Dominica and Liesl ended up sleeping in until early in the afternoon.  I guess that they were really worn out.  My guess is that they were up quite a bit during the night and did not get very much sleep.

Work today was unbelievably slow.  I have no idea what happened but just about no one needed me to do anything today.  It was great.

Andy called in the middle of the morning and we spoke for several hours.  The day just flew by.

Dominica and I ended up not even starting to eat lunch until after two thirty in the afternoon.  Talk about getting a late jump on things.

This afternoon, while Liesl napped, Dominica was finally able to complete playing Paper Mario from the Nintendo 64 on the Wii Virtual Console.  She had to take a couple of runs at Bowser, the final boss in the game, before she was able to complete it.  When it was all said and done she was pretty happy with the game.  It took her between thirty-four and thirty-five hours of game time to complete the adventure.

Today was my email cleaning day.  I cleaned hundreds of emails knocking my inbox and sub-folders down to about half of their previous contents.  I also moved all of the attachments out of the mail and into local folders on my computer so that I am not using the email system as file storage.  Email systems are not meant for that type of use and are not efficient for it at all.

Katie was supposed to come over tonight for a late dinner but she got stuck at work late tonight and it was going to be incredibly late by the time that she would have made it up to Peekskill so we all decided that it would be better to reschedule for Thursday night instead.

After work we ate dinner and watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a movie that is available from Netflix On Demand.  FF7:AC is the direct sequel to the video game Final Fantasy VII from 1997.  I own(ed) Final Fantasy VII for the Sony Playstation back in 1997 or 1998 and played it while living in Greece with Josh.  It has been a really long time since I watched or played anything involving the FF7 plot.  Dominica has never played FF7 and was not familiar with the game very much.  So the movie was completely nonsensical to her.

After watching the movie we had to go back to Wikipedia and read the plot summaries from FF7 and FF7:AC to try to figure out what happened and who was who.  The FF7 storyline is so convoluted and bizarre that it is nearly impossible to keep track of what is going on.

After watching the movie I hooked up the Playstation 2 in the living room so that Dominica could play some of the games from our extensive PS2 collection which she has been wanting to play for a long time.  She popped in and started playing Escape from Monkey Island which she picked up just recently from Game Stop for just five dollars.  Dominica and I have both played Escape from Monkey Island on the PC before but it has been a long time and I know that I, for one, did not ever finish the game and I don’t think that Dominica ever did either.  We own the Monkey Island collection for the PC (Escape from Monkey Island is Monkey Island 4) but playing a game like this on the PS2 is so much more convenient and enjoyable that it makes sense to have it on the PS2.

Escape from Monkey Island plays a lot like a movie with full screen rendered video and fully voice-acted dialogue so it is absolutely perfect for one of us to play while the other one watches.  For me it is just like watching a movie.  Very entertaining.  Even though the game is quite old and we are playing it on a video game console that is almost a decade old it still looks good and is a ton of fun.  It is too bad that the original three games in the series aren’t available for any modern console.  They would have been perfect if ported to the original Playstation.  On the Secret of Monkey Island (MI1) was ever ported to any console and that was the SegaCD way back when.

Dad is thinking about coming down to Peekskill this weekend to see Liesl.  He hasn’t seen her in several weeks.  I’m sure that he will also be bringing a large load of additional stuff for the house with him as well.  That will give us several weeks of unpacking work to do.  Every load from dad’s house is full of unanticipated discoveries as we find all kinds of things that we have completely forgotten that we own.

Tomorrow morning I am working the early shift at the office so I have to be up very early in the morning.  So I am going to do my best to turn in before midnight tonight or else I will be very tired tomorrow.  Although what are the chances that I will really get to bed that early?  That never really happens.  Especially not when I am having an enjoyable time sitting on the loveseat with Oreo writing SGL and watching Dominica play her game.

I am very excited that we have the PS2 hooked back up and working now.  We have so many exciting games for the PS1 and PS2 that I am very much looking forward to playing.  We have quite the stack of classic PS2 titles that have been getting dusty and those two Final Fantasy games for the Playstation (PSX) that arrived yesterday too.  Far more exciting things for the PS2 than we have for the XBOX, PS3, Wii and 360 combined.

Since I was up late anyway I did some drive maintenance on one of my servers. I didn’t get a lot done but every little bit helps in the long run.  You got to keep working on this stuff every day.  My window for getting any amount of projects done has shrunk to nearly nothing these days so I have to take every opportunity that I get.

Dominica got really sleepy and decided to give up on her game a few minutes after midnight.  Even after getting up really late she is really tired today.  Hopefully she will be able to get some real sleep tonight.

When Liesl fell asleep after her morning exercises I got a little bit of a chance, maybe an hour, to play some Fable while Dominica was still working on her classword.  I tried going through the Arena but didn’t understand the directions and ended up accidentally dying just because I did the wrong thing and went through the wrong door.  Oops.  So I had to start over and ended up getting almost nowhere for my work today.

In the early afternoon, after finishing up her schoolwork for today, Dominica settled in to play some Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console.  She has been working hard the last few days to attempt to complete this classic adventure title.  This afternoon she managed to get in a few hours and was able to complete the next to last chapter in the game.

We downloaded Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars for the Wii Virtual Console today.  I have never actually played this classic SNES title before and Dominica has never even seen it.  I played it for maybe fifteen minutes, if that long, so that we could at least see what it looked like today.  Paper Mario is sometimes considered to be the spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG.  SMRPG was made by Squaresoft, however, and is far more similar to classic JRGP titles than the Paper Mario series is as they are adventure/JRPG crossovers made by Nintendo themselves.

I put in an hour or two working for the office today after getting paged out in the middle of the afternoon and subsequently needing to deal with several issues that all came up around about the same time.  I also put in an hour or two working on some other projects in the basement before returning to the upstairs to hang out with the family.

My big challenge for today continued to be attempting to install Windows 2003 (fully virtualized, of course) onto an HP Proliant DL385 G5 remotely onto a Xen Virtualization environment running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.  The challenge was that there was no local graphical environment at all.  I finally found a solution to the issue tonight by using SSH Port Forwarding to bring the remote graphical connection securing back to my laptop from which I am working and then connecting throught the tunnel using TightVNC because UltraVNC, for some reason, is not happy with the connection.  That little problem set me back a good day or two.  NTFS formatting is running as I write this.  Pheww.

Oreo was in a very playful mood tonight.  We played and played for quite a long time.  You can tell when he is really ready to play hard when he decides to dig out his tennis ball instead of just playing with one of his stuffed animals which he knows collectively as his binkies.  Playing with his tennis ball gives him much more of a workout.

Oreo was chasing his tennis ball at one point today and slid under the runner in the vestibule and fell twisting his front left leg.  He limped really badly for half an hour or so but appeared to make a complete recovery by this evening so I guess that it was not all that bad.  We will see how he is tomorrow after he sleeps on it and has a chance to become stiff.

Dominica spent the entire evening attempting to complete Paper Mario.  She picked it back up around eight in the evening and was still playing when I was wrapping up the SGL daily as it was coming up on midnight.  When I was attempting to get off to bed she had long ago completed all of the chapters of the game itself and was just down to the very final section in which she had to track down Bowser himself and defeat him.  I had wished that I could stay up and watch the very final ending of the game but the game really does not have any plot or storyline of which to speak so there really isn’t anything to miss out on.

Paper Mario, like all Mario games, is roughly the video game equivalent of playing a Popeye Cartoon.  Every single episode has the exact same plot and not just the same plot but the same plot with the same characters going through the same motions over and over again in a neverending cycle of dork like girl, girl likes dork, bully kidnaps girl, dork finds bizarre way of beating up bully and takes girl back.  Rinse.  Repeat.

It is almost midnight here.  I am taking Oreo and heading off to bed.  Liesl has been sleeping for many hours now and needs to wake up and get a bottle of formula before she and Dominica can really come to bed.  I have the Windows updates running on the Windows Server 2003 machine that I managed to get installed this evening.  I am very much relieved to have gotten that done and out of the way.  Today qualifies as a rather significant success with a lot of time being spent a) with my daughter during her happy time b) getting real work done for the office c) getting work done at home d) overcoming a major technical obstacle e) catching up on SGL completely f) getting to play Fable for at least an hour and finally g) heading off to bed early enough to be able to play at least twenty minutes of Dragon Quest IV.

Last night I completed chapter one in Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen.  The game is neat in that it is broken up into four chapters, each of which tells the story of a single hero.  In the fifth chapter, I am told, the four heros of the previous chapters come together.  It is a very interesting approach and so far I am enjoying the storytelling.  The graphical style of DQ4 on the Nintendo DS is extremely well done.  I am looking forward to more remakes using this game engine from Square Enix.

This evening, while I was playing with Liesl, she did a whole new range of facial expressions!  Tonight was the first time that I have noticed her using her eyebrows intentionally.  It so cute when she sits in your lap and looks you in the face and makes faces at you.

It’s Saturday and, as usual, I was up at seven thirty so that I could head on down into the dungeon and get to work.  The sun is out today and it is shining brightly.  It is nice to have some serious sunlight.  Now that we have the palm tree and the spiky tree thing in the nursery where there is more light than anywhere else in the house I get to go in there every morning and open up the blinds.  Just doing that easily more than doubles the total amount of natural light coming into the upstairs of the house and makes the house feel so much more open.

I worked for just a few hours this morning down in the basement.  Then I came up and while Dominica and Liesl were still asleep I fired up the XBOX 360 and popped in Fable: The Lost Chapters and played as much as I could while I was alone with Oreo.  I managed to go back and complete the “Rescue the Traders” mission that I had been in the midst of several days ago when the 360 got left on all day and went to sleep effectively causing me to die mid-mission.  I went back to the beginning of the game and completed the Beardy Baldy quest that I had skipped there as well, although after having done it I kind of wish that I had just skipped it altogether.  It was boring and silly.  I even managed to move forward and complete the “Kill the White Balverine” quest which is not a side-quest like the others but is one of the main plot points of the game.  It has been a while since I was able to actually advance the main storyline.  It was not a lot of time that I got to play today but I really appreciated it.

My big project for today is getting Windows Server 2003 installed onto a fully virtualized Xen host.  Doing this is harder than it sounds because my host environment is a completely graphics-free Red Hat Linux host so I am not able to simply fire up the virtual machine and connect locally using a VNC client.  I have to access the VNC data remotely which is a bit of a pain for several reasons.  The first big pain is that our Internet access went down for a little while yesterday (most likely due to weather conditions) and our IPSec VPN went down that connects me to the server on which I have been working and the connections has been unable to reestablish itself in the mean time so I am stuck creating all kinds of troublesome workarounds to attempt to connect to this server so that I may continue to work.

We did some quick cleaning around the house today including dishes, kitchen cleaning and vacuuming.  Linnea drove up from White Plains this afternoon and arrived around two in the afternoon.  This is Linnea’s first trip to Peekskill to visit us and see the new house and to meet little Liesl.

We all hung out at the house for a few hours and then decided to go out to Pastel’s in the Beach Shopping Center for dinner.  They are starting to know Liesl down there.  It is hard not to be famous when you are so cute.

Linnea left Peekskill around eight or so.  I was not watching the clock very closely.  After she left I did some searching around the house to attempt to find the gear necessary for Dominica to be able to play GameCube games on the Nintendo Wii, but all that I was able to find was the controller itself and not the wireless dongle or the memory card.  They are probably packed away somewhere with the missing XBOX 360 controller that we have not yet been able to find either.

So Dominica was not able to play GameCube games like she had wanted to be able to do tonight (she was thinking about starting The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventures) and instead spent the evening playing Paper Mario on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  She is a long way through Paper Mario and it would be really nice if she was able to complete it sometime soon.  If she got another night like tonight in which she was able to play with several hours I would not be surprised if she was able to beat the game.

Paper Mario is actually the second game in a series.  The first game is Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars from the SNES.  That game is by far the most famous and most classic.  It was an isometric 3D game from the late SNES era that was extremely popular as an adventure/JRPG crossover.  Then Paper Mario, which Dominica is playing, came out for the Nintendo 64 introducing true 3D environments and changing the game from a classic isometric view with traditionally designed, sprite-based characters and going with the now-standard 2D “paper” characters in the 3D world.  Following the first Paper Mario was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door for the GameCube (which we also own for Dominica to play once she completes this one.)  And finally, Super Paper Mario is currently available for the Nintendo Wii.  Like most Nintendo-published games claiming to be an RPG, the Paper Mario series is actually a series of adventure games and do not qualify as either true RPGs or JRPGs.

I spent my evening attempting to figure out the remote VNC viewer issues that I am facing with installing Windows Server 2003 onto a Red Hat Linux (RHEL) Xen installation without any local graphical environment.  I finally decided to give up at half past midnight and to focus on getting Sheep Guarding Llama caught up instead.  I have been behind so much recently that I really wanted to get completely caught up so that tomorrow morning I can begin working on tomorrow’s post instead of doing today’s.

Tomorrow, Sunday, Dominica and I get to just stay home for the day.  We have nothing planned other than a short software demo that I need to watch around noon and some light grocery shopping that Dominica is considering doing at some point when Liesl goes to sleep.  Not that it matters much if Liesl falls asleep because she will be wide awake and screaming the instant that Dominica steps out of the door leaving me to deal with a very unhappy baby whom I am completely unable to console until minutes before Dominica arrives back home making it look like she has been asleep the entire time.

I did get a very short chance to play a little bit of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen today.  I am just over one hour into the game at this point.  So far I am very impressed with it as a title from the 16-bit Super Nintendo era.  The graphics on this new Nintendo DS port are really nice.  Square Enix has done a very good job with making the game feel both modern and up-to-date without sacrificing the feel and style of the original games.  What they have done is a really innovative blend of rendered three-dimensional backgrounds with traditional two-dimensional sprites for the characters in the game.  The result works far better than it sounds to explain.  Since this is an “update” of a classic title, this effect really works well.  I don’t know if I would recommend the approach for a new game being made from the ground up, but it works so well in DQ4 that I might consider it if I was designing a new game like this for a portable platform like the DS.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride releases in mid-February this year so I don’t have very much time to complete DQ4 if I am to have it finished before DQ5 releases.  Also releasing this month, on the 20th, is The Sims 3 which looks to be pretty interesting.  It makes me wish that we had a nice gaming PC on which to play it since it is a style of game that the console systems cannot handle at all.

Releasing soon on the Nintendo DS is Dragon Quest IX which is being made by Level 5 who made Dragon Quest VIII for the Sony PS2 which currently ranks as my favourite game ever.  Just a few weeks ago it was officially announced that Square Enix had decided to make Dragon Quest X for the Nintendo Wii.  It will likely be quite some time before we even have a release schedule on that title.  I am very hopeful that Level 5 will be involved and that the gorgeous cell-shading used in DQ8 and Dragon Quest Swords will be carried through onto this latest title.  If we are really lucky the game will not be simplified like DQS was and the full gameplay of the traditional series will be maintained for this latest title.  Having it targetted for the Wii worries me that Square Enix will decide to eschew their traditional, high-quality game play in exchange for the gimmicks so popular for games being made for the Wii.

And today’s SGL award goes to: Andrew T. West for the proper use of the word “verily” in a sentence not involving sheep, angels, shepherds or choirs.

Today was busy at work but nothing like Friday. That was awful. Today was just normal busy. But busy enough to keep me tied to my workstation all day long.

Our big excitement today is the expected delivery of our new futon. For some reason it managed to pass the chair and is arriving first even though it was ordered several days later.

I had to make a run out to the post office today. I had a bunch of stuff to mail. The mail… is it really true that we still need the mail? Can’t we do without it at this point? When do we need it? For birthday cards? That isn’t a good enough reason. To mail checks to people? If they can’t use PayPal or some other simple, standard, cheap, immediate form of payment then they really don’t care enough about the money to justify bothering to send it to them. For magazines? Yes, deforestation is a great reason for keeping the post around. So that tons of big companies that I don’t like can pay some guy to deliver their garbage (you all know what I mean) and put it into our mailboxes instead of into a landfill so that we have to deal with it instead of them?

I had to deal with my first ever major issue with an eBay seller today. I had one once that sold me a $6 video game and never sent it to me and just took off with the money. But it was $6. This time it was $210 and a software pirate. Not as bad as the time that Andy got hit for over $1,000 from an online pirate but still pretty bad. Luckily eBay and PayPal have some major mechanism for dealing with this stuff so I am confident that the issue will be resolved quickly.

Dominica got home with Oreo and we immediately ran out to Subway to grab dinner. It was a quick bite and then we walked down to GameStop to do some Christmas shopping. We are loving have a nice GameStop so close. It is hard to believe that such a nice shop can exist on that corner. If anything is a sign of the times changing in Newark it is that store surviving there. Dominica found two games for the girls for Christmas that she has not been able to find anywhere else. We also picked up, used, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for ourselves as well as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door so that Dominica can go straight on to that after finishing the original Paper Mario for the N64.

On the way home we stopped at Starbucks and got ourselves hot chocolate and gingerbread scones. For some reason, even though we live just one block from a Starbucks, we have only ever been there a few times in the more than a year that we have lived here. This was, in fact, Dominica’s first time into that Starbucks and no more than my third! But perhaps we will be there more often now. Walking to GameStop to do some shopping and stopping off for coffee or other treats is so very handy.

After dinner we came back to the apartment and I did some work online and aided Dominica as she worked on assembling our new loveseat that arrived today from Target and Amazon (some arrangement that I am not clear about.) It wasn’t too bad to put together and in no time it was assembled and set up in our living room. It is a deep chocolate brown simple affair. We have it set between the east facing windows as the center piece of what is now, more or less, a real living room.

We did some shopping on Amazon tonight for Chessex game dice.  We don’t have any here at all and it has become a problem.

And today I leave you with this.

I worked today until ten.  Dominica spent the morning playing Paper Mario to which she is now completely addicted.  She is about ten percent through the game at this point.  It is funny that I bought this game because I thought that it looked interesting and I haven’t played it more than two minutes but Dominica is completely addicted to it.  Funny how that happens.  It is good that so often we like games that are similar enough that even if one isn’t that interested the other often is.

Ramona came over around eleven thirty.  The original plan had been to play D&D again this morning in an attempt to wrap up the scenario from last night but Chris wasn’t able to make it this morning so Ramona just came over for breakfast.

We all ate breakfast downstairs.  Just something light as we decided to get a pizza lunch in a little while so we didn’t want to fill up too much now.  Ramona’s afternoon plans were canceled and Chris was going to come over in the early afternoon so we decided to try D&D then.

While we waited I did some D&D research while Ramona watched Dominica play Paper Mario for several hours.  I am slowly getting back into the D&D groove as well as learning the new rules for the new version of the game.  They are not too much different but there is some big stuff that has changed and it is throwing me off a bit.

Chris made it over around three and we were able to get a game kicked off around four.  We played for about two hours before people had to leave.  With our overall inexperience we started the game at the beginning of a battle and only got partway through it before our time was up.  It was fun, though, and by the end I was getting more into the swing of the combat rolls.

Dominica spent the evening playing Paper Mario mostly.  She is really enjoying that game.