Late to the Party

Hey, Kids.  This will likely be my last post before the new year rings in, so I wanted to wish you all a safe and festive new year.  We’ll be doing something a tad different this year, reviving a simple new year celebration from a few years ago, when we had dinner in the city (this year at our favorite Japanese restaurant, Sushi Naniwa in the River North part of Chicago) and watched the fireworks from Grant Park, standing around Buckingham Fountain.  The last few years we had opted to go more low-key and attend a casual get-together at the hubby’s brother’s place, but this year we decided to go back to the city.  Still kind of low-key, but requires more effort.  Hopefully we can avoid too much traffic going into the city, but we’ve been warned about the Bears/Packers game that night, so we’ll just have to deal with it if there’s a bad traffic jam.  No worries!

Anyway, I hope you all have fun at your respective celebrations.  See you back here after Jan. 1st!

Lots of tech blogs out there asked what techie goodness you got for Christmas, which is always fun to ask, but I thought I’d ask what tech did you give this year?

I bought a good amount of techie stuff for other people this year, despite what I said in a previous blog post, about how I was hesitant to buy tech gifts because other people probably wouldn’t enjoy them as much as I would.  Luckily, it seems that most of my techie gifts were hits.

1. For the hubby, I got a Pioneer Inno portable XM receiver/mp3 player and a car kit, from XMFanStore.com.  Their pricing was the best, with the total for both items being less than the receiver itself from Circuit City.  I had to make sure not to use the joint credit card so that the hubby wouldn’t see the purchase in our online statement!   He hasn’t tried out the mp3 player part of it yet, but we got tons of use out of the receiver for piping Christmas music through our home theatre speakers.  He’s going to have to redo his custom stereo setup in his car to accommodate the new receiver.  He had originally taken apart an XM boom box cradle and created a custom setup in the car since he never listens to regular radio or CDs.  I think the easiest thing he could do now is to put back the original factory stereo in his car and get an aux input adapter for the car kit cradle.

2. For my brother, I got a Zune home AV kit so he can watch videos and pipe music through his TV.  This was a hit, since he’s currently very enthusiastic about his Zune right now.   It’s a little cheesy because all it does is basically output the Zune’s display to the TV instead of displaying a custom kiosk display that is more TV-friendly, but it does the job, and he’s happy with it.

3. For my parents I got a couple techie things that I hope will actually be used.  They each got an iPod shuffle (my bro bought my dad’s, and I bought my mom’s) which we filled with music that they like, so all they have to do is put it in shuffle mode and hit play.  I also bought them an Epson Picturemate Snap inkjet printer.  My mom bought herself a Fuji A500 digital camera (which I bought a 1GB xD card for), and I thought it’d be nice for them to have this nice printer around the house to save a trip out to Target or wherever to get prints of digital pictures they take.  The criteria for both techie gifts were mainly to be drop-dead easy to use, and not require a PC for operation.  Yes, both the iPod shuffle and the printer can be used with a PC, but since my parents are not computer savvy, we were going for PC-less operation.  While I think they’ll probably use the shuffles a good deal, I’m hoping the printer doesn’t just fall by the wayside.  They were very impressed by its performance when I showed them how to print out pictures and used a few pics I took during our gift exchange as examples, but we’ll have to see if they feel comfortable enough printing out their own pics.  I wanted to get them a digital photo frame that I could connect up to the Net to get updates from my Flickr account or something, but they don’t have broadband, and amazingly enough, there are no WiFi access points around their neighborhood that I could have the digiframe piggyback on. *smirk*  I’m not just talking open WiFi, but any WiFi APs, period.  It’s really baffling…  Anyway, the ‘rents were happy for those gifts.  The in-laws also got the same printer, but the hubby’s dad is more computer savvy, so we’re sure they’ll get some good use out of it.

In the less techie realm of gifts…

4. The hubby also got the trio of Burger King Xbox 360 games — Sneak King, Pocket Bike Racer, and Big Bumpin’.   I actually bought these from one of the many sellers on eBay selling the whole set.  Then after I bought them, I saw that BK was offering the whole set for sale without having to buy a value meal and paying an extra $4 for one of the games.   I’m actually very impressed by the quality of these games.  The premise of each one is very fun, and the graphics are top-notch.  Controls are easy and intuitive, and the replay factor is high.  Great for casual gamers.

5. Last, but not least, we got the hubby’s brother and wife a Senseo coffee maker.  Not terribly techie, especially compared to the newer version that has an LCD display on it, but a welcome gift for new parents needing their caffeine boost.

There were lots of “supplementary” gifts given to our family members, like books and DVDs and such, but I thought I’d talk about the techie stuff we bought, considering my blog has been pretty tech-oriented for the most part.   Feel free to post what sort of techie stuff you gave this year; it might be a good idea for someone else to use next year, or for an upcoming birthday.  I’ll post later about the techie stuff I got, besides the good ol’ P1610.

UPDATE: Yeah, take this tip with a grain of salt if you’re planning to use the mouse gestures with a Tablet PC in slate mode. When I was using the mouse gestures on my Tablet with the little trackstick and mouse buttons, they were recognized fine for 98% of the time. But when I switched into slate mode and used my stylus, things quickly went south. I got similar results that the hubby saw, where instead of closing a tab, the browser would load other content into the tab, or would open a new window, or would load the next discussion thread in order of the main index, etc. I don’t know why the mouse gestures would behave so differently when drawn with a stylus, but they do. The mouse gestures in FF are WAY better (and there are more versions to choose from). For now I’ll still stick with IE7, but the mouse gestures are on probation. I just wish FF would fix the stupid memory management problems already! FF is a better browser than IE, for the most part.

I’m probably way behind on finding this add-on for IE7, but I went searching for a mouse gestures “extension” for IE7 since Firefox has been pissing me off lately. I mainly have had problems with Gmail on Firefox on the P1610, not being able to open messages, and I haven’t had the patience to track down the info to fix the problem, so I switched to using IE7 (shocking, no?). I like the Google toolbar that was pre-installed (can’t remember if it was done by Fujitsu or what), and I don’t remember the FF version being the same, so that was another thing I liked about my IE7 installation.

Anyway, with mouse gestures installed, IE7 seems to be working very similarly to a basic installation of FF, so I’m going to try using IE7 for a while to see how it works out. I’ve also been really annoyed at FF’s bloatedness and memory management issues (it’s such a known problem that I’m really surprised it hasn’t been fixed by now), so I wanted to try something else that wasn’t Opera. I think Opera is a good browser, and it was the first one to hook me on mouse gestures, but I still don’t like how it has problems rendering pages that IE and FF can render with no problem. I know it’s a web design standards issue, but why can’t they just relax Opera’s rendering engine a little bit to accommodate the crapily-coded websites that use weirdo code for IE or whatever else? It may be a principles thing, to try to force webmasters to use better code, but in reality, Opera’s just limiting its market share by not relaxing its web standards a bit.

Any other cool add-ons for IE7 I should know about?

Hmmm… Seems like I’ve used that title before. Oh well! This is going to be a gripe-y post (if you didn’t already guess from the title), so you’ve been warned.

Gripe #1: I’m at work with virtually nothing to do but wait until the hubby picks me up around 5pm. I have something to work on, but it’s not urgent, so I don’t have a lot of motivation to do much with it before my upcoming 2-wk vaca.

Gripe #2: The hubby took the FJ so he’d have a vehicle to drive his parents around in at lunchtime. I forgot to bring something to have for lunch, so I had to buy a turkey sandwich from the cafeteria downstairs (I usually go out for lunch because I don’t like the cafeteria food). When I got back to my desk, I found out that a) the bread for the sandwich is the kind with anise seeds in it (rye?), which I hate, and b) the sandwich has no mayo or mustard, so it’s totally dry. *bleh* Meanwhile the hubby & his ‘rents are having a nice lunch at a Thai restaurant, which rules out ordering Thai for dinner tonight at our place! Gah.

I am so ready to be on vaca, obviously. *smirk*

I will probably feel a lot better after going home tonight, even though it’s our turn to host dinner with the hubby’s fam. It’ll be nice because tonight is Friday and there’ll be time to play some games or something after dinner. Last night we had dinner at the hubby’s brother’s place and had to cut the evening short (not that I minded that ) because it was a weeknight.

Tomorrow my parents will be getting to town & we’ll have dinner with them. Then Christmas Eve & Christmas festivities will ensue. And after Christmas our parents will head back home, leaving us to finally get some rest and recuperation without being “on” as hosts. Don’t get me wrong; spending the holidays with family is what it’s all about, but being hosts to visitors gets tiring after a while! Basically our holiday celebrations started last weekend when we drove home to Iowa to visit the hubby’s grandma & extended family, so we’ve been getting quite a lot of family time in. Not to mention starting Christmas shopping earlier than usual. It’ll be nice to see people’s reactions to the gifts we bought. Hopefully there are more good reactions than bad reactions. *smirk*

Well, this might be my last blog post before Christmas, so I’ll wish you all happy holidays now, just in case.

Gonna try out the Windows Live Writer for an ink blog post; this looks better than the last try, maybe because of a thicker line weight.  Anyway…

Via a recent comment on my blog, as well as one of Sumocat’s posts about new ink blogs, I found out there are quite a few other ink bloggers out there!  Please check out Sumocat’s post (link in typed translation below) for some more ink blogging goodness.

P.S. I also saw that Sumocat tagged me for the “5 things you don’t know about me” meme that’s going around.  I’m not avoiding it; I’m just a tad busy with holiday get-togethers.  I’ll try and post my list of 5 things soon!  And the influx of new ink bloggers came at a great time; I’ll have plenty to pass the meme to when I get around to posting.