The MySpace Crossposter I had hoped to use has a problem with the latest version of Wordpress (2.7), which is what I am running. Until that is fixed, I have added an RSS feed to the front page of my MySpace profile. It's on the right hand side, right above my friend's icons -- you can't miss it.

I am currently crossposting to livejournal (flack.livejournal.com) and sending updated links to Facebook as well.

I wasn't sure when I was going to do it, but since MySpace has changed their blogging interface again on me (I can no longer hit "Enter" in a blog? That's just stupid!), this seems like as good a time as any. Until further notice, this will be my last MySpace blog entry.

For those of you who don't know, the blog entries that appear here actually copies of the ones that I post on robohara.com. My website offers an RSS Feed as well as an e-mail list that you can subscribe to for e-mail notifications whenever the blog is updated.

I am looking forward to having all of my friends, readers, and commenters in the same place, and I'm really looking forward to seeing you there!

Like a whirling dervish, Susan came and went this weekend. Our friend Emily picked her up from the airport just before midnight Friday night. The kids did their best to wait up for her. Morgan gassed out around 10:30pm. Mason made it a little longer, to around 11:15pm. By then, not even the spongiest of SpongeBob episodes could keep his eyelids open. Susan came home to a home full of sleeping children.

She also came home to a mess. The house itself actually wasn't that bad but there were dishes piled in the sink and dirty clothes piled in the hall. Susan went right to work, scrubbing plates and washing clothes. I felt guilty about that and told her she didn't have to spend her weekend waiting on us, but she wanted to. I think it's one of those mother/guilt things. I get it. By Sunday all the dishes were clean, all the laundry had been done and ten more outfits (one per child per day) were set out. The house has been reset for Round II.

For the most part we had a good weekend; we had Chinese food, Mexican food (twice), and breakfast at McDonald's at least once. The kids were glad to see Mommy and Mommy was glad to see the kids.

On a sadder note, Bailey Morgan Smith, the young Yukon girl involved in a head on collision on Route 66 last week, passed away over the weekend. She was sixteen. I never met Bailey, but I worked with her mom Brenda many years ago at Pizza Hut, and Bailey's grandparents Jim and Linda Smith (who are also close friends with Susan's family) have been a regular part of our Christmas gatherings for several years. Our hearts are going out to all of them right now. It is definitely one of those things that make you stop and reevaluate your life and your relationships.

Apparently everything in my home that uses electricity held a meeting while I was at work yesterday and determined it is now time to start shocking me at every opportunity. The refrigerator door handle, the screws on the light switch plates, the fireplace, the front of the DVD player and of course the laptop. The fireplace shocked me so hard yesterday I thought it had blown my fingernail off and my whole finger throbbed for a couple of minutes. Ridiculous. I am now touching everything metal in my house first with either my thigh or my elbow (depending on its height) before grabbing it. I wonder if anyone makes static cling sheets for your house, like the size of a queen-sized bedspread.

We've been watching a lot of television this week and I've caught the commercial/trailer for a new upcoming horror film called The Undead several times. From what I gathered through the 30-second spot, a woman is being terrorized by her evil twin who died in the womb and wants to be born. In one part of the commercial the woman is talking to a doctor who tells her (quote), "One iris is a different color than the other, which happens occasionally when you are dealing with twins."

Mom? Anything you've been meaning to tell me?

Speaking of silly and bizarre, here's your comedy link for the morning. Garfield Minus Garfield is a comic site that removes Garfield from Garfield comic strips "in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb." So, there ya go. If you find it unbelievably funny, the book is available on Amazon.

Well here it is -- the longest and most thorough list of New Year's Resolutions I've made for myself in several years. I've been reading quite a bit about ways to find success when it comes to making and keeping New Year's Resolutions, and most experts agree (why are there experts in the New Year's Resolution department?) that there are three basic things you can do to increase your odds of success: put some thought into your resolutions (don't just make them up on New Year's Eve), make a plan to success (don't leave achieving your goals to chance), and make small, measurable goals (instead of big, lofty ones). I've been working on this list for two weeks now, tweaking each of these and working on paths to completing them. In a day or so this list will be moved to the top of my blog so I can view it periodically; I'll also be printing out a physical copy for occasional referral.

And now, the list.

01. Lose Weight.

This one deserves an honorary lifetime achievement award, as I'm sure it'll end up on every list of New Year's Resolutions I make for the rest of my life. Last year I proved that lapband surgery in and of itself cannot force a person to lose weight. My goal this year is to follow the suggested Weightwise eating habits as much as possible. In addition I plan on walking somewhere between three times a week and five times a week (giving myself a little leeway), and (sigh) counting calories. My ultimate goal is to lose 100 pounds before my 20-year reunion. That's pretty simple math -- that's a pound a week over the next two years. That seems achievable, doesn't it?

02. Read More.

Another repeat offender, this one. The good news is, last year I did read more. The bad news is, more was a relative term, as in 2007 I read almost nothing. In 2009 I resolve to read at least one fiction book each month; that's twelve books this year -- certainly an achievable goal, and a sharp increase from last year. Ideally those twelve books will be fiction, or at least not dry technical manuals.

03. Remodel Upstairs.

My 600 square foot upstairs media/game room is overrun with clutter. It's a non-kid-friendly, junk filled mess. This year I have several projects in mind for the room. The first is, remove the shoddy shelves I put up a couple of years ago. A bunch of two-by-fours nailed to one another isn't fooling anybody. After that, the next project will be to relocate the flat panel television from the west wall to the south wall. I know you can't visualize it but, trust me, it makes more sense over there. The television will be wall mounted and I plan on surrounding it with wall shelves, maybe to house the aforementioned Star Wars collection (or some subset thereof). A secret plan that you cannot tell Susan about is I plan to install a door in the upstairs closet that opens into the attic, where I can store more stuff. Shhh.

04. Thin Out Gaming Consoles.

There's no reason to have three Nintendo 64 consoles hooked up and ready to play. Over the past several years I have fallen into the "quantity over quality" category when it comes to videogame collecting. Yes, I have a lot of old videogames and computers, but they don't all need to be out on display all the time, especially the ones that never will get (or never have been) played. I'm not ready to sell everything, but a lot of things are about to be disconnected and stored away for the time being. I have a Sega Saturn that I've owned for five years now and have only played for fifteen minutes total.

05. Record an Album's Worth of Music.

For the purpose of this one I'm going to define an album's worth of material as ten songs, so there's that. To achieve this goal, the ten songs must be complete and posted on robohara.com. I am not making any restrictions as to the type (or quality) of the music. Recording music is something I enjoy doing and I'm not going to let the fact that I can 't sing stop me from doing it.

06. Write (at least) One Book.

I have several books brewing, none of them associated with old computers or arcade games. Part two of this goal is to pursue a traditional publishing house. I have two self-published books under my belt now; I've done that. I am a good writer who could be great with a little guidance and editing. I also suspect I could do better in the sales department with an advertising department and distributor behind me.

07. Traincor -- Get Moving.

I still dream of making Traincor (a training company based around technology-based training) a reality. Last year one of my resolutions was to get the ball rolling by teaching at least one class in the name of Traincor. That did not happen. I'm not giving up on this one just yet. I'm giving myself one more year to do something -- anything -- to get this off the ground. The resolution for this one is the same as it was last year: prepare, advertise, and publicly offer at least one training class in the name of Traincor within 2009. If I haven't done anything with Traincor by the end of 2009, I resolve to let the domain name expire and move on.

08. Organize a Monthly "Movie" Night.

Technically, it doesn't even have to be movies. It could be videogames, board games, poker, whatever. The point isn't the activity, it's to hang out with my friends more often, something I let slide in 2008. I need to come up with a set date (like the last Friday or Saturday of every month, something like that) and just throw it out there and see who shows up. I realize not everyone can come every month, but in trying to juggle schedules last year we ended up not doing it at all. That's not going to happen this year. Wow, I think I just worked out the details while typing. The last Friday of every month is now officially "Movie Night." (EDIT: Invitations for the first official movie night just went out. This one has already started rolling!)

09. Load and Begin Using Linux/Ubuntu

While Ubuntu 8.04 was good, 8.10 was even better. Since I'm not a big PC gamer, there are very few things at this point that I cannot do in Linux that I can do in Windows. Between cloud computing, DRM, and licensed-software packages, I have a bad feeling about the direction Windows is heading. I think now may be the time to make the switch and learn my way around before it's too late, and I'm too old.

10. Attend, and Participate in, Blockparty.

Blockparty is a demoparty hosted by Jason Scott at Cleveland's annual Notacon hacker convention each April. Demoparties consist of the creating and judging of computer-based demos. Not only do I plan to attend Blockparty this year, I plan to enter multiple categories. While I have no place entering some of the categories, Blockparty has several photography and music-related categories which, even if I cannot win, I can enter.

11. Go Digital.

I've been working on this one for a while now, and I expect to be done shortly. The two big focus areas of this one are: getting rid of all VHS tapes and getting rid of all cassette tapes. I am winning both of those battles and hope to have the house clean of both items shortly. That leaves music CDs, which are also slowly being ripped and copied up to the server. LPs are not really a problem at this point; I have a few, but they are more for artwork than listening now. I do have a few that need converting over but that is way down near the bottom of the list. Once the mp3s project is done I plan on rewarding myself by having an mp3-playing stereo installed in the truck.

12. Use RSS.

RSS has been around for years now and other than going, "well huh, that's neat," I've never actually used it. This is the year that changes. While typing this sentence I created an account for Google's RSS reader and punched in RSS feeds for my top 10 favorite blogs. This is going to end up saving my a ton of time checking websites for new posts and a ton of money on my car insurance (just kidding on that second one). I'd like to move from "wow, neat toy" to "hey this is saving me a lot of time" mode. My only reservation is that, knowing me, I'll soon be following 200 feeds and taking up the same amount of time reading that I was previously spending. Ah well, can't fix everything in a single year. By the way, I moved the RSS feed for robohara.com back to Feedburner (RSS Link for robohara.com). It should be working better now.

13. Relaunch the Podcast

I did six episodes of You Don't Know Flack last year -- a decent start, but well below my projected amount. I ran into some technical recording quality difficulties along the way last year that I have since have ironed out. This year's goal is lower than last year's goal but higher than last year's results; I plan on releasing one episode of You Don't Know Flack per month. That's only twelve episodes; surely I can manage that.

14. Clean out the Garage

Man I was so close this year, and Susan was actually able to park her car in the garage ... for about a week. Old habits reappeared, and soon the garage was again full of crappola and there was no way to get a car inside it. If I could get the garage cleaned out enough for that (one car to fit inside), I would be happy. This one can be pushed back a bit since it will take a while to complete, so I'm giving myself until the fall to complete this one. It's a goal, but on the back burner for now.

15. Drink ... Water

Part of the Lapband plan is to not get any calories from drinks, period. Because of the surgery I can no longer have carbonated drinks (which I no longer drink), but unfortunately I made the switch to lemonade, fruit punch, and fruity-tooty iced coffees. No more. For all of 2009, from today forward, I will only drink water or other 0-calorie drinks (ie: Crystal Light or iced-tea). No more coffees, no more lemonade, no more sugary fruit punch. I am giving myself one out on this one; I will give myself one night a month off, in case we have visitors in from out of town or, you know, I happen to have a movie night.

I also made five gaming-related resolutions.

16. Set aside two mini-gaming sessions a week.

These will be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, twice a week (Tuesday and Wednesday night, perhaps?). One of these will be used to play a modern (PS3/360/Wii) game, the other will be used to play a retro game of my choosing (16 bit or older).

17. Update Review-o-Matic at least once a week.

This one originally said "write at least two game reviews a month," but I figure one review a week isn't too much to ask when you add in movies, music, books, and everything else. Ostensibly, the games that get played in the previous resolution will most likely be reviewed.

18. Spend at least one hour a week out in the arcade.

I have an arcade that I rarely play games in. In 2009 I plan on spending at least one hour a week out in the arcade. This time can be spent either playing games, or working on them. Most likely, it'll be a combination of the two.

19. Set up a high-score tracking system out in the arcade.

A white board would work, but I'm thinking something fancier. I already tried my hand at writing one in Visual Basic and it didn't go well, so Jeff is trying it now (I may retry my hand again soon as well, just because I hate failure). I think one of the best things about arcade games is the competition that arises from trying to break high scores, most of which are lost when the machines are powered off.

20. Set up a game night.

This one is actually a cop-out. I had originally written a long diatribe about how I own all these arcade games and videogames and never play them with anyone, but after I wrote all that I wrote resolution number 8 ("Movie Night") and so I think this resolution will get rolled up into that one. For the first month we'll watch movies; next month, we'll play games. Two birds (er, resolutions) with one stone, so to speak.

Whew! A pretty meager list, really -- write a book, record an album, and throw stuff away all while losing weight. Sounds reasonable to me. Let's get started!

My alarm didn't go off this morning. When I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock it said 7:37. My plan this week was to wake up around 6am, take a shower and be dressed by 6:30am, get the kids up and around and dressed and leave the house by 7am.

We're late.

My first thought was, "Gotta go wake the kids up." I ran out to the living room and ... there they were. Mason was playing his Nintendo DS while Morgan was wearing her ballerina tutu and watching television.

"How come nobody woke me up?" I asked. "I dunno," they said. I should jot today's date down. This is the first time in ... well, since my kids have been alive, that they haven't immediately come into my bedroom and woke everybody up. Little buggers.

We left the house at 7:55am. That means in 18 minutes, I:

- Fixed my hair, slapped on some deodorant.
- Got dressed.
- Got two kids dressed.
- Wet and combed Morgan's hair.
- Wet and re-fixed Mason's hair.
- Came up with an excuse as to why the Tooth Fairy left quarters instead of dollar bills last night.*
- Finished packing Mason's lunch.
- Scraped ice off a windshield.

*Mason lost a tooth last night. By all accounts, it appears he accidentally swallowed it. We left what appeared to be a small piece of the tooth in the official Tooth Fairy Bag (c) under Mason's pillow. Unfortunately the Tooth Fairy did not have any one-dollar bills and instead left eight quarters, which Mason seemed okay with.

In completely unrelated news, earlier this week I watched Bam Margera's latest disaster, Bam Margera Presents: Where the !@$ is Santa (link to my review). It was so bad that I won't waste your time here with a review. If you really want to read about how bad it was, click the above link to find out.

As I continue hammering out my 2009 resolutions, one thing I cannot decide is what to do with my Star Wars collection.

I grew up loving Star Wars. In 1982, my bedroom looked like this:



The vast majority of my Star Wars action figures and spaceships survived my childhood and ended up boxed up and packed away. I've lugged them from house to house, occasionally unpacking and displaying them but, for the most part, just storing them. In 1995 when the original films were re-released, Star Wars toys flooded stores and I bought everything I could get my hands on. By the time Susan and I had moved back to Yukon from Spokane, my computer room looked like this:







My walls were covered with action figures and my closet was full of toys. And to be honest, I would say these pictures represent somewhere around 20% of my collection. The collection didn't stop with the toys -- it spread out to include everything from pencils, dishes, and drinking glasses to replica lightsabers and other goofy items. At one point I even had half a dozen or so of these guys:



So, what happened? The collection outgrew its room and, more or less, our house. There's no single room in our house that I can display my collection in. When Mason was born, the vast majority of the collection was boxed up and put out in the garage as storage.

And yet, it grows. Just this year for Christmas I got over a dozen Star Wars-related items. I'm not complaining -- I love the items, but I'm simply out of space to put it all.

So if you were me, what would you do? I've considered selling it but at this point I would get pennies on the dollar (if that). Conservatively speaking I probably have somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars worth of Star Wars toys sitting around and I would do good to get a thousand for it all -- there's simply no market for big collections right now. Without turning the house into some ghetto-looking toy-nut shop I don't know how to display it all at this point, and yet, no one is getting any enjoyment out of it sitting out in the garage at this point.

If you've got any suggestions, I'm all ears. Like Yoda.

The kids and I just got back from dropping Susan off at the airport. She'll be in Florida this week, flying home over the weekend, and flying back out Sunday for a second week in Florida. The kids each have five days worth of clothes laid out for this week. Mason has to take his lunch on Tuesday (it's "stew day"). Other than that, everything should be fairly routine. Morgan was fine with Mommy going on a trip until we arrived at the airport and she realized she wasn't going. It was a rough ride home but she's over it now, at least for tonight.

I don't know if Susan knows this or not, but the minute she leaves town on one of her trips the first thing I do is get the biggest trash can I can find and put it smack dab in the middle of the living room. Recently I picked up ten 22-gallon trash cans from an auction (don't ask; in all fairness, five of them are Jeff's ...), so the minute the kids and I got back from the airport I found the Hefty Hefty Hefty trash liners, installed one in one of the new trash cans, and put the trash can in front of the fireplace. When it comes to cleaning I subscribe to the theory of "least amount of steps," so this system works out well. I may pull a clothes hamper out here and put it on the fireplace too.

Tomorrow is Mason's first day of school with the cast on his arm. The cast is on his writing arm which essentially prevents him from writing. We'll see how that goes. Also, he cannot tie his shoes or button/zip his pants by himself. He did okay playing Rock Band the other night with the cast on, so I suspect "where there's a will, there's a way." He'll get through the day, somehow.

I am putting the finishing touches on my 2009 Resolutions and I'll be darned if they don't look a lot like my 2008 Resolutions. I know that one of the ways to success is to not just make resolutions, but determine your path to success, so I am trying to incorporate that into this year's plan. In other words, I'm not just saying, "lose weight." I'm saying, "lose weight by exercising 3-5 times a week" -- stuff like that. One trap I always seem to fall into is the technology one -- like the time I couldn't start cleaning the garage until I set up a laptop capable of streaming mp3s via wifi from the server out there, or the time I couldn't start walking for exercise until I bought a better mp3 player. One of my resolutions is to "read more books," but most of the books I've been getting lately are eBooks, and I find I don't like reading while sitting at a desk. I pre-ordered a Pandora (a new hand held device) last October and had hoped it would be here by now, but the pre-orders have all been cancelled and the unit has been delayed. One of the things I was looking forward to using this device for was reading eBooks on the go (in the car, in bed, etc.) If the units don't materialize soon I may break down and buy one of those mini-netbook/sub-notebooks for that purpose instead. The prices are comparable (~$300) and I was really looking forward to the Pandora, but ... well, we'll see.

For Christmas this year I got a couple of $50 Best Buy gift certificates, a $50 GameStop gift certificate, and a $25 one for Hastings. Yesterday Mason and I went on a citywide mini-shopping spree. We ended up buying two more Wiimotes for the Wii (we've only had two all this time), a four-Wiimote charging station (those AA batteries were starting to get expensive), and two Wii steering wheels. I rounded out one of the cards with two stickers -- one that says "I {heart} Metal" (for Mason's guitar) and one that says "I {heart} Pirates"" for ... something. I have one card left and I plan on picking up another Xbox 360 controller (I only have one) this week. Mason has been having a good time with the Wii steering wheels. He and Morgan are playing Mario Kart Wii right now, in fact.

Recently I discovered the crack addition that is Facebook. It's MySpace, but with less spam and less bling, and more networking and more real time feedback. I've spent the past week or so uploading photos, reconnecting with old friends and meeting some new ones. Very fun, very addictive. I figured out how to send my blog entries here via RSS to Facebook so there's another place my drivel will appear. Icing the Internet cake with my crap, one site at a time.

About an hour into The Tale of Despereaux (pronounced Dess-per-Row) I was already brainstorming headlines for this review. "Despereaux-te to Leave" was one I came up with. "The Tale of Desper-No" was another one. I originally considered "Desper-eaux-no" before settling on "The Fail of Despereaux," which I decided was wittier, funnier, and more thought provoking than anything contained within the movie itself.

Warning: this review deliberately contains spoilers in an attempt to keep you from paying money to see it.

The Tale of Despereaux tells not one tale but (at least) three intersecting ones. The film begins by introducing us to Roscuro the Rat (Dustin Hoffman) as he arrives in the Kingdom of Dor (which coincidentally rhymes with "bore"). Dor revolves around soup, and one day each year Andre (the king's chef) prepares an irresistible soup for everyone in the entire kingdom. Roscuro is so drawn to the soup's wonderful aroma that he heads directly to the kitchen. (At this point it was hard to ignore the similarities to Pixar's 2007 film "Ratatouille," a film about a rat that loved soup.) While trying to get a better whiff of the soup's mesmerizing aroma, Roscuro slips and falls into the soup. The queen, convinced she has just taken a sip of soup from a bowl containing a rat, has a heart attack and dies. As a result, the King bans both rats and soup from the kingdom. The King retreats to his room where he plays sad songs on the guitar all day, color disappears from the kingdom, and it never rains.

If this sounds weird, just wait -- we're just ramping up here. Roscuro ends up in Ratworld, a place where rats live deep below the city. Also below the city but not near Ratworld is Mouseworld, where mice live. In Mouseworld we meet Despereaux (Matthew Broderick), a young mouse with big ears who refuses to conform to the rules of Mouseworld. He sets off mouse traps for fun, refuses to cower and hide, and wants to (gasp) read books instead of eat them. When Despereaux commits the cardinal sin of talking to a human, he is ultimately banished to a dark hole (which leads to Ratworld).

The story goes on and on. Eventually Roscuro the Rat and Despereaux the Mouse team up to try and save the Kingdom of Dor from its soupless funk. At some point along the way Roscuro turns bad, then good, then bad, then good again, for reasons neither my wife nor myself could ever figure out. When Mason asked if Roscuro was a good guy or a bad guy, all I could say was, "Hell if I know!"

Thrown in the middle of this whole retarded mess is a subplot involving a servant girl (Miggery Sow, played by Tracy Ullman) with a hearing problem who gets duped by Roscuro to kidnap the princess. Through a series of flashbacks we learn that the servant girl with the unique birthmark (don't they always have one?) was given up for adoption and you can bet she'll find her father before the end of the film. What this had to do with anything, I have no idea.

Being an animated film for children one can assume there will be a happy ending, but by the time we got to it nobody in the theater cared. I seriously did not care if anybody in the film lived or died -- in fact, I was secretly hoping they would all die so that the film would end. The film's run time of 100 minutes is deceiving and I felt like they may have left a zero off the end. Despereaux is the only film my kids have asked -- no, begged -- to leave. Morgan finally quit begging 2/3 the way through the film. She was lucky; she fell asleep.

Modern animated films must walk a fine line between entertaining both kids and adults, but The Tale of Despereaux failed to entertain either demographic. After the movie was over I asked Morgan (age 3 1/2) what her favorite part was. She said, "the popcorn." Mason (age 7) claimed to enjoy the film, but when I asked him what it was about he said he had no idea. (To be fair, neither did I.) I also had to look up every single character's name online while writing this review; names like Miggery Sow, Roscuro, and Botticelli are tough to remember and/or spell. The one thing you will remember are the film's morals. Not only do you get beaten over the head with them, but just in case you miss one, they are repeatedly reiterated by the narrator (Sigourney Weaver).

About the only thing this film has going for it is its beautiful animation, but this is 2009 -- I expect beautiful animation. Unfortunately, I also expect to be entertained, and in that respect Despereaux was a failure. Not only would I not recommend seeing this in the theater -- I wouldn't recommend renting it or even downloading it for free.

I hope everybody had a safe and enjoyable New Year's Eve!

Both Jeff and Andy and their families stopped by the house to helped us bring in the new year. There were lots of snacks and fun and (or course) games. Click on the picture of Sawyer Willrath below to see more pictures from New Year's Eve.