There’s a post by Shannon on her website that you should all take a look at, read thoroughly, think about, and then comment on. It’s about women changing their last names to match their husbands.
I’ve commented on the article, so you can read my thoughts there. But I thought I’d send over anyone here that hasn’t read it so you can give your thoughts (I’m looking at you, Scott)
Here’s the link: Doahleigh.com - Last Names: to change or not to change
Just writing a quick update to log what we’re doing in Florida.
We drove down from Thursday to Saturday, making overnight stops in Louisville and Montgomery. We barely missed the big tornados in southern Alabama, and actually drove through the county where the tornados had gone through.
After arriving, we started to take it easy, and stayed inside because of the cool temperature (67). Shan’s wonderful Grandpa and Grandma are playing hosts to us for the week, and they treated us to a yummy lasagne meal. After that we watched TV a while before calling a night.
Sunday consisted of sleeping in, sitting on the balcony in the sun, driving out to see a little town for rich people (including one of Michael Jordan’s houses,) came back for a nap, ate yummy ham sandwishes, and then watched tv and played some cards. Temperatures were low today as well, only topping out at around 62. So, we have yet to go poolside, though we did take a cold, windy walk on the beach today.
Shan and I are using TurboTax to do our taxes this year….we think. Shan did hers up and wasn’t quite sure that the results were what they were supposed to be. I’ll be doing mine in the next few days.
Has anyone else used these programs? What do you think, would you recommend them?
Yeah, things are going to look like this for a while until I can complete a new design. SO DEAL WITH IT. haha
But for real, I’ll get something done here after I finish my 3 other big huge web projects, plus go to school full time, plus work part time, plus spend time with my girlfriend.
So yeah, someday.
My love’s birthday is today! Shan turns 26 today (I’m taking the chance that she’s still young enough to where it’s ok if I reveal her age to the world.)
I’ve never met anyone who’s made me feel more lucky or fortunate than Shannon. She’s shown me so much support, care and love that it’s sickening….sickening! We’re exact opposites and the same person all at the same time, which makes absolutely no sense to anyone but us. Our arguments and fights are the stuff of legend but somehow we come around and realize that we’re so frikkin’ in love that all that stuff doesn’t matter.
I love you honey, and I’m glad you’ve been on Earth for 26 years. Thanks for spending almost two of them so far with me.
Ok, so I got a Nintendo Wii a couple of weeks ago, as an early Christmas present from my sweetie Shannon. First we had to sit in line for it, which was a different experience in itself, and which Shan explained very well on her website.
So once I finally got it all hooked up (that didn’t take too long, there aren’t that many cords,) and then connected to the internet (also very simple, it’s all wireless…but you do need wireless or you’re screwed,) I was off.
First thing to do was to play the pack-in game, Wii Sports.
Wii Sports is probably the most fun people will be having with their Wiis for the next few months. First of all it comes with the system, second it’s designed to show off the motion-sensing controller, and lastly, there just aren’t really that many good games out for the Wii right now. But more on that later.
Wii Sports contains 5 little mini-games: Tennis, Bowling, Golf, Baseball, and Boxing. Besides those, it also has a daily fitness program you can do that keeps track of your progress and gives you an “age” based on how well you do. Do really well and you can get as low as 20, do bad and, well, you’ll be older as far as the game is concerned. I’ve really liked this aspect of the game because it gives me something to do each day instead of just playing the same sports over and over. The daily fitness program will switch up between the sports and have you do 3 different training exercises each day. The best I’ve gotten so far is age 28.
Tennis is probably the most active and fun sport you can play. Especially 2-player. You can play up to 4 people at once so I’m looking forward to getting some friends together soon. Shan and I played against each other in Tennis, Golf and Bowling, and all are pretty fun. The learning curve as far as controls is pretty small: You swing the controller like a tennis racket or a baseball bat or a golf club, or your arms like you would when bowling or boxing.
I haven’tplayed Boxing too much because the controls have been pretty non-responsive for me. There’s a lot you can do as far as placement of your hands on the screen according to where you’re holding the controllers in “real life.” So anyways, that hasn’t been played much.
I also purchased Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blast. I had bought Super Monkey Ball for the Nintendo Gamecube and it was pretty darn fun. Probably the weirdest and hardest game ever, but still fun. So this one is much harder, and definitely more weird. It tries to use the motion controller a little too much: you hold the Wii remote horizontally, and you tilt it each direction, which in turn tilts the entire world on the monkey ball game. This causes your little monkey ball to roll in whatever direction and you tilt your way through to get the monkey ball to go through the maze and finally end up at the goal. Well it’s very hard and frustrating, and I haven’t gotten far because I’ve wanted to throw my controller through the TV on a few occasions already. There’s also 50 different party games which would all be more fun with multiple people, so I haven’t been able to try them all out yet. Overall, I wouldn’t buy this game again if I had to.
Besides the games, the Wii has impressed me with it’s overall experience. One thing that I relly like abou tit is that it plays Gamecube games. So I’ve still been playing NBA Live 2005 on it a lot. It’s got ports for the Gamecube controllers on the top of the system (the wireless Wavebird controller for the Gamecube is my favorite controller ever,) and places for memory cards.
You can also download select games over the internet through the Wii via what Nintendo calls a “Virtual Console.” I loaded up some “Wii Points,” which costs $1.00 for every 100 points, with my credit card and went shopping. I ended up buying Super Mario 64 for 1000 Wii Points (or $10) and will save my other 1000 points for upcoming released older games. They release a bunch of games every Monday, and the selection right now isn’t too good. They have NES, SuperNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx 16 games available. I’ve though about getting Sonic the Hedgehog and Altered Beast, but I think I’ll wait and see what else is released first.
The Wii menu is set up into channels, and one of the channels is called the “Mii channel.” Here you go in and design caricatures of people (yourself and others if you want) that will represent you in games that utilize the Miis, like Wii Sports. I also heard the upcoming games like Wario Ware and The Sims will use your designed Miis. Shannon and I made each other and she made her sisters and her friend Robin, and I made Ed. Scott and Megan made themselves on their Wii and sent them over via the internet. It’s pretty silly, but still fun.
Pretty soon there will be News, Forecast and Internet channels available, so that you can sign up for news feeds, get a Google Earth-like forecast, and surf the ‘Net. But these aren’t available right now.
There’s a Photo channel available right now, which will read photos off your SD card and you can send them to people and draw on them and stuff. Haven’t used this yet and most likely won’t, it’s pretty silly, but could be nice for people who don’t have a computer. But if you have a digital camera then you probably have a computer. Oh well.
I guess that’s it. The graphics and stuff aren’t that impressive as far as an update over the Gamecube, but if the games are fun it doesn’t matter. There’s a game coming out in January called Wii Play that will do some more Wii Sports-like stuff like Pool and darts so that should be fun. And I’m looking forward to Super Mario Galaxy, Wario Ware, Metroid, and any NBA game.
I’d definitely recommend a Wii to anyone looking for a video game system. It’s just plain fun, and the games aren’t too hard to grasp so that you can just sit down and be playing right away without having to learn how to play.
So that’s it! Go buy a Wii and then make fun of yourself for buying and playing with something called a “Wii.”
Shan posted a little about the surprising site we saw when hading back from lunch on Sunday. The fact that those people had their kids out there doing their dirty work was just terrible. Okay, fine, I respect your beliefs and your need to express them. I have no problem with that. but at least wait until your children can make up their own mind before you send them out, protesting something that they most likely have no idea about. Especially something like abortion, where most of the grown men can’t possibly know enough, let alone the little kiddies.
Anyways, I just wanted to say a little something about that.
Besides that, let me officially announce a new feature here at BradBice.com. I’ve alwasy wanted to post movie reviews, and now I have. On the front page, and maybe on an upcoming ‘Movies’ page, I’ll list all of the latest movies I’ve seen plus a rating from 1-10 stars. And I’ll probably write a little something if it’s deserved. That’s it.
Edit: It’s now on it’s own page!
Ok, come back soon!
I picked up a 1GB Sd card for Shannon’s new camera for $12.99, plus a 2GB SD card for my camera for $24.99!
I’ve decided to test a new feature on BradBice.com, called “Slick Deals from SlickDeals”. In this feature, I’ll be showing off some of the things that the marvelous website slickdeals.net has provided for me, at a slick low cost.
I’ll start with the latest deal, which just so happens to be a whole lot of POP!
Thanks to a heads up from SlickDeals, Shan and I were able to score 8 12-packs of Pepsi (4 pepsi, 1 mountain dew, 1 mountain dew livewire, 1 wild cherry pepsi) from Target for $20.00, plus they handed over two gift cards for $5.00 each. Sweet! That’s a lot of pop for $10.00.
Neither of us is that crazy for the pop, though Shan does have a Pepsi craving now and then, but this was a deal we couldn’t pass up. Now our fridge is stocked with 4 flavors of pop so we can stop hitting the healthy milk and water so hard!
After over ten years of playing around with computers, I’ve finally got myself an Apple.
My friend Scott had gotten a Mac Mini a while ago, and I was captivated by it’s small size and the wonderful Mac OS X. You can’t beat the price for what you get, either. I got a 1.83gHz Intel Core Duo with a Superdrive (for making DVDs) and 2GB of RAM. I’ve heard these things are really hard to upgrade, so I got the best of what I could get for now. Only a 80GB hard drive, but I figure I can get an external hard drive for cheap later on.
Anyways, Shan and I just got a new flat screen monitor for the apartment, and the Mac looks nice on it. Not a widescreen, but the desk space is wonderful after having a giant, 90’s CRT TV on there forever.
I’m still in the transition phase, trying to learn the shortcuts and easy ways to do things on a Mac. I know Windows pretty good, at least good enough to get around in it pretty fast, but I’m not too familiar with OSX. But it’s so beautiful and fun to look at that it’s nothing bad to have to spend a few more seconds looking around.
I’m looking forward to spending some time with iPhoto and iDVD, and iMovie HD. Next I need to get a bigger SD card for my camera so I can start taking more videos.
Another real nice thing is the FrontRow feature. Click the link to see some pictures. It’s so smooth and seamless that I love to play with it.
The built-in wireless is also very nice. I just love the attention to detail that Apple puts into it’s products. They know that we don’t want to deal with wires or huge boxes or whatever, so they just make things easier.
The only problem so far has been with the Apple keyboard that I got with the Mini. I ws using the USB slots on the keyboard to transfer photos from Shan’s computer a GB at a time. Let’s see the troubles that caused:
So I had to order a new keyboard. That was annoying, but not a big hassle.
So overall I’ll give the Mac Mini an ‘A’ so far. I’m trying to use it for fun stuff only, and keep using my laptop for work.