NYE

NYE @ THE NEEDLE: At midnight, pyrotechnics will rocket from atop the Space Needle. Around 6 this evening, it was quiet and calm around Seattle's iconic landmark.

I was there to see the King Tut exhibit (finally). It leaves Seattle in 6 days. Amazing, amazing stuff there.

We're hoping the kids can stay up until midnight tonight, so they can see the fireworks shot from atop the Needle. Speaking of fireworks, this afternoon, we watched a BrainPOP video about how fireworks are made and used. Afterward, the kids took a comprehension quiz, which they struggled a bit with. Enough vacation here, time to get back into the schoolin' mode!

IT'S ALIVE!: Big news to report here. We finally got the Famicom game system CJ got for Christmas LAST year working.

For those of you to whom Famicom is an unfamiliar term, what it is is the Japanese equivalent of the ubiquitous Nintendo Entertainment System console which was so popular with US gamers in the late 1980s and beyond.

The Famicom debuted in 1983. We bought this unit from a seller in Japan. We made a couple of lame attempts last year to get it going, but ended up shelving it for a long, long time.

When we decided to try again, I remembered reading long ago that the TV had to be on some high numbered channel, and that old TVs work better than new ones. So, Christian and CJ hooked the machine up to an old tube TV we have, and I found an article online that said channel 95 was the magic number. After a couple of attempts, Christian got the TV to recognize the unit and CJ was off to the races, so to speak.

The first game he played was Yie Ar (pronounced "ee ar") Kung Fu, a Famicom classic.

Needless to say, he and Annabelle were pretty thrilled to get to experience game action on an imported, antique console. Good times.

THIS YEAR AT NASA: We turned on NASA TV this afternoon. Given that it's New Year's Eve, no surprise that one of the shows on was a retrospective, "This Year at NASA."

Afterward, I checked their Web site and found a really neat-o interactive NASA Year in Review 2012. You can find it here: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/YIR12/