Windows Vista Launch - 38 Days until move

So Today is the big day for the launch of Windows Vitsa. I have just read a little bit about this now since a few people around me have been asking me about it. Apparently I have a reputation for a guy that keeps up on his computer geeky news. My mother is even thinking about getting a computer and she was reading some offers out of the paper for new PCs all with windows Vista.

So... what is my opinion on this?

1) Everyone using a PC will eventually have to migrate. This is just a fact of life. Windows on 80% of all PCs, combined with MS moving to a new version, means most people will have no choice. That however does NOT mean you should rush out and buy Vista now. I am not saying anything innovative here, but this is what I think based on what I have read so far.

2) WAIT!!! The average piece of computer code has one error every 100 lines or so. Windows Vista contains over 3.5 MILLION lines of code. That translates into a lot of errors, which translates into a lot of problems. To be fair, MS has been testing this for years now to get out as many bugs as they can, but it is a safe bet that you will be reading about Vista problems for the first months.... until they release the inevitable....

3) SERVICE PACK! This will contain fixes for many of the problems that pop up. Most people who went on to Windows XP found that it was not really that good until the SECOND service pack was released. There will be a Vista SP1. Wait for it, there is no advantage to being an early adopter because...

4) WINDOWS VISTA RUNS SLOWER THAN XP ON CURRENT HW. All I have read indicates that most current generation HW will have a slow down in performance running premium vista, due to all the fancy schmancy graphical eye candy thrown in. Intel, AMD and Nvidia are all releasing fairly major hardware changes in the next year, quad-core 45NM processors, new graphics architecture... all of this new stuff will be much better for Vista, but it could be a year before it is optimized and affordable.

5) Wait and see what Apple offers with:For me, the main reason to stay with Windows as an OS was for playing games. I have not really had so much time for gaming lately and my computer is used far more for internet, photo, and some video conversion. All of these things can be done as well or better on a Mac. I am very very seriously considering a Mac for my next computer. I think that Apple will be having some more detail on OS X 10.5 in their event on Feb 20, could influence me there. I would also like to wait for the Mac lineup to switch over to the new intel chips based on the 45NM tech when it comes out. This may help with the crazy operating temperatures. I don't want a laptop that scars me.

So, those are my thoughts. The takeaway message for this is:

1) If you want a PC, you will eventually have to get Vista, but WAIT!!!
2) Consider a Mac unless you are interested in gaming, but WAIT!!!

overall, now is not the ideal time for a new computer, ask me in 6 months.

The Clean Machine - 39 Days until move

Normally, Sunday is cleaning day in the house, and one of my jobs is the vacuuming of the floors. Liam was watching me and wanted to join in the fun, so he grabbed his little noise making roller thing and followed me around "vacuuming"

This was not enough for the little man though, he really wanted to try out the big machine, so I put it on the floor to see what he would do with it. It was a bit too heavy for him, but he did give it a big try. Later on I let him hold the handle while I moved it around. This was very fun for him. I had to get back to the cleaning though, so I went on vacuuming and Liam disappeared for a bit. Then I heard some banging around and Liam emerged from the closet dragging the broom behind him. He proceeded to walk around behind me sweeping up. It is funny mainly because I don't really use the broom, I don't know where he picked up the knowledge of sweeping. Maybe Mummy is putting him to work through the week when I am not there?

Snowy Playground - 40 Days until move

One of the highlights of the new neighborhood that we will live in is the giant adventure playground just down the street. There are massive, very obviously dangerous apparatus that Liam will be ably to enjoy. I know this place would have been heaven for me as a kid. Look at this 2 story web of climbing next to the always popular tire and post fun station:

Then we have the snowy-slick ramp and yet more tire and post constructions...

Then we have the fenced in basketball/small soccer area. I plan to play a little hoops here myself if there is an available time. It looks fun.

Of course, the place was devoid of children on Saturday since there was a snow explosion here and they were all one street over tobogganing on the big hill.

Finally, here is the snowy castle "Schloss Hohenentringen" that overlooks our street. There is a nice beer garden there overlooking the town that we plan to visit in spring. I have a colleague who has been and it is apparently nice. Our street is named after this castle since we get the nice view of it, Hohenentringerstrasse. Here is their web page...

Schloss Hohenentringen

First Snow - 43 Days until move

I guess it is really Liam's second snow, but during the last one he was only six months old and not able to go out and play around. This year is the first time he can walk and enjoy some of the fun stuff.

Aunt Doris bought him a snow suit for Christmas and we were beginning to think that he would never get to use it. It has not been below zero all winter until now, but the snow pretty much exploded down on us since then... Either my mother or my sister sent him the matching Toronto Maple Leafs hat and mittens.
Once he got outside he seemed very confused. This was the same front walk that he is used to seeing every day, but it looked so different he really did not know what to make of it.
Then we found the first big pile of snow where I had shoveled the walk. He was pretty interested and clearly needed to investigate things.
After a few moments he got over the strangeness of it and seemed to like it. He seemed annoyed that the snow stuck to his boots and he could not shake it off. We borrowed a sled and Claudia took him out for a little pull around in it. He liked it, but he had a bit of a hard time staying stitting up and stable when the sled bounced around too much. He is still a little guy after all.

Hammering action - 44 Days until the move

One of Liam's Christmas toys was a "Hammerbank" this is a little bench with wooden pegs in it that you hammer on. My first thought was of course why would you give a 1 year old a hammer? Everything in our house will become a hammer target! He will learn at this young age the joys of the "Path of Destruction."

Note the speed blur on his arm as he pounds away with great enthusiasm:
My worries are so far for nothing. So far Liam has not smashed anything around the house with his new hammer. From time to time we have to stop him from hitting things he should not, but generally he restricts the pounding to the pegs. He actually plays more often without the hammer, just pulling out the pegs with this hands, then throwing them at me and laughing.

The "throw stuff at daddy" game is one of his favorites.

All that hammering is thirsty work:The other day, there was a comment that I did not look happy in the mountie photo... Well, I think this is probably because I was bored. As I recall, we were at the "musical ride" and that was really for my sister's benefit. She was the horse fanatic, not me. Once I had seen about ten minutes of the horses and the mountie costumes, I had enough. I likely wanted to get back to comic books and star wars toys.

Back from the big trip - 45 Days until move

Well Frankfurt went well, I did not actually go to Paperworld this year as I was in review meetings from 10am to 6 pm. Hooray for reviews.

We have snow chaos here today. It started snowing at 6pm last night and it is still going now, 10am the next day.

In the spirit of patriotism, here is me with a mountie.

Off to Frankfurt - 46 Days until move

I am doing a post this evening since I am off traveling all day tomorrow. I am off to the fun and greatness that is PAPERWORLD!"Paperworld Frankfurt - The World of Office and Paper Products" This is the Premier office paper trade show IN THE WHOLE WORLD! That is right, it is just as exciting as you may think it to be.

My purpose in going here is to attend a meeting with some big fish from HP in California, where I shall present the European performance for 2006 and what the outlook for 2007 currently looks like. I know, you all think that my job sounds movie-star glamorous, and I must admit, it is just like it sounds.

I will be spending some time in the morning reviewing large format paper, then in the afternoon.... small format paper. Small format is the sexy one, it has the photographic paper.

Some days ago, I mentioned that I had a stuffed jawa of the Star Wars Variety as a kid. I thought it would be funny to look and see if I could find one on eBay to give to Liam so he could start his Science Fiction fandom at a very young age. There is no way around it, I will be forcing robots on him at every opportunity.

Anyway, on eBay, the Jawa I so dearly loved apparently goes for around $600. That is US dollars, not pesos, lira, or some other more reasonable rate of currency to go with that price for a stuffed toy. I am pretty sure that mine is still in Mum's closet, so it better be in pristine condition. I will need it to fund my retirement.

Below is a photo of me holding Mr. Jawa.

House Update - 47 days until move

So, the concrete is poured in the floors now, and it is looking more and more like a house that can be lived in. Still some ways to go.

Here you can see the living room, and the doors opening onto the balcony.
Next, here is where the kitchen will go:
Here is Claudia standing next to the "Puffer" which is some component of our heating system. I would say she looks extra excited about the heating.

Finally, here is Liam listening to my headphones this morning. He liked the music, I think it was Jenny Lewis at this point.

Windy Day

Apparently we had winds of 120kph up to 200kph yesterday. Did not look all that horrible to me, just seemed a bit breezy. Apparently there were even some deaths related to this windy storm. The trains stopped running at 6pm and most flights around Germany were grounded. There was even email at work telling people to go home if they wanted.

Lucky for me, I was working from home anyway. I thought it would be fun to try out time lapse photography and make a little clip of the wind blowing the clouds quickly past our window.

This was one photo every 8 seconds, look at those clouds move!

The Spooky Church

I was driving home from the computer store the other day just as the sun was starting to go down. I was passing Wurmlingen at the time, which is the home of a pilgrimage church.

Anyway, I thought it looked spooky and I had my camera in my pocket, so I took a picture out of the car window while I was sitting at a traffic light.


I don't really have much else to say today.... so here is a picture of me from around 1976 or so dressed as Humpty Dumpty. Enjoy the beautiful styles and colours of 1970s Orangeville. Note the sweet looking carpet, and the green and black glass bowl on the side table behind me.

In fact, I know that my mother still has this table. It has been the hall table of the Anderson Family for at LEAST 30 years now. I believe that one drawer handle broke around 1985 or so, and has been repaired numerous times over the years.

I think that my Mum (assuming it was her) made a fine choice of costume for me here too. I remember those fine Hallowe'ens of old, when we all put on our ultra-flammable plastic jumpsuits printed with spacemen and monsters...
Oh yeah, my sister was a tiger that year. Sweet curtains too.

Quick Question

Can everyone see the images in the right sidebar with the movie and book section?

These seem to be working intermittantly...

Bear Patrol

The other day, Liam wandered off and the apartment grew quiet. This is normally a time when we should get nervous that he is up to something. Then we started to hear a lot of banging around noises and lots of shuffling hub-bub from his room. Finally we heard a little voice going "oompa, oompa." The name of his favorite bear is Oompa Loompa, which is also one of the only words he can say...

So I went into his room and saw that he had dragged out the cart from behind his bed, and put the bear in it to push around...Like any good game, this does not stay limited to his room. Oompa Loomp clearly would have to go on a tour of the whole apartment.

This little game went on for about 30 minutes. Just Liam pushing around this cart over and over and over again. From time to time he would stop to pick up some more bears or take some out, but Oompa was always in there as the head of the bears.

I am actually pretty happy that he picked this bear as his favorite, it is a pretty cute bear. I think that it is one my mother gave him. Most of the bears in his room are quite nice, but there are one or two that I think are pretty ugly looking and I would not really like to see them carried all over the place. I have heard stories from friends with kids that are annoyed when their kid chooses the rattiest most gaudily coloured monstrosity from the pile of toys and won't go anyplace without it.

Oompa Loompa is a nice bear and I am happy to bring him along on any adventures we have. Liam's other favorite "bring along" toys are some trucks and buckets. All OK by me.

One more photo of the proud boy out on bear patrol.

So lucky to have this guy around...

My Father-in-law Franz is about the most handy guy that I have ever known. It is really great to have someone around who knows how to fix and build things. I am not too bad as far as the electronic devices are concerned, but I am not so good with a hammer.

If we have any sort of home repair problem, Franz is always the guy we call right away for the tip on what needs to be done.

Even better, he is really great at building things. He has made many many shelves, tables, and other handy objects for around his kid´s homes, but his big passion is building nativity scenes for Christmas. He has also made a few toys for Liam that are pretty amazing. Here he is putting the finishing touches on a train for him:Here is the finished train, which Liam loves to pull around the apartment. There are actually six cars to the train in all, but Liam cannot quite manage to pull around more than a couple at a time. It is of particular note that the crane here is fully functioning. It also extends and rotates on the car.
Here is the nativity that he made for us a couple of years ago, full working lights and an electric bell that you ring on Christmas eve. It is pretty darn impressive if you ask me. This is a picture we took before it was painted, it is a nice dark brown now.

Finally, here is the BIG nativity that is in their house at Christmas. For a sense of scale, you can see my camera tripod peeking out the back on the left hand side of the image. This is a very very large construction, there are two different bells in the top, many lights and it houses a very large collection of figures. Even though Franz's hand working skills dwarf my own, I bet he can't build a website... I have at least one minor skill that is useful in the year 2007.

Finally, the Felix Clock Arrived!

Hooray! My sister's Christmas gift finally arrived, so I can write about it on here.

Since I could not think of anything sensible that she would actually want or need, I decided to get her a gift that would fall into the "bunch of strange crap" category.

Someplace, sometime, I remembered seeing one of these clocks that looked like Felix the cat, with a tail for the pendulum and eyes that looked back and forth on every tick. With that in mind, and the glory of the internet, it did not take long to find out that they still make them. I had no idea if my sister ever wanted one of these or even thought it would be interesting, but I did not care! It was an unusual gift and certainly one that would be remembered in years to come. Even if she thought it was the worst thing ever, she would have the story to tell people about the horrible clock I gave her for Christmas.

Now my sister is the proud owner of a spooky clock, constantly looking around the room. I know at the very least that my nephew Adam thinks it is cool, so I know I have the ability to amuse a four year old.

I think I like the idea of giving gifts that are either really great or really crap. I have given lots of gifts over the years that fall into that grey area in the middle, and there is certainly a place to enjoy things like a decent book or DVD... But I think I would rather give gifts that are remembered, even if they are remembered as being the most horrible thing ever.

Oh, as an aside, I think this is an AWESOME clock.

Music Man

Liam's Christmas gift from his Aunt Shona was a musical learning tree thingamajig. Basically, it is a plastic tree with a hole in the top and many buttons and stuff on it. There are 5 different coloured balls, and depending on which ball is placed in the hole on top, the buttons do different things. The red ball makes the buttons say numbers, the orange does the alphabet and so on. My personal favorite is the blue ball, since it makes music. It is far easier to listen to Liam making the same little songs over and over than to hear a little voice yelling out the alphabet over and over.

At first he was crazy for this tree, to the point of carrying it all over the house to be at his side as needed. Now he has calmed down and the toy has entered the regular rotation. He still plays with it quite a lot, but he no longer lugs it from room to room.

My favorite button on this tree is the one marked volume. I only wish that it has some lower settings.

In my wonderful ongoing quest to put more things on the page, I have just added two more items to the sidebar. There is now "what I am reading" and "what film did I last watch." Hopefully I will be able to figure out how to add some editorial comments to those. I know the world hangs on my opinion when it comes to film and books. (looks like this is not working properly yet, but I will figure it out.)

Apology to Ryan the non-lazy guy

I looked back at the post and comments called "Festival of Ryan" last night and I think that anyone reading this who does not know him may get the impression that he is some sort of lay about.

This is absolutely not the case. Ryan is generally a very active, helpful guy. Just look here and you can see how he helped to prepare the dinner on new years eve: By his own admission, Ryan does not cook much, the food preparation in the Jones house falls squarely upon the shoulders of The Doris. However, in this instance, the ladies were occupied with baby amusement tasks and it fell to the men of the house to make dinner. Clearly it was mans work when you see the giant slabs of beef on the table, steak is man's work.

Ryan did a fine job with his share of the work, sadly it tired him out so much that he had to spend a lot of the evening recovering in a nice lie down on the couch:

Trying a new domain name

As of now, you can also use www.fraseringermany.com as the address for the web page.

Don't worry if you still use the old one, fraseringermany.blgospot.com, it will still work. Traffic from the old name will be redirected to this one.

Just giving it a try.

Playing around with some features

So I am just playing around with some formatting and scripts to add to the page, you may notice a few things popping up and then disappearing if I don't like them.

I just added the possibility for people to sign up so that they receive email notification of any new posts to the site. (NOTE That I am not sure if this is working properly yet... I have tried it and not received notice of the last change, don't count on it 100% yet!) You can also subscribe with a standards RSS reader, but hey, if you know how to do that, you probably are already doing so.

Finally, I put on a little Amazon search box at the bottom of the page, so you can go directly to Amazon.com from my blog. Probably completely superfluous, but I am just playing around at this point.

Don't worry, the extraordinary level of content and commentary will remain unchanged, I am just playing around with the format and widgets. This is a bit of a hobby for me too, I am learning.

The Ice Cream Hound

It has been some days now since I posted a nice photo of Liam.

He is a bit of a funny dude when it comes to eating. He will randomly refuse things, even if it is stuff he really likes. He will eat spaghetti bolognese out of a baby food jar no problem, but if we make a nice pasta for the grown ups, he will not even look at it. He won't even eat an uncooked noodle. Last time we tried that he swung it around his head like a lasso.

One food he will never ever turn down is ice cream. He knew instinctively that this was the food for him. I remember the first time he ate it. We were out for a walk in Herrenberg and stopped at one of the many ice cream cafes for treat. Liam was not really even on solid food at this point, but as soon as Claudia took the first bite, he was going mental trying to get out of his pram to get some himself.

Maybe the ice cream makers add some sort of hyper baby attracting chemicals into their products. Ponter works in the food industry, so maybe he can let us in on a secret? If there is such a thing, maybe I can find a way to put it in photo paper. Chemical addiction is a great way to boost sales from what I hear.

Worst gift idea ever

When I was Christmas Shopping last month, I walked past this store window and saw what I think is the worst gift ever.

These are cushions that are quite large, with portraits of dogs embroidered on them. To improve an already great idea, the dogs appear to be wearing 19th century costumes. One of them in a military looking jacket and the other in a frilly dress.

I don't recall the exact price, but they were not inexpensive.

One day I hope to be visiting someone and see these sitting on the couch. Then I will know exactly the sort of person that shops in a store like this.

Festival of Dave

Ok, since Mike asked for it, here is the Festival of Dave I apologize in advance to anyone reading this who does not know or really care who Dave is. Though I cannot possibly imagine anyone who would not want to know more and see more of Dave.

Dave Crawford, a man, a legend. Renowned in his days at York U for having the sweetest AV setup ever in 1993 or so... years ahead of his time when it came to squeezing a ridiculous home theatre into a very very small room.

My first memory of Dave is when he had a big fight with his new roommate (also named Dave) because on two consecutive nights, Dave2 drank all of Dave's Tang.

Here is Dave from that very year:Dave also dressed up from time to time and pulled monkey faces:
Dave was also popular with the ladies:Then Dave met Ponter and Ponter's insane obsession. look at the number of Ponter hugging Dave photos that exist...
And finally, once when we ate out, we pretended it was Dave's birthday so they brought him cake, and Ponter fed it to him.


Oh, and here is Dave as he appears today: