| *psshhhh!* "oog!" |
[Nov. 25th, 2009|12:17 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  silly | ] |
On my way home today, I saw a van that looked just like an ambulance (large rear cabin, side equipment bins, etc) except for the missing light-bar and the Pepsi livery.
My guess is that it's used when Pepsiman has an accident in the field and has to be brought back to the shop for repairs. |
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| On fashions in names |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|02:44 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
One of the little things that stuck with me from the title story of Vinge's True Names and Other Dangers was, appropriately enough, about names - that at some point, "Jennifer" will have a connotation much like Gertrude and Mildred and Ethel do to our ears today. And someday (though I probably won't be around to see it) the nursing homes will be full of LaShondas and Mikelas. |
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| Well that's just prime |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|06:04 pm] |
Coming home from work today, I found myself third in a line of four bicycles waiting at a stoplight. I looked around and then asked, "Is this where we start singing 'Convoy'?"
Alas, no one responded. |
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| An okay day and a nice evening |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|06:39 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  content | ] |
Managed to remember my Amazon password, so I could place an order at work without having to wait until I got home. Got my hair cut at lunchtime (mostly in back, as short as the barber dared) and had just enough time to grab a quick burrito. A fairly quiet afternoon.
After work, I went across the Ferry Street bridge to Oakway for a friend's birthday card and gift at Trader Joe's (where I also got some tasty olives and mushrooms and juice for myself); a few groceries at Albertsons, where I ran into my brother and his kids while I was swapping out the batteries in my bike headlight for the ones I'd just bought; and for dinner, a burger at Carl's Jr.
And now I am home, warm and dry, and all is well. |
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| Autumn |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|06:02 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
Riding home after dark along a quiet side street, with a bag full of Halloween candy.
A full harvest moon floats, golden, in a wisp of cloud, shining through the bare branches of trees.
The air is just chill enough to pinken my cheeks.
I love this season. Too bad about all the rain, though. |
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| Progress |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|10:48 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  nostalgic | ] |
Sometimes it's hard to believe that only 7 years separate the original Apple ][ from the Macintosh. Or that a similar period passed between the first Mercury flights and Apollo 11.
These days, that's two generations of Windows (XP to 7). |
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| i will not obsess i will not obsess |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|09:05 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  anxious | ] |
( The dilemma )
( The decision )
I probably put too much emotional weight on, well, everything. And I have a tendency to either grab blindly for the short-term solution or obsess and dither and delay about getting everything "perfect" - sometimes both, as we see here.
EDIT: And done. "No problem," he said, probably caring/worrying a lot less about this than I have.
EDIT HARDER: And now, 1.5 hours later, I feel fine. No anxiety at all. Until the next time I have to make a decision...
EDIT III, the SEARCH FOR SHINY: Heh. I go to zipzoomfly to price some alternatives, and guess what /fortune happens to be at the top of the page?
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to continually be afraid you will make one. - Elbert Hubbard"
Yup, that's me all over. |
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| Bye bye, shiny |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|07:13 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  disappointed | ] |
Neither blowing into the card's innards (shades of NES carts) nor a visual inspection helped resolve the problem, and I found out today what form its glitching takes in CoH, which I had been avoiding - it makes parts of the interface and lines of text therein flash and flicker. Constantly. Yeah, no.
So with a heavy heart, I have pulled the bad tooth GPU and set it aside. Oh well, it was free. Running with the X850 again. Going to try to find a better-but-still-cheap card on craigslist, while holding off on a real upgrade (to a card that came out this or last year rather than 4 or 5 ago) until after the first of the year, probably.
Update: Got a line on a very cheap and local X1300, which literally splits the difference. That'd hold me for a while. |
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| Video card woes |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|11:35 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | distressed | ] |
Something in my computer isn't working quite right, so of course, I am unhappy.
My brother gave me a hand-me-down video card that is about twice as good as the one I had before (ATI X1950 vs. X850). It's shiny. I can do HDR now, run stuff with options set to "high". But... it glitches. Sometimes it's flickers, sometimes it's random spikes in terrain or the tip of something stretching off to infinity when looked at from a certain angle. Sometimes half of my screen is taken up by polygon static. And the worst(?) part is, it's not consistent. It doesn't even steadily get worse over time, leading up to a crash, like if it was overheating or something.
At first I thought it might be an issue with my 400W power supply, but my brother seems to think that's sufficient and I've confirmed I have the right sort of connector (six little boxes, with pins in three of 'em). I'm running the latest ATI drivers. It seems to be securely slotted. Tonight I plan to take it out for a moment and blow on everything to make sure it's as clean as a hand-me-down card can be. But beyond that, honestly... I'm at a loss when it comes to hardware of this sort. (I can't even be sure that something's wrong with THIS card, and that buying a new one of similar specs wouldn't have similar problems.)
Worst case, I can always fall back to my old card. But I like the shiny, and I have no way of troubleshooting the new card unless it's in the machine. On the other hand, I also like "stable" and "reliable." If I can't get this resolved in a day or so, I might just give up and wait until my next comprehensive upgrade, possibly early next year. |
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| Not actually related |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|06:03 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  busy | ] |
Today, while I was hard at work preparing legal documents, a little part of my brain was trying to figure out how property, inheritance, etc works for a tribal/feudal society of imaginary lizard people. |
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| You'd think this wouldn't happen anymore |
[Oct. 10th, 2009|12:52 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Every now and then, I am surprised to find how sensitive I - your classic introvert - am to whether I am liked by others. |
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| These are the voyages |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|08:33 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
"To explore strange new worlds... to seek out hot space babes, and high places to hang off of..." |
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| The ask of Mom's tea caddy, oh |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|06:49 pm] |
I recently found out that one of my brothers had sold a piece of furniture that was given to him some years ago by our mother, to feed his fish-and-chips habit. I couldn't believe it, and I confronted him today.
"For the love of cod, Mom's dresser!"
"Yes," he replied, "for the love of cod." |
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| I want another (good) MoO, darn it |
[Oct. 2nd, 2009|12:23 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | disappointed | ] |
I was tempted again by SPORE today, having heard reports that mods and official patches have made the endgame suck less and added an "adventure" mode. But then I looked at it all again and realized that no matter how much I wish or try, it's never going to be a 4X.
What's frustrating is that the Civilization stage is a decent, if simplified, 4X - build up your forces and conquer your neighbors with guns or love, until you own the whole planet. But as soon as you hit the Space stage, the rules change again... and suddenly, nothing matters. You can only have one real "unit" at a time, even if you build an empire the size of the Grox; they have thousands of ships, but you only get one plus a pathetic few, weak wingmen from your "allies." Production is irrelevant, since you have to collect it yourself and planets can't store more than a thimble's worth (two thimbles, if you buy a silo); you get no more advantage from owning a hundred worlds than by flying a loop around the same half dozen, until you've traded enough spice to buy your way to the top of the tech tree. As I've said before, all a big empire gets you is more vulnerable territory and more neighbors to whine and/or rattle sabers at you.
Give me a real fleet, a hundred tricked-out battlewagons backed by my vast industrial base, and I'd be willing to take on an enemy as big and mean as the Grox. It'd take a long time to get to that point, and a longer time to finish the fight, but at least it would be something like a fair contest. But with just one ship, even if replacements are free? One might as well set out to move a beach with a toy bucket.
And I thought this game was gonna be so awesome. |
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| Some thoughts on happiness |
[Sep. 30th, 2009|05:18 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
I don't like being unhappy.
My apologies to anyone who finds the above statement obvious and simple. I'm going to be making more. I find it useful to think aloud on this subject. Perhaps some of you will find my musings of interest.
No one likes being unhappy, really, as a matter of definition, unless you're indulging in catharsis. But happiness inevitably requires unhappiness, as sure as night follows day. After joy comes the letdown. You can't eat your cake and have it later (though you may well have another pound or two of fat around your middle). Stimulants and euphorics have an inevitable crash. Buy something on credit now and you'll have to pay it off later. You can't win, though you can come close to breaking even.
But this is no fun! we declare petulantly, and construct scenarios where we CAN win, where we can have all the joy or cake or money or drugs we want and never have to pay it back. But we can't live in these fantasies, and we corrupt Eden simply by existing there. We bring entropy and greed and selfishness with us. We cannot escape the flawed self. No matter where you go, there you are.
Since we don't like being unhappy, and it's not possible to NOT be unhappy, some set about minimizing their unhappiness. There are two obvious ways to do this. One is to shift your unhappiness off onto someone else; you get the party and they get the bill. Even if one has no moral objections to this inequity, it's not really practical in the long run - those getting the short end will eventually demand an accounting and renegotiation of the terms (sometimes with torches, pitchforks, or guns). The other is self-denial, trying to reduce both sides of the equation - if you incur no debt, you don't have to pay. This works... after a fashion... but the result is not unlike a brain in a jar in a dark room. It never gets happy, it never gets sad, and it will exist in this fashion until the neurons and/or the life support finally give out, having experienced and amounted to very close to nothing.
It is possible to manage happiness and its opposite. It is possible to balance one's diet and one's budget, to go to a buffet without scarfing down everything in sight, to drink socially but not to excess. However, this requires prudence, temperance, constant vigilance attention and effort. It adds somewhat to the "unhappiness" load, for it would be easier and more "fun" to simply indulge oneself without care or restraint. It requires skill and can be hard (even injurious) to learn, like tightrope walking. But short of getting my cerebrum fitted for a jar, I don't see another solution.
Living as an imperfect being in an imperfect world sucks sometimes. Too bad that's all we've got. |
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| Living in the fishbowl |
[Sep. 30th, 2009|01:29 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  worried | ] |
Now and then I get the uneasy feeling that our children and grandchildren will find our definitions and/or expectations of "privacy" amusingly quaint. |
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| A Day at the LAN |
[Sep. 26th, 2009|09:15 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | content | ] |
Today I forewent my usual Saturday routine to... go sit in front of a different computer and play different games! That is, I finally accepted the invitation of my brothers to attend one of the LAN parties put on by their gaming club. These events start around 10 am and, I am told, often go past midnight; I started to fade around 8, however, and caught a ride home.
( Read the whole exciting tale )
Tomorrow I intend to do a few chores, a little CoH, and a lot of nothing. |
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| of gaming fads past |
[Sep. 24th, 2009|09:12 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  geeky | ] |
Meagen (9:02 PM):
I dunno, I thought it was funny. I was thinking of making a game, Dwarf Fortress style, where you run a guild in a fantasy MMO.
Meagen (9:04 PM):
Recruit newbies in starting zones, make your guild richer by farming or collecting guild tax, run raids, watch out for primadonna players and hope the devs don't nerf the game too much.
Kelly (9:05 PM):
Five years ago, we would have stuck a TYCOON on that and shipped it. |
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