Category: Weblog

I found this flyer at work today. It’s been on the bottom of a drawer for a few years to say the least.

Prices for fast computers.

Enjoy.

I recently bought some Henry Rollins CDs. I love spoken word and Henry Rollins. So during one of his rants he uses the phrase “Some fucking guy over there”. I cannot get this phrase out of my head. I fear I will be a meeting at work and say something like “We could jury rig it up like some fucking guy over there but that’s not the way I fucking do it!

Fear consumes me. I need lunch.

BTW, go buy some Henry Rollins stuff. This guy deserves your cash, not some fucking guy over there!

Down at the bottom of the page is a banner ad. The site that used to provide stats for me will now give me 10 cents per link though. Only 450 clicks and I will be able to afford Icewind Dale

Now click, my faithful droogies, click me into RPG heaven!

I’ll admit I’m geek. And yes I may be too geeky for some. You see the family was driving to CostCo (one of those big warehouse stores where you aren’t allowed to leave without spending $100). We were discussing where to eat lunch. I wondered if the new Pokemon stuff was at Burger King yet. The kids love Pokemon and it keeps me away from foul McDonalds. So, I whipped out my net enabled cell phone and started to look up the nearest Burger King to call and find out. My wife didn’t like this one bit. “Can’t you be disconnected for even 5 minutes!”, she said. I put the phone away and we entered the parking lot.

My wife drives when we are in town becasue I don;t want to hear that I am a) driving too slow or b) in the wrong lane. So she drives.

She starts weaving though the parking lot and then turns back a direction we had just came from. I asked, “Don’t you wnat to park over there?”, pointing toward the unexplored part of the lot. “No” She grunted and continued driving.

She drove behind the store, past where the employees play basketball and then she parked. She had chosen the parking space absolutely the furthest from the entrance. I guess this was my punishment for surfing the web on my phone. We pulled the kids out and walk for an eternity to the entrance.

The moral is don’t surf the web on your phone or you run the risk of a long walk.

Thanks to dioxidized.com for the idea of drawing pictures in my weblog.

I logged on to Siege Perilous last night and tried to find some action. None was to be found. Is everyone still wrapped up in the housing stuff on other shards still?

So I turned off the computer *gasp* and watched the DVD of October Sky. Pretty good story. Not great, but better than wandering Siege aimlessly for 90 minutes.

After the movie I went back in the study (what we call the room with computers in my house) and found Michele still sewing like crazy. I booted up Diablo 2 and smashed my way well into level 14. A necro was with me to help, but his skels suxx0r in compairison to my rocking Paladin skills.

BTW, why is everyone so in love with gems. Yah, I know they socket and stuff, but how many socketed things are better than the magic weapons in game. Someone explain it to me.

I got the phone call yesterday afteroon. “It’s here.”, my wife said, joy oozing over the phone. The final piece to her new computer had arrived. My task for the evening was set.

After getting the kids washed and into pajamas and properly positioned in front of Barney and Sigmund the Sea Monster, I began the construction process. James, Michele’s cousin, was over for dinner and to do laundry. While my computer skillz are l33t, he makes me look like the old fogey of 32 that I am. He and I dived in. After a short break to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish to the munchkins, I returned to work on the computer. By around 9:30 we had it POSTing and began the FDISK and FORMAT of the 30 gig hard drive.

We needed milk for the girls, so we logged on to kozmo.com fo easy delivery. We selected the milk, a DVD to watch while Windows installs and the latest Maxim (heh, X-Men chix). Then as we attempted to checkout kozmo bombed out and wouldn’t accept our order. James and I ran to the supermarket to get the milk and picked up Chewy Chips Ahoy, but no damn Maxim! Thy had friggin Cosmopolitain but no Maxim. Sexism!

We returned to the land of ‘searching for drivers’ and feed the Windows monster all the drivers it asked for. Next was updating all the patches. Then I started with the essential apps: Electric Quilt 4, WinZip, Download Accelerator, Napster, iMesh, RioPort, DirectX, WinAmp, etc. Thank God for DSL.

Once the suite of MP3edness was installed, it was time to transfer 1.9 Gigs of MP3s off my computer to the new one. After beating our heads against Microsoft Networking, NetBeui, and Network Neighborhood for a while we finally could see my Music directory from her computer. At this time we we both a little tired and punchy. 45 minutes of file transfer later and it was done. My wife’s new was ready for use. It was 2AM. 4 hours till the kids wake up. I went to sleep. James took his laundry and went home.

This morning I showed Michele the new computer and showed her the power button. Zoe called from the living room. She and Mira requested the ‘Barney Halloween’ to be played. By the time I returned to Michele, Napster was already running and she was downloading. Mission Accomplished.

The remaining big task is moving from Outlook Express on the Mac to the PC. I think we’ll have to upload her stuff to an IMAP server and then d/l it to the PC. Beeg headache. Good thing James knows IMAP.

I ordered a new case to build my wife a PC. They said it shipped last Thursday. Where the hell is it?

I had to Norton Utilitize her Mac again and see dropped even more MP3s on my computer. Will my suffering never end?

Read the Burger King incident.

Dioxidized.com

Why more of you make me laugh like that?

Also check out this.

Yeah so I haven’t updated for a while. Y’all never send me email anyways….

I am pissed about a bunch of stuff, in no particular order.

1) The damn teletubbie that was supposed to perfom at my daughter’s 2nd birthday party never showed. Bastard.
2) Intel showed on their web site that RAMBUS is SLOWER than plain old DDR SDRAM and yet Intel continues to tow the RAMBUS line and sell that crap.
3) The Siege Perilous server is moving to the East Coast. Fuckers.
4) Battle.net is never up and running.
5) I can’t buy a Nvidia Geforce MX yet.
6) The new case for my wife’s PC still isn’t here, so she’s always using my PC to run Napster!
7) The SeaChange video servers at the office keep crashing. Fix the damn memory leak! I’ve given you guys over half a million dollars.
8) The new Horatio Hornblower episodes are nowhere in sight.
9) George W. Bush is still running for president.

OK, I feel a little better.

Raph Koster, aka Designer Dragon, orginal designer of Ultima Online post a long essay on lessons learned from UO. Here’s the best part.

In an odd sort of summary… Being safe from evil is, in my mind, an uneven tradeoff for the fact that you don’t get to be heroes anymore, in that you can just opt out of fighting evil. It may be nobody wants to be heroes except when it doesn’t count, when it isn’t challenging, that people would rather fight “pretend evil” than the real thing, but I don’t personally believe that. I still think people are better than that. I know this is an odd and probably controversial (perhaps even stupid) position to take, but it’s how I feel. I think that the greatest value of interactive entertainment is when it engages you for real, and teaches you things for real.

He’s right. And it is exactly why I don’t like Trammel or games with PvP switches. I want to be a hero when it really matters.