Category Archives: Frenchville

Saying Cheese Amidst a Sea of People

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I took the whole week off from work, but today they were having a company photo, so I went up there to participate in that. I missed our last company photo because we were still living in Austin at the time. All 250 or so employees were down in our lobby area while the photographer was up on the third floor balcony. We’ll have to wait and see if you can actually see me amidst a sea of people. We also video taped a “cameo” video for the beginning of our game. We all yelled “EA Sports! It’s in the game!” and cheered.

Jennifer went to the Toyota dealership to see how much money it was going to take to fix the scratch on the Sequoia. It turns out that it will be about the same amount that Jennifer saved by complaining to Rent a Jumper. They are going to have to repaint the area that was scratched. We are going to take the truck back in on Friday and leave it there so that it can get fixed back up.

I put the final touches on the Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge tribute site. This was the second game I worked on and the last while I was at Atomic Games. I’m slowly going through all the games I’ve worked on and getting tribute sites up. The next one will be Madden 2002.

Today’s picture is of Emily playing on the bounce house at Abby’s party.

Bounce House Vindication

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The day started out with Jennifer placing a call to Rent a Jumper to tell them how displeased we were with the bounce house we rented for Abby’s party. She told him it was frustrating enough without the attitude the driver had, which sent us over the edge. The lady on the phone said she would relay the message back to her boss. I figured that was the last we would ever hear from Rent a Jumper. I was wrong. They called back later that afternoon and Jennifer convinced them to give us half the price we were supposed to pay since they we only had the bounce house for half of Abby’s party. So, I will take back what I wrote earlier. Everyone can consider using Rent a Jumper.

All the Frenchville archives are back in operation, even the Abigail Rose French web site, which was the original web site that I started when Abby was born. Pictures from Emily’s birth and our move to Orlando are also in there.

Recovering from the Party

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We intentionally didn’t do much today. The party yesterday was so energy draining, all we could do is sit around the house all day. Abby received a croquet set for her birthday so we went outside at one point and I showed her how to play. It was pretty cute. She would pick up the ball and take it to each gate and hit it through with the mallet and exclaim, “I win! I win!”

Because we were hanging around the house, I had time to work on Frenchville. You will notice that the web site is pretty much starting to look like it’s old self: the Book and Game Shelf have returned; links to personal web sites for the games I have worked on; and archives of all my old entries are now up and going. There’s a few more old archives I want to get back online, specifically, the original “Abigail Rose French” site.

One incident, which I forgot to mention yesterday. While pulling the new Sequoia into the garage, Jennifer scratched the side rear quarter panel. It’s scratched pretty bad, down through the paint. We are going to see if it will buff out, but I have a feeling it’s more than a superficial wound.

Here’s another picture from yesterday’s party. All the kids are around the table getting ready for Abby to blow out the candles. You can tell they are all pretty sweaty from jumping on the bounce house.

New Frenchville

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I’m messing around with some new blogging software for Frenchville. The goal is to get it back to what it looked like before, but it will have some new features which I will talk about when the transition is complete. For now, just excuse the mess while I get it up and running.

Another Softball Loss

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Frenchville was down a couple of days ago as I moved the web site to a new host. Our last host was $19.95/month for only 100 MB of web space. I was having to delete some of the old pages because I was going over the drive space limit. The new host, VizaWeb, was only $5.95/month for 1 GB of web space. It wasn’t too hard of a choice. Ten times the web space for $14 less per month. I think I’ll go with that one. We should have plenty of more room for growth.

Today was a big softball game against the other team from where I work. There’s actually two softball teams: Tiburon and EA Sports. I’m on the Tiburon team. So, you can image the trash talking that was going on before the game. Well, unfortunately, we lost 15-11. I had some pretty good fielding as several balls were hit my direction. My batting wasn’t that great. I went 1-3, two fly outs. The last hit was an error on the first baseman, my former boss, the Development Director on Madden. I popped it up again, but he wasn’t able to make the catch.

Today’s picture is of Jennifer and Emily at Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.

We Live in a Swamp

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We started out the day by going to the zoo. Even though the Central Florida Zoological Park is less than six miles away, we never found the time to go during the summer. Although it’s nice that there’s a zoo so close, this particular one wasn’t anything special. For one, the hurricanes were not kind to the place. Another realization happened while at the zoo: we live in the middle of a swamp. Their idea of a “nature trail” was a board walk through algae infested swamp water. Today’s picture is one of the creatures that inhabited the “nature trail”. This alligator was huge and looked like he could eat a poodle whole without getting any fur in his teeth.

Later, I joined the girls on their normal Wednesday activities. They go to church for what is called “Kid’s Connection”, which is a couple of classes, doing crafts and playing games. Afterward, we ate dinner there as well. We have a chef as one of the members of our church and each Wednesday he prepares a giant dinner for anyone who wants to sign up. Today was a salmon dish, which neither Jennifer nor I are real big fish eaters, so the meal was “so so”. I ate some of the salmon and declared it to taste like chicken with a little fishy aftertaste.

Today was also another softball game. We once again lost, this time 17-5. We had a real big first inning batting in our only five runs, but the other team crushed us in a big fourth inning. My batting wasn’t too great going 0-2 with a ground out and a fly out. I had two balls hit my way. One I flubbed and it squirted into the outfield. The other one I grabbed up, but the batter was arguably safe at first. From my perspective he was out, but the ump said Tom, who plays first base, hadn’t gotten to the base yet.

The whole Carbone gang showed up with Tom to the softball game. So, I got to meet Tommy, Simon, and Olivia. If I would have known everyone was going to be there, I would have convinced Jennifer, Abby and Emily to come to the game as well. Some of Tom’s friends from Utah were also in town and came to the game as well. I found out where all the hits on the Frenchville counter are coming from as everyone kept telling me that they were regular readers of the web site. Thanks for reading. It was nice seeing everyone in person, as I’m a regular reader of Carbone Family.

I’m up late tonight watching the Astros and the Cardinals play the first game in the NL Championship Series. I forgot to report that the Astros were finally able to beat the Braves in the post season and have advanced to play the Cardinals. Unfortunately, they lost the game 10-7. They were leading in the first couple of innings, but the Cardinals had a big sixth inning that the Astros couldn’t recover from.

I’ve added a Google search to the side of the web page. It allows you to search Frenchville for stories with certain keywords. It uses the Google search engine, which doesn’t crawl Frenchville all that often, so it might not be able to pick up keywords for recent stories. I did a search on “sequoia” and it didn’t pick up any articles. It also allows you to do Google searches for the entire web directly from Frenchville.

Here Comes Jeanne

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Here comes another hurricane. Jeanne is now forecast to hit us on Sunday. It was heading for us a week ago and stalled in the Atlantic. It has now decided to go ahead and visit. I can’t believe that we are going to get three hurricanes in one year. Wish us the best and I will keep everyone updated here on Frenchville.net.

Frenchville.net is now available as an RSS Feed. This is a format for syndicating content for news-like web sites so you can now get updates of Frenchville.net through an RSS Reader. A friend, Tom Carbone, introduced me to RSS Feeds today and I bet him I would have Frenchville.net up as an RSS Feed tonight.

New Frenchville

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As you may have noticed, I changed up some things around Frenchville. It’s been raining all day and I figured it was time to mix up the look a bit. I never really liked the old Frenchville logo, so I went with something simple. I’ve added “Jason’s Bookshelf” which I will update with the books I’m currently reading or have just completed. I will also be adding “Jason’s Game Shelf” soon. Look for new stuff in the future.

As I mentioned, it has been raining here all day. Abby and Emily are getting stir crazy and are really needing to get out of the house. Today’s picture is of Emily hiding under the counter. The girls are having to get creative in order to find things to do.

College Reunion

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The Internet is amazing. I had a Frenchville.net first today. My old college roommate, Mike Barnes, discovered Frenchville and wrote me an e-mail. He’s doing well and finally graduated from college with an accounting degree and is currently living in Dallas. After our second year at U.T., college life wasn’t cutting it and he decided to move back to Oklahoma. I heard from him a couple of times after that and then never heard from him again until today. I e-mailed him back and I hope to hear back from him to find out what he’s been up to for the past ten years.

We are very close to having Madden out of our hands finally. I left work at midnight and we are “on call” through the weekend. Hopefully QA won’t find any major problems in the next two days (knock on wood).

While I was sleeping this morning, Jennifer and the girls went over to the Cowans’ to swim in the swimming pool. Jennifer was impressed that two hours of swimming equaled four hours of nap time after lunch. That fueled the swimming pool talks once again. I looks like Jennifer is more interested in more furniture than a swimming pool. I have to admit, on these hot Florida days, it would be pretty nice to just be floating out in the pool.

Today’s picture is from the family reunion on my mom’s side of the family last week. It’s a picture of Poppy, Jill, and Emily. This was actually the first time Jill had seen her niece since she was born. She moved to El Paso and we moved to Orlando before we could ever meet up again.

One Month of Entries

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One full month of web log entries. It’s a pretty big accomplishment with how busy I’ve been at work. I’ve found it only really takes about fifteen minutes of my time each day to write something here. I feel I probably have at least that much time per day to spare.

Today’s my father’s birthday. Happy Birthday Poppy! The girls miss you and can’t wait to see you next month. Today’s picture is from this winter when my parents came up to visit and we all went to Mickey’s Christmas.