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Family Visit

Two new things have happened (well, more than that really, but who’s counting) recently that bears talking about.

The first is that I got a Linux reseller account on Mesopia to get more space and bandwidth. It was a pretty good deal. 2 GB of disk space and 30GB of bandwidth per month for $12.95. And I can resell any portion of this I want to other people (not planning on doing that, but I will probably be hard pressed to use all this space and bandwidth). Also, I get an unlimited number of email forwards or email addresses, so, if I know you (and since if you are reading this, I probably do) and you want an email address in the chezjones.net domain, email me or call me and I’ll give you one.

The second thing that happened is that my mom and dad and little brother came out to visit me. This was great since it was the first time they’d been out to see us in about 3 or 4 years. They got to see the new house and meet the new puppy and see Zach our cat again.; Dad and I played golf at our local club, Ocotillo(which last I heard was the number 3 course in Arizona… it was darned hard) and I lost (no joke) about 14 golf balls.; They have water hazards EVERYWHERE.; Not that I need water hazards to lose balls, since I put a few into people’s backyards and at least one onto a tile roof (made a nice big CRACK! sound). Anyway, it was still a lot of fun.

Dad and JC and I went to Tucson on Monday and had dinner at a hole in the wall place called El Terero. It was so out of the way that we barely found it.; The sign had been so seriously sun washed it looked like they had painted over it! We parked in the parking lot and I couldn’t tell where the entrance to the restaurant was. But we found it and had some decent Sonoran mexican food.; After that, we ran over to the Pima Air and Space Museum for an hour or so before we headed over to Kitt Peak for the Nightly Observing Program.; Pics from the Pima Museum and Kitt Peak are here.

The next day we went to Las Vegas for one night. 5+ hours of driving to Vegas from Phoenix for one day was probably a bit much, but we still had a good time. We stayed at the Luxor. I tried to take some pics inside the Luxor, since it’s pyramidal shape makes for a wierd internal structure, but the light level was just too low without some serious playing around with the digital camera settings as you can see here.

JC, Christi and I went to the Cirque du Soliel show Mystere that night while Mom and Dad went out to dinner with some friends they know who now live in Vegas. We got to Treasure Island way early, so we tried to see the pirate show, but it is “dark” on Tuesdays, which means they get the day off or some such, so no dice.; We also meandered across the street to the Venetian and next door to the Mirage, where we saw a sole white tiger left over from Sigfried and Roy’s ill fated tiger show. The tiger managed to look bored and hungry at the same time 🙂 I was so tired from 3 days of constant running that I fell asleep in Mystere about 5 or 10 times. I was so tired I didn’t even want to gambling when we got back to the hotel from the show (at midnight). This was a mistake since I wanted to try out my new Roulette strategy and in the morning I only had about an hour to gamble and there were almost no roulette tables going at 10am and the two that were were packed.; I settled for losing $5 playing video poker and then hitting the arcade. There’s always next time for Roulette.

Despite us being in the car for ~12 hours out of 36, the family did a good job of having a lot of fun. Just for the record though, I will no longer drive more than 3 hours to a destination unless we are staying there for more than a day 🙂 Of course, this is not the first time I’ve said this, so I am not very good at keeping; this resolution.

Thursday we just sort of hung around the house and rested up from Tuesday and Wednesday 🙂 Mom and Dad helped us do some work around the house and JC worked on my computers. He managed to get my Gentoo Linux file serverplaying sound, after many failed attempts by myself.; He also got to play a little Battlefield 1942. We all went out to Los Dos Molinos, which has a hot New Mexican style and is the best (and hottest) Mexican food I’ve ever had, for lunch. Thursday night we grilled some shishkabobs from Sprout’s Farmer’s Market. Friday JC and I went to Guedo’s Tacos for lunch (best tacos I’ve ever had and J.C. agreed :)) and then to Best Buy and Fry’s Electronics (where we both bought some DVD writers). Then we spent the rest of Friday night flashing the DVD writer’s firmware to the latest version and swapping the drives into and out of my Windoze box (since the firmware flash util only works in Windoze).

Pics from around the house and Vegas are here.

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