersocks and I use for scheduling everything). The 67 page updated license agreement was a bit ridiculous (required before downloading app updates, although I guess I didn't really have to read it).

Fortunately (for my wallet) I can't get a reasonably priced new iPhone until the end of the year (2 year contract, etc.) so I'll probably just stick with my current one until the next revision.

The latest Delicious Library update was just what I've been wanting from them forever. I can finally have a list of all my media easily accessible on my phone so I'm less likely to buy something I already have (stupid thriftiness).

The late betas of Firefox 3.5 are much nicer on my laptop. Once you get used to multi-touch control it's hard to go back to something that doesn't fully support it.