1) I was at my parents' place in Florida for a brief vacation over the New Year. I mixed up a big batch of pretzel dough, set the oven, got it all laid out on baking sheets, and then discovered the oven was completely cold. We read the manual cover-to-cover several times, ultimately reaching the conclusion something was deeply wrong with the controller board. I ended up baking the pretzels in the toaster oven.

After a phone call to Miele, the solution was that the oven had somehow gotten itself into "demo mode", which required an undocumented key sequence (put the selector into light mode and hold down both timer buttons for 5 seconds). Afterward, it worked fine.

2) A neighbor's PC blew up. He asked me to do what I could, giving me two internal SATA hard drives and an external USB hard drive. Of course, he didn't have any sort of backup strategy. The primary boot drive (a Seagate 160GB model) had some hard errors, but mostly worked. I was able to copy all but 20 or so files, mostly family pictures based on the file names. The secondary drive (a Seagate 500GB model) was formatted in a funny way, such that my Mac couldn't directly mount it, but I could get to it from Windows XP inside VMware. That drive appeared to be okay. It was just completely full of pirated kids videos. At least it wasn't porn. He's ordered himself a new iMac. I'm nudging him to buy a suitably large external drive for Time Machine.

3) We ended up getting an Xbox 360 + Kinect bundle ($300 for all the hardware plus $50 per game) for my daughter for Xmas. I'm a total Xbox newbie, and getting everything set up and running wasn't too painful, although it was much harder than it should have been. For example, the Xbox saw that I had two WiFi base stations and complained that they shouldn't have the same SSID. Really? Umm... no. Please pick the one with the strongest signal strength and do what everybody else does.

The Kinect stuff is remarkable in how well it works. However, you still need to reach for the normal Xbox controller in a variety of unpredictable circumstances that felt not unlike needing to find a DOS window to type obscure commands not supported by the Windows GUI.

Also, I have to ding Microsoft for an apparent lack of usability testing on the target market. My daughter is 5.5 years old and is presently learning to read. Even with the Kinectimals game, which really maxes out on the cute factor and is clearly targeted at my daughter's age group and sensibilities, there are numerous text prompts that appear on screen. "Dad, which one do I pick?" I really want something that my daughter can use without my supervision.

My neighbor's 7 year old boy, who's quite the jock, seemed to have a natural feel for the thing, and it recognized his gestures without trouble. My daughter, who is very much not a jock, had far more trouble, since her gestures weren't really what it had in mind. Also, it seemed to have trouble recognizing gestures involving her legs (kicking, jumping, etc.) when she was wearing her nightgown. Unsurprisingly, it works much better when it can actually see your legs, but girls often wear skirts, dresses, and the like.

I must also rant about some non-Kinect issues:

- I have zero interest in joining Xbox Live Gold. I don't care. So why do I need to be a member of Xbox Live Gold in order to get to Netflix?

- My home network is an Apple Walled Garden sort of place. How hard is it to pay Apple a license fee so you can play nicely with the walled garden, supporting AirPlay, etc.? Or screw Apple, implement compatibility regardless, and just don't support DRM content. That would be fine by me. (Hey, if they can do it with Ford's Sync, why not with Xbox?) Or maybe Apple should write an app for the Xbox that I can download from somewhere. Do I need to install some 3rd party software on my Mac instead?

- I've also got a TiVo downstairs, on the very same network. Wouldn't it be nice if you could speak TiVo's protocols and do content extraction? (We've got the TiVo downstairs and the Xbox upstairs...)

- As my daughter is busy doing her thing, the Xbox is busy "unlocking achievements" and other sundry things that are never explained anywhere. Somehow, I missed the memo that explains all of this mess. I can see that I have some number of G's and trophies. I have no idea what these numbers mean.

- Some Kinect games like to take your picture. How do you extract those photos? Sure, that's obvious.

- Also, I went poking around the Xbox Live Arcade to see what was there. One of my college buddies wrote a game, Braid, so I clicked on it, and it said it cost 800 somethings, where the something was a funny glyph that looks like a cross between a capital G and a euro symbol (you can see it at the web link). Umm.. WTF? Yes, I can go read up and learn that these are Microsoft Points,which are unrelated to the "G's" mentioned above, but nowhere did it bother to say that, much less talk about the dollar cost of Microsoft Points.