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Today’s list of cool tools and weird things is brought to you by – well actually just me. But Kitty can hold her iPhone next to her Dell Laptop showing that she loves both PC and Apple. and yes pink is her favourite colour!

Lets start off with some Microsoft Technologies

Amit has written a good how to article explaining How to Insert Images in a Word Document without Embedding

john has written about his ongoing OneNote testing as part of the OneNote development team in at Microsoft. Interesting stuff. We love OneNote here – its our primary team communication tool (after Outlook) and we use Livemesh to synchronise our shared notebooks with our team spread around the world.

www.ferrari.com is written using Sharepoint Designer (now being offered for free) and is published with a Sharepoint Backend. Awesome! I like the 612 Scaglietti best.

Philip writes Exchange Integrated Outlook – Recovering Deleted Items. A good detailed how to.

Weird and wonderful

Cake Wrecks has some photos of awesome cake decorating – Stargate style!

I had a real great weekend. While Jude took herself off to art classes on Saturday morning I did some work while the kids played and cleaned. After locating a container with Chinese checkers marbles in it, I decided to make a Chinese checkers board. That’s harder than it sounds. After a bunch of maths and several false starts I finally had a board marked out with the correct number of spots. I then drilled all the holes using a countersink and then cut the board to an even square and routed the edges. Jude was home by this time so we all then played a game.

Sunday at church we sang the Michael W Smith song I’m desperate for you. The words in this are awesome. It made me think, about how we are desperate for air – so desperate we breathe all the time – try holding your breath and see how desperate you become when starved from air. the challenge for me is am I that desperate for God?

After church we headed off to Peter and Kitty’s engagement party. This was  real blast! There are some photos on my facebook account.

Sunday night we had a mini party here and then I worked again.

Last night was the last night my parents were here on their current holiday staying with us. It coincided with family night, and we kicked off after dinner with a game of UNO with everybody involved. Mercedes is funny. She likes to get the cards and when she has to put cards down thinks that is bad. When she has to pick she loves it!

Jude usually wins UNO and did again last night by a big margin.

After we put the little two to bed, Miranda Jadeen, Jude and I and Grandad and Grandma played a game of Carcasonne. Mum has played it before but Dad hadn’t. It was a very close game with the end result being a win to me, and then Miranda second with Jadeen and Dad separated by a point with grandma next and Jude coming last.

The results aren’t really important. What is is the time spent bonding as a family, learning group communication and playing skills (for the girls) and the time spent together.

Our family loves games. We have lots of board games and enjoy playing them, card games, strategy games and computer games. Recently we have combined the electronic with the board strategy games with playing Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne online. They are not actually named the same thing as the online website which is free has not licensed the real game. But in absence of an alternative, this is a great way to find other players, and in our case occasionally play with family who are over seas.