I had a nice, relaxing weekend. I got some sleep, spent time with my family, watched a couple of movies. I wish I could have had a longer weekend. Well, Thanksgiving is coming up so there's a 4 day weekend waiting in the wings.

MrsBytor and I watched "The Good German" on Sunday. I really enjoyed it, but MrsBytor wasn't as thrilled. It was a nice homage to 40's movies. It takes place in Berlin, just before the Potsdam Conference. Great story, nice murder intrigue. My only quibble was Toby McGuire. Not really suited for bad guy roles, I think.

Saturday I watched "The Blue Max", with George Pappard as a WWI German pilot, trying to get the required 20 victories in order to win the "Blue Max", Germany's highest award at the time. It's a long movie, but worth every minute.

Alex continues to advance with his mobility. I love how he likes to just go off and explore, and he's been going into his sister's room to play with her toys. Really cute. I can't wait until he can walk and talk.

As I've mentioned previously, I'm playing a campaign in IL-2 as a Hawker Tempest V pilot. I'm totally kicking ass. After 16 missions, my stats are:

Rank - Flight Lieutenant (promoted twice so far)

Air Kills - 34

Ground kills - 7

Medals - 4

The last mission I flew I was able to get the Bar to my DFC medal. Here's what happened:

Standard patrol over Normandy, after about 10 minutes at 10,000 feet my flight leader spotted 4 German planes at low altitude. We started to dive when I saw two more Germans flying high cover, so I went after them. Of course, no one followed, they all went after the flight on the deck. As I get closer I realize they are FW190s. Once I got close to my gun convergence (set to 250 meters), I let a burst from my cannons go and managed to hit the lead 190 in the engine! I couldn't believe my luck. As he flew by, I could see that his engine was smoking and his prop stopped. I figured he wouldn't be any trouble (he wasn't, he crashed a minute later), and went after his wingman. The other 190 must have slipped into the clouds, as I couldn't find him, so I went looking for that flight from earlier.

When I found them, I noticed that my flight mates hadn't even touched them. Four bf109s, each with a bomb on the centerline rack. I dove down at high speed, got behind the last plane in the flight, and shot him down. a second later I shot down his leader.

I started hearing calls over the radio about someone needing help, so I looked around and found one of the other Tempests being chased by another bf109. There must have been another flight in the area, since as I got closer he had different markings. In fact, I recognized it right away: JG26. Anyway, before I could get in range to help out, I saw tracers pass my nose from right to left. I pulled up quickly, nearly going into a high speed stall, and then rolled inverted and pulled back on the stick. It was that other fw190. Damn good thing he missed. He was going down, so I followed. Fortunately, I have a speed advantage over the 190A model, as this one was, and was able to overtake him and blow off his left wing as he was trying to come up and around.

I let my speed from the dive pull me up into a loose spiral climb, and I found one of the bf109s from JG26, maybe the same one that was harassing my flight mate, not sure. I shot him down as well, after a well placed shot in his right wingroot.

At this point, I had 5 kills. I can't remember any time ever getting that many kills in one mission. I didn't see any more enemy planes, nor did I see any of my flight mates, so I decided to head for home. I was just above the clouds, not far from my airbase when I saw a little dot being harassed by my base's AAA fire. So, I dove down, found a bf109 trying to get out of dodge, and I shot him down. 6 kills! I think I might have even had a little ammo left. I quickly landed and ended the mission. I got really lucky with this one. Shooting at convergence range really helped, so quick bursts brought down most of the planes, and lucky shots as well. Four 20mm cannons do a lot of damage, easy to blow off a wing or disable an engine with a 1/2 second burst.

I feel really drained. Last week was very busy and stressful, and I don't feel like I've recovered, not to mention there is more stress on the horizon thanks to endless money issues.

But, there is a bright side, it's just going to take a few weeks to see it. You see, we got into a real financial bind by getting payday advances on my paychecks. But, those things aren't easy to get out off, especially if you get more then one. So, we had to put our collective foot down and say enough. We paid them off, but in the end we don't have enough money to pay rent and eat. So, we are going to short-pay the rent, and pay that off by my next paycheck. It's not nearly as bad as the cash advances, so that's good, but I'm real big on paying rent on time. I think after my next paycheck things will look a little rosier, and not a moment too soon. November sees 3 birthdays and our anniversary (5th!), and then Christmas.

Not much going on with the band, just a couple of rehearsals since last time I blogged. We have a gig at the end of the month, not sure exactly when, though. I think it's a party, which is fine. Ease back into it, eh?

The family is doing great, Alex is learning by leaps and bounds, I wouldn't doubt it if he starts walking well before his first birthday. Annaliese is enjoying pre-school, and seems to be learning things, which makes me happy. She's been a bit of a brat, though, and punishment isn't really working. Hopefully my Mom can take the kids this weekend, as MrsBytor and I need some alone time in a big way.

Didn't get a chance to play much IL-2 this weekend, but I did start a new campaign, this time a dynamic one as a Pilot Officer in the RAF, flying Tempest Vs just after D-day. The first mission I shot down two FW-190s, but also accidentally shot my flight leader (he made it home, barely), and I got pretty tore up but made it home. The second mission I played this morning, 12 bf109-Gs where attacking my airfield. The odds were 3-2 against us, but we managed to disrupt their attack enough to prevent any major damage to the base. I shot down 4 of them in 2 minutes, the first 3 in about 30 seconds time. I had managed to get behind them after they past overhead, and since they each still had a bomb on the center rack, not very maneuverable. I fired a burst from my four 20mm cannons into the last plane, then the same for two of his flight mates. Wings and tail assemblies everywhere. The 4th kills was more of a hunt, and I expended a lot of ammo on him before he went down. I tried for 5, but I didn't have to ammo, so I landed. Fun.

I watched the first episode of "The War", the Ken Burns documentary about WWII. Stunning stuff. I've seen some of his documentaries in the past, and he's good, no doubt about it. But, I think this may be his masterpiece. Obviously, I'm a little biased, but I actually started watching it with the thought that it's just going to be another overview WWII, nothing really new. Yes, there was a lot that I already new, but there was so much more that I didn't. The point of this documentary was to capture the human essance of the war, not so much all the facts and figures, more to the point of what our people thought, felt, and experienced, either the folks at home or those that served in the conflict. This is a 7 episode, 15 hour opus. I can't wait to watch the next episode, though I may have to wait for repeat viewings in order to catch it all, due to family comitments and band rehearsal. Check your local PBS station.

I figured out what was wrong with my computer. I bought the wrong IDE cable. I had run some tests and found that the bottleneck in my computer was the HD, which was only getting a 3MB/s transfer rate. Opening windows, particularly Explorer, and playing IL-2 were noticably slower, though they would speed up after a while. The reason for that was info being loaded into RAM, which is faster then the HD anyways. So, I put my old cable in, ran the test, and found that my HD speed was 39MB/s, obviously a huge improvement. According to the wikipedia entry on ATA, hard drives that use Ultra DMA mode need to have a slightly different cable. The regular IDE cable has 40 wires with a 40-pin connector to connect from controller to HD. The Ultra DMA has 80 wires with a 40-pin connector. I had no idea. I haven't had to deal with replacing a hard drive in about a decade, before Ultra DMA was an option. Checking the documentation from my motherboard confirms that it handles Ultra DMA, and checking the HD in Device Manager in XP shows that my HD is running in DMA Mode 5.

So, upgrades will happen very soon, I hope. My plan is to get a new HD, at least 250 GB, 2 GB of RAM (PC2700, duel-channel), and a new video card (NVidia PCI card with 256mb of video RAM). I'll make the new HD my primary one, and make a fresh install of XP on it, saving my old one as a 120 GB backup. I figure once this is done I should be able to get decent frame rates with most games up to Half-Life 2 or Doom 3, even FarCry, but most importantly IL-2. There are a few campaigns that I can't play due to my slow setup, and it would be nice to bump up the resolution to 1024x768 (I'm at 800x600 in game), and crank up the extra details that I usually keep off, like the awesome water effects and trees. I think I can upgrade for just under $300, mostly from Tiger Direct. Oh, and I need a new joystick.

My kids were both sick over the weekend, mainly Alex, but Annaliese and the sniffles on Friday, so we kept her home from school on Friday. Poor Alex was really congested over the weekend, though. He would sneeze and blow snot all over the place, and you can hear his labored breathing. He's much better now, though.