interrobang (‽)

At the risk of sounding older than my tender 43 years: They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Consumer electronics, that is. Last month my TV finally packed up (and within a month of getting my surround-sound in place, FFS!). This is a Toshiba 50″ plasma flat screen, which I bought for the not inconsiderable sum of $2,000 three years ago (actually as a 10-year anniversary present for the wife - ever the romantic, eh?). About a year ago one of the HDMI ports stopped working, which was irritating but not the end of the world (it has a […]

A couple of weeks ago, Twilight came out on video. Not that the I was eagerly awaiting its release or anything, but the wife was, which meant that I was facing a couple of hours watching a chick-flick if I expected to fulfil my ’conjugal rights’ later that night.  Still, I reasoned, it could be worse - it was a ‘vampire movie’, right?  (Although so was Shaun of the Dead, and that didn’t exactly strike a romantic chord…).
I’ve spent the past couple of years gradually ‘training’ Louise in the art of high definition.  After much cajoling, she’ll now watch the 1080 HD version of a channel, instead […]

Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop.  I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, to get out of doing his homework), but when you tried booting it up you’d just get an “Operating System not found” message.  Freya has an identical laptop (to avoid sibling rivalry) so I swapped her drive into Finn’s laptop and confirmed that everything else was fine - just a blank hard drive. It could have been that he’d just deleted everything, but that’s pretty hard to do by accident, so I’m guessing he dropped the laptop and crashed […]

So that was Christmas.  The officially-sanctioned extended eating/drinking session is over for another year.  I didn’t take a whole deal of time off work (absolutely nothing to do with the in-laws visiting) - only the actual public hoildays themselves, plus Boxing Day (which over here is officially called ‘The Day After Christmas’ - the Americans apparently didn’t know why it was called ‘Boxing Day’ either so just decided to drop the name entirely).  Still, it was nice to have a few days off to play with the kids’ new toys.
The best present by far was Guitar Hero III - Legends […]

A couple of weeks ago, my PC died (again). This is a major catastrophe in our house, what with the kids and Webkins, and the wife and on-line shopping. In theory we can access the Internet via the PlayStation 3, but actually doing so is an exercise in exasperation - the browser window is either too big or too small (you can’t get it to simply re-scale for the TV size the way HTML should), and entering even the shortest URL via the controller is truly painful (and the PS3 refuses to recognize my (non-Sony) bluetooth keyboard). A life without […]

A couple of days ago I was rummaging around in one of the many boxes of crap piled up in my study, when I found my old Nintendo Donkey Kong game (you know, the old orange clam-shell one).  I don’t know why I’ve still got it - maybe out of sentimental gratitude for all the dull church services it helped me through during my boarding school days.  I showed it to my 8-year-old son (Finn) who was distinctly underwhelmed, until I told him that this was the ‘original Nintendo DS’ (hey, it has two screens…), and explained that the little guy was Mario of Super […]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  I’m a complete whore for technology.  I wouldn’t quite put myself in the nerd/geek camp (although some would) but I do love the good, practical use of technology.  And with the convergence of a couple of new-ish technologies, I’ve finally turned my home into something that could have featured on Tomorrow’s World - albeit back in the seventies.
It started with the recent purchase (as a 10th wedding anniversary present) of a new TV - a 50″ Plasma HD TV, which now hangs on the wall above the fireplace (where it doesn’t look as […]