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Mom and Guido are down for the night.  Dan and I wanted to take Guido out to this neat Italian restaurant for his birthday and we just finally were able to get together for the weekend (his birthday is in April).  The restaurant is this cute little (tiny!) place tucked away in a side street in Victorian Village.  It’s called basi italia and the food was delicious.  We all voted that the best part of the meal was the amazing iceberg wedge salad.  It was to die for.  Here’s my mom with hers:

basi salad

Then, we were planning to go to the free outdoor theater in German Village, but it was starting to sprinkle and we didn’t want to risk it.  Instead, we ended up hanging out around the house playing Scrabble.  I haven’t played in a really long time, and I finally realized that you have to have a strategy to win Scrabble.  Go figure.  I used to just want to have the longest, most impressive words, but no, this doesn’t matter (it also explains why I rarely win).  You can have short words as long as you use the letters with the most points and try to land as often as possible on double or triple word score tiles.  I finally get it and I finally won!  Hooray!

All the sick words (like turd) belong to Ben.

Just in case you haven’t heard, the video game, Streetfighter IV came out today. The Streetfighter series are one of Dan’s favorite games dating back to the arcade days. Preparation for this day has been months in the making. Why, you ask? It’s because Dan and his dad have been working on a speciality joystick just for this occasion. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of the beginning of the project, which started in Dan’s parents’ basement workroom (during Christmas break), but continued on in our very own dining room (up until this very day). Here’s Dan sanding and shelac-ing to his little heart’s content.

Here is the joystick in a quasi-finished state. That’s brazillian rosewood on the sides and zebra wood on the top. No, I’m not kidding. Cue the Hallelujah Chorus.

And, if you don’t like specialty wood, Dan even customized the bottom of the joystick with pictures of the characters in the game. Eat that.

This morning, Dan just so happened to be off of work. The game came out at noon and here he is at about 12:15, back from the store and ready to play his butt off. He even got a free bandana (think Karate Kid) that says “Streetfighter,” but he wouldn’t let me take a picture of him with it on.

And up in the multimedia paradise that is Dan’s office, he enjoys the game. Notice that he doesn’t have the custom joystick in this shot. Don’t worry though, the final coat is drying.

So, you’ve heard of golf widows? Well, I think you can make the analogy for yourself. Right now as I type, I hear the furious clicking of the joystick.

I know you won’t believe it, but I’m playing a computer game called Spore. For my games class, I have to present a game to the class and show them how it works and how it might be useful in education. Spore is a new game from the creator of the Sims where you create your own creature and it evolves over time. It’s pretty fun and I thought it might have some good Science connections. It even allows you to record parts of the game as you play. This is right after my egg hatched and my happy new creature grows.

I’m also experimenting with Second Life. It’s an online environment where you can walk around and meet people and they are doing some neat things there with Education. For example, you can take your avatar (the character you create to look like you) and go to speeches or conferences online with other people’s avatars. Different companies or people have “islands.” I found ISTE’s island (International Society for Technology in Education). Here is my avatar sitting in one of their lecture halls.
And I also found the Exploratorium’s island, which is a Science museum in San Francisco. They have neat exhibits set up there. This one is a model of the sun showing how light particles move. They were really moving. Neat, huh?

Someone also recreated the Casablanca region of Morocco! Here I am in the mosque there. There’s also a bazaar and everything. Beth Ray would love this!