Night Before Christmas

To say Liam likes Christmas is like saying fish are fond of water.  He has been Christmas crazy for weeks now.  Having many exciting phases of singing, dancing around, and wearing a santa hat everywhere he goes.  We had a few arguments already when he wanted to wear the Santa hat to kindergarten in the last week of November.

The latest mania is that he watched the classic 1964 Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer animagic (puppet) show and he latched on to the Flying Lion who is king of the island of misfit toys, Moonracer.  He has been callling himself Moonracer for a week now, and flying around the house roaring.  We have to address him as Moonracer or Liam-Moonracer if we want an answer.  It started off funny, but Claudia and I have both heard about enough from Moonracer.  Oh, he also has a crown made of gold pipecleaners that he wears around the house.

Liam is also very active in his Christmas art.  There are drawings of santa with reindeer and his sleigh all over the house.  He normally glues some cotton to the page for the beard.  Below is the most recent drawing and I love the maniacal looking Santa.  I think he looks like a crazy in a red top hat, but hey, that is just my interpretation.

I did mention that Liam wears the Santa hat a lot.  really a lot.  It had come to the point where we could only get it off him after he was asleep.  Here is a typical image of Mr.Christmas in the evening.Well, Germany has the big day of gifts and fun on the 24th, so this evening the Christkind will be paying the wee man a visit.  I hope that the post-Christmas come-down will be OK for him and we can get back to some normal routine. 

Firemen

Recently, Liam invited over the next door neighbour Annika for some play time.  After some brief noisy action, we were informed that Annika needed to wear Liam’s fireman costume.

It looks like she was not allowed to wear the coveted hat though.  That is only for chief Liam.

Entringen Christmas Market

It is the market season once again, probably the best time of year in Germany.  Most of the big markets are a little too packed for me to have the energy to navigate this year with a hyper 4 year old and a tired pregnant wife, so we are visiting far less that usual.

So far, we have only gone to our village market.  Entringen, population around 3000 of course still needs to have booths. Entringen has pretty much the same booths each year and this time was no exception.  Some crafts, and lots of food ones run by the local clubs.  I enjoyed a yummy gluhwein made by Liam’s former daycare group.

Liam had a waffle with powdered sugar from the sports club kids.  He likes his winter outfit and is eagerly awaiting some snow.  He really wants to make snow men and a snow fort as soon as possible.  Of course, he also wants his own reindeer to pull him and his friends to kindergarten on a sleigh.

Giving up on Subtlety…

I think that by the time they were making these posters, they were all out of clever, nice ways to ask people to shut up.

 

• Space – Celebrations are great and even better when held in common spaces away from work areas.
• Space - Avoid gatherings & group chatter in the open office.  Please use common spaces or e-Clubs.

First, I think that there has been no official definition for a “common area” I can only assume they mean meeting rooms and coffee corners.  Although there is no indication that these are actually common areas, I guess it must be them.

I would also love to know what an e-Club is.  This remains a mystery.

Sometimes things need to be explained carefully

  

In case my colleagues and I did not fully understand the subtle message behind the “VOLUME” series of posters, we are gently reminded with these delicately worded works of art.

• Noise – Be considerate of others working in your area
• Noise – Please ask colleagues to modify their behaviour if they are creating nuisance noise

I interpret these two in the following sequential way:

• Noise – shut up big mouth.
• Noise – Don’t be afraid to tell bigmouth to shut up.

I particularly like the expression “modify behaviour.”  I think the definition of “nuisance” noise is also open to wild interpretation.  I know for a fact if all the noise stopped that I consider a nuisance, it would result in more than a few deaths as so many would be holding their breath.

MORE MOTIVATION!

Well, Here are the next two motivational posters in the series “how to behave”

• Volume – Sitting down and using a headset while on the phone is quieter.
• Volume – Walking and talking can be disturbing to others.

Now, perhaps I am being picky, but surely those are things I should not need a 1.5 metre high poster to remind me of? they seem to be in the realm of what I would call “the obvious.” I am pretty sure that everyone in my office could come to these conclusions entirely on their own. But since these posters exist, they must imply that management perceives these two activities to be a problem in the office.

I would have to say that if these are a problem it is not because people don’t understand the concept of volume, but more that they are choosing to ignore the concept of volume. I would suggest the following to be more appropriate:

• Volume – Don’t be a noisy jerk.
• Volume – No one wants to hear you.

I can absolutely throw stones as far as this topic goes since I am probably the quietest guy in the entire building. I shun human contact and get about two phone calls a year. I communicate almost entirely via email and IM with colleagues.

I also think the guy in the first poster looks really angry. Second poster walker-talker at least looks like he is enjoying his work.

Friendly reminders from the company

In recent days, the office has started to put up some interesting posters all over the place.  They are supposed to be reminders of how to behave in our environment.  By that I mean of course our office environment, which is:

• Open concept
• Shared desks (sit wherever is free)

I will go ahead and say that the move to this office system was not popular with everyone, myself included.  I preferred having my own, fixed desk.  It is not as bad as I thought it would be, but if I have to choose, it would be for having my own desk.

I thought I could share some of the office propaganda in the next posts while I accumulate some topics to talk about on the site.

When we arrive in the office, of course the first thing you have to do is find a place to sit.  Thank goodness I have been guided in how to do so by these posters:

“CHOOOSE – Select a workspace to match your needs.  Use meeting or team areas for collaboration”

“CHOOSE – Choose the type of workspace you need… Lively, collaborative, common, or quiet”

I thought these were a bit amusing , thinking that I start each day knowing what my daily style will be.  Of course, not a single one of the options cater to those who would like to choose “isolated from humanity by thick concrete sound proof walls.”  That would be my ideal setting.

I would say the true way that most of my colleagues actually choose their workspace is:

1. those arriving before 8:30 take all window spots.
2. those arriving after 8:30 take whatever is left.
3. preference is given to a seat as far away as possible from “noisy people”

Without naming names, there are absolutely specific noisy people that are well known to all and avoided like the plague.  I think I am a preferred neighbour since I am a very quite office worker.  I strive to be as not-noticeable as possible so people don’t bother me with their problems.  I never talk on the phone, preferring email or messenger, so really my cube is normally like a nice little vacuum zone.

OK, without generalizing too much.  “noisy people” = “the French”

Soooo many Windows….

OK, I know i have not posted too much lately, but all I can say is that it is out of pure lazyness.  I have not taken a whole lot of photos and my computers have been in a bit of an mess recently.

I have for the past years been managing all my photos, music and posts from my work computer, mainly since it is way newer and better than my 10 year old desktop at home.  I keep all of my data on an external HDD, and then run the management software on the laptop.  I used iTunes for music, Picasa for photos, and Firefox for browsing and blogging.

All this changed recently when the office decided to give me a nice new PC.   I was delighted to unexpectedly get a new laptop a couple of weeks ago, and due to the office’s “self serve” IT, i had to set the whole thing up on my own.  I am a reasonably technically proficient guy, so that is ok, but it was time consuming.   However, I only set up work applications on the work laptop, so I lost access to my music and photos, which put a slow down on the blog posts.

It also forced me to add yet another windows to my everyday use.  My work is currently using Vista as the official OS, something I had hoped to totally bypass.  So at the moment, I have XP on my home desktop, Vista on my work laptop and Windows 7 on my home laptop.  The home desktop is used almost exclusively by Claudia for teaching these days, but as the household tech support, I need to be on there pretty regularly.

I thought it would be a good moment to briefly reflect on all the windows I am using.

 

XP is the one that has been in front of me daily for quite a few years now.  I thought it was a pretty good system, but now after living in the new windows worlds, I can see how clunky and unfriendly many aspects of it were.  I still like that it is stable and I am used to it, but I have to say I dont really miss it now that I have moved on.

Windows Vista is the OS that I had taken great pains to avoid since its much maligned release.  I was pretty much against it from launch, for no good reason at all.  I just totally bought in to all the negative hype I read.  After using Vista for about a month professionally now, I have to say it was a lot of hub-bub about nothing. 

Maybe the initial release of Vista had driver issues and was slower and buggier, but as I recall, XP was so bad as to be almost unusable almost until the second service pack  dropped.  At this point, Vista runs quite fine and I think it is fast, better looking and adds quite some improved features over XP.  The search window on the start menu alone has changed the way I do things.

I have not yet added back iTunes and Picasa, but all of my work applications (office, SAP) run great and my non-work applications like firefox and photoshop also run great.  The Windows Live writer for blog posting is also pretty wonderful.  I do most of my posts (when I bother,)  in this program now and I really like it.

Windows 7 is of course the new big sexy and I had to get on board with that the day it dropped.  I run it on my home laptop, which is a slightly older, but not ancient one.  I really think it feels like Vista++ rather than a whole new OS.  It lost some of the things I disliked (the silly widget window) and added great things like the way you manage windows on the desktop.

My primary uses of the Windows 7 box are internet browsing (firefox again runs perfectly,) Light gaming (Warcraft, Torchlight, Team Fortress 2) and some video watching.    The OS handles all these applications great.

Now I need to decide where my music, photos and video needs to live… on my work PC or on my home laptop.  Ideally I will set up an HDD as a network drive (or maybe a NAS for Christmas if work gives a nice bonus.)   Once I get all my media set up to be accessed easily, I hope I will be able to motivate myself to write a few more blog entries.

Oh, and since we have another baby on the way (not sure who knows and who does not) that will no doubt provide a bunch more content for me both photos and stories.

What the hell is this?

OK, I was on the internet today and I saw that some travel site was listing the top 10 ugliest buildings in the world. 

I was surprised when they listed the ROM in there.  I have not lived in Toronto for a long time, but I had remembered the ROM as a nice old building.  I jumped on to google to see what this ugliness was all about.

It seems that since I moved, the powers that be decided to do a little renovation to the museum.  I have to agree with the internets, this is one of the ugliest things I have seen in my life.  What I think makes it infinitely worse is the fact that this not only destroys a nice building, this is destroying a whole area of the city.

The ROM is right at Queen’s Park, where the provincial government is located.  Home to some nice old buildings, this chrome and glass explosion really does not fit at all. 

Maybe I am just becoming an old crank or something, but I can’t see why anyone could have thought this was a good idea. 

Updating the links section

OK, so i noticed that my "links to friends blogs" section is really really out of date. So, it is time to make a few changes.

OUT:
Wong Family Blog : I know its cruel to remove your own family, but hey, last post was May 2007.
Warren in Vancouver : removed as Warren has TWO new sites.
Shelley in Toronto: Last post Dec, 2008. I know Shelley has moved on to Twitter as her main vehicle.
Nader and Rina in Singapore: Sorry brother, no updates in a year.

IN:.
Mike P : infrequent updates Plaka, but you are still at it on occasion.
Warren's personal Blog: moved from the old address.
Warren Cartwright Photography: his new professional endeavour.
Rymal Family Blog: Jay & Bonnie are pretty much Twitter folks now, but I left it on for the moment.
Save the New York Times: a site by the Doris.
M-cause: Ryan's cause and marketing related site.
I'd Rather Be Gaming: blog from Ozvortex in Australia that sometimes comments on here as well. Good one for board gamers like me.

I think that cleans up the links section.

Poorly thought out Advertising

Ok, so I was at the gas station this morning when I noticed this advertisement on the side of the building. Excuse the poor quality of the image, it was taken with my phone.

The German text reads “whether Coffee, buns, or sweets…. Drink and Drive” then at the bottom, “your bake-shop”

This brilliant poster was of course on display at a gas station. For those who don't know, German gas stations also sell alcohol. Beer, wine, vodka, whatever you like (to those of legal age of course.) I know that western media has become somewhat hyper-sensitive and politically correct in recent years, but come on...

I have to think that this is a ill conceived campaign. I can not believe that someone first thought this up, then managed to sell the idea to the company doing the advertising. Do they not think that this could be seen in a negative way?

Saint Martin’s day walk 2009

It is that time of year again and Liam’s kindergarten made the annual Saint Martin’s evening walk with the lanterns last Thursday.  It was actaully the day after St. Martin’s, but given the size of the kindergarten classes, they do walks on three separate  nights so that the size is manageable.

Following the genius theatrical performance I wrote about last time, the kids all put on their coats and got their lanterns together to head out into the night.    Liam had made an elephant lantern that he was very proud of.  I thought it looked pretty good.  I am certain that he had quite some help from the kindergarten teachers making it, but he has been getting very good at drawing animals. 

So, with the whole group in tow, we began the walk.  Something I also enjoy trying to do on the walk is take pictures of them using a slow synchronized flash, so I can see some details of the kids, but also get the ambient lighting and interesting light trails from the lanterns.

Here are a couple of them strolling along the dark streets of the village.

Like I mentioned, Liam was pretty proud of his elephant lantern and  took many opportunities to hold it up and make many elephant noises.  He is also getting quite good at his impression.

Another Great Theatre Production

Well, before this year’s Lantern walk (to come in another post soon)  Liam’s kindergarten class put on a play about “Elli the Elephant”

The kindergarten was all set up as the theatre and in case it is not immediately obvious, the setting of the play is Africa.This year the kids made animal lanterns to use for the St. Martins walk, and I guess that gave them the idea to use them as puppets to do the show.  The story is essentially that Elli the Elephant has lost his herd and is asking other animals to help him find them.  Here Elli is talking to Giri the Giraffe.  All of the animals are named in this way.  Then a word with Gepi the Leopard (Gepard in German)After talking to Lions, Leopards, Tigers, Alligators and a host of other animals, Elli found the herd.  This was represented by the Elephant parade.  The parade was acted out by all the younger kids.  The puppeteers  were the older kids, the ones almost ready to move on to school.   They were better able to handle puppets, remember lines, and tall enough to reach over the wall.There you have it.  Not quite as big a role as in the play last year, where as you may recall Liam was the scene stealing hedgehog, but still, he did very well.  A fine play and I look forward to the next big production. 

Candy from a bygone era

I was in a toy store today shopping for a gift for my nephew, when I happened across  the candy section of the store.  There was a pretty wide range of sweets, the typical chocolate and hard candies along with some of the more unusual modern things like cell phone candy and the like.

Then I noticed this and had to look twice…  Candy cigarettes. something I remember having as a kid (popeye brand for me thanks,) but I thought had vanished in a poof of political correctness years ago. 

Of course I had to buy some, a bargain at 40 cents a pack.  Despite the fact they are now called “sticks” and not cigarettes, it is pretty clear from the packaging that they did not spend a lot of thought on the redesign of the product after changing this word.

First up we have King-Lion brand.  Look at this… I opened them up and sure enough, the “sticks” looked just like I remembered them.  Very clearly modeled on its tobacco counterpart.

The sticks are paper wrapped pseudo-chocolate. 

Just as all teenagers know, smoking makes you look cool.  Now I can have that whole defiant rebel look going on  without any of that pesky cancer and heart disease.

I do have to say, the use of the word “chocolate” is very generous.  It is barely chocolate.  It is barely edible in fact… they taste really quite bad.  If it were not for how cool they made me look, I would not have kept up the habit all afternoon.  The package actually calls it “chocolate flavoured confection” which contains Sugar, hardened vegetable oil, whey powder, soy, cocoa powder and vanilla.  After reading that, perhaps I should still consider they health effects of these bad boys.

One last thing, these “sticks” are not just for the boys anymore.  Obviously they have found small girls to be a key demographic that must not be missed.  So if the King Lion brand are a little to butch for you, there is the amazingly feminine “Aerobica” for the ladies. I particularly like the 1980’s workout lady image on the packet.  From the taste of these, they have very likely been sitting around since those leg warmers were in fashion.

Oh, before you condemn the Germans for still having this on the shelves, it is not a product they make.  This fine children’s confectionary is made by the good folks in the Netherlands at PIETERMAN

http://www.pietchoc.nl/

Just like Papa

Like lots of little kids, Liam likes to do the things that his parents do. I work from home fairly regularly, which means I spend the day in the office in front of my laptop. Recently, Liam seemed to become very jealous of this behaviour and was going on and on about how he needed his his own computer.

So... I dug up this rather old, non-functional laptop and stuck it in front of him to see what would happen.
It turns out, this was just what was needed. Liam started banging away on the keys immediately and seemed to not care at all that the screen was black. Now he has fairly much claimed this laptop as his and it is staying in his room on his wee table. Or when I am working, he is often dragging it over and sitting next to me at the desk while he works too.

Crazy boy.

I dearly love Penny Arcade

How great is this comic...

taken from the fine folks at Penny Arcade

A Musical Interlude

Today is forecast publishing day at work. This means I have to sit and type in lots and lots and lots of data. It can in fact be a little mind numbing and I like to do it while listening to music.

Last week I heard the new Ian Brown song "Stellify" and it reminded me to listen to one of my all time favorite bands, the Stone Roses. That has led on to my re-enjoyment of some older tunes lingering in my iTunes.

I think this song is forgotten by lots of people, but I still find it catchy:


Of course, the Specials are never forgotten

then there is Madness

New Work Computer

Well, something unexpected happend this week. I had a packaged arrive at my desk unannounced. It turns out that my work computer was due for a replacement.

I had recieved a message recently that I was "in the queue" to receive new hardware, and that an email would be coming to advise me when it had been ordered. Then all of a sudden POW. This turns up at my desk.

This is an HP Compaq 6530b, the standard laptop for the drones like me. It seems pretty decent. Core2 duo 2.8ghz processor, and sadly windows Vista. I had kind of hoped that I would be able to hold out for a new PC with Windows 7, but apparently it could be many months or even another year before our company IT is ready to migrate.

We also have the wonderful (and cost saving) do it yourself IT now, so I had to set up the machine by myself. I am a fairly technical guy and was not really worried, but it was in fact absurdly easy. I set up everything in about an hour and it appears to be working perfectly.

So... now lets see how I can adjust to new(old) windows, new(2007) office. New harware is always a pleasure to have in my life. It adds some enthusiasm to work.

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Liam the Dragon Tamer

I am still recovering from the nasty cold I had last week and feeling quite run down. I did not get up to a lot last week other than sleeping and then sleeping some more. I did space it out with a little computer gaming (Dave still needs to tell me his WoW character name.) I have recently discovered the fantastic Team Fortress 2 and been having some fun with that. I also picked up Fable 2 on ebay for a cheapo price and started that up. Fun game.

Here is Liam the Dragon Rider at the fairy tale garden on a summer visit there. He will no doubt be a nerdy sci-fi geek like papa at this rate.

Fall is Fully Here

It is well into fall now and it feels like Winter is not too far away. I have had to scrape ice off the car the past two mornings and Liam slipped and crashed his way down icy front steps first thing this morning.

As much as I love snow, cold and winter, I would not be too sad for a few more days of warm sunny weather. It has been rainy misery here for saome days now.

Here is a nice family pic we took before the trees went yellow...

More Pumpkin Fest

Here are the rest of the pumpkin fest displays.

Bad Posting week

Sorry for t the scarcity of posts this week.

I am home with Liam who is sick with something that looks to be chickenpox.

He is in good spirits and on the mend, but I need to do some entertaining.

not much to say otherwise. I will not be posting photos of spotty Liam. That is cruel.

Happy Birthday Dave

Well, it is Dave's Birthday (as my MS Outlook and Facebook advise me) and I recall that for the past few years I have commemorated this occasion by posting a terrible photo of Dave.

This year I have decided to go another route and just post a photo of Dave in party mode that I took on my last trip to Canada.

Notice he is surrounded by adoring ladies.

Dave, you get this treatment as you are far and away my most vocal website reader.

Rock Band is awesome in a box

The Joneses were staying over a night with us on the way back to Geneva, which provided us with an evening of some fun activities. Normally this would mean it is time to break out some board games, but since it was a work night for Claudia, we decided to do something that was not quite as long a time commitment.

We broke out my recent Ebay purchase. ROCK BAND. This is a game I had been REALLY wanting for ages and ages. It was one of the drivers behind me wanting an Xbox at all. I have to say, it totally lived up to my expectations as far as fun goes.

I just have the first Rock Band game, one guitar, drums and a microphone, so we could not quite get the full band experience going. Maybe one day I'll splash out on a second guitar, but not yet.

I had played a bunch at my sister's place on my last vacation, so I had a bit of a feel for the instruments and how the game worked, and I had played with Claudia once since I bought it. I had to explain the whole thing to Doris and Ryan though. It is not super complicated and they understood the gameplay pretty fast.

What surprised me the most was the willingness to have a go at the singing. I don't enjoy it and did not sing, but all the other little songbirds had a go. I have to say it is a very good thing that the TV volume is higher than the singing volume. As a group... not the most beautiful voices. But i will definately say that Ryan put in the best stage performance as this photo shows.

It is also pretty funny how some people were just instantly better at some of the instruments. Claudia - basically never plays ANY video games of any kind. Picked up the guitar and was scoring 80%+ on the mudium difficulty levels. Drums... disaster. I think she did not get more that 20% through a song on easy

Doris - Also not a gamer, but did quite fine on the drums from the start, getting through songs. Guitar... not so much. She could not seem to master the timing and was pretty bad.

Ryan - Did very well at both Guitar and Drums on easy right away, but for some reason insisted on trying medium drums over and over, which he failed EVERY TIME (Sorry Ryan, but the little animated crowd does not lie.) Despite singing in a way that was making my eyes water, the little computer fans went nuts for him and he scored 95% I would give him huge bonus for his acrobatics as well.

I did make some videos as well, but I think I will save those until I can best figure out how to display them.

Claudia has also summed up the game well. "It is fun, but we really are just a bunch of lame-os sitting on the couch with plastic instruments!" I totally agree.

Pumpkin Fest displays

This year the theme of the pumpkin festival was Fairy Tales. So there were a whole bunch of displays/dioramas crafted from pumpkins showing various famous childrens stories. To be honest, I was not as impressed as last year's outer space theme.

Some of the displays, like Gulliver, were pretty great, but there were all too many that seemed to be just a couple of wooden mannequins standing in a small patch of pumpkins. that is uncool.

Here is the very nice Gulliver one. You can see they did a pretty nice giant Gulliver getting tied down by the Lilliputians.

Up a little closer you can see some of the details. Also you get an idea of how huge this particular display was.Now... Little Red Riding hood. Lame. Two wooden figures standing in some pumpkins. They could have made the characters, or some trees or some other think out of pumpkins surely. It is like they were not even trying.

Very disappointing.