was santa good to you?

[12Footer]

Re: was santa good to you?

Santa skips over my house,allmost entirely. This by by choice. My kids are all in the less-than $22K annual income bracket. The ol man is not far above that himself, and the wife is currently unemployed.<br />As far as presents, it has been the best Christmas to my memory. We had a great day with the kids and grandbuddies, watching the grandbuddies open thier gifts. Then, we all had a huge dinner, followed by an outdoor campfire.<br />It's kind of strange. My son-in-law is an avid sword/knife collector, and I had an old Samuri sword,origin unknown, but authentic. I gave it to him wrapped in a large wad of excess Christmas paper.I was going to give it to him anyway, but kept forgetting it,whenever we went to visit.<br />You'd have thought I gave him a million bucks in a card!!<br />Samey Same with my brother. He was telling us the at his camp, everyone uses VHF radios, except for him, as he doesn't have one. "Well,hellzbellz, bro..Why didn't you say something",I said.<br />"You know I am into all things 'boat', and I have just the ticket out in the truck. I gave him an HT still in the box, that I keep under the seat (ya never know)...Picked it up on the internet used, as part of a package deal,in which I was buying a GPS..It was just a freebie.<br /><br />He was tickled beyond words!<br />But the campfire was a nice touch.<br /><br />Everyone was there, including the ex wife,her sisters and parents. What a beatifull day too.<br />My lawnmower threw a rod back in October, and I was explaining why my grass was kinda higher than normal, to my brother, Dennis. He said, "well why didn't you tell me? You know I'm in the lawn buisness, and I have an old tractor that werks.You'll have to find out why it has no neutral, but it's a fast, strong machine". So in consolation, I got a kikkin Yardman 16HP,and have been spending the days since in the garage, tooling on it..I got 80buks in parts, and now have a $3200 rider! Like I said, it's beenm a great Christmas, in spite of our family agreement.<br />And we didn't go into debt.That's allmost the best part, isn't it?

 

[JB]

Re: was santa good to you?

Sounds to me like the best kind of Christmas, 12Footer. There is no price tag on a loving family.

 

[miloman]

Re: was santa good to you?

12 footer god bless you man as Christmas approaches I often dread the gifts the shopping as a whole the complete experience. I have 3 kids ther are young enough to believe in Santa so that is kinda nice as the do get older I would love to move to small presents at Christmas lets not forget what the day is about and for thier birthdays I would go to town although this christmas was really nice

 

[Scoop]

Re: was santa good to you?

I got the kid's new computer games running. Both problems were Microsoft. <br /><br />The first one was caused by the way MS programmed a lot of its games and some of you may run into this problem with a huge list of other MS games. When you run the game the first time after loading, you get a black window. The processor usage pegs and you can do nothing with the computer except force a shut down through the power button.<br />The solution, use some command line switches on the command line of the shortcut for running the game. I found I had to use -noconfigx /gosNoVideo.<br />This stopped some processes running that enable me to see the End User License Agreement (EULA). The game was waiting for me to click yes on accepting the terms of the software license agreement which was hidden behind windows you could not minimize. This happens with a huge list of MS games. It is likely you will run into this if you buy any MS computer games.<br /><br />The second was a problem with DirectX. Even though the DirectX utility assured me I had all options enabled, it was wrong. I had to click disable on the 3D video service to get it to enable. I should have thought of that. Only Microsoft would have a bug where you have to push disable to enable something.