Sorry for the interruption but I was out of town for most of the holiday (we left the 26th for Chicago, but thats a whole post on its own!). I did however, want to brag about some of the Christmas Gifts that blessed our house this season though.

Amy’s big gift this year is to have the Master Bath and Bedroom repainted. When we bought the house from her parents, we inherited the DEEP red color of the bath and bed room. Its a dark red (think maroon) that is hard to match colors with. Now we’re going for a lighter, beachier look and are painting them Beachnut (its a lowes color). The master bath is done (Amy found some Votive candle holders at a store in Nashville), next on to the bedroom!

Grace had a very Hannah Montanna Christmas. She got a Hannah Montanna Guitar Game (like Guitar Hero) that plugs in to the tv, a Hannah Costume, and doll. Its pretty cool and she likes pretending to be a rockstar. Maybe someday. I like playing her game (since I haven’t bought Guitar HEro World Tour yet) and she’s getting better at it.

Mose got a Trampoline. One of her favorite things to do is jump. We’d wake on Saturday mornings to the heavy thud of emma jumping up and down in our door way. Now she can do it all she wants and it doesn’t make the house shake. Its pretty cool and Grace and Emma take turns on it. Amy wanted to try it out, but its for people under 80 pounds (and neither of us meet that requirement!

The girls also got some tinkertoys, and some other little odds and ends that they like to play with, but the coolest by far is my Ultimate Wall-E Robot.

We saw the movie in the theaters and we’re big fans (mose loves him). We had seen the Ultimate Wall-e at the Disney Store but we weren’t going to get him because of the price tag. Needless to say, Santa found him on Sale and he was wrapped and under the tree for me on Christmas morning. He has fun dancing, chasing the dogs around and just exploring on his own. If you haven’t seen one yet, I’ll work on some video and see if I can get anything posted. Its pretty cool though and the way he can respond to voice commands or find his own way around the room is fairly smooth.

Was there one gift that you prized more than the others??

WUBI!! w00t!! Wait! What? WUBI?? Thats right, the Windows UBuntu Installer project installs an Ubuntu install right to your windows box with out repartitioning, or otherwise fscking up your partitions or harddisks. But wait you say, it can’t be a full Ubuntu install can it? Oh, but it can and it is.

I was a little skeptical at first myself, it sounded too good to be true, and I had used VMplayer to load Linux Distributions before and while they worked, there were things lacking (graphic support, sound and so on…). However, once I fired up the installer and I noticed that it downloaded what appeared to be the actual ISO for Feisty, I became a little more impressed. I let it run over night and when I came in in the morning, it was finished and ready for a reboot.

The installer actually creates a vitrual image of the OS that resides on your drive. Obviously, its size is a full size distribution and the more crap you download and add to the install, the more space it takes up, but in a world where you can buy 1tb harddrives these days, who cares? Anyway, it edits the NTboot loader and creates an option for ubuntu. I need to go in and change the timeout on it, but thats a minor thing (I believe that when there is an option on a non-mission critical machine, it should wait for you to select an OS no matter how long it waits….). I selected ubuntu and on first boot it took a bit of time and one reboot as it configured itself, after that though it was smooth sailing.

I did have to enable the closed source ATI drivers and add XGL support and beryl following some instructions I had found, but I would have had to do that on a regular install anyway (Thanks ATI!) and over all, I’d have to say, I’m pretty impressed. I have not tried the wireless connection yet, but the wired connection came right up and connected right away….

I’ll post some screenshots later today….