Christmas Presence

Son&Heir gave me a great present last night. We sat together working on assembling his new computer. He researched and bought all the components (save for Win7 Ultimate, since I had a couple of spare copies to use around twc central–and before anyone goes off on me for providing the evil M$ OS, he’s a gamer with well-developed tastes in gaming, so Windows was just about it, apart from his XBoxes, Wii, and whatever else *heh*).

Lian Li case (watch me drool), really, really nice Core i7 processor, bangup nVidia video with scads of DDR5 memory, 2.5 TB of storage, bunches and bunches of DDR3 system memory, killer power supply, etc. A nice rig. Amusing to check Device Manager and see it reporting 8 processors running at ~3Ghz each. No, it’s not an “Octacore” *heh*. Of course that’s just four hyper-threaded cores looking like eight cores to Windows.

He’s quite a guy, and he really deserves this really, really nice box. After he racked out (his day began around 3:00 a.m., so he was pretty tuckered out by 8:30 or so), I installed Win7, performed all the updates, installed and configured the necessary security software, tweaked the system a bit and then hit the sack myself.

Fun working on it with him and drooling over parts (the case is just about perfect for a mid-tower case; just screams yummy goodness :-)), anticipating the pleasure he’ll have using it, and enjoying… his presence.

One of the nicest Christmas Eves in a few years.

The Gift

[audio:Midnight_Clear_clip.mp3]



The Gift

Trees and lights and bells and carols;
Bright-wrapped packages, piled high;
Winter’s sharp blow joins the heralds:
“Christmas-time is nigh!”

Mailmen hurry; shoppers scurry;
Time is fleeing – Oh! So fast!
Parties gather, loud and merry,
Grander than in Christmas’ past.

Pause a moment to remember
That a Savior’s simple birth
Still stirs angel wings in susur’ –
“Peace to men; good will on earth!”

Now the Father’s hands that molded
The first Adam in the clay,
Gently ’round a manger folded,
Cradle a Baby in the hay.

So the Greatest Gift extended,
Gift of love and peace to all,
“God’s great love to man descended”
Calls us to a manger stall.

©1990 David Needham

Candlelight

[audio:http://thirdworldcounty.us/audio/John_Rutter_Candlelight_Carol.mp3]

(Once again, semi-sincere *heh* apology for the rough embedding; you’ll need a media player plugin to view/listen)

Deleted the video I’d embedded and converted it to an mp3. Wait for it. There’s an almost 8-second lag before it starts that I didn’t edit out.

Slightly “less good” musically (the first performance is helped by having the composer conduct *heh* For one thing, Rutter just happened to get the tempos right ;-)), but an cleaner embedding of a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eME_gxZRDxo

Angels

I like John Rutter’s music. There. I’ve admitted it. 😉 (Apologies for the sloppy embedding, but the YouTube uploader of the piece disabled embedding the YT video and I’m too lazy to put a lot of effort into embedding it slickly. The music’s the same, in any case.)

Oh, heck, here’s a version from Slovenia while I’m at it:

And another performance by a younger choir than either of the two above (and, really, better despite a few pitch problems–more forgivable in such a young group–and their director? For the cognoscenti, two words: Elizabeth Green *heh*):

Coal

Here’s some “coal” to put in the stockings of really, really (REALLY) bad boys and girls. WARNING: This thing will make you want to poke your own ears out! It’s worse than even rap “music”…

[audio:NoHolyNight.mp3]

*spit-gag-hurl*