It was another fine Christmas for me. In the morning Mom, Chris and I went to my mom's foster family where we exchanged gifts, ate, talked, and watched people. We've been doing this like every year, although Dad and Steph don't go anymore. I asked Steph about it and she said she was uncomfortable with the situation since we're not blood related. It finally hit me that I'm getting old. I see people like Kimberly and KJ and David and I remember when they were toddlers or just born a dozen years ago. Mom talks a lot and has a good time. Chris and I kind of hang around, talk a bit, but mostly just stand around watching people. It's a nice, family atmosphere.

We actually opened presents the night before. I got a Penguin coffee table book from Chris; a Penguin calendar, some towels and sheets from Steph; Dad and Mom got me wireless headphones; Kooma gave me $100. The headphones are neat because I don't have a cord dangling so I can move around and not worry about a cable. Unfortunately, they use the 900 MHz band which the Ricochet modem also uses (and Metricom just charged my account so I have Ricochet for another year), so when the Ricochet is broadcasting I get these static pops from the headphones. Reminds me of the interference that the Ricochet makes with some electronic equipment.

I bought a couple of 6' serial cable extenders and tried to move the Ricochet to the next cubicle, but the static is still there. It's present more or less all the time, although just occassional pops unless the connection is being used, like when Eudora is checking email. The next thing I'll try is to get my PowerMac 6100 cover and try to use that as a shield. I can put the Ricochet in a corner of my cubicle and cover it, letting it face the highway. Then we'll see how good that is. Another option is to set it up in another room, which would require setting up a dedicated Mac as a router. I could use the 6100 for that, although I'm not sure what'll happen when the IS guys find my Mac in the switch room.

For Tartan's site I want to put back the video clips, if I can find them. But if I can't I'll need to create those files. Clips from "Denial" and "Chill Factor" should be easy since I can just rip them from the DVDs. Stuff on video casette though is a bigger problem because my PowerBook doesn't have a slot for a video capture card. One solution is to buy a digital camcorder, then record the video clips onto that and transfer the data to my PowerBook over the Firewire link, then reprocess the clips into QuickTime format. But I still want a really small camcorder, like the Canon ZR which is long out of production and I haven't found any alternatives (not that ZR has a video- in port in any case).

I'm really getting into Diablo again, which is too bad since I need to get work done and I've done nothing today (Wednesday). Sure it's not as sexy as Diablo II, but it does have a simple appeal to me. Thing is I don't remember if I beat it on Hell level, so I have to go through it and accomplish that, but to be able to play Hell you have to complete the game at Normal and a Hard level. This will take a while. I'm starting out with the Warrior since that's the easiest one to play. It's annoying that the village on the surface is so spread out, takes a while to walk around talking to people. I liked the really early computer games where when you went to the surface you just had a menu to see what shops you visited, much faster.

Not that this'll matter to any people, but the cable guide that my cable company sends me every month rearranged the movie descriptions by channel, and more significantly added the Independent Film Channel and Turner Classic Movies to the descriptions. The problem with having a lot of channels is that the various printed tv guides don't cover all the channels and if they're not in the tv guide how are you going to know what's on those channels? In which case what use are those extra channels? Web services like ClickTV aren't the answer because they're not as convenient when I sit down and scan the movie listings to see what's interesting this week, and they don't have a movie listings section in any case.