I dig the concept of themes and gamer pictures for Xbox 360. They have a lot of cool ones on the Xbox Live Marketplace, too. The problem is, when you’re scrolling around through the Xbox 360 interface, you don’t actually get a good preview of what’s in the theme pack or what the pictures in the gamerpic pack look like.

The Xbox Live Marketplace site actually does have previews, though, both for themes and gamerpics. You can actually see what you’re buying before you buy it. And I think that’s important, especially if there aren’t any refunds. When are they going to work that into the 360 interface?

Sunday morning Jenn and I went out and worked in the back yard. There’s sort of a drainage issue along the north fence in our back yard, so we needed to widen the flower beds, till up the ground, and plant something in there that can stand living in a bog. To that end, we needed to rent a rototiller, which we got from Home Depot.

I’ve never rototilled anything. I’ve seen it done, and the guy at the store explained how the tiller works, but I’ve never actually personally done it.

Holy shit.

I mean, holy shit.

I’m a desk jockey. Seriously, I sit on my ass all day and the most strenuous it gets is me reaching from the keyboard to my coffee or getting up to walk to the car to go get lunch.

That rototiller damn near killed me. It reminded me a lot of running a garden-oriented jackhammer crossed with holding back an entire dog sled team single-handedly. All we had to do was an 18 foot by four foot section, and it was all I could do to get that done. I am a huge, huge pussy.

It’s worse today. Yesterday I thought I was feeling pretty bad. Today I feel horrible. Everything on me aches. I can barely turn my head. Reaching for my coffee hurts, so I’m just sort of looking at it longingly, hoping to develop telekinetic powers that will get the coffee from my cup into my mouth. I have bruises on my legs, but I’m not sure how I got them. I don’t remember hitting my shins with anything, but the bruises are there and they weren’t there pre-tiller. (What the hell were my shins doing anywhere near that thing? Are the bruises unrelated?) I can’t grip anything, either, because the insides of my arms hurt so bad when I close my hands. Stretching the elastic of my boxers to get them over my fat ass posed a serious threat this morning. I nearly had to call in due to inability to put on pants.

Anyway, I’m dying today, but the flower bed has been widened and tilled, so it’s ready for some plants to go in. Jenn picked some up from the nursery and will be putting those in tonight. Something grassy looking, but I was too tired to ask. Whatever it is, it’d better love water.

Saturday was Granddad’s memorial service where we buried him next to Grandma. One of his buddies said a few kind words and my aunt Linda read a really nice memorial to him that she had written. Once people had said what they needed to say, we put his ashes in the ground (he was cremated; Grandma wasn’t) and each of us put a shovel of dirt into the hole.

We went after that to Granddad’s favorite pizza joint and filled up on some pretty tasty pizza. It was good to hang out with folks and see what people were up to.

After pizza, some of us went back to Granddad’s house and took a few minutes to walk around and remember. My goodness, he had a lot of crap. (He liked doing woodworking, metalworking, stained glass work… and he had every type of tool, trinket, and spare material bits to do all of it.)

We got home late that night, a super long day of visiting and remembering and celebration. I think Granddad would have approved.

I have a friend who really needs to pay attention to this billboard: Don’t sound stupid, stop saying ‘like.’

The new version adds the ability to render XFN data for links that have no other contact information attached and fixes a positioning bug.

Go get it!