Vacation- Day 2

The kids have been enjoying a favorite from my younger days, Ultraman. I’m fairly certain part of their enojyment is knowing that Dad used to watch it. But, for whatever reason, it’s certainly captured their attention. They’ve now watched half of the episodes from the DVD.

I have to say, watching it now, it’s beyond cheesy. The “special effects” consist of people in rubber costumes, scale models of cities, and models of ships. That’s to say nothing of the general plotline- that apparently Japan has tons of ugly monsters hanging around just waiting to wreak havoc. While the US would deploy Jerry Bruckheimer, Japan deploys the Science Patrol to save the day. At least they have Ultraman.

Yet somehow, the show is still not awful to watch. I particularly get a kick out of the kids. In one of the episodes today, the character who becomes Ultraman lost the beta capsule on a rocky ledge. While he was trying to retrieve it he “accidently knocked” it further down the cliff. Of course, while this was going on the monster was, er, monstering, or something. The boy actually gasped as the character struggled to retrieve the beta capsule. He was visibly relieved subsequently when the capsule was finally retrieved and Ultraman saved the day. Again.

Good times. That’s how Day 2 started.

From there we purchased more sand for the new sandbox. Since it was a rainy day, they didn’t want to open the sand bags yet. They would have been fine with leaving them in the car. The car’s suspension, on the other hand, didn’t like that idea so much so I transported them to the sandbox and left them there unopened. The kids can have the pleasure of opening them in the sandbox tomorrow.

After lunch, they were getting along so well that I decided to take a chance and give them some Wii time. This is almost always a sure fire method to cause problems. Someone won’t want to play a certain game. Or they’ll play, but intentionally sabotage the other player. Then the other reciprocates. The other favorite is to deliberately choose games that the other doesn’t like to play. However it works out, it’s a guarantee to result in a feud of some sort. It took about an hour today.

But that was OK. I was able to get a custom kernel up and running for my 1015PN. Having managed to compile it, I can definitively say that it’s not a hardcore development platform. Eesh. It took about 3 hours to compile the kernel and build the deb package. I’m still trying to figure out how to specify the Atom processor for the build process. I know it’s a configuration option for the kernel, but I don’t know if it causes GCC to target that processor. Ah well, perhaps tomorrow.

The day ended with a martial arts lesson, dinner and desert. Dinner was biscuits and gravy. Yum. Homemade biscuits at that. Double yum. Desert consisted of strawberries on pound cake with real whipped cream. Triple yum. The pound cake was authentic pound cake- 1 pound each of butter, eggs, sugar and flour. Quadruple bypass. But it was worth it. The boy asked me “What’s this called Dad?” after he’d inhaled half of it. I told him “Good.” and he laughed. He and the lass couldn’t eat it fast enough. Who am I kidding? Neither could I.

Actually, I lied. The day ended like it began with a couple more episodes of Ultraman. Could vacation possibly get any better?