Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Merry Christmas to all!  We passed a very quiet Christmas Day.  We spread our gift opening over three days. 

We opened the presents from my in-laws on the twenty-third.  The kids had fun playing with their toys that day and watching WALL-E.  We really enjoyed it in theatre and I regretted not having picked it up for Christmas so I was thrilled when we opened the presents and saw it.

Christmas Eve we went to my parents’.  We opened presents and ate snacks.  It was a fun, relaxed afternoon.  The kids were absolutely wired before bed and it took a long time to get to sleep. I set up an alarm at the top of the stairs to discourage anyone from heading down too early. 

We opened the family gifts Christmas morning.  I thought the kids would be up at five again but they didn’t get up till seven or so.  They were very happy with their gifts.  Do not buy MEGA-Bloks - they do not hold together well at all.  It’s definitely worth paying the little bit extra for Lego.  I got a Discworld book and a couple of Cook’s Illustrated Magazines to read.  The kids played peacefully till evening. 

Matthew Rossi asks, Do you care about PvP anymore?  He describes how he went from doing some PvP in classic WoW, less in Burning Crusade to not doing any in Wrath.  I’ve found that as I played Warcraft more I PvPed less.  The last time I PvPed was when my warlock hit 60 and I tried to do the AV quests for XP.  My kids will occasionally take one of my toons and go to a battleground but that’s the only time you’d have seen my toons there in the last few months. 

I don’t know what could be done to make PvP more interesting.  A standard set of PvP gear so that it’s skill that matters, not twinking, might help.  I’d still get owned, but at least I’d feel as though I had the possibility of doing something.  Alternately, I like the idea of gear brackets of some kind - let those with full arena gear beat on each other instead of my PvE geared toons. 

There may not be any point in try to get me interested in PvP again though.  My preference is for PvE play.  The changes Blizzard has made in PvP may simply be catering to those who prefer PvP.  I can live with the fact that a portion of the game has no appeal to me.  I’ll play the parts I enjoy and ignore the bits I don’t.

This is currently my daughter’s favorite video.  I’m doing my best to ensure that my kids get exposed to a random selection of videos from the internet.  Nothing like trying to explain lyrics and symbolism to broaden my horizons. 

This SuperSculpey Firm as described on Cool Tools looks like something that would be fun for the kids. Maybe for Christmas?

This CrockPot Baked Oatmeal Recipe looks like something I could make and send with the kids for lunches.

Well, my long-anticipated vacation is now over. 

There seems to be something about taking a vacation that causes big chunks of money to disappear.  I took Thursday off, and my motherboard decided to die Thursday night and take the CPU with it.  I was trying out an exercise ball as a chair and I managed to roll it into a corner of my open computer case.  BOOM!  That’s the second giant ball I’ve managed to run into a sharp corner while sitting on it.  One of my minor projects was replacing the toilet seat and I managed to crack the toilet bowl. That required a late evening purchase of a new toilet. My dad kept asking me when I could come back in to work to finish off some reports and I lost a day and a half of vacation to coming in and doing them.  By this point I was ready to pull the blankets over my head and not touch anything for the rest of my vacation.  Fortunately the rest of it went much more smoothly.

We went out for lunch with some friends on Monday, which was a lot of fun.  We talked about WoW and other things and had a fine time.  I was able to borrow my computer from work, so apart from having to install Wrath three times, my playtime wasn’t hugely affected.  By the way, as Justin reminded me, you don’t need to do the whole install if you can access a previous install - just copy the files over and create your own shortcuts.  Jaimie and I managed to get the toilet replaced with a minimum of bother.  I figured out the cause of my Wrath malaise and I’m having a fun time leveling again.  Getting the kids out the door and being able to stay home myself was satisfying.  It wasn’t quite as cheap of a holiday as I had hoped, but it was still fun.

Jaimie and Faith went and waited in line at the 24 hour Walmart to pick up Wrath of the Lich King.  They got there about 2 hours ahead of time and were fifth and sixth in line.  The guy just ahead of Jaimie decided not to get a collector’s edition, so she managed to get it!  Jaimie got back around 1:30 AM and we proceeded to install the game and the patches.  We ran two of our toons to Northrend and called it a night.  The kids had a great time flipping through the art book and the card game this morning.  I’m looking forward to exploring Northrend. 

The Ferrett pointed out this article on two very different attitudes about sex currently active in the United States: Red Sex, Blue Sex. This is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Sadly, I have not reached any profound conclusions. I’ve already started telling my kids about sex via The Cartoon Guide to Sex and not dodging the issue when it comes up. I’ve made sure to emphasize that having a child is a huge responsibility and that contraceptives are a necessary option if you’re not up raising a child yet. I’ve also made sure that they know that contraceptives can fail. The reason that I tell them all this resonates with what’s described as a liberal attitude in the article - I want my kids to live the lives they choose, not fall into child-rearing by default and come to resent it later.

I don’t know about the educational value of these 4 Flash Games to Help Educate Your Kids, but they might be fun. I’ll point my kids to the sites and see what they think.

Most evenings when I get home, I do a daily maintenance routine in Warcraft.  First I log onto my bank alt, see what’s sold, and scan the auction house for bargains.  If I’m lucky I’ll have passed another goalpost money-wise.  Then I log into my enchanter, disenchant the stuff my bank alt has sent, mail the resulting mats back, and check the daily fishing quest.  If it’s one I can do I’ll do it on her and my paladin to skill up their fishing and pick up some extra fish for buff food.  Then it’s on to my warrior for my daily transmute.  If it was one of the tougher fishing quests, I may go do it on him.  Then it’s on to my shaman to prospect any ores that my bank alt may have found.  Finally I log back into my bank alt and put the enchanting mats and gems up for sale.  By the time I finish that, it’s about time for me to log off to help the kids with homework.  I’ll be back on to play in an hour or two. 

The whole routine takes me about an hour.  Why do I do it?  It’s easy money.  I’m nowhere near the gold cap, but I’ve had no problem buying epic mounts for my level 70 toons.  It’s easy to interrupt.  It really doesn’t matter if I walk away from my computer for 15 minutes in the middle of a transmute.  If I tried that in the middle of a run it wouldn’t go so well.  This part of my evening is prone to interruptions anyway, so I may as well plan for them. 

A good chunk of it is just a personality thing.  I like to get the dull stuff out of the way first so that I can enjoy the good stuff guilt free.  Doing this little maintenance routine is enough fun that I get a little break between work and starting housework.  At the same time, it’s dull enough that I’d rather not be doing it during my prime playing time.  Taking care of routine stuff this way works for me.

  Do you have any routines you follow in WoW?

I bought Spore when it came out.  I’ve played it but it was rather dull.  My five year old plays it a a lot because he likes to make new critters.  The DRM is very obnoxious.  It’s really annoying - I’m going to be installing this on the kids’ computer (which means I’ll be wiping and reinstalling the system every three to six months).  This means that my legal copy will stop working in less than a year, while if I get a cracked copy it’ll keep on working.  The legal copy is a downgraded version of a pirated copy.  Sigh. 

Geekdad has a post on how Teaching Kids to Roleplay is Only Natural. I haven’t had much luck playing games with my kids. Either the games are too simple and I get bored or the the games are too complex and they get frustrated. Reason # 4,991 why I’m a bad parent.

Get Rich Slowly had guest post a while back on How to Inoculate Your Children Against Advertising. I am trying some of these ideas. I know that advertising definitely affects our kids.

I’ve found that the best way of turning them down when they ask for something that they’ve seen advertised is to say “Sure!”. Then I make an estimate of the product’s price and tell them that when they’ve done their chores X days in a row they’ll have the money to buy it. Oddly enough that dampens their insistence that they’ll die without it.

I find that a similar strategy works decently to curb my own impulse spending. If I start pricing out things as “I will have to work Y hours extra to have this”, my feeling that I’ll simply die without the latest widget diminishes greatly. The biggest problem with this approach is that I actually have the money so if I don’t stop and think I can spend it foolishly before making the calculation.

I would like to figure out a better way of getting good lunches for my kids.  At the moment, lunches consist of a pizza pop, juice, crackers or a granola bar, and canned fruit or an apple.  I’m not too thrilled about the pizza pop but I got sick of throwing out sandwiches with one bite taken out of them day after day.  I know they’ll eat the pizza pop since it’s a treat. 

I’d like to set things up so that they’re eating less processed stuff but I’m not sure how to do it in such a way that they’ll actually eat what is served.  Throw in random school rules due to allergies, microwave availability, and the phase of the moon and it gets complicated.  One possibility would be to get something like a Laptop Lunchbox and figure out a couple of options for each of the compartments.  My biggest criteria is that I don’t want to spend a lot of prep time on the lunches - maybe 15 minutes prep total for the three lunches.  Anyone have any good sites/recipe books/suggestions?

Cutest. Thing. Ever. I can’t wait to get one of these. The kids will squee.

My vacations for the last sevenish years have been family-centric.  If we weren’t driving somewhere to visit relatives, we were visiting nearby relatives.  The stress from either makes coming back to work to make maps and write reports seem pleasant. 

I’ve decided to take a week off when Wrath comes out.  This will be a vacation for me.

• No Kids: Unless Wrath comes out over the Christmas holidays the kids will be in school so I won’t have to be responsible for them for about 8 hours a day. 
• Cheap: It’s a cheap vacation - once I buy Wrath it won’t cost me more than my normal living expenses. 
• Antisocial: It’s very antisocial.  This is probably the most appealing part for me.  I need time away from people and I haven’t had any extended periods of that for a long time.   Even if I do end up playing with friends online, it’s not the same as trying to make small talk with Aunt Suzie while keeping the kids from destroying her immaculate house. 
• Fun: It’ll be fun.  Tromping around Northrend and knowing that I’m one of the first people to see this live appeals to me. 

Now all I need is a solid release date and a pre-order of the Collector’s Edition…

It looks like One Laptop Per Child’s Give One Get One program is coming back.  I might look at getting one of these for my kids.  The biggest factor will be the timing of the offer.  If it doesn’t happen while I have some discretionary income, I’ll have to wait for the next time it comes around. 

I constantly struggle with trying to keep our house clean.  I have managed to form a few good cleaning habits, but there is a long, long way to go.  The key that I seem to be missing is doing a bit of housework every day rather than trying to do it in bursts. 

I tried FlyLady’s method for about 10 days, but I always felt that I was intruding on a ladies-only event.  Zen Habits had a post on Editing Your Rooms that looks to have some possibilities. 

Frankly, my big hope right now it that with the kids going back to school and getting back into a regular routine I’ll be able to get into a routine of cleaning house again.

While shopping for school supplies for the kids I noticed a subnotebook that looked as though it would function well as an ebook reader.  The price is comparable to that of an Amazon Kindle or a PDA and it looks like it would offer a lot more utility.  Download Squad talked about using one of these coupled with zero-footprint applications as a way of preserving privacy, particularly if you have to cross the US border.  It’s definitely worth checking into. 

Massively linked to a video preview of Free Realms.  It looks to have more to do and see than Club Penguin.  I hope that there’s enough of a game there to make things interesting.  If the system requirements are fairly low, it might be fun to play with the kids.  Eurogamer had another preview that really made it sound appealing I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.