Brain Age: Start Addictions in Minutes a Day

Confession time:
My mum's been staying with us for a week.
During that time, I think I've turned my Mum into a Nintendo DS addict.

I introduced her to the Brain Age game a few nights ago.
She got pretty peeved (as we all did on our first attempt) when the chunky faced professor told her that she had the brain of an 80 year old. I haven't seen her so fired up! Especially yelling into the microphone: "Blue. Blue! Buh-lue! BLOOOOOOOOEEEE!!!"
On that first night, she played for almost an hour.
And then when I offered her another hit, an hour the following day.
And last night, it was Mum who approached me and asked me for the DS. And she played it till the batteries ran dead.

I may need to buy her one.

In other DS related news, this is what the family's been playing:
Homer - Mario Hoops 3 on 3 (US Import)
Marge - The mini-games on New Super Mario. But only vs me or Bart.
Bart - Not much. But Lego Star Wars II is waiting for him after he finishes his homework.
Lisa - Nintendogs. With the Corgi named Elmo.
Maggie - Are you kidding? I'm not letting her near the DS. Not after she snapped her Wiggles DVD in two with her bare hands. I kid you not.

It was supposed to be a simple mission

It was supposed to be a simple mission.
Fix the dashboard menu on my brother's xbox, after it mysteriously turned blank last night.
I reckoned 30 minutes - max.

That was before realising that I had to manually set the IP address on his PC so I could FTP in, as the default network on the xbox was different.
That was before realising how slow his PC was because it was riddled with virii and spyware.
That was before discovering that his dashboard was Anod-X, something which I had never seen before.

After figuring out the menu definition, we FTPed a new config file - and all seemed good. But for some reason, the config file would then get corrupted or wiped intermittently after exiting the previous program, and then default to a blank menu. Very strange - and frustrating!
After a couple hours of this, I decided to install good ol' Evolution X instead.

That and XBoxMediaCentre. Now THAT is a brilliant piece of software.
I had been running the same old version for the last year, and only recently decided to install the latest CVS build. I'm glad I did. It's a totally different animal.
Much prettier (with the 360 look) and feature packed.
Plus it plays any video file I can stream to it. Even the ones that won't play on my PCs.

But I digress. Anyway, the 30 minute job ended up taking over 4 hours.
Isn't that so typical of an IT problem?
For my next trick: I say we nuke all of those virii on that darn PC. Reformat. It's the only way to be sure.

We had dinner in Dickson. My first time at the Zeffirelli Pizza Resturant. And it won't be the last. The food was great. And the servings were generous. Bart managed to finish a whole pizza (albeit a smallish one) by himself.

Still here

It's been too long since the last entry.
So much has happened since then.
So much to write about, yet I don't know where to start.
So I think I'll just go to bed and sleep on it.
And perhaps dream of simpler times...
back in Toowoomba, living the life of a uni student.
just hanging out with friends 24/7. Friends for life. More than friends - we were like family.
Before Reality closed in. And presented the corporate ladder. And served it with kids and a mortgage.
And suddenly a lot of those friends are now just email addresses.
And I'm just another cc: on a forwarded email.

Maybe things would be different if I started replying to their emails.