Last day of vacation today… Back to work tomorrow… Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
Sure, my vacation has been restful. I’m probably as ready to deal with work as I’ll ever be. But I still don’t want to go back. It’s so nice to simply do what I want to, when I want to… Instead of running around and fixing other people’s problems.
I didn’t really do much over the vacation… Just sat around the house, slept in, read, and played video games. But that was very nice. It was great just not to have to worry about clients and backups and tape drives and power outages and whatever else. A real load off my mind.
Both Christmas and New Year’s were pretty low-key around here. We had a big ol’ feast on Christmas… Opened the presents… Watched Santa’s Slay… The usual. But it was all far more relaxed than usual. We had a tiny little tree that wasn’t a pain in the ass to decorate… We didn’t try to buy a metric crapton of presents for each-other… We just took it easy this year.
So I got my nook. I’ve been reading on it ever since.
Terri got her iPod Touch, though she actually got that a month or so before Christmas.
We also got a couple gifts for the both of us… A Keurig coffee maker and a Samsung BD-P1590 Blu-Ray disc player.
The Keurig is very nice. You just put in the k-cup, push a button, and you’ve got coffee. Hot, fresh, predictable coffee. Terri only drinks decaf… I only drink caffeinated… Which makes it inconvenient to brew a whole pot of coffee. The “fix” was for Terri to get her coffee at Dunkin Donuts every morning, while I drank the stuff at work. And on the weekends I’d usually drink energy drinks of some sort. Not exactly economical.
Now we can both have whatever kind of coffee we want, at the push of a button, for significantly less than the cost of Dunkin Donuts or an energy drink.
The Samsung BD player is a replacement for our aging DVD player… It still works, mostly, but it tries to eat the discs. When you press the eject button you have mere moments before the tray slides back in. You literally have to wrestle with the thing to insert or remove a disc. And if you aren’t quick enough the disc gets jammed in the tray.
The Samsung BD player plays both DVDs and blu-ray discs… But it can also stream stuff from Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora. Terri’s been playing with Pandora lately… And there might be some fun stuff on YouTube… But Netflix playback is a godsend.
We used to use a laptop from work to watch Netflix stuff on our TV… But that laptop was replaced with a netbook that just can’t stream Netflix smoothly. I tried to throw together a box just to stream Netflix to our TV, but didn’t have enough quality parts to make it work well. It was slow, choppy, and annoying. So, for a while now, we haven’t been streaming anything from Netflix.
We were looking at the Roku as a possible solution to our problems… But that would be yet another device sitting on the pile next to our TV… And if we ever canceled Netflix the Roku would be completely useless.
The Samsung player does everything the Roku does… Plus it replaces our DVD player… And it can stream from Blockbuster if we ever switch to their service.
presidential
