While I'm still very busy, I can't do as much today. We moved to a new building, our network connectivity is still intermittent for some of our file servers, and our printers are spread across the campus, or are in transit.

The pros of the move are I'm slightly closer to home (by a few hundred meters), most of the members of our new organization will be in the new building, I'll no longer be reminded of former cow-orkers by walking by their cubes and we have an ice cream vending machine.

The cons are it's hard to support printers without easy physical access to them, and it's hard to investigate problems without access to the logs.

It was a significant year for eleven_year_old. She now has a mobile, it was her biggest Christmas request so we got her a cheap standard slider with QWERTY keyboard. She's still not getting the teenage girl thing, it's rarely within her reach, and she doesn't read texts for days. The new girl on her Lego team got one too, I suspect quite a few other sixth grader's got one.

Speaking of the Lego team, her team got a trophy for best programming at the Finger Lakes championship meet. They were also in the running for best teamwork, but the judges didn't want to award two trophies to them. If you want to see the Lego Robotics meet, there's five videos on youtube, search under efamily215. She might have a flare for programming, she asked me to get a Mindstorms NXT so she could learn to program better. I'd better sell a lot on ebay.

In final eleven_year_old news, she's become quite a Tolkien fan. She's seen An Unexpected Journey twice now, read The Hobbit in one day, finisher The Lord of the Rings and felt the familiar sense of loss when it was done, all over break. Our New Year's Eve was spent watching the end of Fellowship, all of the Two Towers, and most of Return.

Yes, a new New Year's Eve tradition. Porsche_mom was too tired to host her annual party, so we stayed home and sixteen_year_old went to a Quidditch team NYE party. From what she's told us, it was far more wholesome than any NYE party I went to at her age. We stayed home and ate, drank, watched LOTR and discovered the youngest cat really, really likes shrimp.

Holy Radagast on a rabbit sled!

Yeah, I took the girls to see An Unexpected Journey soon after it opened. I liked it, though I kept telling myself it's an adaption of a book, filtered through Jackson's vision. The rabbit sled was a bit much, and the roots of the trouble between the wood elves and Thorin's folk were not due to the lack of help dealing with the dragon. The troll scene could have been closer to the book too, what's wrong with Bilbo getting the key?

In other geeky media, we watched the Doctor Who Christmas special, the first time I've watched one when it premiered in America. Thumbs up to Jenna Louise-Coleman, though the plot resolution was underwhelming. I followed that up with The Runaway Bride which was very good.

In other new news, the garage roof is done, the gutters and cleanup aren't. I have a modified batch of honey lager going in the basement, I didn't have enough Cascade hops so I used some Columbus. For whatever reason it's very aggressively fermenting.

I do worry, I didn't have enough malt and the closest and quickest place for me to some was a combination homebrew/home growing place. I should keep the receipt in case the Feds come after me, honest, I only wanted malt!

Finally, I read Pratchett's Nation recently, sixteen_year_old bought it. It was good, if not discworld. She did get a few new discworld books for Christmas, I can borrow them when I need do destress.

We did get some gaming done over break, we've played four games of Carc, three of classic Carcassonne with pigs, builders, the river and Cathedrals, and one of Hunters & Gatherers. I've only won once. I also got another win in Civ III, using the Space Race as the Americans on Regent level.