I finally finished the biggest painting I've ever worked on. It's a mural about 12 feet long by 8 feet high and acrylic paint was the medium.
Last year in December my sister and brother in law came to me with a special project idea. They wanted to surprise their daughter, my niece, who was turning three years old in April of 2006, with a forest/castle in the woods themed mural on my nieces new bedroom wall. I was hesitant at first because I had never painted something of that size, but I took on the project. Months later when my sister and brother in law purchased their first townhouse, I started on the big project. I started with a quick sketch on the wall of a castle in the distance and a bridge that traverses a small creek. I would then add several trees, and eventually alot of paint. The whole project took about three weeks because I had to work in between at my day job, but it's finished now. I'll go back in to do a few touch ups here and there but overall I'm very pleased by the way it turned out.

    The Xbox 360 is finally getting a dashboard update which is going to the include a few long-awaited features that many 360 enthusiasts have been clamoring for.  A few of the new features include a more robust download manager, better DVD and CD playback and control, and probably the most wanted feature of all, the ablility to boot directly to the dashboard.
    Xbox Live has surpassed 24 million online downloads and is still going strong.  However, when downloading large files such as game demos, or HD content, you had to wait for the download to finish and wern't able to do anything else with your 360.  Not anymore.  Now there is an option to continue downloading while you play any single player off-line game.  If you do want jump into an online multi-player game over Live, the new download manager will know to pause your current download and then resume when you are finished playing online.  And no longer will you be able to download just one thing at a time.  You can now queue up to six files at once which means when one file is done downloading, the next one in the queue will begin soon after.  This is really cool for people who like getting all the new game demos at once yet don't want to sit around and stare at another progress bar.
    One other cool feature that perhaps is the most favorite of 360 users is the new start-up feature located in the system blade of the dashboard.  Now you have the choice to startup directly to the game that is currently in the tray, or you can boot directly to the dashboard itself.
    There are many more features included in this update, but we won't know how well they will function until that happens.  For more information on the dashboard update, check out Xbox.com or Gamespot.com for more footage, screens, and demonstrations.