Swimmin' In The Rain

Southern Man has his eight-year-old daughter this weekend, and as she's complained that she didn't get a "proper" birthday party with cake and candles and such during the summer Southern Man arranged a little cookout and swim party for her at gf's house. Daughter was so excited that she put on her swimsuit Friday evening and kept it on until party time on Saturday afternoon. She squealed with delight upon seeing one of her playmates waiting for her and in no time both of them were itching to get into the pool.

Problem was, instead of another hundred-degree day it was overcast and sprinkling and neither Southern Man nor gf were very excited about letting the little ones swim under such conditions. Well, the rain let up after a bit and we relented and it turns out that swimming in the rain is a lot of fun and we all swam and played and had a great time. Then we (the older we, that is) fired up the grill and cooked burgers and hot dogs while the little ones continued to splash about. Then we moved back inside and one of gf's talented daughters decorated the cake and whenever we can drag the kids away from watching last night's broadcast of "Disney's High School Musical II" on gf's DVR we'll sing "Happy Birthday" and my little angel will blow out her candles and the party will continue late into the night.

Life is good!

Surgical Steel

Southern Man and his ex have had more than one discussion as to whether or not teenage son should be permitted to pierce his ears. It's not a big deal to Southern Man and the issue hadn't come up for some time and he hadn't even thought about it for months...until teenage son took matters into his own hands and did the job himself. The first Southern Man knew about it was when his son strolled into the study last night with two bloody holes in his ears and a couple of home-made posts in his hand and said "Hey, Dad, would you please help me get these in?" For what it's worth, he claims he sterilized the safety pin used for the operation over an open flame first.

Well, what would you do in such a situation?

Southern Man chose to bow to the inevitable, helped him as requested, and send him to the mall earlier today to get some proper plugs. But his mother (who got the news via youngest daughter this morning) is (based on her rather curt comments at the time) not, repeat not happy about any of this. It will be interesting to see her reaction when she sees him in church tomorrow morning.

A Tale of Two Routers

For a computer geek, Southern Man's current setup is...well, pretty lame. One game PC (Windows 98 2nd Edition for those good old games that just won't run on XP), one ancient box hanging on the cable modem for Internet access, and a closetful of machines that need work (like the XP Game PC and the two good office machines that won't boot or post for some reason or another, teenage son's virus-laden PC from his mom's house, the old laptop, and a bunch of others that need to come up just long enough to copy stuff from their hard drives). So there is currently no home network at Casa Southern Man.

Then teenage son purchased a subscription to XBox Live.

After a week of passing the cable modem back and forth Southern Man did a little research and nabbed a used Logitech Play Link (a product so ancient that it no longer appears on their web site, but Southern Man is a long-time fan of Logitech mice and keyboards and decided to just trust the reviews) for about forty bucks on amazon.com's marketplace. Then after returning from a week of vacation in Branson, MO and finding that said Play Link had been safely delivered to Casa Southern Man by the US Mail Southern Man and gf and teenage son ventured into the 100° heat in search of a router. The first store we hit, Circuit City, had three perfectly acceptable products for $50 each. And Southern Man selected the one he'd never heard of - a Buffalo Technology Wireless-G High-Speed Router - even though there were more familiar DLink and LinkSys products right there on the same shelf because the Buffalo came with a $25 rebate. Gonna save some money this trip, said Southern Man! Right.

Now, while Southern Man makes no claims to be any sort of network engineer, hooking up a router is well within his skill set - or so he thought. But a frustrating hour-and-a-half later it was obvious that he was buffalo'd by this one, so he and his entourage again braved the heat and swapped this not-quite-a-bargain-after-all for a tried-and-true LinkSys WRT 54G that worked just fine right out of the box and Southern Man once again had the foundation for a legitimate home network.

The Play Link is as simple as can be - two power supplies, two cables, and two transmitter/reciever boxes that act just like a hardwire connection. We plugged one unit into the router and the other into the XBox and XBox Live lit right up, so Southern Man can sit upstairs in the study and blog work while teenage son (aka EmoKid185) and his equally emo-ish best friend simultaneously wreak havok in Halo 2 online.

So it is probably no surprise that the LinkSys router and the Logitech Play Link earn the Southern Man^TM Seal of Approval^TM but that Buffalo got sent back to the range, never again to roam on the fertile fields of Southern Man's new network.

Family Vacation!

Finally, a brief break between summer school and the upcoming Fall semester. And Southern Man is ready, having purchased a co-worker's timeshare week at the Silverleaf Holiday Hills Resort in Branson, Mo. So Southern Man, his mother, and his daughters had a wonderful time. Teen daughter carefully planned all of our activities and served most ably as navigator through the confusing twists and turns and Red and Yellow and Blue Routes of Branson so all Southern Man had to do was go wherever she told us. Which included...

• Endless hours swimming in the condo pool...
• Evenings cooking dinners and eating snacks and playing Clue in the condo...
• Walking and shopping at the relatively new Branson Landing...
• Teen daughter and Southern Man spent a couple of hours at the new Titanic exhibition...
• Riding the Ducks, during which both daughters earned their Honorary Duck Piloting Certificates on the waters of Lake Taneycomo...
• Attending the world-famous Kirby van Burch magic show...
• Saw a terrific Broadway musical review at the Branson Theatre...
• Dinner and a show and a cruise on Table Rock Lake on the Showboat Branson Belle...
• Swimming and sunning at White Water (twice!)...
• Rides and the "Ignite the Night" fireworks / laser show at Celebration City...

It was a great trip and Southern Man is looking forward to many, many more family vacations in the future!

Concert Review - Kansas

Details to follow...