So I’ve been neglecting the old blog a bit.  Free time has been at a premium (obviously) so I just haven’t had the chance I’d like to post on here.  Summer is coming so I’m afraid the neglect might continue - maybe with my laptop up north I’ll get more blogging done (one can hope).

Paige is doing well.  Tammy is doing well.  Paige has been growing up at an incredible pace  and it seems like every day she is doing something new.  A few days ago now she started sitting up on her own and now it seems like she doesn’t want do anything other then sitting up.  She’s also eating solid food now and making some fantastic messes.

Gaming wise EQ2 has been my primary focus.  I hit level 80.  Got my epic.  We’ve been doing a lot of raiding and having a blast.

So just a quick update :)  I’ll try and get a more substantional post up sooner or later

I’m not sure who all watches HBO’s The Wire out there but this article (from Slate) is really and worth reading for anyone who does.  To me The Wire is the best show thats has ever been on television and I’m having a real tough time trying to figure out what I’ll watch next now that the show is coming to an end.  This article put a smile on my face and helped me reflect on 5 great seasons of television.

“The Wire” changed the way we see things. It merged the haves with the have nots, put a face, a heart, a life, a story to inner-city youth who most folks would rather forget,. and it proved, time and time again, that no one is all good, or all bad. It is far better and more compelling than politics.

Read the whole article here. (The Article does contain spoilers - so if you are not current to episode 9 of season 5 do not read - it will ruin the season for you :))

Tammy and I bought a car! As many of you know our current priority is saving up for and buying a house (we have a workable target of next summer) and we are planning on moving outside of Toronto (likely to the east) which would require a car. We were planning on waiting for the summer but we hadn’t considered that the insurance for my other car was coming due now. So we had to choose if we wanted to pay double insurance for 2008 or if we wanted to move up our plans to buy the car.

So to help make our decision we decided we’d go out and see if any cars and current promotions would entice us to buy the car right away. I had always wanted to look at both the Honda Civic and Accord so I decided to start our search at Honda.

At the Honda dealership Tammy was a little underwhelmed by the customer service at first. Its amazing how you Americans are beat around by rabid salesman in the US and have come to expect to be jumped by 12 salesman the moment you step onto the lot. The fact that no one attacked us in the parking lot actually frustrated Tammy! We eventually did meet up with a salesman and he showed us around the cars and took us out for a test drive of the Honda Civic DX-G.

We instantly fell in love!!! …. With the dashboard. Oh - the car was great too. At this point I should break this post to show you this:

Yes ladies and gentleman - that is in actual fact the sickest interior in the history of man kind. So we were impressed with Honda and the price was definitely right for a model with some decent upgrades (the base models at Honda all come with a pretty decent compliment of features) but we wanted to make sure we took in the competition and got the best deal for our money. So off we went to check out the competition…

First we decided to check out Chrysler (my family has always owned Chryslers so there is some instilled loyalty there) and it was REALLY disappointing. To start with I told the sales guy that Honda was giving me a 2.9 interest rate. He kept giving me shitty rates that did not compete (from a piece of paper - he did not know his product at all). It was odd - Chrysler doesn’t have one unified interest rate at given terms - every vehicle has its own interest rates and they vary A LOT. I was excited to see the Avenger but in the end no matter what Chrysler model I looked at there was just too much plastic. Ahh well. On to Toyota.

I figured if anyone was going to be able to compete with Honda it would be Toyota so we drove a bit further down the auto strip on Eglinton Avenue to the Toyota dealership.

The Toyotas were nice enough of cars but they lacked the wow factor that the Hondas had. They also had a pretty weak interest rate.

So in the end we went with a Honda Civic DX-G. We will be picking up the car on Friday and I’ll have lots of pictures to share

So I haven’t had a Paige update on here in a while and thought I’d share a quick update and give some thoughts on watching a human being grow up.

Paige is doing very well - she’s been sleeping through the night for over a month now (which is just insane I’m told). We haven’t had her weighed or measured lately but the growth has just been staggering. She’s been spending more and more time awake and is quickly becoming more aware of herself (more on that below). People tell you your kids will grow up in the blink of an eye, and I’ve quickly become afraid of blinking.

As I said above one of the coolest things about getting used to life with baby is watching Paige become more aware of herself. Watching Paige grow in the womb was an amazing snapshot of how we’ve evolved. Seeing her as a small little dot with no limbs, no brain - just a small organism floating around and then a few months later seeing a fully developed little person is just insane.

Now watching Paige’s cognitive and social development is proving to be even more fascinating. As you can see in the picture above Paige has discovered her hand. This is the first in a series of discoveries about herself that is proving she’s a very intelligent little girl. She’s ahead by a few months in many milestones and I cannot articulate the pride and love I feel when she sits there and stares at her hand while moving it around; developing that link between her motor skills and her ability to control it.

Having a baby and watching it grow from a peanut sized dot on an ultrasound to a smart little girl who’s just discovering who and what she is no doubt the most fascinating and touching experience anyone could go through…

This comes by way of Evan Sims…

The Webware 100 awards for 2008 are taking votes from the community!  This awards program is a cool recognition system for a lot of sites and services we use everyday and often take for granted so show your love!  Vote here.

As Evan did I’ll share my votes:

Audio iTunes, Last.fm (almost made live365 number three for old times sake but they hadn’t done anything memorable in so long I went against it!  Didn’t go with a third…)
Browsing Adobe AIR, Google Reader. Firefox
Commerce & Events Craiglist, Paypal, Woot
Commuications Gmail, Skype, XFire (If I had another vote I wanted to throw one at Meebo)
Productivity Basecamp, Google Cal, Google Docs
Publishing & Productivity Flickr, Twitter, WordPress
Search & Reference Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia
Social Facebook, Delicious, LinkedIn
Utility & Security OpenDNS, BT (I considered giving OpenID my third vote but I’m just not convinced yet… I went with nothing)
Video YouTUBE, Viddler, Vimeo

My quest to find solo friendly games has led me to two places.  To cover my MMO needs I’ve followed Jim, Evan and the boys into Lord of the Rings Online.  I’ve really come to enjoy the storyline gameplay and playing through the central storyline quests with a static group has been a lot of fun.  Our plan is to get together a few days a week and work together on the main storyline quests and do side quests, crafting, etc on the off nights.  The game offers a lot as a casual game with many great virtual world elements.  One of the coolest things I’ve ever done in an MMO was playing music in front of the prancing pony the other night.  LOTRO allows you to play music in the game using various instruments.  Its just a really cool example of how Turbine makes LOTRO more then just a game.  If anyone is looking to try the game out check us out on the Firefoot server - we’ve got a guild setup and everything…

My other casual-post-baby poison is a facebook game - PackRat.  Evan convinced me to install this (as a rule I avoid all things facebook outside of basic communication  as a rule) and I’ve been having a blast ever since.  The game is really simple - You steal, buy and craft collectible cards and try and come up with full collections.

Outside of gaming I’ve been busy with work and getting atvtrailfind.com ready for release.  I’m hoping to have the site done this weekend!

RJOworld and my other sites are now all over on a new web host!  Evan and I went ahead and purchased a virtual dedicated server together.  From my end I wanted to get some dedicated resources for some new projects I am working on, particularly atvtrailfind.com which is about to launch in 2-4 weeks (depending on a few things) and I’m expecting a pretty decent level of traffic for the site.

Dreamhost has been a great host offering low cost hosting with tonnes of features but you definitely get what you pay for.  As one of the largest webhosts on the tubes there are many site slow downs when other people hosted on your shared box spike traffic.  Also application performance (in particular PHP and mySQL) can sometimes grind to a halt.

So its a brave new world with a dedicated box!

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out how to continue to be a gamer while spending every moment I can with the baby.  Of particular difficulty has been trying to figure out how/if/what to do with the MMO genre with my new reality and the baby.  I haven’t played an MMO now in weeks and honestly I find that it isn’t a loss at all.  I think I’ve finally burned out on the genre to the point where it might be lasting.

I’ve been addicted to MMOs now for almost 13 years and I’ve spent more hours playing these games then I care to recount.  I’ve bought pretty much every game in the genre that has come out (even those I knew I wouldn’t like) and I’ve enjoyed every minute playing the games.  I owe MMO’s a lot obviously.  I have many friends I’ve met playing these games and of course I met my wife working on the media end of the games.

But here I am unable to bring myself to care about having 0 desire to play the games.

In the last few weeks I’ve played my XBOX 360 constantly, a little bit of the wii and hell yesterday I went tobogganing with my sister (yes we rule).  I don’t know, I’m finding life without time consuming MMO games to be vastly improved.  I’ve always scoffed at people who’ve said “you are wasting your life playing those games” - well of course that is bullshit, it’s just another avenue of entertainment.  However too much of a good thing can be bad and its nice from time to time to be reminded that there are many ways of spending your time, money and energies.

At the insistence of Jim (:P) I picked up Rock Band while I was in the US of A last week and both Tammy and I have been playing it when the baby naps and we’ve been having a blast.  We’ve also been playing Scene It.  I think I’m really beginning to like the Casual / Wii-Era of gaming where you can really get your family involved.

I guess the importance of family can’t be understated, especially when you have a baby - maybe its just having better things to do that finally puts the MMO itch to bed…

Inspiron 1420 Unboxing,
originally uploaded by RJO.

I meant to get these pictures up a month ago but here we are in February.

Over on flickr I’ve uploaded my unboxing picture from my new latop!

So yesterday we went down to Buffalo to pick up my mother in law at Buffalo International Airport.  Of course we couldn’t go down to Buffalo without doing a little shopping and enjoying some US-only-cuisine.

After frantic googling for places to go last week I discovered that there is an Olive Garden in Amherst (’burb of Buffalo).  I don’t know about you - but I think Olive Garden is quite possibly the best restaurant ever known to man.  There are not many things I don’t like about Canada but not having an Olive Garden is one of them.  Another of those things is not having Target - but we took care of that as well.

Our trip started in a fairly predictable fashion - with some good ol’ fashioned American racism.  When crossing the border the border guard asked us (like they always do) why we decided to live in Toronto as opposed to Phoenix (where Tammy is from) (by the way - Why do all Americans have trouble understanding why ANYONE could EVER leave the United States to go live elsewhere - the arrogance from the border guards every single time is brutal).  My answer was that A) its too hot and B) the unemployment rate is a joke.  His response to that?  “I know its terrible, all them mexicans taking the jobs”.  UGHHHHHHHHHHH welcome to the United States.

With racism out of the way we decided to explore another great American tradition - Shopping!  We made our way straight to the Target.  Target is one of those places that just rocks.  It’s like Walmart but there are actually merchandising standards and the people don’t give the impression that they’d rather be in a pool of lava then helping you out.  We picked up quite a bit of clothing for me (some work clothes, although the bulk of the stuff I bought was for being a lazy horse around the house - PJs, Boxers, sweaters…) and the baby probably cleared 100 dollars worth of clothes.  Target was for sure a success.

I have to point this out, mostly to make my fellow Canadians bitter - I had a copy of rockband in my hand.  In fact Target had 2 PS3 and 2 360 copies of the game.  In the end I had too much stuff with me and I didn’t want to risk putting too much merchandise in the car - I didn’t want the border guards to tax me out the ass end for importing too much stuff.  i must admit I regret now not picking it up, but I’ll live.  We are taking Tammy’s mother back in two weeks so I might take a look at that time.

After Target we quickly hit Best Buy and then it was off to explore the last great American tradition  - Eating like horses.  It was off to Olive Garden where Tammy enjoyed Zuppa Soup with breadsticks and I had chicken parm, oh yes and iced tea - their peach iced tea is to die for.  All and all the meal was a 12/10 - every time I have Olive Garden the place just rocks.

After this we headed over to the airport, picked up Tammy’s mom and returned home.

That is my most recent adventure into the United States of these Americas.  Hopefully next time will be just as exciting!