Well, what a week in the spaceship. The middle of the week saw the Smallest Space Cadet of them all having his seventh birthday. This is his cake, which he helped in the making of, and it was delicious. Bit runny, but delicious.
To mark the occasion we officially bought him a gang hut that will go up in the garden on stilts, but this was not delivered until today, so he had no big present on the day. Now, my son is negotiator, so at lunchtime he came upstairs to the office, and said.
"Can I have a PlayStation? It is my birthday, and we have talked about it." I mean, he's seven. I didn't know how to ask good questions like that until I was about 25. Seemed hard to say no, so I nipped out and we bought one. I have never played with a PlayStation, and I have to say I liked it a lot. The game that I am playing the most when he is not there is some kind of street racing game that claims it for three and up, but the only objective of the game is to destroy the other cars whilst behaving as antisocially as possible on the road. Which makes the 3+ rating very dubious. Even better it is in French, and so I am learning all the terms in french for hot-rodding ("le tuning" in French for the cars, and "les chauffardes" for the drivers.)
Having said that, my current obsession is flight simulators. On the PC at the moment I have a full install of IL2, and Pacific Fighters, which gives over two hundred flyable aircraft from the second world war. Including the really obscure ones, like the Romanian air-force, and the Finnish Winter Campaign. My only (minor) gripe is that it does not have any maps of where I live. I like to fly over where my house will be one day.
I used to have CFS3 on my machine, but it sucked, and the only good thing about it was the flying over the alps bit. It had a really odd perspective that meant that you could not pick the supposed enemy out of the background landscape not matter how often you tried, whereas in IL2 it's really clear. Bit fatal to the notion of shooting them down.
So, I bought X-plane, which was supposedly much better with a brilliant flight model. So far, I have to say that IL2 still has a significant edge. I have been bashing as hard as I can at the machines in X-Plane, and I have never gotten them to stall or spin yet. In IL2, they bite your head off as soon as you do something daft, and it feels a lot more realistic for it.
But, in X-Plane, you can build your own planes, with this mind-bendingly obscure piece of software, (Hey, I implement SAP, how bad could it be ;-) , and that is something that I am really looking forward to. Something exotic and powerful, (but that's enough about me, HoHo.)
Easter as well. Wim, the most Intelligent Member of the Crew found not only some of the real hard boiled eggs that we had hidden in the garden, but also one of the small baskets of chocolate eggs which he ate foil and all, and made himself very ill. Tin foil laced dog puke is not something that you enjoy taking out of the hall carpet. Gack! This is him looking a bit sorry for himself beforehand, even though I didn't know it when I took the photo. He does look like he's about to chuck though, now that I see it again.
And, yes, I did a lot of work too. SAP is taking off in the banking market, and we have won more customers for our current Bank Analyzer product, which for the usual reasons I cannot mention. Suffice to say I have never been so busy, writing proposals, presentations, and so on, but much, much better to be too busy than to be idle. For sure. Just ask this fellow.
