Oil Changes and Vista

So I'm sitting here at the car dealership getting my wife's oil changed in her car (I get the glory of repeating this process again tomorrow for my car...joy.) It is nice though, since the Mazda dealership offers free Wifi so I can bring my laptop and mess around on the net while waiting for my car to get done.

I also get to roam around the dealership lot and check out all the new cars and see what's out on the market that's cool. The thing I found that interests me the most is the new 09 Mazda CX-7. If you don't know what it is, it's Mazda's first step into the crossover market (and from what I remember, I believe it was one of the very first, if not the first crossover SUV to be offered on the market.) It's a pretty cool car. The 09 is nice because they retooled the engine to take regular unleaded fuel, as opposed to the 07 and 08's which had to user super unleaded fuel.

Anyway, onto more interesting things, games (of course.) I took the plunge over Christmas and reformatted my desktop to Vista. Mind you, I still have my XP partition, just in case, but mainly I'm going to give Vista a real try from a gaming perspective, and see how it does.

I'm now about a week into it, and have everything pretty much set-up the way I like and it seems to be running fine. I've been playing Command and Conquer 3 on it and have had zero problems running it. When I get back home this afternoon I plan on getting Dawn of War: Soulstorm installed and see how that runs on it. I'm guessing there won't really be any problems. The only game that I know is having problems currently is Diablo II, since it's so old. I'm hoping Star Craft won't have any problems with Vista, but I'm really not holding out any hope there.

I also read on Life Hacker that the beta for Windows 7 is out in the wild (even though it's not supposed to be released until sometime in early 09.) I really can't wait to get my hands on copy because everything I've heard has been good about Windows 7. People are saying it's the most stable beta M$ has ever put out, so I'm kind of curious to see what they are talking about. I'll let you know as soon as I get my hands on a copy.

Oh yeah, I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but if you haven't seen you should check out Rocket Dock:



The cool part is that the software is free, you download it from here: Rocket Dock. On my Vista machine, I have Rocket dock as opposed to any icons on my desktop. It's pretty nice, it also helps keep your desktop clean and tidy (something I'm a big fan of.)

Anyway, I think Amy's care is almost done. More later on.

~C

CFdesign 2008

So since I posted the CFdesign model from 2007, here's the one from 2008:



Anyway, Christmas is over, it was tons of fun and Santa was good to both Amy and I. The best part is now I'm on vacation until the 2nd of January. I'm sure I'll be blogging more as my vacation continues, but for now, off to play some Command and Conquer 3!

~C

FlashMob Rave at UVA

So I thought this was amusing. Last night at my company Christmas party, one of the guys talked about this random rave he went to in a library at UVA. Well, here it is:



Yeah, I think the video is worth 1000 words...

~C

Christmas Party Saturday

So somehow all of the stars aligned properly, and both Amy and I have our company Christmas parties tonight.

It was looking pretty bleak because Amy's party was originally set to start at 6 and my Christmas party was set to start at 6:30, so that wasn't going to work. Amy ended up having a talk with her boss, and that party got moved to starting at 4:30 so we can do both parties tonight.

I'm sure it's going to be crazy and if we get any fun pictures I'll probably post them here.

Oh well, off to Christmas present wrapping and light hanging up.

~C

Just a short post

Just a short post before heading off to bed. Work is crazy, but I just really wanted to share this video with you:



And just cause it's fun, check this out:



This was made by one of the guys from my work Derrek (thevirutalengineer), it's appropriate for the season and it's a fun use of our software CFdesign.

Anyway, Happy Holiday's everyone! I'm sure I'll post more during the Christmas Holiday.

~C

Christmas and the 2008 Toy Lift

So the holiday's are finally upon us. Thanksgiving was nice, we ended up eating dinner with Amy's mom, her older brother, and her grandmother. After dinner it was the traditional going though all of the Black Friday ad's to plan out where we would go shopping the next day.

It was a good time, Amy and I put a game plan together and in the end, we were pretty successful on the day. Of course I'm going to say here where all we went, it may give away some peoples Christmas presents :P

Anyway, so sense the holiday's are in full swing, it came time for the annual toy lift in Charlottesville. This year was it's 20 anniversary and I decided to volunteer this year at the toy lift. I have to say, it's a good feeling to help out, the toy lift is a great cause, and the work you do goes directly towards helping less fortunate kids for the holidays...it was a good time. Mind you, it was freezing cold and I was almost a solid block of ice at the end of it, but it was totally worth it.

Other than that, it's been pretty quite here, work, work and more work. Next Saturday we have both Amy and my Holiday Parties, so that should keep us pretty busy.

Ok, that's about it, more later on.

~C