Lucky Number 13 and Geek Toys

The other day I was entering Qdoba when I saw a young lady wearing a coat which prominently featured the number 13 on the back and sleeve. I thought to myself, "Hmm...what could possibly cause someone to put a 13 on their coat? NASCAR fan? Wilt Chamberlain fan (or offspring)?"

It then occurred to me that it was a letter jacket and she was graduating in 2013. How in the crap are kids graduating in 2013 now? I'm pretty sure '13 will never mean 2013 to me. I will always think of men with handlebar mustaches riding bikes with giant front wheels whilst smoking pipes when I think of '13 (although a brief search on Google suggests that perhaps I'm off by 30 years, but hey, it's my memory...don't mess with it.)

In other Hawkins family news, we finally got our new PC at home, which has resulted in endless tinkering by yours truly in an effort to get it working properly. I used to enjoy the geek thrill of setting up and playing with a new PC. Now I just find it to be a time sink away from the real things which interest me in life, namely sleep and booze.

I think I've finally got everything up and running again, but I'm still finding my way around Windows 7. I find myself frequently saying nonsensical things like "Dagnabbit" and "Doh!" and "Screw you Microsoft."

But in between these things, I have discovered some cool new stuff. One is the ability to "throw" movies from my computer to the network enabled TV in our bedroom. This is much cooler and easier to setup than I expected.

I've seen ads on TV for this, and you can read about it here on Microsoft's site. And while the quality isn't quite what I would want to watch a full movie over, it works great for showing the kids a quick episode of Bob the Builder whilst trying to shave. (Nothing quite kills a good shave like a small Chinese person clawing at you to pick her up.)

Hopefully I'm done tinkering for a while, and I can go back to the way I spent my evenings at the beginning of January when our old computer died -- lying on the couch watching Tivo while my kids try and start a fire in the kitchen.