Traditions

Every family has its Christmas traditions. Ours are probably geekier than most. Often they aren’t by choice.

Traditionally, for us, Christmas is a time when things break. Mostly electronics.  Every time RTH and I put aside time to catch up on DVDs, Blu Rays, XBox , PC or PS games, one of the aforementioned inevitably decides to quit on us.

One year it was the hilarious overheating of the graphics card which led to GTA Vice City being populated by very pointy random polygons, and then there was the great Xbox red ring of Christmas. I have distinct memories of ringing in the new year trying to rebuild RTHs PC and cursing the fact that we appeared to have blanked the hard drive before downloading the SATA drivers needed to re-access it.

Well this year the fine tradition seems to be continuing. RTH’s PC obviously got wind of his new year’s plan to upgrade and decided to quit prematurely in protest. Which means I got to spend Christmas day watching RTH and a friend build a brand new PC from components.

With a decent bottle of wine it actually turns into a reasonable spectator sport, although I suspect half my fun has been done away with as I actually caught RTH reading the manual beforehand.