January 1, 2013: Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone.  This is my last day at home alone.  Dominica and the girls are hanging out in Houston this morning but only for a few hours and then coming back home this afternoon.  The Peaks arrived in Houston this morning so they are all visiting before they head back north.

I did some more cleaning today but not a lot.  I decided that I needed a little downtime and this morning I discovered Steam by Valve which is an online download service for video games.  It is pretty cool.  I love using Kindle and Audible for books and audiobooks and this is very much the same kind of service.

I bought a couple of games on Steam to try it out.  Yesterday I actually bought Fable through Steam and installed it on Dominica’s computer with her new graphics card to try it out.  It was just $2.50 for the game so a pretty safe investment even though I already own it and have played through it on the XBOX 360.  The graphics are a lot crisper on the PC version. On the 360 it is downright blurry.  Of course the difference in resolution is 640×480 vs. 1280×1024.  And one is heavily anti-aliased while the other is not.  So about four times the resolution on the PC version that we have.

I picked up a matching graphics card to Dominica’s yesterday and installed it on my desktop too.  So I have three monitors now as well and can really play some games as well.  I bought the Broken Sword series for a few dollars and decided for five dollars to check out Knights of the Old Republic from Bioware originally for the original XBOX.

KOTOR ended up being a lot of fun, much like an earlier version of Mass Effect, and I got into it a bit.  I managed to play for several hours today.  It doesn’t have the graphics and deep story of Mass Effect but it is older and from an older platform so you can’t complain too much there.  This is not a new game by any stretch.  I really like the writing and pacing of Bioware titles, though, so want to check this one out as I am up to date on all of the Bioware titles that are currently in production (Mass Effect and Dragon Age series.)  I can’t wait until they get Dragon Age 3 out the door!

Dominica left Houston early in the afternoon and arrived in Dallas when it was just getting dark.  Boy is it good to have my girls home again.  I have really missed them.  Liesl and Luciana were extremely excited to be home too.  Both because they missed me (and the house) but also because they have a lot of toys that they have been waiting to get to play with that they were not allowed to play with until they got home.

Evening with the family, but a short evening as everyone is tired.  I am staying home with the kids tomorrow while Dominica goes to the office.

Leave a comment