Watson Family News

I just updated my Dell laptop to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) the other night. I actually just reinstalled over my previous Ubuntu partition, and everything went without a hitch. I had a few moments of trepidation as I held my finger over the mouse. My nightmare is accidentally choosing the wrong partition and wiping out my Windows system.

Losing Windows wouldn’t be so bad, but losing all my saved games would be tragic. I’m only part way through The Orange Box and I’d have to start again from scratch. Now that I think about it, replaying Portal and Episode 2 wouldn’t be so bad. So far Episode 2 is the usual, polished Half-life game, but not much of a departure from the previous two releases. Portal on the other hand is something completely new (to me at least). A great, mind-bending puzzle game with a fun, funny sequence at the end that made me want to replay the ending as soon as I’d finished it. Or I would have if it hadn’t already kept me up until 2:00 in the morning. I choose sleep and waited a few days to replay it.

Back to Ubuntu — like Orange Box, it’s pretty great. So far everything just work in a smooth and integrated way. Both my ATI video card and my wireless card worked out of the box. It was easy to download the optional proprietary ATI driver and install it. The default apps are well chosen and work just fine. Mounting Windows shares is easy and I can even mount a remote system through SHH — pretty cool. In general, the best Linux system I’ve ever used and the first I’d recommend to a casual user over Windows.

I never wrote about our end-of-summer trip yurt camping at the beach.  We went with three other families that all had boys in Evan’s class last year.  All counted, there were 11 children and somewhere between 5-9 adults; as usual I was the token dad for much of the week.  Needless to say it was pretty wild at times.  It’s amazing how easy it is to get your kids to bed when they’ve spent the whole day running and playing outside.  Some nights the boys were literally begging us to take them to bed.

One highlight of the trip was our outdoor movie night.  One of the dads brought his home-theater projector and a mini-DVD player down one night.  We strung up a big white sheet between two trees and weighted the bottom corners to keep it still.  Then we lined up all of our camping chairs and after sunset watched “Happy Feet”.  It was a pretty magical experience.

After that we had a quite week or two before school started.  After a month we are all adjusted to the school schedule.  Davis goes to preschool three mornings a week and really enjoys it.  This year Evan started taking the bus to and from school.  He wasn’t so sure about the idea at first, but he seems to really like it now.