It's the time of year where I get to buy myself a present.  This year, I am torn between a 30" monitor from my good friends at Dell or a new camera, so I can take  better pictures.  What I may do is wait until Jenny goes out of town again, and then get BOTH.  ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

This morning Alex and I got up bright and early and went to my parent's place at Lake Norman.  We had to pick Eric up, because he had been staying with his favorite cousin Will this week.  It was nice to have some time where I didn't have to chase Jake and Isabel around, although it was kind of mean to dump them on Jennifer right after she had been out of town for a week.

Anyway, we had a great time at the lake, swimming, boating, and just sitting around talking.  Eric found a turtle skull that he wants to wear on a necklace.  Jenny will be so pleased! I got a little bit of sun, but I didn't burn like I usually do.

Eric and Alex are both starting school again on Monday. It's hard to believe that Eric will be a fourth grader, and Alex will be in 2d grade.  Alex is very excited to be going back to school, because it's an excuse for him to get some office supplies (he is obsessed with office supplies; I have no idea why).  Eric is NOT excited.   His teacher was the Teacher of the Year in Union County last year, so hopefully she will be able to deal with Eric pretty well...he's smart, but sometimes he doesn't want to do what the TEACHER wants him to do.  I have no idea where he gets that from.

Today pretty much sucked.  I had arguments with a couple of people who I probably shouldn't have argued with, I had to deal with a kid who was acting up, and I'm pissed because Jenny is going back to Seattle on Sunday. AND THEN, I was supposed to go out with Jenny to dinner and a movie, but I really didn't want to, because I was in a bad mood. 

But then we went to dinner at a nice place and to see SuperBad (which she really didn't want to see, but went to see it with me anyway) and ended up having a really good time.  Also, I got some new shorts that are 38" waist.  My waist hasn't been 38" since before I got married.  When it gets down to 32 or so, I'll be back to where I was when I got out of the Army (which was around 1992 or 1993).

The movie only gets an 8.  I was kind of disappointed, because I was expecting a 10, but it was worth the money.

...but I am going to go and see this movie this weekend.  My only friend is going on vacation, so I will probably have to talk Jenny into going to see it with me.  I wont tell her what I got tickets for until we get there.

The movie is "SuperBad", and it's in the Animal House, Porky's, American Pie tradition.  The trailer is rated PG, and you can look around on YouTube if you want to see the R rated preview.  The R rated preview is DEFINETLY not safe for work.

So today some guy asked a question on qna about how to force a computer to sleep from a command prompt.  I like to answer questions like that because they are usually really simple.  I figured that powercfg.exe would have an option to force the computer to go to sleep, but I quickly found out that powercfg is more for setting up the power settings and profiles, as opposed to actually forcing the computer to do something.  I was kind of suprised that there wasn't an in-box way to do this, but I figured it couldn't be that hard.  I was right:  I looked at MSDN, and found that SetSystemPowerState would do exactly what I wanted.  So I took a few minutes to come up with some working code (the hardest part was adjusting security so that it would let me sleep the machine, I put it here if anyone is interested.).

Then, I went back to the original question, all ready to answer, and I found out that you CAN sleep the PC using built in commands, it's in shutdown.exe, which has been shipping at least since windows 2000.  So someone ELSE gets the best answer.

I hate when that happens.

My manager is kind of obsessively competitive.  His current obsession is playing the Sharkrunners game over on the Discovery Channel's website.  He has been playing it nonstop for a few days, trying to amass as much game money as possible.  The thing is, he went on vacation to the Bahamas today, so I am going to start trying to catch up to his score (he has more than 10x the score I have).  He's so obsessive about winning, I bet he will sit in his hotel room during his vacation, making sure that I cant get close.

My evil plan is SURE to succeed.  Unless he reads this.  Nahhh, he'd never do that.

I went upstairs last night to commune with my computer, and when I got to the attic, I saw this:

Alex even likes to instant message with me when I am in the room.  He will send me a wink or a message, and then run over to me to see if I got it, which kind of misses the whole point, but he has a good time.

Archie McPhee® Toys, Gifts & Novelties is my new favorite store. 

Getting much past level 4 on http://qna.live.com is kind of a hassle, so I figure I wont get beyond level 5, which I got to today.  The signal to noise ratio has never been that great, but isnt really a problem for me since I try to avoid all of the subjective questions and stick to things I know about.  Sometimes, I think I have a better answer than the person who wins "best answer" (like this question, for example), but overall I can't complain.

While being a level 5 is nice, I like having 5 stars next to my name more, because it says that a high proportion of my answers are "best answers".  Napoleon said that if he had enough ribbon for medals, he could conquer the world.  I'm like that, in that if I can get enough stars next to my name, I will dispense free technical support forever.

One of my answers even got picked up by a review of the various question and answer sites.  My brush with greatness.