To those who've read my other blog in the past know that I have 3 children (One on the way will make 4 in a couple of weeks.)  I've never used their real names, but I have nicknames that I've used for them.  My oldest (8) is the Hurricane, Middle (5) is the Tornado and my littlest (2.10) is known as Godzilla.

From the title of this post, this a tale of destruction perpetrated by my little Godzilla.  

First, a quick rehash of why he is known as big G.  Well, he's big for his age, loud and destructive... 'Nuff said?

Well, a couple of days ago, while I was working, my poor, prego wife was met by Godzilla and he said, "Spiderman toothbrush in potty."  Well, if it were just in the potty, that is easy enough to fix, reach, pick, throw away, explain the error of his ways.

If only it were that easy.  Not only had he placed the toothbrush in the toilet, he flushed.  Now a little history, I've lost 2... count them, 2, Gillette Fusion razors (the greatest razor under the sun) to the destructive nature of Godzilla and his propensity to flush things down the toilet.  We've also lost a sippy cup lid and God only knows what else that actually went down and didn't get stuck.

So, my daily, often hourly, task the last 3 days has been to try and get this thing out of the toilet.  Between the plunger and a sewer snake I was able to get everything to go down, but not without an extreme amount of work.  I wasn't able to get the brush to get past the barrier of the curve in the toilet flow.  Last night I finally had it.  If I wasn't able to get the obstruction cleared we were going to call the plumber today and have him come out and take care of the problem (at a premium price of @ $120... ugh!)

So, I brought the snake up from the basement, one more time, and went to work.  Pounding, shoving, twisting, screaming, almost ralphing, wash, rinse, repeat.  Finally, I got to the end of my senses and threw myself down, almost crying from frustration and gave it one more shot.  One more round of the above and I was ready to give up, take a shower (I was fealling quite gross by this point) and go to bed, defeated.  As I pulled the snake out of the toilet, what to my wondering eyes would appear, but the Spiderman toothbrush.  Fortunately by the time this happened all of the "stuff" in the toilet was already down and I was able to get it out without having to go through a pile of "stuff" to get it.

Eureka, I was able to flush the toilet and it went straight down.  No problems, no concerns.  I took a shower, saved $120 in our budget and took $60 and went and bought  Fable II for my Xbox 360.

I am a big fan of science fiction in general.  So, I’m entering into 2009 with a little trepidation, as far as TV goes.  My all time favorite Sci-Fi series is coming to an end this year. 

As every Friday night passes 10pm, my heart cries a little more as Battlestar Galactica careens toward its finale.

However, there is a bright spot on the horizon.  Joss Whedon, who brought us the too short lived series Firefly, is back with Dollhouse.

Dollhouse has the potential to be great, given Joss Wedon’s past successes (if you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, you’ve missed out on one of the great events of 2008.)

Wikipedia states the premise of Dollhouse as:

In Dollhouse, Eliza Dushku plays a young woman named Echo, a member of a group of people known as "Actives" or "Dolls." The Dolls have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas, including memory, muscle memory, skills, and language, for different assignments. They're then hired out for particular jobs, crimes, fantasies, and occasional good deeds. On missions, Actives are monitored internally (and remotely) by Handlers. In between tasks, they are mind-wiped into a child-like state and live in a futuristic dormitory/laboratory, a hidden facility nicknamed "The Dollhouse". The story follows Echo, who begins, in her mind-wiped state, to become self-aware.

Personally, I’m looking forward to this show, I only hope that NBC gives it more of a chance than they gave Firefly, which I didn’t discover until long after it was off of the air and it was brilliance… Pure and simple brilliance.

Well, I have every intention of TiVoing the first episode on February 13 and I’ll give a brief review once I’ve had a chance to actually see the show.

Ok, I'm now officially a fanboy of Windows 7. I'll state that right up front.

The company that I work for, ConsultUSA is a Microsoft Certified Partner. That is my fancy way of saying that I was watching Steve Balmer's (CEO of Microsoft) keynote address at CES on one tab of firefox and hitting refresh on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) website on another waiting for windows 7 to show up as available to download.

That night I downloaded the x64 and x86 versions of the OS, created a partition on my laptop and installed the new OS. At first blush, I liked it. It kind of looks like Vista, but when I got under the hood a little, I realized the differences.

One of the nice features that Microsoft introduced in Vista was a system performance ranking system. You could run an analyzer on your PC and it would spit out a ranking of 1 - 4 in several different areas. This was one of the first things that I did when I loaded Windows 7. I do wish that I had the original Vista rankings on hand, but alas, I've since blown away the Windows 7 partition and upgraded Vista completely to Windows 7 and I cannot undo that, specifically just to get the performance ranking.

Alas, I can tell you that my performance increased in all areas, the biggest, not in size of jump, but because it was the biggest bottleneck on Vista was my graphic card performance. On Vista it was stuck at 2.5 on Windows 7 it is given... wait for it... wait for it... 2.7! I know, it's not ground breaking, except for the fact that Windows 7 itself takes fewer resources so it's able to get better performance out of the one system resource on a laptop that is really hard to upgrade. When I first got the laptop it had 1 gb of memory, the memory ranking was 2.5, I upgraded it to 2.5 gb and the performance went up to almost 4. Upgradable, easy peasy. Graphic cards... not so much.

The control panel on Windows 7 is another area that has been greatly improved. Not only is it a nicer layout and easier to find specific items in it. There are more items at your fingertips for managing this marvelous peice of technology.

The one thing that I've discovered that I don't like, primarily because it is frustrating my wife, is that the show desktop has been moved and the nature has been changed. It is no longer an icon on the shortcut bar it is a little section of the taskbar itself, on the right hand side of the bar. Well, as fate would have it, I have a slanted table that fits over the arm of my chair in the living room(just because I do some work at home doesn't mean I have to be away from my family.) I also have a wireless mouse that has a tendency to slide down the slant and flop to its right side when you let go (darn that gravity!) It is frustrating when it does that because the mouse pointer automagically flys to the exact point of the show desktop area.

Ok, so I mentioned that the nature of the show desktop had changed. Now when you hover over the show desktop, it... shows the desktop. If you move the mouse everything comes back as normal, but just hovering shows it. If you want to minimize all of the windows to interact with the desktop, just click that area and everything stays minimzed, just as before.

One of the nicest new features of windows 7 though is the ability to attach programs right to the task bar. This becomes their perminent place on the bar. They've also changed the size of the programs there to be the size of the programs icon. So, for instance. I currently have IE, Visual Studio 2008, Firefox, Thunderbird, Zune and a couple other programs pinned to the task bar. I can click on Thunderbird, and it opens up, it doesn't create a new spot on the taskbar, it already has one and lives on that one spot. At that point it behaves just like an open program from the previous OS's, click the icon while its open it minimizes, while it's minimized, it opens.

Ultimately, Microsoft is in the process of hitting a home run and I say, thank you. I may have been the minority and didn't hate Vista, but even I will not go back. I'm looking forward to the full RTM version as soon as it hits stores.